The Philosophy Department is pleased to announce its 2019 Aquinas Lecturer and recipient of its Aquinas Medal: John P. O'Callaghan, of the University of Notre Dame. His lecture, “The Mercy of Boo Radley,” is scheduled for Thursday, February 7, in the Multipurpose Room of SB Hall.
John O'Callaghan is an associate professor of philosophy and the director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. In 2010, he was appointed by Pope Benedict XVI as a permanent member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Professor O'Callaghan has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He is the author of Thomistic Realism and The Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence as well as a host of scholarly papers and book chapters.
In his lecture, Professor O'Callaghan will reflect on ethical themes that arise from Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The curious figure of Boo Radley will come to the forefront. Why is it Boo--and not Atticus, their own father--who saves Scout and Jem? Contrasting Atticus with Boo provides an opportunity to reflect philosophically on the difference between a morality of duty and obligation prompted by stoic detachment and a morality of compassion and mercy prompted by friendship.
Chair and Assistant Professor of English Debra Romanick Baldwin, Ph.D., and Professor of Physics and recent Interim Dean of Constantin College Sally Hicks, Ph.D., have secured a $299,078 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support writing instruction at UD for the fall 2020 semester.
+ Read MoreHis first step was to enroll in physician’s assistant school at Baylor’s College of Medicine, a career trajectory to which he had aspired since his early childhood. Nowadays, Jonathan Cunningham, BA ’17, is dedicated to the vocational pursuit of comfort and healing at MD Anderson in Houston, among the largest cancer treatment centers in the U.S., where he was once a chemotherapy patient himself.
+ Read MoreDuring his Rome semester in 1991, Joseph Meaney, BA '93, with his friends (now Father) Kevin Cook, BA '94, and (now Texas State Representative and UD Trustee) Tan Parker, BA '93, attended a private Mass with Pope St. John Paul II. Several weeks earlier, they had hand-delivered a letter to the Swiss Guards outside St. Peter's requesting the Mass and including their contact information; at last, they'd received the phone call instructing them to be at the Bronze Gates at 5 a.m.
+ Read More
