An Embattled Mind, In Defense of St. Thomas: The Post-Conciliar Years (The Collected Wanderer Articles: 1971–1987) (Book 7/Collected Works)
by Carol Jackson Robinson | Introduction by Gregorio Montejo, Ph.D.
- Product Code: aem
- Publication date: Late 2025/Early 2026
- Size: 6 x 9
$25.95
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Carol Robinson was a savvy first-hand witness of the collapse of large swaths of Catholic culture in America in the immediate post-Vatican II years. In these detailed and perceptive essays from the pages of The Wanderer, she passionately yet soundly dissects the destructive forces at work in the years spanning 1971–1987. Robinsons’ keen analytical mind surveys many of the most pressing issues of the time, but three themes are uppermost in her mind, beginning with a concerning reluctance from Bishops to exercise their apostolic duty to teach the faithful. Robinson chronicles the epidemic of increasingly poor catechizing that resulted in a generation of young Catholics who were ever more ignorant of the Magisterium. Robinson is exceptionally good at chronicling the dereliction of the teaching office in regard to Scripture, examining how the misuse of historical-critical methodologies at the hands of Catholic biblical scholars progressively undermined belief in the word of God among post-Conciliar Catholics. Above all, Robinson devotes her energies to exposing distressing trends within Thomism in the wake of the Council, a time when the Angelic Doctor’s work lost its preeminence in the schools, especially when it came to seminary formation.
Robinson is particularly insightful in her critique of a growing historicization of Aquinas’ thought amidst the Thomist movement itself, which in her mind parallels the analogous process of demythologizing of Scripture. After surveying a host of innovating academics who would reduce Thomas’ thought to the historically conditioned product of a bygone era, Robinson persuasively argues for the enduring universality of the Common Doctor, and the undiminished relevance of his teaching as anchored in a firm, clear-sited philosophy of being. The pieces reprinted here provide a fascinating window into the tumultuous situation in the Church in these years, but this collection is much more than a mere review of the troubled past. In her diagnosis of the problems besetting the Catholicism of her time she also provides a prophetic strategy for the embattled Church in our own day, centered around a profound retrieval of authentic Thomism and the perennial spiritual and intellectual patrimony of Catholic Tradition.
Table of Contents
Introduction by Gregorio Montejo, Ph.D.
1971
Adult Brainwashing (May 13)
Death of a Priest (June 23)
1972
Bless Me…/Ma’am? (January 13)
A Little Thomistic Logic: Letter to the Editor (February 3)
The Modern Mind (March 16)
Gremlins at Work (April 13)
The Artificial Sermon (April 20)
1973
The Bare Ruined Choirs of Secular Molinism (January 4)
The Most Private Property (May 31)
The Credulity of Father Brown (June 7)
The Credibility of Father Brown (November 8)
1974
The Church Militant (March 28)
Death of a Killer (April 11)
Dishonoring St. Thomas (May 12)
The Demythologizing of St. Thomas (November 21)
1975
Dissolving the Faith in Action (March 20)
Male Chauvinist Pigs, Marriage, and the New Catholic World (August 7)
The Sins of the First Lady (September 18)
The Greening of the Catholic Church in America (November 13)
1976
On the Revolutionary Front (January 15)
NCR’s “Non Serviam” (February 12)
Jimmy Carter’s Little Sister (June 17)
Secular Christianity and the Eucharist (August 12)
A Denial of Thomistic Principles: Letter to the Editor (September 16)
On the Validity of the Tennessee Sacraments (December 30)
1977
More on the Validity of the Tennessee Sacraments (February 24)
Prodigal Sons…Or Unjust Stewards? (March 10)
On the Demythologizing of Roots (May 26)
Little Pockets of Holiness and Peace (December 22)
1979
A Reason to Rejoice, The Pope is Coming (September 27)
1980
Putting the Pope Down (August 14)
The New Fundamentalism (September 11)
Whatever Happened to Amazing Grace? (November 27)
If the Blind Lead the Blind (December 11)
1981
Bishops as Mouthpieces for Freud (March 19)
Children Need to Know About Purity (June 25)
Monasticism as Therapy (September 10)
Religious Pragmatism (October 8)
The New Apologetics (November 19)
1982
The Case of the Occult Heretic (February 25)
The Hinckley Case (July 22)
Whose Church Is It, Anyhow? (December 16)
1983
Social Insecurity (February 17)
So That’s Why It’s Called “Amazing Grace” (March 3)
On Polarization (July 7)
The Worship of Freedom as an End in Itself (July 14)
The Signs of Predestination (September 29)
The Signs of Reprobation (October 6)
Happy Birthday, Martin Luther (November 10)
1984
Pleasing Martin Luther (January 19)
Renew: On-Site Training for Becoming The American Church (March 15)
My Dream (March 29)
Who is the Common Doctor of the Church: Thomas Aquinas or Martin Luther? (November 8)
No Knee Shall Bend: The Triumphalism of the Religious Proletariat (November 29)
1985
Antinomianism in the Catholic Church (February 7)
Renew: The American Mode (May)
Who am I?: Letter to the Editor (October 3)
Six-Part Series on Karl Rahner (October 24–November 28)
Part I: Karl Rahner’s Duplicitous Theology
Part II: Rahner in Context
Part III: Kant’s Copernican Revolution
Part IV: The Reversal of the Order of the Sciences
Part V: Existentialism: The Flat-Earth Philosophy
Part VI: The Medium is Not the Message
1986
A Summit Meeting of The Two Cities (September 11)
1987
The Common Good and “Pack of Lies” (March 28) -
With startling foresight, laser-sharp insight, refreshingly clear prose, and delightful wit, Robinson explains how intoxication with "progress" in the 1970s and 1980s provided a cover for revolutionaries' underlying war on metaphysics, as they gnawed away at the Church's interior wiring system. Robinson applies her training in philosophy to expose the toxic 'isms informing the revolution, such as Molinism and atheistic humanism. Along the way, she shares zany tales of what passed as "progress" in her era. —Jennifer Bryson, PhD, Fellow, Catholic Women's Forum at the Ethics and Public Policy Center
Carol Robinson tackles with a strikingly refreshing combo of earthiness and intellectual depth what matters to Catholic men and women in a post-covid 19 world. Cris-crossing the insights of Catholicism’s greatest philosopher with the postmodern Catholic’s existence in a way that stimulates creativity for daily lifestyle, she is witty, humorous, and uncannily insightful. —Fr. William J. Slattery, Ph.D, S.T.L., author of The Logic of Truth: St. Thomas Aquinas's Epistemology and Antonio Livi's Alethic Logic (Leonardo da Vinci, 2016) and Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build—and can help Rebuild—Western Civilization (Ignatius Press, 2017)
The question asked by most Catholics under-65 (and plenty over 65) is: What happened after Vatican II? Carol Jackson Robinson lays it all out in this abundant collection of essays. It’s one of the several major themes in an important book by a savvy laywoman who was a Catholic publishing figure of the middle and late 20th century, a premium writer, and a knowledgeable Thomist. —Roger A. McCaffrey, Publisher
In the second half of the twentieth century a lot of nonsense was written by people who claimed to read the signs of the times. Unfortunately for them, and as Carol Jackson pointed out, God only speaks two languages: common sense and Thomism. Fortunately for us she was fluent in both. —Alan Fimister, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Director of Graduate Theology at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Connecticut, co-author (with Fr. Thomas Crean, O.P.) of Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy (2020), and author of The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man: Romanitas as a Note of the Church (2023)
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