At a public ceremony held on November 27, Cambridge University awarded its Doctor of Philosophy in Divinity degree to our brother, Fr. Nicholas Lombardo, O.P. The conferral of the degree followed upon Fr. Lombardo's completion and successful defense of his thesis, The Ethics of Redemption: God's Will and Christ's Crucifixion, an abstract of which can be found below. Please join the Province of St. Joseph in congratulating Fr. Lombardo on this prestigious achievement. Before returning to the Province to assume teaching duties, Fr. Lombardo is completing a year of post-doctoral research at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.

From The Ethics of Redemption: God's Will and Christ's Crucifixion:

God's goodness seems to preclude the possibility of God attaining any objective, no matter how beneficial, through the torture and execution of an innocent man. Yet the New Testament and Christian tradition assert that Christ's crucifixion somehow plays a pivotal role in the overcoming of evil and death. It seems necessary, on the one hand, to deny that God wills Christ's crucifixion; and on the other hand, to affirm that God does. This study critiques the attempts of Anselm and Abelard to resolve this tension, which have been enormously influential in Western theology, and then argues that the patristic interpretation of the crucifixion provides a much more satisfactory solution.