Pints With Aquinas - BONUS | Peter Kreeft interview | The Matt Fradd Show

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

In this episode of TMFS I talk to Dr. Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, about his conversion to the Catholic faith, why he loves Thomas Aquinas, his thoughts about Pope Francis, Dostoevsky (obviously) and the best arguments for God and atheism ... and much else besides. --- SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Hi, my name is Matt Fradd, and this is The Matt Fradd Show, and today I was so excited to interview one of my heroes, Dr. Peter Kreeft. He is philosopher at Boston College. He's 82 years old, and I think has written more books than that, 85 or something. Really brilliant guy. We speak about philosophy. We speak about the state of the church. We speak about his conversion to Catholicism

and all sorts besides, a bunch of other stuff besides. It was really terrific, really terrific. One of the reasons I love these long form discussions is usually when you're meeting someone for the first time, it takes about 20 minutes until you get into a groove and man, it was fun. I love this man so much and you are gonna love this interview.

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report to your accountability partner telling you where you went, where they went, what they typed in and things like that. So be sure to check that out, covenanteyes.com, covenanteyes.com, and be sure to use the promo code, one word, Matt Fradd. All right, here's my interview with Dr. Peter Kreeft. There's this very pious Catholic who is a bear hunter. Okay. And he believes in miracles. And one day he's out hunting bear and he loses his rifle. And this bear is very aggressive and very hungry and is chasing him.

And he's running away and the bear is gaining on him. aggressive and very hungry and is chasing him and he's running away and the bear is gaining on him. So he says, the only way I can possibly escape is by getting supernatural help. So he falls down on his knees and prays, God, please convert this bear and make him a good Catholic. And then he turns around and he sees that the bear too is on his knees and praying. He says, ah, my prayer has been heard. And then he listens to the content of the bear. Bless us, O Lord, in these, I guess, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Very good. Alright, awesome. Lead us.

Do you want to listen, Lord? We've done that. Oh, we'll pray. Alright, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this opportunity to record this interview. We pray that it would be a blessing to people, that they would know the love of God and grow in relationship with Jesus.

In your name we pray. Amen. Amen and amen. St. Clair of Assisi. Pray for us. Patron Saint of Television. I thought that was Joseph of Cupertino. Why?

Isn't that the one that flied? Yes. So why would he be the patron saint of television? Well, television makes images fly through space. Oh, very good. Okay, I think i told you this last time you might not remember it first of all i don't know how they pick who who's the patron saint of what it's more of a public thing it's the holy spirit has something

to do with that all right we'll check it out thomas aquinas was that is the patron saint of universities yeah he died the same day as bonaventure right also a doctor of the church and close friend or best friend this is not not making this up bonaventure, right? Also a doctor of the church and close friend or best friend. This is not making this up. Bonaventure is the patron saint of bowel difficulties or bowel abnormalities or bowel movements. Does he have a bowel abnormality? I don't know. Huh. But it doesn't seem right.

I mean, they're both terrific men of the church. Aquinas gets universities. man of the church, Aquinas gets universities. Aquinas should also be the patron saint of donkeys because he refused to ride a donkey when all the other monks did because he weighed well over 300 pounds and he loved animals. Very good. You love Aquinas? I do.

Why do you love Aquinas? Because I always lose. When I do sumo wrestling with that sumo wrestler, he always wins. What's the best thing you love about Thomasomas aquinas he speaks the truth yeah i find that when i read thomas aquinas i find myself fully convinced sometimes i'll read other authors i'm like yeah maybe yeah but after he's laid out the objections and then houdini's out of them yeah it's pretty impressive even bertram russell admitted that in his autobiography he said i read aquinas and I thought I'd get some of his objections. And I found that my own objections to his philosophy were not as good as his own objections.

That's amazing. What an admission. Yeah. Now, one of the things I find difficult with Thomas Aquinas is the lying bit. The lying bit? Yeah. Whether lying is intrinsically evil. That's tricky because... It much more culturally and socially relative than most other forms of human behavior.

If your father is in hospital and he's just had a heart attack and the doctor comes to you and says, when you visit your father, please don't tell him he had a heart attack because if you do, he's probably going to have another one and die. Yeah. So your father says, tell me, son, did I have a heart attack? I think you're commanded to lie. Wow. The Jews have to lie to the Nazis who are seeking the Jews

because they promised the Jews that they'd hide them. So I think yeah but we got we got two options here either that's just not a lie yeah we have to somehow play with language and call that something mental reservation or something. It's not just mental reservation I think that there are some people who have given up their right to truth just as a violent aggressor has given up his right to life, and you're allowed to use lethal force if necessary to save your own life. And how do you judge that, though?

Well, that's the prudential judgment, yeah. God does not give us answers to all the questions. He gives us the principles, and we find the applications. Here's a weirder question. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Here's a weirder question. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Well, I'm an extrovert in that I don't like to think that much about myself or worry that much about myself or keep diaries.

But on the other hand, I'm an introvert in that I like to be alone. And I don't like small talk. Me too. Like most philosophers. Yes. Oh, is that right? So I don't like the categories. I hate being in an elevator with somebody.

Well, that's only temporary. Just one other person. Yeah, but it's temporary enough to make it awkward. Hey, how are you? Not bad. This is going to end soon. Let's just grin and bear it. I've heard that introverts don't like small talk.

I'm definitely like that. I'm definitely introverted. You can take chances in an elevator. You can insult people. Ah. What might you say? Do you think this elevator can hold both of us very good hmm this you can use the old western line this town is too small for both of us and one of us is going to have to leave and i'm staying billy connelly made a joke he said

wasn't really a joke it's just you say I feel about as welcomed as a fart in an elevator. Very descriptive. Yes. Yes, that's how I feel when I'm in elevators. Well I have a soft spot in my heart for farters. Why? I'm a farter myself. I actually fart too. Yes. That's great. At least two of us. I farted I farted

four children. That's what I meant too. It had nothing to do with my bum. I love dogs, and we've always had basset hounds. And once you smell a basset fart, there's nothing quite like it. It travels that long distance. It's low to the ground. It makes every other human fart seem tame.

You're like, please, no need to apologize. I have a basset hound. I have a black Russian. Really? What? I have a basset hound. No, I have a black Russian terrier. Oh.

And a terrier, thank you black Russian terrier. Oh. And a terrier, thank you, a terrier sounds like a small dog, but it's not. It's bloody huge. It's about 120, would you say 120 pounds? Easy. Oh, that's a different kind. We had a fox terrier once. I had a fox terrier too.

Oh. I heard somebody say that if you can step on a dog and kill it, it wasn't a dog to begin with. What do you think about that? that if you can step on a dog and kill it, it wasn't a dog to begin with. What do you think about that? No, that doesn't apply to chihuahuas. Ah, why? You can just flick your finger and kill them.

Yes, but you can also step on them. Yeah. So tell me how you got to where you are. You are 82 years old. Where I got to where I am. You write 820 books. How many? 820. I don't know am. You write 820 books. How many? 820. I don't know.

I'm just taking a guess. How many books have you written? Do you keep count? It's in the 80s somewhere. What's the first book you ever wrote? Love is Stronger Than Death. Who published that? Originally Harper and Rowe.

Okay. And then Ignatius Press. Wow. Actually, it was three books in one. There's a story behind that. Please. I taught a story behind that. Please. I taught a course in death and dying at Boston College. One of my students said, I work for, let's see, what's the name of the publisher now?

What's the Unitarian Publishing Company? I don't know. Forget what it is. Anyway, she said, I'm going to approach my boss because your course is fascinating. And you said you're writing a book on it and you might want to publish it. Well, I started the course by talking about what death was and how it appeared in various ways. And then I asked about why we love life after death and seek it and desire it, the longing for heaven. And then finally concluded with some speculation about the nature of life after death and seek it and desire it, the longing for heaven, and then finally concluded with some speculation about the nature of life after death.

They eventually became three books, Love is Stronger Than Death, Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing, and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven But Know You Didn't Have Asking. I see that one around. I outlined the book, and I gave it to a student, and she approached the publisher, and the publisher's agent contacted me and said, we'd love to print your book. I said, well, fine. Can I have a contract? Well, I have to check with the president first. But I've been here for 20 years, and I've published 400 books, and he's rubber-stamped every one of them.

So I got to work on the book, and eventually he said, I'm sorry, we can't do your book. I'll refer you to a friend of mine in Harper and Row they probably will do it but we can't do it why not yeah I'm not a liberty to tell I said that's very strange I thought Unitarians published everything yeah you do you do Catholic stuff atheist stuff Zen Buddhist stuff everything he said no sorry I can't tell you years later I met him in the, and he was no longer working for that publisher. And I said, can you tell me now why you turned down my book? And he said, oh, yes, it was too Christian.

We Unitarians have no idea what we are, but we know one thing, we're not Christians. So I was flattered. That's very good. So how old were you when you wrote your first book or this trilogy? Let's see. The kids were just in school. So that was 1970, about 78. I guess I was 30.

Okay. And you were working at Boston College? Yeah. How long have you been working at Boston College for? I don't work at Boston College. I have fun at Boston College. They pay me for it. I teach philosophy.

And when did you get tenure? About halfway through. Very good. Do you think if you didn't have tenure, some of the things you have been saying or the way you talk about the Catholic faith? No, Boston College is a good place. It's Catholic enough to be home and it's pagan enough to be wild and you can pretty much say anything and get away with it. Now, you told me before we did this interview that Focus are not on the campus. Focus is a series of Catholic missionaries who have a great sense of humor because missionaries always go to the ghettos, the darkest places. So they target American universities, especially Catholic universities. But they're not there. Well, I think there's a rivalry between the Jesuits and Opus Dei and Focus. So it's a kind of Indian house thing.

There are some very good Jesuits at BC amidst all the heretics. Okay. So we're going back. I love the Jesuits. You do? I do. Okay. There's good Jesuit jokes.

They're very smart. Oh, there's good Jesuit jokes. We know a good Jesuit joke. Best Jesuit joke of all time. I know what you're going to say. Tell it. Aquinas one. What is the difference between a Jesuit and a Dominican?

This is going to upset so many Protestants. What? The Dominicans were founded by Saint Dominic in the 12th century to combat the heresy of Albigensianism. The Jesuits were founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century to combat the heresy of Protestantism. Now tell me, how many Albigensians have you met lately? Zero. Yes. Yes, it's a very good joke. So we're going backwards in time then. So you converted when you were at college to Catholicism. What college were you at?

Calvin College, a very Calvinist college, a very good liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Okay. In the Reformed or Presbyterian tradition. Okay. And they take scholarship very seriously. And I'm a philosopher because of one of the professors there, Harry Jellema, who was one of the wisest men I ever met, a kind of a living Socrates. And I read my way into the church. I gradually fell in love with things Catholic.

I thought it was a temptation. I took a course in church history. our Protestant view of church history and the Catholic view of church history was that we Protestants know that we are the true Christians because we're in the Bible, and the church in the Bible is a Protestant church, and it gradually became bad that it's Catholic in the Middle Ages, and we're not the new kids on the block. We restored the old church. Catholics, on the other hand, believe the opposite, that theirs is the original church. Catholics, on the other hand, believe the opposite, that theirs is the original church. So I remember asking him a question,

Professor, if I take a time machine back to the first century, and my Catholic friend also does the same thing, and we both worship together, that I would feel more at home than he. And the professor said, that's a very strange way to put it, but yes. I said, oh good, I'll deal with my temptation by reading the early church fathers and prove to myself how Protestant they were. Well, you know the rest of the story. Yeah. Now this was something, like you said, it's a temptation you felt. So when you were reading the church fathers, it legitimately was to try to dissuade yourself from joining the Catholic church at that point? Oh yeah, yeah.

I had never knowingly talked to any Catholic at all. Wow. I had been told. Only on accident. Right, maybe accident, maybe the milkman, who knows. That's right. But I had been told that this was the whore of Babylon and it was basically paganism with the thin veneer of Christianity. And I read a lot of people that I didn't understand, like Saint John of the Cross and some of Thomas Aquinas. But I recognize that this was, if this was a heresy, it was a beautiful and great one. It's a mountain. There's something remarkable here.

It deserves at least respect and investigation. And the more I read, the more Catholic it looked. The Eucharist, for instance. Not a single Christian for a thousand years denied the real presence in the Eucharist. How could the Holy Spirit have fallen asleep so far? I think that with baptismal regeneration, the first person to deny baptismal regeneration was Ulrich Zwingli. And in his work, De Baptismo, he says something to the effect of, I can only conclude that all of the doctors and fathers were in error. Yeah.

I think, well, you can, that's at least consistent, but goodness. That's like the Jehovah's Witnesses. They say the church went into heresy in the first century and recovered only in the 19th. That doesn't fit the fact. Yeah, so that would mean for about 1,900 years the words of Christ, if you have a disagreement, bring it to the church, were irrelevant. Yeah.

