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Thomistic and Patristic

My buddy Mike Sullivan has posted a great tribute to Brad Fallon, who was a friend of mine and one of the pre-publication readers for the first edition of my book The Fathers of the Church. Brad was probably the most critical of the lot, though the others, too, were pretty tough on the child-author. Brad certainly made it a better book.

Brad was a disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose feast we mark today, and the last book Brad read was St. Thomas’s collection of patristic commentaries, the Catena Aurea. Thomas was the great patrologist of the medieval west. His Summa is largely a collection of patristic authorities. It was he who said he’d give all of Paris for a collection of Chrysostom’s homiles. Sounds like a bargain to me.

My own study of St. Thomas concentrates on his poetry: Praying in the Presence of Our Lord: With St. Thomas Aquinas.