The 2026 Symposium of St. Thomas Aquinas

The 2026 McMahon Aquinas Lecture

 "Mentors in the Living Tradition of Aquinas: Learning from McCormick, MacIntyre, and McInerny"
Featuring Christopher Kaczor, PhD

7 p.m., Wednesday, September 30 and
11 a.m., Thursday, October 1, 2026
Rice Commons, Student Center

Fr. Richard McCormick, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Ralph McInerny were giants in their fields—moral theology, moral philosophy, and Thomistic philosophy. "In this talk," Kaczor states, "I consider them not so much in terms of the doctrines that they taught professionally, but the lives that they led as professors. They can serve, in very different ways, as models of the living tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas." 

About Christopher Kaczor
Christopher Kaczor, PhD is a professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University and current president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. His books include The Gospel of Happiness; A Defense of Dignity; The Ethics of Abortion; Thomas Aquinas on the Cardinal Virtues; Life Issues-Medical Choices; Thomas Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love; The Edge of Life; and Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition. Dr. Kaczor’s views have been in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, National Review, NPR, BBC, EWTN, ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, TEDx, and The Today Show.

Dr. Kaczor writes: "This talk advocates for a reasonable faith and a faithful reason as understood in stories. Specifically, I’ll look at the story that all religions are paths up the same mountain, the story of the blind men and the elephant, the story of the hiddenness of God, and the story of the Chinese farmer."

While he is on campus, Dr. Kaczor will deliver a second lecture entitled Is Belief Believable? on Thursday, October 1, at 11 a.m. in Rice Commons.