Yeah. There was no church. So were your parents and friends Calvinist or evangelical? All of them. Yeah. How would they define themselves? Are Calvinist specifically? Like the...

Protestant, Christian, Protestant, evangelical, Calvinist. All of it. All of it. Yeah. So how do they view Catholicism? Some of them with more respect than others. All of them theologically negatively. And I respect that because if the church isn't what it claims to be, it's the most arrogant false prophet in the world. It claims infallibility. It claims that it inherits the

promise that Christ gave to his apostles. He who hears you hears me. So it's either a true prophet or a false prophet. And there's an immense difference between the two. You can't just paper that over. So when you started reading the church fathers, how did you begin to disclose to your friends and family that you were maybe moving towards Rome? Friends are easier to talk to than family. And my father, especially, who was an elder in the church, took it very badly. We had a lot of theological discussions. We were very open with each other, and we had a lot of nasty arguments and a lot of respectful arguments. Time eventually healed it. Good.

And he eventually said, Peter, I still disagree with your theology, but I respect your motives. You're trying to follow the will of Christ. I think you're making a mistake, but God is somehow using you. He was a pastor or an elder in his? An elder, yeah. And so you grew up with him as an elder in the church? Yeah, a very wise man. Yeah, I've heard you speak lovingly of your father before. It's always lovely when you hear men speak well of their fathers. His honesty gave me the first Catholic idea I ever had in my life. We lived in New Jersey, and we went to New York City a lot as tourists, and I'd never been in a cathedral before. All the Protestant churches that I knew were rather plain. Went to St. Patrick's Cathedral. I was overwhelmed. It was a different kind of beauty. I turned to my father and said, Dad, this is a Catholic church, isn't it? He said, yes. I said, the Catholics are

wrong, aren't they? He said, yes, they're very wrong. And I said, in my simple eight-year-old honesty, then how come their churches are so beautiful? And he said, I don't know. Wow. That was the first time I ever heard him say, I don't know. So I just filed it away. Yeah. Now, when you were growing up, I guess, so when did you convert? You were in college, but what year? Senior year. But what year?

Like 60s, 50s? 1959. So this is before the Novus Ordo came in? Yeah. So that's interesting. So you became a Catholic just as a lot of the chaos was sort of revolving around, yeah, all that in the United States. I came before the chaos. Yeah.

I didn't cause the chaos. No, to be clear. I didn't start before it. No, I was baptized, conditionally rebaptized at Yale in 1960. Wow. Why at Yale? Were you studying there? That's where I went, yeah.

Oh, okay. To graduate school. Oh, okay. Doing your PhD work there? Yeah. Okay. And then i transferred to fordham to get homism so i got my phd at water oh fantastic and so what was your specific phd and

what was your wonder in plato and augustine really the origin of philosophy i've always been a kind of a little kid uh with a sense of wonder and awe and whimsy. And I love philosophers who share that. And the greatest ones always do. Yeah, it says a lot about you and the work that the Father's done in you that you are very wonderful. You do wonder. Whereas you meet a lot of older folks who don't seem to be able to do that anymore. Life's beaten them around a bit and they become cynical.

Do you see that or no? Yeah, I see that. And I don't know how to deal with that. That's a pity. It's easy to take a naive, happy believer and turn them into a cynic. It's much harder to do the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. I forget who it was who said something like cynicism. A cynic is somebody who knows the price of everything, the value of everything. The value of nothing, yeah. Well, it kind of makes sense. I mean, we're thrown into life, and when you're young, you might experience certain traumatic events, but they don't affect you a great deal. Right.

But after a while, you just kind of get beaten up, and you start to believe things. And you get bored. You get bored. I think boredom is one of the biggest problems of modern life. The very word didn't exist until modern times. Is that right? There's no word in any ancient language for generalized boredom. Interesting. Yeah. So things like sloth would have existed, but generalized boredom. Right, right. Yeah,

I've heard you say this, not boredom about any one thing in particular. But boredom about life itself. You say, which covers us like the sky, just everything. That's a linguistic fact. It puzzles me though. I mean, isn't somebody like, ohula bored? Is that why he does what he does? Yeah. Well, I think I like what Aquinas, his differentiation between curiosity and studiousness. And most people today, when you hear curiosity, we think of it as a virtue. He says it's a vice because he sees it as just accumulating useless knowledge. The difference is that vain curiosity, which is a it as a virtue. He says it's a vice because he sees it as just accumulating useless knowledge. The difference is that vain curiosity, which is a vice, is arrogant. It wants to know everything. It plays God. Whereas humble curiosity is just the search for truth. And that's

just honesty. That's a virtue. Yeah. And I think that's kind of what he would call studiousness. We have a desire to know. Yeah. Yeah. So why do you think we're bored? I'm bored. I'm bored all the time. I'm bored with myself. I'm bored with everything. Well, like me, you probably have ADD. Okay. I've heard you say this. When did you know you had ADD? Not until my daughter was diagnosed with it. Oh, really? She's been in special schools all her life. She's brilliant at things like computers and animals, but not with language. So she's a mixture. I think everybody in the world is very good at something and very bad at something.

Anyway, we had her evaluated to justify putting her in private school, and the psychiatrist wanted to evaluate the whole family. And after a session with me, he said, you have ADD, you know. And he went through 21 symptoms and I had them all. What were some of the symptoms? Not just boredom, but... You can diagnose me right here. I can remember every word of a poem that I read once and love deeply, but I can't remember the third thing that my wife tells me to do you know go down the cellar and yes the table and and the batteries and that's a sign is it and the mousetrap okay and that's a sign of ADD or at least one of the academics have it yeah especially

philosophers they usually have ADHD which is attention deficit high definition they like to define their terms. Yes, exactly. To be clear. Yeah, I think I can't finish a movie. We have Frad Family. My last name is Frad, so we call it Frad Family Movie Night. We all go down and we sit down. I always like the idea of watching a movie. But about 25 minutes in, I'm like, there's something else I could be doing.

Which is weird because I love the beach, being from Australia.ia oh me too yeah so i can sit on an ocean me too i can i can sit not on a i can sit and watch waves without being bored much more easily than i can read a book through so why is that because well the same reason uh as in the poem Trees. Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree. Books are made by fools like me, but only God can make a wave. Yeah. There's something.

It's rhythmic. It allows you to kind of, to use Thomas Merton's words, slow down to a human tempo. Yeah, but so is a washing machine. That's not interesting. I don't sit in front of a washing machine. I sit front of waves touche the the iroquois have a word for it it's called orinda it's the spiritual sugar that the great spirit put in certain things like moving water and stars and mountains yeah it just attracts us so speaking of books are you reading any books right now somebody once said to me you

must have written more books than you've read uh that's becoming increasingly true um i don't really that can't be true do you read bits of books or do you read the whole thing 19 out of 20 books i read bits of bits of maybe non-fiction books i read bits of but fiction i mean you can't just pick up in the fourth chapter. You either abandon it after 50 pages or you read it straight through. I must confess, this is almost a sin. First time I read The Lord of the Rings, I stopped after page 50. I said, I'm not interested in all this.

Really? That is a sin. Yes. And then somebody said, go beyond page 50 and then you'll get to the elves and dragons. And I was totally hooked. Yeah, I just read the first part to my kids. So we're on the second book right now. And it's just griffing.

It's lovely. Masterpiece. What's your favorite fiction book? The Lord of the Rings, certainly. It's the greatest book of the 20th century. Four polls picked it. Everybody knows that except the critics. I have a toss up between, um yeah lord of the rings but

probably i like dostoevsky so i like uh i think i like crime and punishment more than even more than the brothers i think so that might say more about me than both masterpieces but yeah if the lord of the rings is not a novel but an epic the brothers karamazov has to be the greatest novel ever written and okay why do you say that? It's profound. Yeah. It's one of the few books that radically changed my mind on a philosophical issue. I always thought the notion of collective responsibility or universal guilt was a kind of an exaggeration

or maybe a liberal guilt trip or something like that. He persuaded me simply through the plot events that every good that we do has consequences in everybody else's life. And every evil that we do have consequences in everybody else's life. So in an indirect way, everybody is responsible for all the sins of the world. This is Zosima, isn't it? It's Zosima. Very profound.

Yeah, maybe I need to read it again because I just found there were a lot of kind of tangents that, you know, if you were to take. Oh, yeah. It's enormous. Yeah. It's enormous. Yeah. It's elaborate. It's just the opposite of a Tolstoy book, which is perfectly classically written. Yes. But Dostoevsky's all over the place.

I love him. I just started reading Anna Karenina. I'm about 200 pages in and I'm a bit bored. Really? Now, the chances that that says something about him is very unlikely. So I get that it's my fault. I think it's because it's hard to love Anna. Yeah. She's bratty and selfish and she gets her comeuppance at the end which is very hard to write write good

heroes today good villains is easy yeah it was as hard that's what that's what tolkien did in lord of the rings you've got real heroes yeah well why do you think that is? We're cynical. We're bored. We're jaded. We don't believe in heroism. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Who's the author from Georgia? Flannery O'Connor. I love Flannery O'Connor because she has short stories and I don't get bored.

My kids love it too. I shouldn't read it to my kids. They're like, tell us that one where the old lady gets shot. Okay, shut up. Not in front of people we don't read that but she could uh it was almost like she played into people's cynicism in order to bring out the grace that was oh sure she's a missionary and your missionary has to start with where people are which is down over there and then you bring them over here so then what what

what about the idiot have you readot by Dostoevsky? I never got to it. No, I know the plot. Yeah, I think you wrote that. I read part of it, actually. Okay. Wonderful style. Didn't grip you?

Brothers Karamazov is an improvement on The Idiot because Alyosha is the complete Jesus and not just the nice Jesus. If I'm not mistaken i thought uh crime and punishment was written first and then later on the idiot i know the brother karamazov was last because he planned a sequel to it oh that's right yeah he did too um and i thought that you know raskolnikov or mishkin was like the mirror image of raskolnikov yeah what's interesting about raskolnikov is the the name means schism i think think, or it comes from that.

And what you notice about him is when he starts overthinking things, he becomes evil, does evil things. But he does these spontaneous acts of kindness for people like the woman he meets and he throws, he gives money to the family whose husband had just died. This is because God designed the heart and we have a lot to do with designing our thoughts. So there's usually a beating heart, even under the evil cynic. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's my only slight hope that maybe the universalist is right,

and maybe the most wicked of us will repent and be saved in the end. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Why are people so afraid of us hoping for that? There are some people. I think the church has taught... Well, the Blessed Virgin commanded us to pray for her, that prayer that she added to the rosary to the three children at Fatima.

Let all souls happen, especially those most in need. We can't be sure of it, but we have to hope for it. Not that it's likely. Right. I mean, why would Jesus sure of it, but we have to hope for it. Not that it's likely. Right. I mean, why would Jesus say of Judas, it would have been better if that man had never been born? That doesn't sound like universalism, but we don't know. It's good not to know some things.

One more thing about Dostoevsky. I think the reason you can't turn his books into good films is because of a lot of the drama plays out within the psyche of the person right so brilliantly like he explains people's mental states in a way that you say i thought i was the only one to experience this whereas the lord of the rings a lot of it is exterior that's a good question i teach a course in philosophy and cinema and that's one of the questions we ask in the course why are so few great novels turned into great movies why are so many great films turned into great movies why are so many great

films not turned into great movies the two versions of the brothers karamazov were both very bad the american version and the russian version and again it's all playing on in the head he's telling you what they're going through and thinking on the other hand the bbc's version of a tale of two cities i thought was a masterpiece okay i'm very faithful. I've read very little. I only really started reading after my conversion in Rome in 2000. So I was an agnostic. I thought that God was a cute idea invented by people to make death less scary. And I went with a bunch of Christians to Rome. You've heard of the World Youth Days. So there was about 2.5 million young people there. And I encountered Christians who loved Jesus and weren't weird

and were like saving sex or marriage and all these bizarre things. And I thought, why are they happier than me and my friends? That's the unanswerable question. Yeah. That's what converted the world, the happiness of the saints. Yeah. Why are these people singing hymns and forgiving their enemies as we're feeding them to the lions

no answer to that question except the truth reminds me of Teresa of Avila's quote God save us from sour faced nuns so it was there that I came to Christ and I came home so happy it made you sick like trying to hug everybody

the honeymoon did you ever have a moment like that I came home so happy. It made you sick. Yeah. They're that kind. Like trying to hug everybody. The honeymoon. Yeah. Did you ever have a moment like that? No, I've never wanted to hug everybody. You're from New England. When I met you today, I'm like, handshake. We're the frozen chosen, yes.

Yeah. But okay, but when did your faith become your own? So even as a Protestant, I presume you loved Jesus. There were steps. I remember the first and probably the most brilliant idea I ever got in my life. I was about seven years old. We were riding home from church, and my father and I were sitting in the front of the car. My mother was in the back.

