Rewritten Theology: Aquinas After His Readers

Recent years have seen numerous appropriations of Thomas Aquinas’s work by a range of theologians, from liberal Catholics to the creators of radical orthodoxy. Responding to this upsurge of interest, this book goes straight to the heart of the contemporary debates about Thomism. Author Mark Jordan focuses on the concept of authority, both in terms of Aquinas’s own attitude to authority and how the Church authorities have used Aquinas to shore up their own position. He shows how to read Aquinas from, into and against theological authorities, and argues for future readings of Thomas which are substantially different from those which have gone before.

Preface. Abbreviations and Editions. 1 St. Thomas and the Police. 2 The Competition of Authoritative Languages. 3 Imaginary Thomistic Sciences. 4 Thomas’s Alleged Aristotelianism or Aristotle Among the Authorities. 5 The Protreptic of Against the Gentiles. 6 The Summa of Theology as Moral Formation. 7 What the Summa of Theology Teaches. 8 Philosophy in a Summa of Theology. 9 Writing Secrets in a Summa of Theology. Conclusion: Writing Theology after Thomas –– and His Readers. Index.

Mark D. Jordan is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University. He is the author of Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourse in Aquinas (1986), The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997), The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism (2000) and The Ethics of Sex (Blackwell, 2001).

“Mark Jordan′s recent book, Rewritten Theology, challenges the way in which the achievement of Thomas Aquinas has been both received and reformulated, often in order to serve particular theological and philosophical ends.” ( American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly , May 2009)