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in the spirit of Fehlner’s hero John Henry Newman, Studies Systematic and Critical, includes published and previously unpublished studies, spanning a wide range of years and topics.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.

Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv. (1931-2018), was a Franciscan priest and theologian. For nearly forty years he taught theology in Franciscan schools and seminaries in Italy and the United States. He is the author of several books and countless articles in theological and pastoral journals. His final work was published posthumously as The Theologian of Auschwitz: St. Maximilian Kolbe on the Immaculate Conception in the Life of the Church (2019).


J. Isaac Goff is an instructor of dogmatic theology at Saints Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary. He is coeditor of A Companion to Bonaventure (2014) and author of Caritas in Primo: A Study of Bonaventure's Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity (2015).


Fr. Christiaan W. Kappes is academic dean of Ss. Cyril and Methodius Byzantine Catholic Seminary. His latest publications include "Gregorios Palamas' Reception of Augustine's Doctrine of the Original Sin and Nicholas Kabasilas' Rejection of Aquinas' Maculism as the Background to Scholarios' Immaculism," ita (2017), and "A New Narrative for the Reception of Seven Sacraments into Orthodoxy: Peter Lombard's Sentences in Nicholas Cabasilas and Symeon of Thessalonica and the Utilization of John Duns Scotus by the Holy Synaxis," italiciz (2017).