And I said, Dad, you teach in Sunday school. And I'm a little confused. We're learning all this different stuff, and I try to follow the preacher's sermon every Sunday, and I get a little of it, but I'm really confused. Doesn't it all come down to just one thing? My father said, what do you mean just one thing? He was very suspicious. I said, well, all you have to do is love Jesus and ask him what you want us to do and then do it. And he looked at me and says, you know it's on your right. That's great.

It's all gone downhill since then. But I had one insight when I was seven. One insight, yeah. Yeah, I think if I were to ask you what's the most profoundest thought you've ever thought, you would probably say, what would you say? most profoundest thought you've ever thought? You would probably say, what would you say? Well, that's like the question that the pious monks in Connecticut said to me. They guests we ask you to pray for us and if God would grant

any one gift because of your prayer to every single monk in this monastery what would you ask and remembering that little incident I just told you about I said well that every one of you would fall totally in love with Jesus every moment for the rest of your lives. And they all began to laugh

respectfully. And the abbot said, we're not laughing at you. We're laughing with you because we had Mother Teresa here last week. That's what she said too. Yes. Another home run. Okay. Yeah. That's a grand slam. So you became Catholic in college. Tell me what it was like as as the vatican two changes and of course a lot of the changes that were implemented weren't outlined in the documents things just started happening i hear horror stories about i have always been suspicious of the press newspapers the media the tv uh everything really and always always loved books so i actually read some of the documents and compared them to what was being made out of them by the popular press and saw the immense gap

so i had no problem with vatican ii it didn't throw anything out it added modern stuff to the ancient stuff and i loved it all as did john paul and benedict and the rest so i never had any problems but what about the implementations of it that you began seeing? Because you grew up, you saw the Tridentine Mass. Presumably that was part of what you were saying to your father, even if you weren't at Holy Mass. Absolutely. The beauty of it. A masterpiece, an absolute masterpiece.

How could the devil endure such beauty? It must cause him immense pain. It's a beautiful thing to say. And that's 2,000 years old and it's not dying. So I have no problem with Vatican II at all. Sure, but the implementation of it. The implementation of it was stupid, it was silly. I knew from the beginning that the only church that can possibly exist is the Church of Idiot Sinners. That's what we are. One of the books my Calvinist friends gave me in Calvin to deter

me from becoming a Catholic was Boccaccio's De Cameron which is a lot of anti-Catholic short stories written by this renaissance humorist and one of them takes place during the Borgia papacy when basically the mafia controlled the papacy and a couple of popes were spectacularly wicked. And the story is about this pious French bishop in Paris who has a neighbor who's Jewish and who's a businessman, is very smart. His name is Abraham. And the bishop thinks Abraham's on the verge of conversion. And one day Abraham comes to the bishop and says, Bishop, wish me good speed. I have to take a trip to Rome and do some business deal there. I have to do business with the Vatican Bank and I'm going to live with the papal family.

And the bishop said, look, Abraham, I know you're on the verge of conversion. Let me baptize you before you go. Well, I don't know if I'm ready yet, but why before? Well, it's foggy down there. You won't see things clearly. The air is clearer up here. And Abraham says, nope, business first, then pleasure. That's my rule.

I'll see you in the spring. He leaves. The bishop said, I lost him. He'll see the corruption there. He'll never become a Catholic. Comes back in the spring and says, I'm ready to be baptized. What? You didn't go to Rome then?

Yeah. You didn't do business with the Vatican Bank? Yeah. You didn't live with the papal family? Yeah, I did. And now you want to become a Catholic? I don't get it. Abraham said, look, I don't know that much about your theology, but I know a heck of a lot about business. And one thing I know for sure, no merely earthly

business that stupid and corrupt could last 14 days. Yours has lasted 14 centuries. It's a miracle. I'm convinced. Right. I thought that was a good argument. Yeah, it is pretty good. You know, the other thing too, is if you were looking for the perfect religion based on the moral purity of the adherents, you would have missed the true religion in the Old Testament. Do you know what I'm saying? The Jewish people, when you read the story of David and Moses and Rahab. The stiff-necked, impossible, arrogant people, us. It always has been. Are you seeing a temptation among Catholics that you interact with maybe at your college and others to leave the church right now given the current

scandal in the church? Yeah but I think that's always an excuse for a weak faith to begin with. I haven't met anybody who once was a serious moral intelligent Catholic who is leaving just because of the brief scandals yeah i've met nice naive people who said it's all kumbaya and now it's all trash but you've got to be naive to begin with to to let scandals drive you away yeah so when do you go to a latin mass or do you go to a novus ordo or do you have a strong preference? I love all forms of Mass but I go most of the time to an Anglican youth Mass where the priest and half of his congregation used to be Anglican are now Catholic. He's married. Yeah. And we have the other great masterpiece of

English language, the Book of Common Prayer. Yes, it's beautiful. Which is very beautiful. I have to admit before all my audience were going to be upset with me, I don't know what you think, but my favorite translation, well, I don't know if it's my favorite, but I love the King James. So do I. Do you? So do I. But my problem was, of course, I could never find one with the Deuterocanonical books

until I met an Anglican priest who had this big Bible, had the Common Prayer, had the Deuterocanonicals, and the whole thing was the King James. Yep. Why do you like the King James? It's effect. It's not only beautiful, and it's not only accurate. By the way, I know enough Greek to compare the King James New Testament to modern translations. It's more literal as well as more poetic.

Yeah. The modern translations take it away. Yeah, it's glorious. So it's not only more beautiful, but it's much easier to worship in King James language. Yep. If you call God thou instead of you, that keeps him up at that level. Yes. And the fact that he comes down that much to you in intimacy is much greater than if he or chum.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now we're here. Let's sit at a bar and drink together yeah baseball that's not how you deal with god yeah so talk a bit more about that about how language affects how we pray i mean benedict implemented those changes in the novus ordo so that we would say different things and maybe there were some people who thought that that was a waste of time but language does affect how we understand ourselves in God, yeah? It does. Let's take a little example. Eisel's old translation of the Gloria in the Mass, eliminated repetition. And the result was, okay, this is like a philosophical treatise,

0.1, 0.2, 0.3. The old version was, you say it over again, you repeat it. Well, you don't have to do that. There's no utilitarian reason for doing it. But it's like the Psalms. The parallelism gets under your skin and into your soul and hammers the same nail in twice. And they don't understand that. I've been going to a Byzantine church for four years

and talk about repeating. There's a joke to a Byzantine church for four years and talk about repeating. There's a joke in the Byzantine church, there's nothing the Romans can do in 10 minutes that we can't do in an hour. But it's the same thing. Everything is prayed three times in a row and it's glorious. It's beautiful. Well, I think John Paul II must have ADE too because his favorite prayer was the rosary and that's full of repetition. Yeah. But it's full of repetition. Yeah. But it's not boring repetition. It's like the waves.

Yeah. Yeah, not like the washing machine. Yep. How long have you been praying the rosary for? Let's see. Since I thought of becoming a Catholic. Really? Since my senior year at Calvin College.

Is this something you choose to pray daily, or is it something you... When do you pray it? Usually when I'm driving. Yeah. ADD, right? That helps doing something while you're praying the rosary. I think an obstacle many people have to the rosary or prayer in general is that they think they have to feel a certain way for their prayer to be effective or meaningful. This was one of the most liberating discoveries I made in reading the Catholic saints. They all said, don't pay so much attention to your feelings. Feelings don't count. They're God's gifts. They're fine. They help. But it's the will that counts. And when you will something, not only do you strengthen your will, but you're

accomplishing something. Feelings don't accomplish anything. It's like watching a movie. It's entertaining, and it's helpful, and it's good. But praying the rosary isn't meant to be interesting. It's meant to be an accomplishment. With every word, prayer changes things. Yeah. You wrote a book called Prayer for Beginners. That was almost a plagiarism of Brother Lawrence's The Practice of the Presence of God, which is one of my favorite books because it's very, very simple. Yeah. What does it say? You use this analogy where you say a way to pray, you do the same thing when you kind of come to the end of a sidewalk to cross the street.

You stop, wait, and listen. Talk about that. Yeah, there used to be signs around railroad crossings that said stop, look, and listen. Oh, okay. And before you can either look or listen, you have to stop. We're like flywheels. We keep moving and moving and moving. And it's much harder to stop than to start.

Yes. So the first thing you have to do in order to pray is stop doing everything else. And when I wake up every morning, my mind is racing at the beginning. This is what I have to do. This is what I have to worry about. This is what I have to accomplish. And you have to stop that. You have to kill those little gremlins that are attacking you with their little sword stuck into your brain. I love St. Benedict's interpretation of Psalm 137 by the Waters of Babylon, which ends in that horrible verse, O Babylon destroyer, blessed is he who seizes your little babies and smashes their brains out against the curb stone. How can a Christian pray that?

St. Benedict says, well, those little babies are baby thoughts. And every sin starts with thought. And Babylon is, of course, the Jew's enemy and a symbol of evil. So as soon as this evil thought occurs to you, have no mercy upon it. Bash the little bastard's brains out. Love it. So stop. How do you stop, though? Because you can't just will yourself to stop having those thoughts, can you?

You say you wake up in the morning, they rush at you. Yes, you can. They still come, but they don't touch you. You're not saying yes to them. You're ignoring them. They still come. You're still distracted. But you know that that's not you.

You don't identify with them. You don't find your identity in them. Do you have a morning ritual, prayer routine? No, just the morning offering. And I say a psalm or two at night and I try to remember during the day. I'm not good at praying in general. And I'm not good at praying for a long time. I get bored so easily. So

for me, the most important thing about prayer is that not just that it is something you do for a few minutes a day, but it's something you do all day. Implicitly, the morning offering permeates into all your prayers. God, take this. I'm going to forget you, but you're not going to forget me. Here, this little drug here called caffeine may be doing me a little good and a little harm. And I'm not thinking about it right now. I'm just doing it, but I'll drink this coffee for you. I don't know what that means, but I want to do it. Yeah, kind of childlike dependency and submission to a good father. Well, this, I mean, have you heard of the, you've heard, of course, of the Jesus prayer in the Eastern Christianity.

Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue in the Summa as to whether we should pray at all times. And he said, in one sense, yes, and in one sense, no. One sense, no, because you have obligations to fulfill. You can't be praying at all times. But he quotes Augustine in saying that we can pray at all times by desire. Yes, exactly. What does he mean by that?

He, before Freud, understood the power of the subconscious. Desires aren't always conscious. Desires are also subconscious. And the subconscious ones come from the depths of the heart. They're the deepest desires of all. And if your deepest desire is to do God's will, you're going to go to heaven, no matter how badly you act on that desire.

It might take a lot of purgatory, but it's what Karl Rahner calls your fundamental option. You're not consciously aware of that at all times. The reason you have to keep going back to formal prayer is to remember that, to get the rust off it. But it's there all the time. What do we do then with those desires that come up that that make us afraid like sexual desires or desires to hurt people or desires for money any sort of wicked desire that we're very ashamed of we don't bring it to other people because we're afraid if they knew that about us they wouldn't like us but as you say there those subconscious desires are

speaking to us well the more hidden and subconscious they are, the more dangerous they are because they're not in the lights. The first thing you have to do is bring them to the light. Be honest. Sometimes we treat God in the same way that we treat other people. We're afraid of them and we're afraid to confess these things and we're afraid to deal with them. And even if you deal with them badly, just that you're dealing with them in the presence of God helps. And even if he doesn't give you the answer that you want, you know that your honest bringing this into God's presence is going to make a difference. And if he doesn't heal those desires and you're still bothered by them, that's his will too.

Thomas Aquinas says God's like a doctor. He'll sometimes deliberately not heal a certain disease because he knows that if he does, more harm is going to come. Yeah, that's interesting, isn't it? Especially pride. It reminds me of Paul talking about that, what does he call it? Thorn in the flesh. And we've all speculated as to what that could possibly mean. But this idea that pride is the worst sin. Yeah. We don't think that, a lot of us. Deep down,

we don't. Although when we see it in others, we hate it more than any other sin. So if my friend is lustful, I feel sorry for him, maybe. If he's prideful, I find that the most disgusting. A lot of us confuse pride with vanity. You know, look into a mirror and say how beautiful I am. Well, that's a fault. That's not pride. Yeah. Pride is I want to play God. Yeah. My will be done, not yours. I want to instrumentalize God. I want to use him to gratify my desires, which I'm identifying with. You don't do that. You have to give him everything. How do you know if you're prideful? You don't. That's what's so tough, right? You don't. It doesn't matter. That's a trap the devil likes to get us into. Let's see, what's going on in me? How can I deal with that? Is this bad me,

or is this good me, the real me? That leads nowhere. Stop looking. That's the problem. Start looking out. Is that the answer? Hey, if you're in the presence of somebody that's much more beautiful than you and much wiser than you and much better than you, do you want to talk about yourself or do you want to forget yourself? Yeah. Because this is the thing. I mean, you meet people and you think,

this person is extraordinarily arrogant. And they don't know that about themselves. But then you think, well, if they don't know that about them, what don't I know about me? Touche. Touche. Yeah. That's the helpful thing about having a wife.

