Studies Systematic and Critical: The Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv: Volume 8

This eighth and final volume of the Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner entitled, in the spirit of Fehlner’s hero John Henry Newman, Studies Systematic and Critical, includes published and previously unpublished studies, spanning a wide range of years and topics. In his critical studies, Fehlner with his Scotistic subtlety wrestles with Karl Rahner over Trinitarian theology and the Kantian inflections within transcendental Thomism. Fehlner unmasks Hegelian undercurrents of Neopatripassianism. And he unravels sophistries in situational and sentimental ethics. Fehlner’s systematic essays unpack Scotus’s teaching on the person, grace, and justification. Seeing created personal perfection in the Immaculate Mother of God, Fehlner explores how Mary can be exemplar, mother, and teacher of Christians precisely as the most perfectly redeemed beneficiary of her Son’s redemptive and salvific work. In a monumental and original study, Fehlner demonstrates the deep contours of thought between the two greatest Oxford theologians: John Duns Scotus and John Henry Newman. The essays in this volume give clear witness to the range and depth of Fehlner’s theological and philosophical contributions as a critic and, more importantly, as the greatest Franciscan voice in constructive theology since the seventeenth-century “Golden Age” of Scotism.
Read more