Aquinas by other means

Allow me to boldly suggest that theologians teaching Aquinas 101 consider Warren Kinghorn’s Wayfaring as a first text. It’s about the history and limitations of the regnant model of mental healthcare — with its mechanistic framings, its commodification, its internalist individualism — but then it provides Aquinas’s idea of the person-as-wayfarer in the most lucid and concise terms: substance and cause, telos and virtues, the good of “beatitudo” as not just happiness or flourishing, but “participation in blessing.” Short, approachable, and the frame of mental health is something students all recognize. A beautiful walking-up to the Thomist tradition and the larger Christian framing of personhood.