My wife's always willing to tell me. This is why one of the best things that happened to C.S. Lewis was his marriage to Joy Davidman, who was not a sweet, nice, beautiful wife, but she was wonderfully honest, and she exposed his baloney, and he loved her for it. Really? You know what's fascinating is when we talk about the problem of evil and how we have a pastoral approach and a kind of philosophical approach,

when you put side by side the problem of evil with, what was the book he wrote after the death of his wife? A Grief Observed. A Grief Observed. You see the difference. The wonderful honesty in that book. That is the best book I know to give to someone who's grieving. Do you know the story of, he wrote that under a pen name?

Oh, yeah. And then I was told that people kept giving it to him. Did you tell me that? You told me that, I was told that people kept giving it to him. Did you tell me that? You told me that, Mac. Yeah. People kept giving it to him. I was like, all right, I'll just come back. But that first line, nobody told me fear felt so much.

What did he say? No one told me grief felt so much like fear. I keep swallowing, something like that. Yeah. And he goes to all these places, and they're not the same. Nothing's the same without her. How could the death of one person be like the sky spread over everything? Yeah, the idea that if I travel to all the planets throughout all of space,

I'll never see her face, hear her voice. Wonderfully honest. I was weeping after reading that first page. It just really broke me. Then there's one line in that book, which is the fundamental solution practically to the problem of evil. Is it conceivable that a loving God should give us such pains and such griefs? Well, if we don't need them, he's not a loving God.

And if he is, we need them. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Everything we get, all the sufferings we get, we need. Which is so hard to believe when you consider how much certain people go through. Yeah. It's a bloody difficult problem. It is. It is. It's not meant to be easy. It's interesting when you look at the Sumer, Aquinas sometimes puts 12 or

13, or if you read De Marlo, his other work, he'll have like 24 objections. Yeah. And here he has two to the existence of God. Yep. yep only two and the big one is the problem of evil and the other one isn't really a conclusive proof that god doesn't exist no no apparently science can explain everything but who knows yeah yeah what do you think the best so what do you think the best argument for atheism is problem of evil certainly yeah how can i trust a god who lets us horrible things happen yeah and. And not just to us, but to animals. Of course. Why do animals need it? They don't need it.

There's no clear answer to that question. There you go. We're told what we need to know, and we're only given hints about the animals. And I think Lewis's chapter in The Problem of Pain about animal suffering is the best answer. Their answer has something to do with our answer. They're not to be understood in themselves, but in their relation to us. They're parts of our family. He

goes so far as to say that the pet is the more truly natural animal than the wild animal. Because if God made everything for us, he made animals for us. So the most important animals are cats and dogs. And the least important animals are the ones that can't be tamed.

Cats, I would have thought. No, I guess they're just litter boxes. But they'd be doing that whether they had us or not, if they had a litter box. Well, dogs have the problem of despair and cats have the problem of pride. They're equal. When I grew up, I thought all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Everybody thinks that. Yeah.

I wonder why. Do you remember misconceptions you had as a kid? I'll offer one just to kind of show you what I mean. When I was a kid, I thought allergic meant afraid of. So I remember going to the doctor and they say, are you allergic to anything? And I'd say, yeah, those big moths with the eyes on the back. My mom when she's angry. No, I don't remember saying that. So what are some misconceptions you had? I remember a book no listening to a sermon which called god the supreme being and i thought it was a supreme bean and i didn't like beans you felt guilty that's hilarious my friend john father john park said he grew up by a car yard, sales lot, you know, and it would have the number of the year the car was made, so 82, 97, whatever, and he would drive past and think,

only parents are so stupid that they would pay $97 for a car. You know how much candy you could buy for that? Yeah. So why, you said it was when you were at your college calvin college you decided to be a philosopher yeah did you have any inklings towards it prior to then no i write a lot of poetry in uh in high school yeah and i wanted to become a writer i thought i wanted to become a poet i was an english major yeah uh and the first philosophy course i ever taught was taught by somebody who was probably certifiably insane. Yeah. Why do you say that? He would put his chair on the desk and say, I am the king and this is my kingdom and you are my subjects.

And he would march up and down the aisles and point at our heads and say, it's there, but it's not there. But you remember him oh yes he was so absent-minded that he was constantly going uh across the street uh reading a book and getting hit by cars no he's in the hospital a few times you're joking i'm not joking so was he bright or just stupid both both yeah both anyway uh the chairman of the department uh william harryellema, who was probably the best philosopher I ever met, said to me when I said I don't want to take any more philosophy courses, he said, you probably took Dr. Runner. I said, yes. He said, give somebody else a chance. So I did. And I gave Jellema a chance. And he was great. I took about six of his courses. Most, I think, of our vocational choices are due to models.

We see somebody who's successful in the field. I want to be like that. And when you started studying in your undergrad, I imagine, is that what you mean? Philosophy? Did you know you wanted to go on to do a PhD in it? Yes, I did. Yep. I thought of going to seminary.

And at Yale, I thought of becoming a Dominican. Wow. And I worked my way through that, and I concluded that, well, I want it all. Me too. I want to be the other kind of father. Oh, yeah. Fantastic. So did you go stay with the Dominicans?

I had some Dominican teachers. At Calvin, actually, I went to Aquinas College, which is also in Grand Rapids, and took a course from a Dominican. Yeah. I didn't understand Aquinas very well at the time but I respected the teacher he was a very wise and holy man yeah I love the Dominicans I do too father Thomas Joseph White he's a brilliant man he just wrote a book on Catholicism I forget the name of it it was excellent yeah I discerned with the Franciscans I think I like the idea i like the idea of being a dominican but i think i'm a franciscan at heart father groeschel type yeah i'm just more wild and here's a funny story for you i woke up one morning the house was a mess suitcases busted open kids

were loud six in the morning and i was laying on my wife you know i said honey you know that sign that we saw that said if i could do it all over again i'd find you sooner so i could love you longer and she went yes i said i think i'd be a dominican but then i had a priest friend say to me, he's like, the grass isn't green. It's brown everywhere. It is, right. It's just brown everywhere. Yeah.

Father Grishel, you knew him. I knew him. Tell us about him. A New Yorker sense of humor and irony coupled with deep piety, but not the wrong kind. Yeah. No BS. Right on target. Yeah. No BS. Right on target. Utterly honest.

Tough-minded. Did you know him when he founded the CFRs? As he was a capuchin or afterwards? I think both before and afterwards. Wow. Every time I met him, I was very impressed. And was he a New York Yankee fan? Well, we have to make allowances you know

nobody has to be tolerant of others one of the questions i'm going to ask god if i get to heaven is uh why for 86 years were you a yankee fan very good now perhaps because the boston red socks needed the suffering according that's right well uh, New York has 10 times more people than Boston, and Boston has 10 times more philosophers than New York, and the reason is that philosophy is the love of wisdom, and wisdom comes through suffering, and we have the Red Sox. Very good. Do you think that baseball is the greatest sport?

Yes. Good. I'm glad you didn't waffle on that and just sit here. Michael Novak wrote an article called Take Me Out to the Liturgy in which he proved that proposition. Ah, give us the argument. And George Carlin has a famous thing about two philosophies of life, baseball and football, in which he shows that football is the devil's sport and baseball is God's sport. Very good. Yeah, growing up, I watched cricket. You ever watched cricket before yeah you brits are

i mean i'll forgive you for that that's all right i'm not a brit well that's like my mom calling all americans yankees you sound like a bloody yank that's what she says to me mom yang refers doesn't matter you know excuse the insult it would be an insult to call me a yankee yeah i wouldn't i promise but you so you don't watch it, cricket. You never watch the game. No, they go on for hours, right? No, they go on for five days. That's not an exaggeration.

A test match can go for five days. It's wonderful. And you have ADD and you get bored easily. It's interesting. And you can follow a cricket match for five days. Here's why I think I like it. If you go away and come back an hour later, nothing's happened. Maybe that's... Well Maybe that's true.

The grass growing in your backyard, which doesn't make it interesting. Well, that's true, too. But it is interesting. There's something about the culture around it. You fill the fridge full of beer, sit in your chair, and it's great. And watch grass grow. And watch grass grow. Yeah, they even stop for tea and lunch and sandwiches.

That's kind of charming. It's lovely, yeah. But now they're making it more like baseball. grow watch grass grow yeah they even stop for tea and lunch and sandwiches and they always they roll it out onto the it's lovely yeah but now they're making it more like baseball they're condensing the games from five days to one day and now they're doing it in an afternoon and so all of the uh we're pretty upset about it in australia yeah it's too bloody american everyone says well what you call football is what we call soccer. Again, we prefer our American football, which is much more violent and much more like war. Well, our football is different again. We call soccer, soccer. But we have Aussie rules football, which is a variation of Gaelic football, but more violent.

And we have rugby. Those are the two big games in Australia. But I don't like sports a great deal. Well, how do you sit through a baseball game if you have ADD? It's like life. It's like history. It's unpredictable. It's not only that you admire the skill, you also have hopes and fears. And the more you identify with the team, the more acute your hopes and fears are. You can overdo it or you can underdo it. If you identify with the team, the more acute your hopes and fears are. You can overdo it or you can underdo it. If you're underdo it, you're bored.

If you overdo it, you're an addict. So do you like football? I do. Yeah. I do. My father-in-law is from Boston. He's a huge Red Sox fan. And the first American I ever met, she was on my net team.

You ever heard of net ministries? No. We travel around high schools, run retreats. And she was from the Bronx. So I knew nothing about nothing. And she told me that I have to go for the New York Yankees. I said, all right. My wife is from the Bronx. Her father was a fanatical Yankee fan.

So was she. So I wouldn't marry her until she converted and she became a Red Sox fan. At least she said she did. I suspect that deep down in her heart she's still a Yankee fan. Oh, really? Does she watch baseball with youx fan. At least she said she did. I suspect that deep down in her heart, she's still a Yankee fan. Oh, really? Does she watch baseball with you? Sometimes. Yeah.

But when I met my wife and we were dating and she said, okay, but you just have to say Red Sox. You cannot err on that. I said, done. Right. So there you go. My son dated a lot of girls at Boston College. The two questions he asked of them were,

are you a Catholic and are you a Red Sox fan? And if the answer to both was not yes, he wouldn't take them seriously. Mixed marriages don't work. Yeah, no. Tell us about, I'm sure we have a lot of men who are new fathers and we're trying to do a good job failing, getting up again. How was it for you being a dad? What advice do you have for dads? The first memory I have of being a new father is exhaustion

the kids will just hire you out there are bundles of energy and you feel very very old i feel younger now at 82 than i probably feel now yeah yeah um i remember realizing just how selfish i was yeah because before that my wife and I would go to the same movie we wanted to go see. We wanted to go to this person's house. This is why God invented children. Is this why? Exactly. Okay.

Because then I give a stuff what you want. The people who don't have children tend to be selfish yuppies and self-absorbed. This is our life. And you don't know you're selfish, though. Exactly. And when you have kids, you realize that you have to be there for them all the time and you are their servants yes vice versa yes uh this is your life i love kids i love my youngest son his name is peter actually uh peter francis he's a beautiful boy and he asks

the most interesting questions so he was peeing today with the door open of course and while he was peeing he said dad what happens if you don't pee i've had better philosophical discussions with my four-year-old than more that's a profound question you know there's no philosopher whoever deeply philosophized about the fact that everything comes in one end and out the other we we philosophize about the one end but very rarely about the other all right well come on elaborate on this well I guess I guess the closest thing to that is in the Hindu mystical tradition where breathing is a spiritual exercise the good air comes in the bad air comes out and we have to do that with our souls the bad stuff goes out the good stuff comes in so God has given us bodies as images of that. Just as sex is an image

of divine love, Trinitarian love, so eating and excreting is an image of... Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I like it. I like it. That's good. Now, do you think a lot of Catholics, because of the New Age movement, have become afraid of things like you should breathe deeply, you know. I find people have this perhaps unnecessary skepticism when somebody talks about centering yourself and taking deep breaths in and out as you pray. These things can be helpful. Of course they can. Of course they can.

You have to use them with discernment. They can be used for flaky and silly purposes. But without some sort of deliberate mindfulness, without some sort of cultivation of the mind, you're not fully human. You're not able to perform well in any field, either academic or spiritual. Yeah. You're not very tech savvy, you've told me. I am proud of the fact that I am probably the least tech savvy person who has ever existed in the entire history of the world. Do you have email?

