What Does a 13th-Century Monk Have to Do With the Laws Regulating Abortion?

After six episodes exploring Aristotle's ethics — eudaimonia, teleology, the golden mean, and the politics of the good life — we turn to the thinker who took that framework and transformed it into the philosophical backbone of Western Christianity: Saint Thomas Aquinas. The 13th-century Dominican friar didn't just borrow Aristotle. He baptized his ideas in Catholicism, taking Aristotle's "natural order" and reframed it as God's design; a creation overflowing with meaning, moral law, and divine purpose baked into the structure of reality itself.

This episode isn't really about religion. It's about power. Because Aquinas's natural law idea has traveled through centuries of Catholic doctrine, into modern conservative political philosophy, and ultimately into the reasoning behind some of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions of our time, including the Dobbs decision.

Who gets to define what's "natural"? Who benefits when a specific version of natural law becomes the law of the land? That's what we need to find out.