Thanks for visiting my website. My name is Mark F. Johnson, and since 1996 I have been blessed to teach in the Department of Theology at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA). At this site I share information about my research and publication interests with colleagues, students, and friends. But because, as Qoheleth says, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3), I also treasure sharing my opinions—why else become a professor?—which you can sample in my blog.

A bit about my academic interests. Since my B.A. from Cornell College of Iowa (1983), and then my graduate studies at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto (Ph.D. in 1990), most of my research has been on the life, thought, and works of St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Italian theologian, a member of the Dominican Order. My multidisciplinary background makes me hard to categorize; when pressed, I call myself a “medievalist theologian.”

While I am interested in every aspect of Thomas’s life and thought, I been targeting his moral teaching (found most especially in the Secunda pars of his Summa theologiae), and, most recently, his pastoralia, that is, his work that pertains ultimately to the ‘care of souls’ (cura animarum). Please also visit my beloved thomistica.net, a site I started in 2004, devoted to Thomas Aquinas news and academic resources.

Having been raised on the truths of the 1960’s and 1970’s I entered college in 1979 diffident about my religion and eager to demonstrate my independent political mind—which I did in 1980 by voting for Jimmy Carter, just as everybody else at my college had. My life’s walk has taken me to different destinations. In religion and in politics I have become a conservative—a result of my reading of primary texts all day. My Catholic conservatism leads me to embrace the teaching of Paul VI’s Humanae vitae and also binds me to the teaching of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum and the other social encyclicals. To be an American Catholic conservative is no easy trick; there is much thinking for me to do. Thanks for visiting. Read, comment, criticize.