The Shape of Holiness: St. Bonaventure's Theology of Grace for Troubled Times

"The Shape of Holiness: St. Bonaventure's Theology of Grace for Troubled Times" by Katherine Wrisley Shelby, PhD, is the third lecture of the Franciscan Zoom Lecture Series - Winter 2025 Semester, hosted by the Franciscan School of Theology at the University of San Diego.

Even for faithful Christians, the high scholastic theology of a thinker like St. Bonaventure can seem irrelevant and inaccessible. For Bonaventure, grace “hierarchizes” the soul by shaping it into a likeness of the Trinity through the “Threefold Way” in the tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius. This presentation explores the relevance of Bonaventure’s teachings on grace for our 21st-century context – namely, within a culture that largely interprets grace as an individual ticket to personal salvation at the expense of all others, Bonaventure rather calls us to understand how grace necessarily invites us into communion with our “neighbor” and the broader world around us.