About me

Welcome to my website. My name is Mark Johnson, and I am blessed to teach in the Department of Theology at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA). I’ve built this site to share information about my research and publication interests with friends, students, and colleagues. But because, as Qoheleth says, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity,” (Ecclesiastes 1:2-3), in addition to pages about my academic life, you’ll find pages devoted to the city of Vicenza, Italy, where I lived when I was a young teenager, the son of a US Army officer. And, of course, you can visit my stream-of-consciousness blog page.

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 Order of the Preachers (the Dominicans).

Who are these “Dominicans”? The Dominican Order, officially called the “Order of the Preachers,” was founded in 1217 in Toulouse, France, by St Dominic of Caleruega (1175-1221). Though a Spaniard, Dominic had settled in southern France in the area of Toulouse when he found the dualist heresy, the Alibigensian or Cathar heresy, thriving among powerful laity there. He founded the religious order in the then-unified Christian church in order to safeguard true Christian teaching through persuasive preaching, hearing confessions, and above all by a life of exemplary holiness, prayer, and begging for sustenance, after the fashion of the Apostles (Luke 10).

While I am interested in every aspect of Thomas’s life and thought, I been working specifically on 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). To see my current research and teaching interests, you can check out my projects or teaching pages. I invite you to visit my pet extra-curricular project, Thomistica.NET, which is home to my “Tommaso d’Aquino Newsletter,” and news blog.

Please look around, and leave some comments in the guestbook.