Willis Jenkins is 2017 Aquinas Symposium Speaker

January 30, 2017 (Notre Dame, Ind.) — Saint Mary’s College is proud to announce that Willis Jenkins, associate professor of religion, ethics and environment at the University of Virginia, is the speaker for the 2017 Symposium on St. Thomas Aquinas. The hour-long talk will be held on Wednesday, March 1 at 7 p.m. in Rice Commons in the Student Center. A brief discussion and reception will follow the talk. The event is free and open to the public. Click for a campus map.

Willis’s lecture is titled “After Laudato Si’: Revisiting the ecological legacy of Thomas Aquinas.” He will explain Pope Francis’ encyclical and why Thomas’s thought merits a richer place in contemporary Christian discussions of environmental ethics and sustainability.

“Professor Willis Jenkins has been at the forefront of contemporary scholars calling attention to Aquinas’s work as a significant resource for a theology of the environment. That will strike many as strange, since Thomas’s classical theism has frequently been portrayed as inimical to environmental concerns. But in the context in which Jenkins presents him, that’s a significant misreading,” said religious studies professor Joseph Incandela, the Joyce McMahon Hank Aquinas Chair in Catholic Theology at Saint Mary's College.  

The Aquinas Symposium is sponsored by the Joyce McMahon Hank Aquinas Chair in Catholic Theology. Click to see videos of past Aquinas Symposium lectures.  For more information on this year’s event, call Barb Westra, administrative assistant in religious studies, at (574) 284-4534

About Saint Mary's College: Celebrating over 175 years of empowering women to make a difference in the world, Saint Mary’s College is recognized as a pioneer and continued force in the education of women. A Catholic, liberal arts institution in Notre Dame, Indiana, the College offers more than 50 undergraduate academic programs and also offers co-educational master’s degrees.