In the nineteen sixties, when the author became a Dominican, the province went through a profound crisis. This article asks how it was able to survive this crisis and find new life and vigour. It did so because the brethren were usually able to engage in constructive dialogue. This was due to three characteristics of the province. As British, it embraced diversity in its core; the intellectual tradition of the province, an open Thomism, pushed it beyond any simplistic opposition between the tradition and progress. There is a tradition of brotherhood often overflowing into friendship which held the brethren together in times of crisis.

In this text, I explore the contribution of the Dominican, Osmund Lewry, to medieval scholarship by focusing on his work on the medieval Dominican, Robert Kilwardby (1215-1279). I examine in some detail one area of Kilwardby's thought that was first noted by Lewry: the question of how the principles of scientific knowledge are acquired. In order to do so, I will briefly connect Kilwardby's answer to this question with those of his two more famous Dominican contemporaries, Albert the Great (ca. 1200-1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274). The aim of this paper is to give to provide a glimpse of the outstanding contribution of both Kilwardby and Lewry to the development of medieval philosophy and the scholarship on medieval philosophy.

This paper argues that the Dominican, Robert Holcot's, Trinitarian theology is methodologically consistent with what one finds in the Franciscan theologian, William of Ockham's, Summa logicae. Both theologians, it is argued, develop a form of Trinitarian minimalism that rejects many of the developments in thirteenth-century Trinitarian theology. Further, it is argued that the traditional two-model approach to medieval Trinitarian theology, as found in Théodore de Regnon, Michael Schmaus, and Russell Friedman must be re-evaluated in light of current research.

In 1221 the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers (Dominican friars) sent out groups of friars to various European countries. The largest group was sent to England where they established their first priory in the University city of Oxford on the Feast of the Assumption, 1221. Within a decade they had spread to Ireland and has established their first houses in Scotland. The Scottish Dominicans remained part of the English province for close on 300 years. The Scottish Wars of Independence forced a reconsideration of that relationship. In 1481 Scotland became an independent province and adopted the Strict Observance initiated by Raymond of Capua (1330-1399). The province flourished for the first sixty years of its existence before being overwhelmed by the Scottish Reformation.

A study of the British reception history of Rerum Novarum between 1891 and 1919 shows the key role of Fr. Vincent McNabb OP in popularising in the Catholic press what would become the predominant interpretation of the encyclical, switching its perceived emphasis away from the defence of private property to the advocacy of an urgent redistribution of property unjustly withheld from the impoverished working classes

When thinking about the life and theology of the English Dominican, Victor White OP (1902-1960), it is his formation at Hawkesyard which holds the key to understanding the direction of his life and work. This brief introduction sets White in the context of his day, showing how his formation created the conditions which drew him to the analytical psychologist, C.G. Jung (1875-1961), at the same time prompting his identification as a modern Thomist, an identification which gave him the framework to engage Jung's thought, and to influence the direction of theology at Blackfriars Oxford. In other words, I hope to show that White's formation at Hawkesyard is the turning point from which all else follows.

This essay examines the Dominican influences on the Catholic philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe while an undergraduate at Oxford University between 1937–1941. It focuses on three Thomists who formally instructed Anscombe and how one Dominican, Victor White, likely instructed her on a radically Catholic perspective regarding the morality of warfare, which would not only influence her 1940 co-authored pamphlet, ‘The Justice of the Present War Examined’, but would shape her writings on war and murder for her entire academic career.

This essay accompanies the republication of Anscombe's ‘I am Sadly Theoretical: It is the Effect of Being at Oxford,’ her earliest known published essay. She wrote this article in response to a public invitation from the Catholic Herald for Catholics between the ages of 18 and 25 to make their voices heard by their fellow Catholics. In this teenage apologia, Anscombe outlines the goals for her life, and what it means for her as a Catholic to be a witness.