Yes, I do, and I always make mistakes about it. And I've been using Microsoft Word for the last 30 or 40 years, and it always tricks me with new hoops to jump through, which I fail to do, and I am in awe of the devil's power of controlling that medium i speak of my digital demons i don't really mean it but it certainly looks like that um and then do you know what twitter is have you heard of twitter yeah somebody has started a dr peter craig twitter account not me yeah i guarantee you well that

was funny because it started and then it was just all these your fantastic tweets from quotes from your books and i thought i don't think that can be dr pitt and then somebody said no he's he's no way i have a lot of free downloads on my website which i never visit and i'm told that the one that gets the most hits is a little essay called why i hate computers ah so there are a lot of other cyber letterheadsates out there. So do you have a smartphone? I have tried a number of times to master a smartphone, and I am absolutely and totally incapable of doing it. So do you know what apps are? Sorry, I'm not sure. I know what the word is.

I don't really know what it means. It's like a program. The reason I was getting to this is there's a new app called Halo, like Halo would be thy name, Halo, and it leads you through these prayer experiences. But I wouldn't know how to put an app into the smartphone. Do you have a smartphone? No, I don't.

I was going to download Hallow for you. I have this old-fashioned flip phone. That's fantastic. Which is more than a phone. And if I can disable all its non-phone components, I would do so. But the reason I was bringing this up is um hello this app thing for young for catholics is it helps you integrate these things because there's a lot of new age apps right now that talk about breathing and these sorts of things but this thing's 100 catholic

based in the tradition and yet at the same time talks about things like being calm and mindfulness do you think that we're all running around a lot quicker than we used to? Oh, yeah. We're all talking about being stressed, but why is this? Well, Anthony Esalen calls it the abolition of childhood. George Medved says the same thing. Childhood is when you're supposed to play and waste time. Nobody's allowed to waste time anymore. One of our neighbors was worried about my wife also uh often uh gets people into private schools or colleges and uh his kid was going into kindergarten yeah and he was worried that his kid would never get into harvard because he wasn't getting into a prestigious kindergarten so she had to somehow write a letter saying this kid is bright enough to get into your special

kindergarten now that's crazy see See, I don't think. I'm not for physical harm, usually, but people like that should be slapped. They're stupid. I'm very proud of the fact that we regulate very little TV. They're homeschooled, so they're usually hitting each other with sticks. My son today found a rat that the cat killed and was running around. It's just lovely and just being human.

Chesterton has an essay on sticks being the primary toy. You can use it for anything. No, sticks. Okay, good. Glad we clarified. A stick being the primary toy, yeah. It can be a sword. It can be an oar.

It can be the beginning of a house. It can be anything. Now, we've an oar. It can be the beginning of a house. It can be anything. Now, we've talked about boredom in the negative sense, but part of why I want my children not to have phones, not to be playing games, you know, I mean, with some exceptions, is that I want them to be bored. But maybe I don't mean bored in the negative sense. I mean... Stimulated to do something original and creative themselves instead of disappearing into their screens. Yeah, maybe that's it. I observe kids today addicted to their their phones. One of the assignments I give to my students is you want to do an extra credit essay right on how my world

changed when I resolved not to look at any screen for 24 hours. And I've gotten about a dozen essays back, and about half of them say the same thing. I couldn't do it. I thought I could. I cannot live without my iPhone. That's addiction. Hi, I just want to take a pause for a moment and say thanks to our third sponsor, Exodus 90. Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men where men get together in small

groups and for 90 days, read the book of Exodus, give up things like alcohol and hot showers. They take on things like reading more, reading the scriptures more, praying in adoration more. It's really difficult, quite frankly, but it's also really life transforming. I think a lot of us want our lives transformed, but we don't want to do anything about it. Exodus 90 is a very masculine response to the scandals in the church today. Go to exodus90.com. That's exodus90.com to learn more about it. And I think you're going to be really, really impressed with it. I did it for a while.

I had health issues and stuff was different, but going to be really, really impressed with it. I did it for a while. I had health issues and stuff was different, but it was really great, really great. And the men I speak to was just at Google recently. And they told me they started an Exodus 90 group in Google. And they said it was totally life transforming. So if you want to take your spiritual life to the next level, go to exodus90.com. Thanks. this last year i'm doing it again this year i give up the internet for a month so all of august starting why not a year because i wouldn't have a job anymore and my children wouldn't have food or is that a lot maybe that's a yeah the spider web is encompassing us it's encompassing us i mean this is it i mean this is i consider this to be good

work that's going to go out to all these people, but this, of course, is based on the internet. Eventually, we will evolve into the matrix. Yeah. But I find it bloody hard. Like, I used to drop off my phone. I'd put my phone and my laptop, which were the only kind of devices I had, into a bag, and I would take it to a friend's house Friday night and say, I'll pick it up Monday. If I come earlier, make fun of me and don't let me have it. And as I would back out, I would reach for my phone. And this can't be good. Well, if there's anything that you can't live with that is less than yourself, that's your master. If there's anything you can't live with. Yeah. Gotta have it. Well, that's not your servant. That's your master coffee's my master

i can do without coffee can you is there anything you can't do without that you're working on breaking right now i don't think so i guess there is i guess god will show it to me whatever it is but no um are you afraid of death no i'm afraid of dying I'm a coward I don't like pain I'm a coward too so the death bit's okay you die in your sleep you could die anyway

I know as a Christian I know I'm not going to go to heaven because I'm good enough I'm going to go to heaven because God loves me period

end of story so it's not the death it's the it's the pain that might be yeah yeah if you could die in any way I guess the answer is however god wills it but if you got to choose well there

are special privileges for martyrs oh my gosh you know a chop of the head is very merciful very quick yeah yeah my favorite movie of all time is a man for all seasons st thomas moore oh i love a man for all seasons i think that's probably yeah one of my top three favorite movies very beautiful too the jokes he cracked at that remind me remind me i forget oh he said something to the to the man about to chop his head off didn't he yeah please spare my beard it at least has not committed reason against good king that's amazing it's amazing because um i remember being more stirred by that movie on a low budget than i did with braveheart although i love braveheart too yeah why are most saint movies crap

that's a good question they certainly are yeah embarrass. Embarrassingly bad. Embarrassingly bad. I don't know. That's clearer, I think, for Protestants than for Catholics, because Protestants write Jesus novels, and they're all horribly bad. Oh, really? Embarrassingly bad. Amazingly bad. I haven't seen any of these Jesus novels. Yeah.

Like fiction? Fictional Jesus novels. They're terrible. Yeah. The fact that you can't write Jesus fiction proves that he's different than anybody else. You can write fiction about Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar or Stalin, anybody. Yeah. You cannot write fiction about Jesus.

Dostoevsky came closest to it in The Grand Inquisitor. He doesn't say a word. Love it. He doesn't do a deed except one. Kissed him. Yeah. Yeah. But, okay.

I don't know why. Is it because piety? We don't understand that, I don't know, a lot of these movies with saints, they look effeminate. Yeah, they do. As if piety meant to act like that. They do. I think part of the answer is we are so into pop psychology and feelings and so into niceness that we think to be a saint is to have nice feelings. So let's portray them

as as nice and it's comfortable and it's smiling all the time and it's not honest enough to deal with this yeah yeah crap yeah well and then mother teresa what she had to say about the spiritual life that came out after she died shows yeah let's talk about tough bloody hard did you ever meet mother teresa i did did you tell us it. She came to our local parish, and there was a line outside the church afterwards, about 100 people long, to simply say hello and shake her hands. And it took about two hours because she spent some time with everybody. Wow. And I got up to her and shook her hand, and she said hello uh god loves you something like that but it took 10 seconds but it was like there was nobody else in the universe it was just me and her

and there was no time i know exactly what it meant didn't matter whether it was one second or 10 hours that was the only thing what is that because I experienced that with a bloke called Father Bob Bedard, who founded the Companions of the Cross up in Canada. Very holy man. Kind of messy, unkempt, madly in love with Jesus. I remember the same thing happening. He came up and he shook my hand and everything melted away. Yeah.

And I'm like, what is happening? Total attention. And I heard that people would say that about John Paul II. The opposite of ADD. Total attention. All of you is there. Your whole heart, your whole mind, your whole will. He looks at you as God does.

God doesn't say, well, all right, I'll give you one-tenth of my attention because I have all these other people. No, I'm going to give you all of it. Yeah. Is that something you actually purposely try to do? Because you must meet a lot of people who are thrilled to meet you i'm thrilled to meet you no i am shy and i get easily embarrassed so i back away yeah i get easily embarrassed i feel very awkward around people i can speak to 10 000 people and i'll do

a great job and it'll be fine but if i meet people one-on-one afterwards i'm aware of how i look as they're looking at me and i I'm afraid I sound silly. And I just, I don't know what that is. I've got to work on it. This is why I don't like to read my own books, and I don't like to listen to my own podcasts, because I sound wrong. I used to live in Ireland, and I binged Peter Kreeft for several months. Oh, is that the embarrassment bit there? Yeah.

I'm sorry but then what do you do because you could have chosen augustine or aquinas or somebody worth binging on for goodness well i think i eventually binged on them because you talked about them in a way that actually made it interesting okay then then my existence is justified good but then how do you respond to people who come up to you just like you met mother theresa and i'm sure you were wanting to meet her excited to meet her it's probably humbling to recognize, just like you met Mother Teresa, and I'm sure you were wanting to meet her, excited to meet her. It's probably humbling to recognize that people see you and they have that same

kind of experience. No. No, I don't mean when they meet you, but I mean they at least want to meet you, like you may have wanted to meet Mother Teresa. So how do you sort of validate that? I'm an absent-minded professor who is congenitally unaware of other people and their

deepest needs yeah oh that'll do so i live on the surface if they ask me a question i answer it did you ever feel a temptation to not be embarrassed not be awkward okay i've got to be better and then eventually just went oh screw it this is me with it? Or have you always been just this is me? Sometimes you know that there is a sudden transition. I remember once I was going to a very important something or other, I don't know what it was, speaking engagement or a meeting, and I had a new suit on and it started to rain and I lost my way and it was getting dark. And then the tire blew, and I still had a half hour, so I tried to change the tire. And I was by this road cursing. And an 18-wheeler came by and totally splashed my new suit.

At that point, I broke out into uproarious laughter. Did you really? It was healing, yes. Wow. That was a divine gift. That was the suffering you needed, hey? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That was a divine gift. That was the suffering you needed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Because I'm always aware of that. Like on a much smaller level, people will come up to me and thank me for a book that I've written. Of course, I've only written like two. But, you know, and I'm tempted to dismiss it. But then I realize it's important to them that I hear it, you know. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course.

I try, but I'm not very good. I mean, psychologically, I am the last kind of person that ought to be a parish priest. Yeah. hear it you know yeah of course yeah of course i i try but i'm not very good i mean psychologically i am the last kind of person that ought to be a parish priest yeah uh holding old ladies hands and comforting them that's not my thing no i don't have time for this okay if you tell me what you need i'll do it but i do you know it's a guy thing i think this is why god invented women thank god thank god for women do you know i met you at a legatus conference in florida a couple of years ago i had the unfortunate uh i had to speak after you which no one would want to do that would be ridiculous yeah you gave a talk and then i gave a talk and then i met you and i said

hey how you doing i think they want us to do some panel discussion you went oh i was gonna go surfing which i thought was excellent oh and you know i think you I was going to go surfing, which I thought was excellent. Oh, and you know, I think you said, do they know I know that? I'm not sure. Okay, well, maybe I'm just going to go. Anyway, I don't know if you remember that. I'm an escapist. Yeah. Yeah, I like that too.

I like being alone. Here's how I knew I was introverted. If I go to a party, I love going to the bathroom, and I love going into a bathroom and shutting the door and locking it. And I just feel this instant relief for two reasons. Relief because I let things go too. But I especially like it if there's two types of locks, the one that slides over and the button that gives the satisfying click. Now, if there is no satisfying click, I'm on edge in the bathroom, thinking at any point someone can burst in. I hate parties, too.

I don't usually go to the bathroom. But if you can seek out one other person who you can have a deep conversation with at a party, and if the party hostess isn't one of these intrusive people who breaks up such conversations, come on, this is a party, you feel like strangling them at that point. Then a party is worthwhile. When I go to a party, I find a spot, get a drink, get my pipe or cigar, and I sit. And I just don't move and hope that someone interesting sits next to me. You're not supposed to do that. You're supposed to circulate.

Mingle. Mingle, circulate. Now, my wife, on the other hand, is very extroverted. She's afraid if she leaves a party, they all stop having fun. My wife is exactly the same. I think all women are like that. They are experts in relationships. We're not.

That's true. That bit's definitely true. Women are much better at relationships. This is probably why among the 100 most famous philosophers, there's not a single woman. Yeah. Now, people will say that's because of sexism. They have to bring us into the world and educate us and love us so we can become philosophers. But then what do you say to the retort that, well, that's just a matter of sexism?

People like Eleanor Stump and... Oh, there are some. There are. No, you're not saying there's none. There are some. But I imagine some of them would say that, yeah, I don't know, this is just a matter of sexism. I think you're right. I'm just pushing back to see what you'd say against it.

