Tutor’s New Book Wrestles with Moral Theology

An upcoming book by Dr. Ryan Brady, a member of Thomas Aquinas College’s teaching faculty on the California campus, addresses a detailed but crucial question in moral theology: “Is the practical wisdom of the prudent man founded upon some kind of innate or acquired instinct, or does it presuppose understanding of intellectually grasped basic principles?” Conforming to Right Reason, published by Emmaus Academic Press, guides readers through St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on reason, will, conscience, virtue, and the natural law to answer this decisive question.

“My interest in this subject began when I realized that many scholars were discussing virtue in very subjective ways that seemed to bracket it off from the influence of natural law,” says Dr. Brady. “These notions, it seemed to me, would make reason feckless when it comes to morality and reduce the life of virtue to a pursuit of a kind of nebulous conception of the ‘good’ that would be unmoored from first principles.”

Fascination with this fundamental question sustained Dr. Brady through his subsequent labors, which were considerable. “I worked on the manuscript for a year straight, though it is the culmination of about eight years of serious thought,” he says. “Even after completing the initial draft, though, I spent about two years working closely with the publisher. They asked me to translate what amounted to about 60 pages of mostly Latin footnotes derived largely from St. Thomas and his commentators.” With those years of toil behind him, Dr. Brady is overjoyed to see the fruits of his scholarship in print.

Advance response to the book has been overwhelmingly positive. As an exercise in systematic theology, Conforming to Right Reason is “an extremely impressive work,” according to Rev. Kevin L. Flannery, S.J.; “In an exhaustive and precise manner, [it] examines areas of Thomas Aquinas’s thought that are of fundamental importance for contemporary ethics and moral theology.” Moreover, Dr. Brady’s meticulous translations have garnered widespread attention: “As a professional translator of Thomistic works from the Latin, his fluency in Aquinas’s language and thought is simply outstanding,” says Dr. David Elliot of The Catholic University of America.

“In the end, I am quite pleased with the result,” reflects Dr. Brady. “I hope the two extra years I spent working on it in my spare time will make the book more widely accessible to anyone interested in the relationship between the will and reason, the true nature of freedom, and the centrality of intellectually informed virtue for attaining happiness and union with God.”