David B. Burrell

David B. Burrell (b. 1933), a Holy Cross priest and longtime Hesburgh Professor of Philosophy and Theology at the University of Notre Dame, is among the foremost Catholic philosophical theologians to develop Thomas Aquinas in sustained dialogue with Islamic and Jewish thought. Trained in analytic philosophy and Thomistic metaphysics, he was decisively shaped by Wittgenstein's grammar of religious language and by extended residencies at Tantur (Jerusalem), the American University of Beirut, and institutions in Bangladesh and Uganda. His central thesis—articulated in Aquinas: God and Action (1979) and Knowing the Unknowable God (1986)—is that Aquinas's treatment of divine simplicity, eternity, and creation cannot be properly understood without its debts to Ibn Sina and Maimonides, and that the Abrahamic traditions converge in a grammar of God as Creator wholly distinct from creation. In Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (1993) and later works, he reframes creation ex nihilo as the shared horizon of trilateral philosophical theology. Burrell has also translated al-Ghazali (Faith in Divine Unity and Trust in Divine Providence) and engaged Sadrian metaphysics. Critics, including some analytic theologians, have questioned whether his apophatic, grammatical reading underplays positive predication, while others within comparative theology have asked whether his Thomist framing dominates the dialogue. His work nonetheless remains foundational for contemporary Christian-Muslim-Jewish philosophical theology.