As the title of this collection of essays suggests, Matthew Lamb has brought together a group of scholars who are offering an apologetic for the Catholic Church's insistence that faith is both compatible with and in need of reason. More specifically, as Lamb tells it, the assembled group of philosophers and theologians are defending a central tenet of John Paul II's pontificate later picked up by Benedict XVI: in the face of the secular world's attack on reason itself, Catholic intellectuals need to defend reason's (albeit limited) ability to penetrate into the nature of things, and thus its suitability to serve as a handmaid to theology. And, while this is a forward-looking project of philosophically informed theology, the church looks to Aquinas as “a model of the right way to do theology” (Fides et Ratio, §43). Even more specifically, this collection is held together as a sort of incidental memorial for Ralph McInerny, who passed away during the organizational stage of the 2011 conference out of which this book comes. Finally, with Matthew Lamb's recent death, his editorial work for this book can be seen as his parting gift to the Catholic intellectual world. Given the limited space of this review, I will outline two characteristic essays in the collection, and then conclude with some general remarks.

First, in “The Concept of Nature: Philosophical Reflections in Service of Theology,” Joseph Koterski, SJ, shows how a “realist metaphysics and natural philosophy” provides a foundational understanding of the human person that can be taken up by theology in its reflection on the imago Dei. By focusing on the dignity that comes with possessing both reason and will, as well as hylomorphism's insistence that humans are neither spiritual beings nor reducible to matter in motion, this broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic approach helps one appreciate the reasonableness of Catholic moral teaching. After establishing this point, Koterski analyzes the doctrine of original sin in terms of this philosophical conception of the human person, and discusses the need for grace to both restore one's nature and transcend it.

Second, in “Charles De Koninck and Aquinas's Doctrine of the Common Good,” Sebastian Walshe, O Praem, revisits the origins of a debate that continues today among Catholic political theorists concerning the nature of the common good. Despite broad agreement on church moral and political teaching, the question is whether the common good is limited and instrumental or final and transcendent. Walshe, in defense of the latter position, rearticulates De Koninck's claim that the common good is a potential whole, like victory in relation to the army; it is a final cause, “the reason for the determination and specificity in the goods it causes” (272). While this may just seem like a claim about politics, the importance for theology is made clear at the end of the essay, where Walshe discusses how appreciating the primacy of the common good helps to combat errors concerning the salvation of individual souls, predestination, the existence of hell, and so forth.

Speaking now about the book as a whole, one of the challenges of a book honoring someone's legacy is that the attempt to pay tribute does not readily lend itself to either advancing scholarship or speaking to outsiders. By each of these measures, the value of Theology Needs Philosophy is limited: with perhaps a few exceptions (e.g., the essays by Long and Kaczor), these essays for the most part remind us of positions the authors themselves or other recent Thomists have already stated, and they provide little engagement with other schools of thought. With that in mind, one should think of this as a resource for those interested in thinking about philosophy's role as a handmaid to theology as understood within the Thomist tradition. In either an advanced undergrad or grad setting, this is the type of book one would recommend to a student who is reading Aquinas and in need of an introduction to the terrain of recent scholarship. Beyond that, students, admirers, and friends of Ralph McInerny as well as of Matthew Lamb himself would find here a fitting tribute and happy reminder that their legacies are alive and well.