Professor Michael Krom discusses Aquinas's approach to the moral life, emphasizing the pursuit of the good and the integration of faith, hope, and charity, while also addressing moral relativism and the importance of objective moral principles.

This lecture was given on October 26th, 2024, at University of South Carolina.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Prof. 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: Augustine, Beauty, Good, Moral Life, Moral Relativism, Natural Law, Objectivity, Prudence, Subjectivity, Truth