You know, Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, was fired because he suggested in a faculty meeting that perhaps, just perhaps, probably not, but perhaps. Just throwing it out there. Perhaps one of the reasons why Harvard is not attracting more women to the hard sciences is that there's some physiological differences between the female and the male brain. You get crucified for that. Which, of course, has been proved biologically. Yes. He got fired for suggesting that they discuss that. Same thing happened at Google.

There was a memo that was released where he was like, in order to bring more women into Google, maybe we should consider this, and he was fired. Oh, we are not living in a free country. No. So how are you experiencing all of this craziness

being at a college? Are there safe spaces where you go? No, Boston College is not yet Yale. When Trump got elected, you know what Yale did? What? They not only created safe spaces, but they brought to the students who took refuge in those safe spaces the ultimate answer to Donald Trump, puppies to pet. They didn't think that was funny.

If I were God, I would not have saved us. I would have seen that and went, bugger them. They're on their own. It's nuts. No, I don't get involved in campus politics. It's a waste of time. I heard of a college that the professors had to stop writing on the papers with red ink because it was triggering.

They had to now use black. It's good that you can just laugh at that. What else can you do? Just get super upset. We have an excellent chairman in our philosophy department, and we have an agreement, he and I. I don't do committee work, as most of the other people in the department do, and I teach an extra course instead because I lousy at committee work and I'm good in the classroom yeah what do you like in meetings I don't like meetings I thought you'd be terrible I hate meetings so much has anything great in history ever been accomplished

by a committee no no I mean even if the last supper was a meeting Judas went out after that and went crazy so no famous Arab definition of a camel, a horse designed by a committee. That's very good. I haven't heard that one. Yeah. What's your favorite course to teach in philosophy? What most interests you right now? A course in one philosopher. Probably the best course I ever taught was a course on just one book, The Confessions of St. Augustine. Yeah, okay. And the students were so into it that they all chose to write journals, and most of them were longer than the Confessions itself. Really? Wrote journals, you say? Yeah. How do you mean?

React to, analyze, argue with each chapter in the Confessions. Interesting. Why is it that, do you think that Augustine speaks to modern man in a way that maybe Aquinas doesn't immediately seem to? Or do you disagree with the premise? No, the premise is true. Augustine speaks with the whole of himself at once. Aquinas is wonderfully analytical and wonderfully clear, and he'll not only separate theses and objections, but he'll separate the parts of himself and talk about the head with the heart and talk about

the will with the mind and so on. He's the perfect philosopher for a man. The analytical, clear thinking. Augustine is much more complex, much more messy, and much more accessible, instinctively

accessible. Medieval statues of Augustine always had a burning heart in one hand and an open book in the other hand. That was perfect. Yeah, he's beautiful in a different way to Aquinas. Yeah. I heard someone say it may have been Pieper, Joseph Pieper, that Aquinas is beautiful like a tool.

You might say a tool tool or I think you said mathematics or what did you say geometry geometry whereas Augustine is beautiful like a garden I mean there's yeah yeah and there's two kinds of gardens too there's the Victorian garden which is very formal yes and there's the messy country English garden, which is deliberately messy and natural. Well, what is this? I mean, there are different authors that I find really compelling. And I don't know if they're in the kind of more the Platonic tradition. So like Augustine, Pascal, Anselm.

Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, is he really? I think so. Is that an Eastern Orthodox thing, though? Do they seem to be more in a Platonic tradition? Definitely more than they are. Sus suspicious of Aristotle and Aquinas. Too rationalistic. And there's more mystery.

There's more mystery. And if you try and nail things down, they get upset. You need both. You need both. The two lungs of the church, the two wings of the bird. It's interesting because going to a Byzantine church, the chanting almost sounds like we're drunk. Everything's rounded. There's incense and it's all very, you know, babies are crying, but no one's getting pissed off.

But you go to a tridentine mass. You hold your hands like that. You kneel down, you know. I think, I imagine that he is, I'm going to throw this out to see what you think. I imagine people who go to the Latin mass are a lot more susceptible to scrupulosity than those either in the Eastern Orthodox or Eastern Catholic. Yeah. But in art, it's not an either or to both ends. In theology, it's an either or. This proposition is either true or false. Yeah. But this art form is very different than that one. Well, vive la différence. Yes. Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. But back to this

Aristotelian tradition and Platonic tradition, I find myself more moved by what I would consider more Platonic type people. Like even when I read Aristotle, like I love Aristotle, but when I read Plato, I'm like, oh. I had a crisis of philosophical faith at Calvin College. I fell in love with Plato, read Aristotle, was convinced that rationally and philosophically and logically Aristotle was right and Plato was wrong about the forms and about the soul and the body and I said okay I have to choose between beauty and fascination on the one hand and truth on the other truth trumps everything yes I still love Plato and love to teach him much more than Aristotle but Aristotle's right but then I think sometimes people make a sharp distinction

between Plato and Aristotle that may not necessarily be so. Do you think? More than that, I would say that Aristotle is 90% Plato. Ah, wow. A.E. Taylor, who wrote a very good book on Plato, also wrote a short one on Aristotle, proving that Aristotle is basically a Platonist. How did he do that?

Where are the forms located? Well, Aquinas synthesizes them by saying that the forms exist in three places. They exist in the mind of God, in themselves. They exist in things, as the forms of natural things, as Aristotle said. And they exist in the human mind as abstracted from things, as Aristotle also says right so that's basically two-thirds aristotle and one-third plato yeah but plato is right about god and aristotle is right about us yeah um who's your favorite philosopher other than aquinas pascal i love pascal my students too they are moved by pascal talk about someone who speaks to modern man. He just comes right in. He speaks clearer than...

I'm very sensitive to sounds. And a teacher usually knows how engaged students are by how much they're shuffling and how much they're talking and how quiet they are. And there's maybe four or five different levels of sounds. There's the talking, which is kind of intrusive, and there's the shuffling of papers, which means I'm bored. And there's just the moving around in the seat, which is saying I'm slightly bored. And then there's the sudden attention.

Leaning forward. And beyond that, if you're in a small classroom, you can tell when students stop breathing. Wow. Pascal and Augustine are the only two philosophers I know that can make students stop breathing. Wow. With a directed quote. Do you teach a whole course on Pascal? Half a course.

I do Pascal and I compare him with Jean-Paul Sartre. He's a kind of existentialist. Talk to me. Talk to me. Teach me. talk to me talk to me teach me well i think sartre uh is a is a a missionary that god put in the camp of atheists to convince the atheists to run screamingly into the arms of the nearest priest really because only an idiot can read and love sartre uh-huh why do you say that you scare the hell out of you life is meaningless it's empty yeah life sucks then you die that's sartre yeah

this is something i think we like we could intellectually assent to but not live like that no no i i mean this is something that would have fascinated me as a 17 year old who just wanted to burn everything down and was pissed off anyway for a couple of months or a couple of years yeah but but you can't live like it's like moral relativism If you take Sartre seriously when you're an adult, you have serious mental problems. Nietzsche's a bit different. Why is Nietzsche different? Nietzsche's more complex than Sartre. He's more sophisticated.

He's not just an intellectual. He's a poet. And he has some profoundly positive things to say and some profoundly negative things to say. He, too, will scare the hell out of you. But after you run out of his arms, you keep looking back and saying, I want to read him again.

Yeah. He's also totally honest. I think Sartre is a hypocrite. I think he's simply a liar. He's faking it. So Pascal, the Ponce's, is there anything else? Did he publish anything? The Provincial Letters, which are an elaborate joke on the Jesuits,

which is much too sophisticated for ordinary taste, including mine. Yeah. I think one of the reasons I love Pascal is because I may have ADD, as we're discovering during this thing. So reading little snippets is very helpful. Exactly. I think God, in his mercy killed Pascal at a very young age because those little snippets were notes for a book and Pascal was going to put

them into a nice ordered book, which would have been boring. Well, let's talk about two things regard to Pascal. Let's talk about distractions and then we'll get to Pascal's wager. One of my favorite things he said, and I've heard you say it too, all of the ills of society or modern man can be traced back to the fact that he cannot sit alone in a dark room silently. Brilliant. It's like a litmus test if you want to see how depressed you are. Go give that a shot. See how long you last.

That's when my students stop breathing when I quote that. And I say, test him. You wonder whether that's true or not. Do it, literally. I've tried. put yourself in the bathroom with a noise machine so you're not distracted see if you can last an hour almost nobody does but see this is something i was i got better at last august when i quit the internet i felt like my head was running around like a one of those rotating fans and i pulled it out of the and it took a while for it to slow. But it got to a point where I could sit and read a lot.

I read The Brothers in 20 days. I couldn't do that now. I couldn't read that in two years, given how much internet I use. Well, Pascal is suggesting something much more radical than that. You don't read in that room. No, I know. You don't even think consciously about X, Y, or Z in that room. You just say, who am I?

What's going on here? So why can't we do it? Or maybe you can. Why can't I do it? I can't do it either. Huh. I think it's because I don't like myself. I like the fact that I don't like myself.

If I liked myself, I wouldn't like myself if i like myself i wouldn't like myself if you like i don't i don't respect people who think highly of themselves yeah i respect people who are honest enough to say uh i'm a 90 failure and i've got to patch myself up and god's got to help so here's well here's my idea you're at a party someone walks over to you you don't like them you don't want to talk to them. You move away from them. It's easy to do. But if you don't like you, it's a little more difficult to evade you.

And I think that plunging yourself headlong into a myriad of distractions, in a sense, does that. It fragments the internal life. I don't have to be with me. That might be too simple, but that's the first thing I thought of. That's true, but what's also true is something that seems to contradict that namely that god designed us to look outward uh the eyes can't see themselves without a mirror we have two ears and only one mouth so we should

listen more than we speak yeah we exist for other people not for ourselves and we can find who we are only by going outside of ourselves which is why porn is so bad it drives inward that which is designed to be outward you give yourself to the other but you don't do that in porn you create your own other well then is pascal wrong no pascal's right because if we were made for the other and made not to be self-sufficient maybe that says why we can't sit for a long period of time every once in a while you have to take your temperature you have to uh be honest with yourself it's it's not pleasant but but there it is and and it's at least uh a lesson in humility to realize that you can't stand your own company for an hour.

And you know what's funny? I was just about to ask you, how would one do this? But see, that's part of the problem. The problem is I don't like the simple answer, sit and put a noise machine on. I'm like, no, give us five steps. Exactly. That's what I want. We're techies.

Technology is a way of making something that's hard into something that's simple. For instance, the lights in this studio. All you have to do is press a button. That's easy. Suppose we didn't have electricity. You'd have to gather wood and you'd have to put a bonfire on and you'd have to worry about it, other things catching. So technology is a way of making things easier. There's no such thing as spiritual technology.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's meant to be hard. So the how question is the wrong question. How do I do this? Give me 12 steps. If I do A, that'll cause B. If I do B, that'll cause C, like dominoes. We're free, and therefore we transcend that kind of causal determinism. You just do it. You just choose to do it. Well, how do I choose to do it? You just do it. I remember talking to a guy once who was deeply troubled, and he said, I want to believe in God, but I can't do it. I said, why can't you do it? Is it a problem of evil or what? No, no, no. I know all the arguments. Yes. And I know these people of faith and they're happy and i envy them i can't do it i said yes you can he said no i can't i said well uh who do you love the most i said my wife

i said okay suppose your wife appeared on the other side of that door there was a glass frame in the door you knew it was her and the door was locked. And she said, Harry, open the door. What would you do? He said, I'd get up out of my seat and open the door. I said, how would you do it? He said, what do you mean? I mean, well, you've got to do it step by step. How many steps do you have to take? In order to open the door, you have to grab the handle. In order to grab the handle, you have to twist your arm. In order to twist your arm, you have to be by the door. In order to be by the door, you have to walk to the door. And in order to walk to the door, you have to get up off your seat. And in order to get up off your seat, you have to make the decision to get up off your seat. And what's the connection

between the decision and the muscles? He says, I don't know. I said, but you'd do it anyway, wouldn't you? He said, yeah. I said, so just do it with God. You mean it's that simple? I said, uh-huh. Yep. That's excellent. The problem, though, is we don't have the same, the consequence isn't usually as pleasant for people who then just do it. If I get off my seat and open the door for my wife, I know what to expect, and I'll probably get what I expect. But when you say to someone, just do it, just pray. Well, that's where faith comes in. These unpleasant experiences, these difficulties, this fact that you have to be utterly honest and humble with your sins, the fact that God is going to test you and he's not going to make your life easier.

You have to trust him. You have to say, yeah, I know you're a doctor and this is going to hurt, but you need it. Yeah. And this is going to hurt, but you need it. Yeah. Even, I think, like, realizing, like, what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives now. You know, sometimes we don't know what's going on with our emotional life and just sort of submitting ourselves to the Father. Almost like a patient.

Like, go to work, Father. I trust you. This is why you have to be a little kid. Yeah. I trust that you're good. Yep. Anything more to say on Pascal? It's logical to trust because unless you're an atheist, there is some being that deserves the name God. Now, no being deserves the name God who is stupid.

