Just wanted to let you know that one of our sisters will be teaching a 10-week course on Aquinas and the Trinity to run Friday evenings 7:30-9 pm, from 6 October - 15 December (with half-term break in November). It will be held both in-person (Cambridge) and online via Zoom. The requested donation for the Dominican Sisters is £50 for the entire course. For more information or to register, go to the Thomistic Studies website: https://www.thomisticstudies.org You can register online or by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Please also pass this on!

Blessed— or happy - are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — or for justice; for they shall have their fill. We will come back to the choice different translators of the scriptures make here between justice and righteousness, but, before we go there, the question of whether happy, or blessed, is the best translation of St Matthew's Greek is of course also a vexed one, and perhaps especially in connection with this beatitude.

Fidelity to sacred vows is a cause for thanksgiving, hence it's a privilege and a joy to preach at Sr Tamsin's Silver Jubilee. It reminds me of an earlier Jubilee: 32 years ago, in the chapel upstairs, we celebrated her parents' Golden Wedding. With eyes of faith, we see Christian Marriage as a Sacrament. But virtually all human beings have been able to see how life-giving Marriage is: it makes sense even as a human reality. By contrast, Tamsin's Vows were, so to speak, more blatant: dedicating oneself to religious life makes sense only because God Incarnate spoke the Beatitudes, lived by them, and died by them.

Exploring the human person in the Thomistic theological tradition