thesis was written on William Blake, done in the framework of neo-Thomism.

But much came from the university itself which (under the influence of several remarkable men--most of them American Irish, by the way) was teaching a humanities curriculum that instructed the National Champion football-playing sons of Catholic immigrants in neo-Thomism, the Greeks and Dante, as well as the English classics, and had us reading Bernanos, Mauriac, Acton, Pascal, Burke, Berdyaev, et al.

He surveys the standard periods in which Thomas's work was most popular--from the great theologian's own time, when he had to defend his work, to the flourishing of Neo-Thomism in the latter half of the nineteenth century.