Professor Michael Krom evaluates the modern "Benedict Option" as a proposed Christian response to cultural decline, contrasting it with Saint Benedict’s historical withdrawal from Rome and analyzing its merits through Thomistic ethical frameworks governing obedience to authority and resistance to unjust laws.

This lecture was given on November 8th, 2024, at Florida State University.

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About the Speaker:

Michael Krom started reading Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae shortly after his conversion at the end of college. Upon learning about Flannery O’Connor’s “hillbilly Thomist” habit of reading Aquinas every night, he started studying two articles a day and completed the Summa while in graduate school at Emory University. As a professor at Saint Vincent College, he saw the urgent need for collegians and seminarians to receive a solid foundation in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. In 2020, he published Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought (Baker Academic Press), and teaches a Thomistic philosophy course each fall. In addition to continuing work on the moral, economic, and political topics covered in the book, his current research is on the influence of monastic spirituality on Aquinas; he is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Aquinas Among the Benedictines.

Keywords: Aristotelianism, Benedict Option, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Life of Saint Benedict, Patrick Deneen, Post-Liberal Age, Saint Benedict, Scott Hahn, Thomistic Theology, Virtue Ethics