So he's got to be omniscient. No being deserves the name God who is weak. So he's got to be omnipotent. And no being deserves the name God if he's wicked. So he has to be good. And good means unselfish and loving. All right. So God is unlimited wisdom, unlimited power, and unlimited love. From those three premises, it logically follows that everything that happens in your life works out for good

if you just trust God. He's bringing this stuff into your life for one reason and one reason only. He knows that it's good for you yeah that's logical that's logical you can't escape the logic it doesn't feel like that it doesn't but that's the way it can feel like death yeah but that yeah though i walked through the valley of the shadow of death without death where would we be there's a bunch of idiots in silicon valley who are working on the immortality pill it's not a pill it's a immortality by engineering. It's the transhumanists who say we're about to evolve technologically into the next species and we'll be immortal. If they ever attain that goal, I think that would be the end of the world. I don't think God would allow a world of

immortals to exist. That would be hell incarnate. We would be like a dozen eggs left on your kitchen table for six months. We would go rotten. Yeah. Death is absolutely necessary. I heard a story. It was a science fiction story. You may have heard of it.

I'm not sure where it's from. He was, this astronaut was on a planet and he, the ship broke down and he had two pills. One was for suicide and the one was to live forever. And because he was stuck on this planet no way out he chose to kill himself but he took the wrong pill and he had to sit there alone forever that sounds like a short story by ursula le Guin okay entitled or as a canister or something those who walk away from and then there's some foreign word that begins with an O, like Ormulan. There's this ideal society on another planet

in which everybody's happy. No problems, no poverty, no prejudice. And some of them discover that the reason for their happiness is that there's one little girl who's constantly tortured inside a little building outside the city and her horrible physical and spiritual screams are transformed by this machine into good energy and pumped into all the other millions of people so their happiness depends upon her misery i gotta read this story and some say, I cannot endure this, and I'm going out into the wilderness to live normally.

And some say, this is utopia, and they stay there. So implicitly it says, what do you choose? Yeah, this is the consequentialist argument, right? Or the utilitarian argument. Yeah. What do you think the best argument, or not just the best argument for God's existence, because there might be something that's more convincing, but convincing can be relative. What do you like? If somebody said to you, sitting on an airplane,

Peter, why should I believe in God? If you're talking purely logically, I think the best argument for God is Aquinas' five ways, the cosmological argument. All the intelligence, all the intelligibility in the universe, the greater the scientist, the more he approaches a kind of a theism like Einstein. If you're talking about the human side, I would say the moral argument. You can't be a saint without God. I love Albert Camus. He was a reluctant atheist. And I love his hero, Dr. Rue, in the plague, who, like Camus, couldn't believe in God. And he stays to help these people with the plague. He's the only doctor around.

He knows he's gonna catch the plague and he's gonna die. And they ask him why. And he says, well, I don't know the meaning of life except that the meaning of life is to be a saint and i can't believe in god and i know you can't be a saint without god and one of those three propositions has to be false and i can't reject either one so i'm just confused that's that's good honest atheism do you find that your students are more kind of inward looking as opposed to sort of so rather than Aquinas's cosmological arguments beginning from facts in the world that we know about looking inward yeah that's that's typical of of the modern mind in in the good sense as well as the bad sense of the word yeah uh for instance Cardinal Newman's uh new version of the moral argument uh instead of starting with an objective natural law, which all societies believed, and we don't, of course, time, he starts with private conscience.

Do you believe that we all have our own law? You have your Ten Commandments. I have mine. Different strokes for different folks. Yeah, I'm a moral religious. Fine. Do you believe that it's ever wrong for you individually to violate your own private conscience, to do something that you honestly believe is morally reprehensible. Of course not. Why? Where did that authority come from? Is conscience just an accident of evolution? Is it just your parents word?

Is it just society's consensus? Why do you bow down to that as if it were a prophet from God? That's a very good argument. It might lead you into Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov. You know, there's no God, therefore everything is permissible, but more likely it'll lead you into Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov. There's no God, therefore everything is permissible. But more likely, it'll lead you, well, I can't say that I shouldn't be a saint, and therefore I'll have to believe in God. But my simplest argument for the existence of God is Jesus. If God doesn't exist, Jesus is the biggest fool who ever lived.

He wasn't the biggest fool that ever lived, therefore God exists. Of course. Pascal's wager I find really impressive. I find that this is often misunderstood. People think it's an argument for God's existence. It isn't. Do you want to talk about that? Of course. It's addressed to the skeptic. It's worthless for the believer. He has better arguments. But the skeptic wants, because he's human, two things. He wants truth. He wants happiness. And he thinks that the truth is not ascertainable. Neither theism nor atheism can be proved.

So he has to bet on the red chips instead of the blue chips, on happiness instead of truth. All right. How can you attain the happiness that you want but don't get? We all have a lover's quarrel with the world. This world is not enough. There is suffering. There is death. I want more than that.

I'm not sure what it is, but I want something more than that. The only chance of getting that is, one, God and heaven exist, and two, you buy into that. You accept his offer. That combination is your only chance of attaining happiness. So why not buy into it? Now, of course, the Pascal's wager would only kind of get off the ground if I think that the arguments for or the likelihood of God and atheism are equal.

If I think there's better arguments for atheism, I might just choose to be an atheist. Because I have people come up to me quite regularly who say, I've looked at all the arguments. I've been watching to be an atheist. Because I had people come up to me quite regularly who say, I've looked at all the arguments. I've been watching all the YouTube videos. I really don't know what to do. Both seem convincing one day or the other. Before I've had my coffee, I'm an atheist. What do I do?

And so I know Pascal said something after that, though, didn't he? He said, so suppose you bet on God, and then he tells us what to do. He imagines his interlocutor saying, I just can't make the leap of faith. Yeah. Can't do it. So Pascal says, well, you don't need more arguments. You need to live it. Yes.

Here's a suit of clothes. Put it on. See what it feels like. Go to church. Light some candles. Go to mass. Use holy water. And what do you say to the person who says, but if I do that, I'm a hypocrite?

No, you're not. You're not buying the car yet. You're just test driving it. Yeah. And of course, if God doesn't exist, there's probably nothing wrong with being a hypocrite. So that's all right. Yeah. If you can't prove or disprove that God exists, then there's no conclusive proof either way. And you're not a fool. Nobody can prove that you're a

fool whichever way you choose that's when he shifts from the mind to the heart and the heart's at least as important as the mind god made us to demand two things truth and happiness unless your happiness is just comfort and contentment. If you can say, oh, I'm just contented with three good meals a day and no terrible pain. That's all I want. That's what the beasts desire. Yeah. Yeah. Deep down, you know, that's not you.

Yeah. But nobody else can tell you that. You have to search your own heart and realize that that's not going to make you happy. Now, did you find that there was an uptick in atheists in your class during the new atheism thing that went on with Dawkins and the rest of them? Now that seems to have died down. What's been going on? No, but I think Boston College is not typical.

I think most of the kids there come from a vaguely Catholic or vaguely religious background. And they tend to be kind of pragmatic. They're in college to get a good job and make a lot of money, not to find out whether God exists or not. And the students that come to my courses are usually much more motivated for the big questions than the average student. Are they? Well, yeah.

Yeah. Well, hopefully, yeah. They would have, obviously, intellectual curiosity, presumably, if they're taking philosophy. And then have you taught master students? Own doctor students, yeah. Have you? Yeah. BC is one of the, I think, 2% of universities in America that still require two philosophy courses for every student.

Yeah. Philosophy is not that popular anymore. Why? Have we replaced it with psychology? No, we've replaced it with technology. 99.4% of all research and development money in American universities goes to the STEM courses. 0.6% go to all the arts and all the humanities combined. We're becoming technocrats.

And why is that an issue? Why is that a problem, would you say to them? Because if you don't know yourself, which is what philosophy does, you don't know who's using all these things and becoming so powerful in the matter of the world. That's right. And that's worthless. It reminds me of Augustine's comment about going throughout the world and seeing mountains and passing by himself without caring to know. Nobody on his deathbed said, you know, I spent too little time working on this problem of how to make more efficient drains

and too much time worrying about who I am and what's the meaning of my life. Nobody ever said that. You think we don't think about death enough? Of course we don't. If you do, that makes you lively. If you think about death, it makes you lively. People who have near-death experiences always take life more seriously and appreciate it more.

Because we're fools. We appreciate things only by contrast. In heaven, you won't need evil to appreciate good, but here we do. And we need suffering to appreciate joy, and we need death to appreciate life. So if your first thought in the morning is, I might die today. In light of that, how shall I live? That improves your life. Yeah.

Who is one of your, in the Catholic world, who are you seeing that you're glad exists? Do you know what I mean? Like whether they be... Live Catholics? Yeah, right now. Who are you like, oh wow, this person's impressive. Michael O'Brien, who I think is the best Catholic novelist alive.

Tony Esalen, who I think is the best popular Catholic writer alive. He's fantastic. Actually, just a couple of days ago, I interviewed a bloke called Timothy Gordon. And he had a child who was very sick, brain damaged. And he wrote to Michael O'Brien and said, what do I do? I'm not really into my faith. I don't know why he reached out to him. But Michael O'Brien wrote back, what do I do? I'm not really into my faith. I don't know why he reached out to him, but Michael O'Brien wrote back and said,

you should pray to the Holy Spirit. And so he began to pray to the Holy Spirit. And he said one day they were in mass and the child was about four or five or so. I forget the age. But the child who hadn't spoken started saying Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit repeatedly.

And he took the head of his wife and pulled her down. They were both listening to it. Remarkable, hey? It's remarkable what the human spirit is capable of. My mother had Parkinson's disease. My dad has that. For the last 20 years of her life. And as it progressed, she became incapable of speech, but not of song.

Really? She always loved certain hymns. So she could still sing those hymns, but quite eloquently, when she couldn't speak. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. Was your mom a Protestant when she died? Oh, yeah. Did you feel a great responsibility to try to convert them?

How did you deal with not being able to? No, I felt more of a responsibility to comfort them. They were shocked and saddened. I felt more of a responsibility to comfort them. They were shocked and saddened. And they were loving and not nasty or condemning or anything, you know, like a doctor seeing a patient contracting a horrible disease. So there were a lot of arguments. My mother was a very simple soul, not brilliant, not terribly aggressive, just sort of sat there and listened nicely. And I remember one discussion my father and I were having about purgatory, and it was becoming very heated. And he said, Don, if you believe in purgatory, you don't really believe in justification by faith and all of that.

We were going round and round, and we stopped for a minute. My mother said, John, my father's name was John, I think Peter really believes the same thing we do, but he's just using a different word. John said, no, of course not. So my mother said, Peter, you believe everything in the Bible, don't you? I said, yeah. And she said, well, you believe that we're all sinners, right?

Right. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. Okay. So on our deathbed, we're still sinners. Okay. And you believe what the Bible says about heaven, that no sin enters heaven and heaven is absolutely perfect. Yeah, I believe that. And you believe that the difference between sin and holiness is immense. You can't fudge that. I said, right. Well, then she turned to my father, John. I think we just don't use the same word, but we believe the same thing. God's got to do something to us when we die. Yeah, that's right.

That's a great argument. Who cares if you call it purgatory or not? No, that's right. I think sometimes as Catholics we get too hung up on the terminology rather than trying to help somebody understand. It's the same thing with mortal and venial sin. Well, forget those words for a second. This is why there should be more women philosophers. Okay.

And okay, so tell me, who was your most impressive student? Because you've been teaching for how many years now? Decades? Yes. Well, my probably most intellectually brilliant student is someone who's probably retired now. He taught at the University of Texas. That's fantastic. Hugh McCann. now. He taught at the University of Texas. That's fantastic. Hugh McCann. He got 100 on every test. Another was another student who got 100 on every test,

and he's now my colleague, Father Ron Tasselli. Oh, he wrote that book with you. Yes. But there were two students from the Camacho family, Paul and Michael, who both wrote master's theses on the theology of the body, and they were both brilliant. I don't know where they are now. Okay. So speaking of that book,

a handbook for Catholic apologetics, excellent book. We're talking about what the first book you wrote was, or the trilogy. What's the book you're most proud of, if you're allowed to be proud of a book. Oh, Jesus, shock. It's very simple. Augustine Press or was that?

