Interview with Dominic Doyle on The promise of Christian humanism: Thomas Aquinas on hope, by Dominic Doyle

Abstract

In this book, Dominic Doyle discusses how the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, Charles Taylor, Nicholas Boyle, and others reveals the essential bond between the Christian virtue of hope and the life-affirming sensibilities of humanism. How can we care about this world and the pain of others when we also look towards the transcendence and salvation of the afterlife? This book offers an answer to this profound and polarizing question, bringing unity to contemporary humanism and Christian hope. It offers a creative retrieval of Aquinas's understanding of theological hope—the desire for the future, difficult, yet possible good of eternal life with God—as the empowering source and encompassing horizon of all ordinary human hopes. This retrieval of Aquinas is framed by a critical engagement with the influential work of Charles Taylor and Nicholas Boyle, who bring the project of Christian humanism into the twenty-first century.