Can a Protestant read Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae without converting to Catholicism? Nadya Williams welcomes Miles Smith IV (Hillsdale College) to take up the question currently churning on social media. Miles argues yes — and that the more interesting question lies upstream: what do Christians do with Aristotle? Along the way, they consider the Summa's 13th-century context, its reception alongside Dante and through the Black Death, the Socratic shape of Aquinas's method, and why certain books (the Summa, Willa Cather's My Ántonia, Lewis's Till We Have Faces) break us open while others simply don't.
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00:00 - Aquinas's Prologue and Welcome
02:18 - Introducing Miles Smith IV
03:11 - What Makes a Classic?
04:18 - Reading Aquinas as a Protestant
08:34 - The Social Media Debate Behind This Episode
09:26 - Who Was Thomas Aquinas?
11:46 - Reason, Revelation, and What Evangelicals Already Assume
12:47 - The Aristotle Question
15:20 - Virtue, Flourishing, and the Knowledge of God
18:04 - How to Begin Reading the Summa
20:52 - The Socratic Method and Aquinas's Contemporaries
24:25 - The Summa, Dante, and the Black Death
29:02 - Theology, Philosophy, and Devotion
31:03 - Books That Break Us (and Till We Have Faces)
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