We note how Gerald Vann's pastoral context fired his concerns, and examine part of his output, especially his Lectorate thesis, Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Divine Pity, and The Son's Course. He popularised insights drawn from Aquinas and Neo-Thomists, developed in conversation with his brethren, while critically welcoming other traditions and modern culture. He rooted creative thought in Thomist doctrine, and offered Aquinas's vision as an answer to prevalent forms of disintegration. Some of his ideas and expressions are ‘of their time’; his urging an ever fresh contemplation of Christ, and his approach to the Gospel ‘paradox’ of renouncing all things for God's sake, while sharing God's love for creatures, are recognized as a powerful statement of recurring Christian themes. Vann was ahead of his time in sharing widely the distinctively Thomist account of the Spirit's role in guiding our pilgrimage, working unity, and divinizing our perceptions through his Seven Gifts. In this Vann was faithful to the Thomist vision he developed in his formal studies, of the eternal Processions of the Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit lying behind the coming of creatures from God and, more excitingly still, lying behind our return to our Triune Archetype.

This article reconsiders the lay Dominican community of artisans which gathered in Ditchling, Sussex, in the 1920s. It does so by situating Ditchling in its distinctively Dominican context and by relating it to a form of sacramental politics powerfully evoked in the work of Herbert McCabe OP. In this way, it aims to reaffirm the continuing political-theological relevance of aspects of Ditchling, and to assert a measure of continuity with the Catholic New Left of the 1960s, with which Herbert McCabe is associated. The article identifies Ditchling's distinctively Dominican charism in a concern for contemplation, liturgy, and the regular life, alongside an aesthetic that brings together art, sacrament, and preaching, and relates such priorities to wider debate within the Dominican Order. These concerns are related to themes in McCabe's work on the relationship between Church, world, and community within the broader context of a theological politics that is both radical and sacramental. The article concludes that Ditchling's perceived ‘otherworldliness’ deserves re-evaluation, and that in the light of McCabe's sacramental politics Ditchling was not, in fact, quite ‘otherworldly’ enough.

This essay is a personal reflection, rather than a history, of the role of Spode House in the twentieth-century Catholic Peace Movement. In particular, it draws attention to the lasting influence of Conrad Pepler on Spode and on the movement.

The Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, 60 volumes between 1964 and 1976, the greatest collective scholarly achievement of the English Dominican Province, was conceived and orchestrated by Fr Thomas Gilby. To what school of 20th century Thomism did he and his collaborators owe allegiance, if any? This paper considers that question while documenting some of the significant influences on Gilby and his collaborators on his translation of Aquinas's Summa.

Thomism is a contested category that exhibits considerable plasticity in its application. An examination of the role played by such invocations of proper names in contemporary theological discourse indicates the importance of textual accessibility and engagement. The role played by texts is examined in terms of an often-elided distinction between ‘intelligibility’ and ‘readability’, with the former aligned with propositional contents and the latter a more expansive attentiveness to the text's performative operations. The historical remoteness of Aquinas coupled with the importation into theology of secularised reading strategies is seen to have alienated the full readability of Aquinas's texts. Acting against Cartesian modes of reading, Cornelius Ernst's re-performance of Thomistic pedagogy as ‘engaged contemplation’ is concerned to enact a horizon of meaning within which Aquinas's texts retain enduring readability. This article develops Ernst's Thomistic meta-theology into an account of Thomism as ‘meta-reading’. On this account, authentic Thomism involves the intentional cultivation of a total human culture, within which the inherently theological discipline of textual engagement exercises a quasi-liturgical function.

Over the eight hundred years of the English Dominican province, few of its members have matched the rigour and depth of thought of Herbert McCabe. This paper presents a brief overview of McCabe's thought, focusing first on his understanding of God and then on his conception of human beings. Like Thomas before him, McCabe thought it vital to think clearly and correctly about both God and humanity, an effort which in the case of God involves recognising the many ways in which we cannot think of God.

Reviewing a half-century of personal experience of the English Dominican Province by an American friar provides a rich gallery of unforgettable people, places, and events. But the following account is more a story than a history, which is better left to historians.