On Tuesday, Dec. 5 from 6:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m in the Gentry Building, the University of Connecticut’s chapter of the Thomistic Institute held their first visiting speaker lecture of the academic year. The talk, “The Virtues: Moral, Intellectual, and Theological,” was presented by Dr. Adam Eitel of the University of Dallas, an expert on the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and former assistant professor at Yale University’s Divinity School.
UConn’s Thomistic Institute is one of many campus chapters of the national Thomistic Institute, founded in 2009 under the domain of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. With over 80 chapters across colleges in the United States, the TI aims to “organize lectures, seminars, and reading groups to explore the riches of the Christian intellectual tradition,” with a specific focus on the theology and philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
“In 2015, the TI began offering campus chapters that allow for students to bring the Catholic intellectual tradition to their campus…” said President of the UConn chapter Emma Winston. “To offer their fellow students the chance to bring questions about the Catholic faith to us and to create an open dialogue.”
The TI chapter at UConn comes from humble origins. Following a discussion with a high school theology teacher, Winston reached out to the National Institute about forming a chapter and discovered another student, now-Vice President Sean Murphy, had already begun to do the same. By the fall semester of 2023, the TI was officially enshrined as a registered student organization aiming to provide those interested in philosophy, theology and questions of morality and faith with an avenue for discussion at UConn.
“We hope to share the Catholic intellectual tradition because we’ve noticed a lack of formation around the intellectual side of religion,” Winston said. “Our goal is to cultivate a community that aims to strengthen that amongst students.”
Eitel’s lecture is the first of many for the Thomistic Institute at UConn. Three future speakers are already planned to come to UConn during the spring semester and give talks on topics ranging from the problem of evil, to the existence of God to love, friendship, and happiness and its connection with faith.
“We have a speaker menu made by the TI that they give to all the student leaders of these chapters,” Winston explained. “These are qualified speakers who have studied these topics in-depth and went to school for them.”
The Thomistic Institute’s next speaker, presenting on Feb. 12, 2024 on the rationality of belief in God, is to be Dr. Joshua Hochschild, the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics program at Mount St. Mary’s University and former President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.
In addition to hosting speakers from the Catholic philosophical and theological traditions, the TI also hosts bi-weekly reading groups on campus.
“The reading groups are the core of the TI at UConn,” Winston said. “We have a few speakers each semester, but the reading groups are where we get together and really have a conversation.”
The reading groups are an opportunity for anyone to bring questions, but they are also an opportunity for the TI to educate students on the rich intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church embodied by Aquinas. His relationship to other philosophers is explored as well; Aquinas often addressed the work of his Greek antecedents, frequently citing Aristotle as “the Philosopher.”
Club reading groups, for example, have addressed the Thomist response to Socrates’ “Euthyphro Dilemma” regarding the nature of piety and justice. Other topics of discussion have included explorations of friendship and love, the existence of God and the meanings of virtue and evil.
The reading groups are “open for any students no matter where you’re coming from, no matter how much knowledge you have on these topics and the works of Aquinas,” Winston said. “We’re students who really care about sharing this tradition with fellow students at UConn.”