Prof. Michael Krom explores how athletic rivalry, when rooted in justice and love of the good, can deepen genuine friendship, build virtue, and lead toward a contemplative vision of life.

This lecture was given on November 13th, 2025, at Indiana University.

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About the Speakers:

Michael Krom started reading Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae shortly after his conversion at the end of college. Upon learning about Flannery O’Connor’s “hillbilly Thomist” habit of reading Aquinas every night, he started studying two articles a day and completed the Summa while in graduate school at Emory University. As a professor at Saint Vincent College, he saw the urgent need for collegians and seminarians to receive a solid foundation in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. In 2020, he published Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought (Baker Academic Press), and teaches a Thomistic philosophy course each fall. In addition to continuing work on the moral, economic, and political topics covered in the book, his current research is on the influence of monastic spirituality on Aquinas; he is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Aquinas Among the Benedictines.

Keywords: Athletic Excellence and Virtue, Competition and Friendship, Contemplation and Sport, Desire for the Good, Let the Best One Win, Sportsmanship and Justice, Virtue and Human Flourishing, Vocation and Play, Workaholism and Fanaticism, Wrestling with Rivalry

Let the Best One Win: Reflections of Friendship and Competition – Prof. Michael Krom

The Thomistic Institute