Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I'm Matt Frad. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with St. Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be?

In today's episode, we're going to ask him about five qualities that every prayer should have. If this was to be asked in a pub and a colloquial way, you might say,

please give me some tips on prayer, St. Thomas. In the Q&A portion of today's episode, we're going to be discussing my favorite whiskey.

We're also going to be doing a follow-up to the Santa Claus episode and asking whether we can become too rigid and over-thinking everything.

We'll also be asking about tongues. What do Thomas Aquinas say about tongues? And then I'll also be responding to someone's question about my personal prayer routine.

So be sure to stick around for that. Here we go.

Hey, welcome back to Pints with Aquinas. This is the show where you and I pull up a bar stall next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy.

Merry Christmas. I hope you had a very good Christmas day and that you are drawing close to our blessed Lord this season.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I tweeted that we should be careful as people who are very interested in the intellectual aspect of our faith.

Not to turn our faith into an equation of source. Do you understand? Where you walk around saying things like,

okay, there are two types of ways something can be. It can be necessary or it can be contingent. But if every being is contingent, then there should be no contingent beings.

I'm saying, it's easy to do that because it tickles some part of our intellect. And that's good. That's good. That's good.

But we have to be careful that you're like me. You love Thomas Aquinas. You love the intellectual aspect of the faith. We have to be careful that we don't turn our faith which ought to be a love affair into an equation of sorts.

In the tweet, I said, we should yearn for Jesus Christ. We should ache for Jesus Christ. We should commune with Jesus Christ.

And if we're not doing that, if you and I are spending more time thinking of philosophical proofs and defining terms and getting into arguments over YouTube,

if we're spending more time doing that than we are calling upon the name of the Lord in prayer, it might be time to take a step back and really question that.

So today, I want to share with you five tips on prayer from St. Thomas Aquinas. In what he writes on the our father, he says, well, let me just quote you this one line.

He says, among all other prayers, the Lord's prayer holds the chief place. It has five excellent qualities which are required in all prayer.

And then he goes on to say what those qualities are. We're going to get into that and it's going to help you in your prayer life. Of course it will.

The angelic doctor is here to help you and we'll pause after each one of these five things and elaborate.

I want to say a massive thank you to everybody who supports Pines with Aquinas on Patreon. If you want to be part of the Pines with Aquinas tribe, don't blame you. We're pretty awesome.

Go to Pines with Aquinas.com and click support. You can donate as little or as much as you want. And I give you thank you gifts in return.

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