In 1920, the journal Blackfriars was established ‘to state and defend truth’. Its publications served this mission from 1920 to 1964, during the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), prior to its transformation into the scholarly journal New Blackfriars. Blackfriars was intended for an educated, but not scholarly, audience. Apologetics was near and dear to the original mission of Blackfriars. This article examines some of the apologetical themes and treatments in the periodical’s pages from 1920 to 1964, situating these discussions in the context of the anti-Modernist Catholic culture that emerged after Pope St Pius X’s condemnation of Modernism in 1907. The main areas of apologetical discussion that emerged in the pages of Blackfriars centered on Catholic responses to Protestants, the phenomenological approach to the study of religion, challenges stemming from biological evolution, Modernism (both Catholic and Protestant), and modern biblical studies.

This paper develops a new evidential challenge to a contemporary universalist account grounded in the doctrine of efficacious grace. Drawing primarily on the work of John Kronen and Eric Reitan, I argue that if God possesses a morally legitimate and effective means of transforming even the gravest sinners without violating rational freedom, then the continued existence of apparently gratuitous moral evils becomes especially difficult to explain. The challenge does not consist in the traditional claim that evil is incompatible with divine goodness, nor does it attempt to refute universalism as such. Rather, it asks why transformative grace capable of healing distorted agency is reserved for the eschaton if its earlier application could plausibly prevent at least some of history’s worst atrocities. After reconstructing the evidential problem of evil in Rowe and Russell, I examine the universalist account of efficacious grace and develop what I call the Evidential Challenge to Efficacious Grace. I then consider several possible universalist responses, including skeptical theism, appeals to the Fall, and arguments from divine sovereignty. I conclude that efficacious grace intensifies the explanatory burden generated by apparently gratuitous evil and therefore introduces a distinctive internal challenge for one influential form of contemporary universalism.

Two forms of existential proposition are identified, one favoured by analytical philosophers, one by Thomists. It is argued, against objections, that both forms were recognized and used by Thomas. A useful way of labelling this point is to speak of the distinction between esse ut verum and esse reale: being in the sense of the true, the analytical notion, on the one hand, and the Thomist notion of actual or real existence on the other. The former is best expressed by a second-level predicable, the latter by a first-level predicable. Both express a valid notion which is fittingly called ‘existential’, and both are, indeed, analogically connected in meaning.

Aristotle’s views about the female body are commonly held to be an insurmountable obstacle to aligning his philosophy with feminism. Sarah Borden Sharkey, however, has attempted a robust Aristotelian feminism that alters only the minimum. She argues that to succeed it must give positive and detailed reasons for sexual equality, a task that she leaves open. Building on Sharkey’s work, this essay argues that Thomas Aquinas’ view of the will allows such a position, by combining it with Aristotle’s notion of thumos as the main dividing factor between the sexes. The result is an Aristotelian–Thomistic view that keeps female biological difference, while allowing equality in attaining virtue and prudence.

In De ente et essentia, Thomas Aquinas states unambiguously that the essence of a composite substance is comprised of both form and matter. Some Thomistic interpreters conclude from this that the death of the human body entails the loss of matter from the essence, so that the subsisting soul possesses an essence fundamentally different from that of a living human being. This article demonstrates that such a reading is mistaken. By reconstructing Aquinas’ threefold distinction of matter and his account of essence, it shows that while prime and designated matter are lost at death, common matter continues to pertain to the soul’s essence. Consequently, even after its separation from the body, the soul retains an act of existence in and through a human essence and so constitutes the continued existence of a human being in a real ontological sense, even if such an existence is partial and imperfect in virtue of being subject to privation. Thus, Aquinas’ account of matter and essence is incompatible with certain corruptionist accounts of essence and establishes a firm metaphysical foundation for survivalism.