Dr. Michael Dominic Taylor, Teaching Fellow at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, has recently accepted an Expanded Reason Award from the Francisco de Vitoria University (Madrid) and the Ratzinger Foundation (Vatican). The award ceremony was held on May 24, 2022 in Madrid, Spain as part of the Expanded Reason Congress.
Dr. Taylor won in the Research category for his 2020 publication, The Foundations of Nature: Metaphysics of Gift for an Integral Ecological Ethic. This work, according to the Francisco de Vitoria’s press release, “confronts the fact that practically all modern and postmodern thought has lost the ability to hold together both our intrinsic relationality with all other created beings and the radiant unity of the truth, goodness and beauty of creation.”
“It is a tremendous honor to be recognized by the Expanded Reason Institute. I am grateful to the Institute for the work that they do to promote the fundamental human quest for truth, goodness, and beauty,” Dr. Taylor stated. “Rather than a recognition of my personal achievement, this award is a testament to the enduring power and relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition to apply perennial truths and methods to current conundrums. It is also a call to continue to build on that foundation rather than abandon our roots.”
Dean Walter J. Thompson remarked, “In his Regensburg Address, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI challenged our contemporaries to have ‘the courage to engage the whole breadth of reason.’ We are proud to see Dr. Taylor recognized for his Catholic insistence on the integral truth of man in his relation to the natural world.”
