International Catholic University

Dear fellow students & Father Mullady,

Here is some information about references I've found helpful. If, as I'm sure is the case, you know of any others, please share them with the rest of us.

Msgr. Smith refers in the notes to Lesson 5 to "My Way of Life" by Walter Farrell and Martin Healy (1952). It is published by the Confraternity of the Precious Blood, 5300 Ft. Hamilton Pkway, Brooklyn, NY 11219. After some looking around I found it is available on-line from Amazon Books (www.amazon.com) for $6.50 (plus shipping and handling).

Complementary to this text is Farrell's "Companion to the Summa" written 10-15 years earlier and available on-line at http://www.op.org/Farrell/Companion/ The text of the Summa Theologica is available on-line at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ Both of these can be accessed from The Thomas Instituut te Utrecht website at http://www.ktu.nl/thomas/index.htm

Peter Kreeft has two books with annotated extracts from the Summa, "Summa of the Summa" (539 pp) and "A Shorter Summa" (162 pp). Both have a dictionary of philosophical terms used by Saint Thomas which I found helpful. The longer work includes an index; the shorter does not.

Speaking of dictionaries, you may want to take a look at the "Dictionary of Theological Terms" by Donald McKim, published by Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY. As you can guess from the publisher, this is not a Catholic work, but it does include terms from Catholic as well as Protestant and Reformed theology. I bought it because it included two very hard-to-find terms from "Veritatis Splendor," "paraenesis" and "ontic." It does not cover philosophical terms - no "final cause," "efficient cause," "material cause," "formal cause," etc.

In Christ,
Paul Soper
Wilmington, Delaware