Hello and welcome to sacred and profane love, a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss their favorite books and poems and how these words have shaped how they think about love and happiness.

I am your host, Jennifer Frey. I am assistant professor of philosophy at the

University of South Carolina, and I'm co-PI of the Virtue, Happiness and Meaning of Life Project,

which, along with this podcast, is generously supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Today we've got a conversation with the Thomas Theologian, Father Thomas Joseph White, about love, grace, redemption, and comic mercy in the short stories of Flannery O'Connor.

I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did.

I'm very happy to have Father Thomas Joseph White join us this morning. Good morning, Father.

Good morning, Jennifer. It's great to be here. Great. It's great to have you. So Father Thomas Joseph entered the order of preachers in 2003. His research and teaching have focused, particularly on topics related to to mystic metaphysics and Christology,

as well as Roman Catholic Reformed Ecumenical Dialogue. And you've written a whole bunch of books,

which I'm not going to list, but I will mention that you were a scholar on our virtue, happiness,

and meaning of life project. You were one of our theologians. So, Father, you work at the Dominican

House of Studies, and I suspect that many of our listeners have no idea what that is,

or perhaps even what the Dominican order is and how it relates to where you work. So could you

tell us a little something more about that? St. Dominic was very interested in the blossoming university life of Europe, as universities

kind of came into being in their crystallized form, and sent friars to study and teach in these

universities, including the famous St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, who were two

early Dominicans. And so the Dominicans rose to prominence

as an intellectual order from the beginning and were very involved in the Aristotelian revival in medieval

Catholicism and the theories of virtue, the theories of human personhood that were a Christian

interpretation, a Christian reception of Aristotle. And so Dominicans to this day, they don't slavishly follow Aquinas,

but they all get some exposure to Aquinas typically. And we have houses of study where we train

people for the priesthood, but also for higher studies, often afterwards, doing doctors and philosophy

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