Lance Gracy

UNT Faculty Profile

• M.A. Philosophy, University of Texas-San Antonio (2019)
• Thesis: Ethical concern about 'the animal soul' through the activity of imagination: a phenomenological approach
• B.A. Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of the Incarnate Word (2016)
• Research interests: Medieval Philosophy (esp. St. Bonaventure); Philosophy of Religion; Environmental Philosophy/Ethics; Phenomenology; Asian and Comparative Philosophy

Lance Gracy is a Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas. His dissertation is an exegesis of wisdom in the Collationes in Hexaemeron of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, the premiere scholastic 'doctor' (teacher) of the Franciscan Order. In exegeting/articulating this last great work of the "Seraphic Doctor," Lance's dissertation conveys the "return to the wisdom of metaphysics and religion" as not only a return to exhortative and propaedeutical reading and instruction, sound doctrine, (re)conciliation, and so on, but also as something importantly related to the environment and ecology in that the return to the wisdom of metaphysics of religion properly reorients one to the understanding of nature through four essential components of wisdom: virtue, vestige, Scripture, and Bonaventure's so-called "excesses of love." 

Lance has been involved with various organizations working in the area of environmental thought, such as the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center and the St. Basil Institute for the Theology of Creation. He has two book chapters with the St. Basil Institute Press forthcoming in August 2024 - one entitled "Saint Bonaventure and the Theology of Animals" and the other entitled "Tom Bombadil, Bonaventure, and the Theology of Creation: On the Seven Pillars of Wisdom."