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Today’s reading brings us face to face with the raw cost of discipleship and the careful labor of theological understanding. Ignatius of Antioch walks us toward martyrdom without hesitation, insisting that death for Christ is not loss but true life, a refusal to trade eternity for the whole world (Matthew 16:26). Augustine, looking back on his younger self, confesses that even within the walls of the Church his desires remained disordered—restless, curious, and enslaved—until God’s mercy restrained him (Psalm 119:37). Finally, we pause with Thomas Aquinas before plunging further into the Summa Theologica, stepping back to understand the philosophical grammar that ...