Dr. Michael Hanby will be a plenary speaker the 45th annual meeting of the American Maritain Association with a presentation titled, “The Interior Schism: On the Unresolved Question of the Church in the Modern World.” The AMA conference topic is “Thomism and Contemporary Ideologies.”

The conference will be held from Thursday, April 7 to Saturday, April 9, 2022, at DeSales University in Center Valley, PA.

The following alumni are also presenting during the conference’s concurrent sessions.

• Dr. William R. Hamant (Ph.D. ’12): “The Imagination and the Imago Dei”
• Mr. Daniel A. Drain (M.T.S. ’16, current Ph.D. candidate): “Anima Technica Vacua: Modern Man in Jacques Maritain, Robert Spaemann, and Ferdinand Ulrich”

Below is the American Maritain Association’s Description of the Conference Topic:

Jacques Maritain is often considered a critic of modernity. We would do better, however, to see his work as engaging the disorders of modern philosophy and its drift into ideology. He begins his seminal The Degrees of Knowledge—which celebrates its 90th anniversary in 2022—by noting that the failure of modern philosophies lie in their neglect of being. Lacking a foundation in reality, the moderns too often presume reality to be obedient to the mind and the will of man. This pervasive error leads them to a Babel of divergent worldviews. In doing so, it frustrates the human drive for truth. As Maritain affirms, “What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.” In advancing the commission of Aeterni Patris, he argues that only by centering ourselves in the realism of St. Thomas can we find a sure ground for both the person and society.

Many of the distortions that Maritain fought—nominalism, idealism, collectivism—are still with us. Yet these have been joined by new and unexpected ideologies arising from the ever more adamant refusals to engage being. We cannot ignore the pressing practical problems associated with these ideologies.