Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

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to mystic institute.org. It's a great pleasure to be with you all this afternoon for this lecture called

Aquinas the DJ, tradition and innovation in the liturgy of Corpus Christi. Can you all hear me

decently well? Okay, very good. So my talk today is about Aquinas, the

DJ. Well, what does this mean? It's obviously absurd. For those who arrived early, I was inviting

them to count all of the anachronisms in this little picture here. There's a little cat off to the side.

You can hardly see that. But anyway, lots of,

lots of humor here, of course. But what's the point I'm trying to make with this?

The overall point today is to see Thomas Aquinas as somebody who's deeply rooted in his tradition,

and yet contributing something vitally new through music in particular. So we're going to be exploring

how Thomas Aquinas uses music as a way of communicating with those who he's writing his music

for. So Thomas Aquinas is frequently thought of as a very abstract person, somebody just

engaging in theological or philosophical discourse. Today I'm

trying to introduce another side of him, the side of Thomas as a musician, as somebody who's

helping us to sing and through singing to understand the theology that Thomas is promoting.

So in order to get deeper into this topic, I'd like to start by thinking

about what is a DJ. So here we've got DJ Kitty to introduce us. He'll return a little bit later.

So what is a DJ? According to Wikipedia, a disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as a DJ,

is a person who plays recorded music for an audience.

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