St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Doctor of the church. He was an Italian Dominican friar and Roman Catholic priest who was an influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism. Canonized in 1323 by Pope John XXII, Aquinas was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology and the father of Thomism.The late John A. Oesterle was assistant chairman of the department of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (1972-1977) and the editor of The New Scholasticism (1967-1977).

"[This] excellent translations go far towards capturing the best aspects of St. Thomas' Latin prose: laconic and condensed, but always clear and orderly." —Faith and Reason"[This] text . . . performs an extremely useful task. It makes an important part of Thomas's moral thought readily available to those with little or no knowledge of Latin, and without the wherewithal to approach the large and costly English editions. It is a step in the right direction, not of returning to some Catholic version of fundamentalist bibliolatry, but of reading a Christian theologian and philosopher whose immense wisdom repays careful study by Christians and non-Christians alike." —New Oxford Review