I love that you've written so many books you don't know. Let's see. I heard that first as a talk and it blew me away. I remember going to mass. I was living in Ireland at the time. So I listened to it from your website. I was so moved by it and I had never been so excited to go to mass i was living in ireland at the time so i listened to it from your website i was so moved by it and i had never been so excited to go to mass so there you go for a different reason i

think some of the summer has helped the most people yeah get into aquinas yeah i like to bridge gaps between great and difficult philosophers and ordinary people yes i think my book on pascal is the best written because I quote Pascal so much and my novel An Ocean Full of Angels although it's not a great novel I put the most blood sweat and tears and time into yes now tell us about that how long were you writing that for is this your first fiction work my first and only one it took almost 20 years to finish you started 20 years ago oh yeah

30 years ago it's 10 years old now but it's a messy thing 20 years ago. Oh, yeah. 30 years ago. It's 10 years old now. Crikey. But it's a messy thing. It's an angel's eye view of the connection between, let's see, Jesus Christ, dead Vikings, Muhammad, post-abortion trauma, Catholic universities, Russian prophets, two and a half popes in one year, the great blizzard of 78, armless nature mystics, Dutch Calvinist seminarians, philosophical Muslim surfers, and the end of the world, among a few other things. Did the end of the world happen in the book? No.

But it's discussed. No, but it's sort of apocalyptic in the sense that Michael O'Brien means the term. Now, what feedback? What's your feedback been from people you respect? Like Michael O'Brien, I imagine, read it, did he? Yes, and gave some good suggestions for it, yes. I've gotten one or two letters, not too many, but the ones I've gotten said I love your book. Yeah.

I think I got one from a sheep farmer in New Zealand, which really tickled me. That's lovely. I was just in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago. So, and then how, what's the difference for you? Like writing fiction versus writing nonfiction. What's the difference in the process? You do not control fiction. Ha.

I thought I controlled it. I had it plotted out. Yeah. And all the characters change before my eyes as I let them. That's really cool. So you just have to wait until the plant grows. And it takes a long time. And all you do is cultivate it.

And you let your characters teach you instead of vice versa. And speaking to other authors, do they say the same thing? Like they don't plot it out strictly? Yes. In fact, famous authors often say that. Tolkien said that. T.S. Eliot said that. Paul Valery of the Art of Poetry says that. Yeah, that's how it works.

So you've written so many books, and this is a tremendous gift that you have, because you don't BS. That's why people like you as an author. It sounds like you're just speaking like a human speaks, rather than trying to sound clever. Is that so hard? Well, you wouldn't think that, but when I try to write, I try to sound clever. Is that so hard? I mean, we are humans after all. Well, you wouldn't think that. But when I try to write, I try to sound sophisticated. No, this is clever. No, you don't. No, you don't.

No, I do, and that's why I'm not a good writer. Well, you're certainly a good speaker. Oh, thank you. You're right on target. So I just have to write how I speak. Uncompromised. What is your... I think you have to develop a speaking style in writing.

The best compliment anybody ever gave me for any of my books was given to me by a guy who wrote one of the best, in fact, the best biographies of C.S. Lewis. It's called Jack, and his name is... Yeah, I saw that recently. What's his name? I've forgotten his name. I don't know. Anyway, he was about 90 years old and this was oh 30, 40 years ago and I had just come out with Between Heaven and Hell, the dialogue between C.S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy and Aldous Huxley. We had supper together and he said, how many times have

you met Lewis? And I said, never. He said, that's impossible. I said, why? He said, well, it's easy to imitate Lewis's writing style yeah but you've imitated his speaking style you must have heard him speak that's what I said never yeah so there you go so what's your um how do you write don't just say just do it there's going to be some inspiring Catholics out there who want to take up the mantle and start to write I don't know I don't ask that question I'm not good at that question I'm not good at that question. I'm not interested in that question. I'm not a techie, not even an intellectual or spiritual techie. How do you do it? What's your method? All right, well, not a method then, but you must do devote time per day to write? Oh, no, not at all. When important things are

taken care of, when the house is not falling apart and the kids are not screaming, then I go to the typewriter, the laptop, and maybe I'll be there for a minute and something distracts me. And maybe I'll be there for five minutes and maybe I'll be there for an hour. That's what I do. Do you think the computer has made you a better writer or less of a good writer? The reason I ask is I feel like when you type right, there's no room for error. So you have to be intentional about the words you're writing. Yes, yes. I don't know the answer to that question.

I know it's faster on a laptop. I tried to go back to writing by hand. I can't do it. So that ability has dried up in me. I can't handwrite anymore. I have to type because it's just faster. Is this how you did your original manuscripts back in the day? Would you handwrite them and send them to publishers?

No, I'd handwrite them and then copy them down on a typewriter. Oh, I see. Yeah, yeah. And I've been looking for an old-fashioned word processor, which is fast, but it's just a fast typewriter. They don't exist anymore. Typewriters do, though. Typewriters still exist. Yeah, but they take too long, and it's hard to revise them. Yeah, yeah. So I've done my best to accommodate to Microsoft Word, and we have wrestling matches all the time, and it usually wins. So I've got to get that book now. Which book? The fiction book. Ah book uh an ocean full of angels all right

you're proud of it i'm not proud of it because i know that by the canons of literary criticism it's not a great novel yeah but there's so much stuff in it that it's going to hit a lot of people in a lot of places i think my my sister and i begin writing short horror stories together like uh 20 page little things you know and we're terrible uh well that's not true uh we have we have interesting ideas that we both bounce off each other but i i would imagine part of the success being a successful fiction writer is just enjoying the craft and not wonder at worrying so much as to whether you're good or not well that's necessary but not sufficient if you don't writing, you're not going to do it well. But just because you enjoy it doesn't mean you're going to do it well.

As being a professor for so many years has shown you when people hand in their papers, I suppose. I want to ask you about surfing. When did you start surfing? In my mother's womb. Ah, good answer. I've remembered that ever since. On the Jersey Shore as a kid.

Yeah? We didn't even have surfboards we had canvas mats but that was good because you couldn't control it very much so you had to go where the wave went so I've always been a soul surfer rather than a hot dogger hot dogger, what's that? well, somebody who whose attitude towards the wave is

get down bitch I'm the master which is why I don't like stand-up surfing besides the fact that i have a balance problem so i use a bodyboard yep yep and you can do anything on a bodyboard that you can do in a stand-up surfboard it's a lot easier yeah i once won a surfing contest i was down in florida uh my son had just graduated from fit He's a pilot. And he left the car down there. So I went down to bring the car back. And along the way, I went to Sebastian Inlet, which is where Kelly Slater grew up.

And there was a surfing contest going on. So I watched. And there were these really good surfers who were doing amazing athletic things. I was about 55 then, I think. And then they said, now we're going to have two other contests. One for the Groms, that's the little kids under 12, and one for the old fogies, anybody over 50. Very good.

So the Groms were doing their fantastic thing, too. And there were just four or five old fogies, all of them overweight except me. Yes. So they gave us all boogie boards, and I just happened to catch the best wave and I won a surfing contest. I came home a day late and my wife met me at the door and said,

yeah, you phoned me, you'll be a day late but you didn't say why. You just said you had something important to do. Yeah, I won a surfing contest. You've got to be kidding me. Philosophers aren't supposed to do that. Did you get a certificate or a trophy or something? No, no. No, just a memory.

And do you get to do that up in Massachusetts much? Yeah, there are waves in Massachusetts, believe it or not. I remember one in 1978. No, you have to be patient. Okay, very good. They come in August and September. Okay. When you're on a wave, you lose your ordinary consciousness.

Yeah. You become one with the wave. I'm a coward. I don't take chances. The one time I did something really foolish was when I was very much younger. A hurricane had just hit the Jersey Shore, and we were at Wildwood. And nobody was in the water, and there were no policemen to kick anybody out of the water because only a fool would go in. And the waves were still pretty big and there were riptides all over the place.

And I was so naive, I didn't know how dangerous riptides were. And I started swimming and body surfing in those waves and I felt the riptides carrying me back and forth. Fortunately, they didn't carry me out. But a syllogism almost killed me. I thought, I have become one with the ocean the one thing that can never drown in the ocean is the ocean itself therefore i can never drown i lost all fear i let the tides carry me fortunately god said to the riptide don't carry him out i need him dump him off the beach yes premise one was incorrect well there was

equivocation and being one with the ocean or something but But it was mystical, therefore it must have been true. I love it. I love that the syllogism nearly killed a surfer who once won a... That's fantastic. I learned to surf in Ireland, believe it or not. Bloody freezing cold. You've got to wear those hats and the gloves and this thing. And then I moved to San Diego and did a bunch there. Did you ever see

that surfing video where they're teaching professional surfers are teaching Irish kids to surf? No. I never saw such wide smiles in my life oh really it's on those kids face yeah you told me or you said at one point about a poll of surfers would you rather give up sex or surfing and the majority said they'd rather give up sex well this was from um i think the new yorker magazine or else the new york times and it was was a cross-section of surfers at various levels and that was the question and 11 of them said they would give up surfing and 89 of them said they'd give up sex and as a result the publication got very many angry letters from surfers saying

this is a fake you couldn't find 11 people who would give up surfing. Very good. Speaking of sex, you've said one other thing that I thought was brilliant, and I always quote this. You were saying, asking, will we have sex in heaven? It's like a child, upon hearing about sex for the first time, asking her mom, when we have sex, can we have candy? Oh, honey, you won't want candy.

Like most of my ideas, that was plagiarized from C.S. Lewis. Oh, was it? Yeah. Almost everything is. Everything good. So let's talk about just heaven and the fact that we can't, we talked about not being able to depict Christ or the saints. Yeah. Heaven, I can't think of it in a way that's not boring.

Well, that's because the best definition of heaven is the one that you get in the New Testament. Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man. Try to explain to an unborn baby what life in the world is like. You can't do it. It's more of everything. But in quantity, not quality, not just quantity. So this is why when we read books about heaven or near-death experiences where someone goes to heaven and they tell us what it was like, it all sounds bloody miserable. Yeah, yeah. There

has never been a good movie about heaven. Yeah. Never. Can't be. Because if you ask yourself, like, what do I most enjoy? And you might say sex or surfing or eating tacos and drinking tequila. Well, if you're honest, I think you have to give, as an answer to that question, Well, if you're honest, I think you have to give, as an answer to that question, the very best answer. What gives you the most joy and therefore what you enjoy the most is love. Loving other people, loving God, loving yourself. And in order to do that, you have to really know them. I mean, knowledge and love reinforce each other.

The more you know, the more you love. The more you love, the more you know. So those are our six tasks on earth, to get to know and love God, your neighbor, and yourself. And somehow we'll do that in heaven in a much better way than we do it down here. So is this why when we're kind of deprived of love, we cease to be, I don't know, we kind of, our humanity lessens to a degree, right? Oh yeah, yeah. It's like being deprived of food, or air, or water. You sh It's like being deprived of food or air or water. You shrivel up. People keep telling me a story about babies who have left unattended will die. I heard that enough that I assume it's true.

Have you heard that? Yeah. I also heard that Skinner boxes are outlawed because when you put the baby in the Skinner box and you gave it all the technological... What's a Skinner box? Oh, B.F. Skinner, the atheist, materialist, behaviorist psychologist at Harvard, invented this box for ordinary babies that substituted for mothers.

It gave the baby everything, but mechanically, without human contact. Okay. And this was his vision of the ideal world. Oh, dear God. And some of the babies died. For no reason at all. They just died. Yeah.

That's fascinating. What are we living in right now? Brave New World on 1984? We're living in Brave New World. We're scared of 1984. There's too much violence and suffering there. So we're not going to go back to the Nazis. I hope not. But we're going to go forward to Brave New World. We're already in Brave New World. Yeah. Huxley in the 50s. He wrote Brave New World. We're already in Brave New World. Huxley in the 50s, he wrote Brave New World in 1932, I think, in the 50s. So he already said, I was wrong. I thought it would take 300 years. We're halfway there. We're now three quarters of the way there. So for our listeners, the difference

between 1984 and Brave New World? 1984 is what de Tocqueville called a totalitarianism of force or a hard totalitarianism. Brave New World is a soft totalitarianism, a totalitarianism of comfort. Yeah. So it's almost like one's imposed from the top down and one's from the down up. We choose our own slavery as opposed to being imposed on us. The first time I used Brave New World as a required text in a course in philosophy and literature at Boston College, I gave the students no guidance at all. I said, just read this over the weekend or over the vacation.

We'll come back and talk about it in class. And the discussion was not going anywhere for a couple of minutes until I realized that most of the students thought that Huxley was for Brave New World, that it was a utopia instead of a dystopia. I am not joking. They read the whole book? They read the whole book. And they were disappointed that the savage committed suicide. Yeah.

But he was a savage after all. Yeah. And who wouldn't want to live in a world where there's free sex, free drugs, free entertainment? It's basically advanced Scandinavia. I read an amazing article in the Boston Globe last year. There's apparently an organization called the Global Happiness Project, which rates all the countries in the world by the happiness of its citizens. They give some sort of prize to the five happiest countries

and some sort of warning to the five unhappiest countries. And according to this bunch of experts, the five happiest countries in the world are the five Scandinavian countries. Finland and Sweden and Norway and Iceland and Denmark. The five unhappiest countries in the world are all in sub-Saharan Africa. I said this is a joke, right? Because everybody, even a baby who doesn't even know how to speak, knows how to recognize happiness. When people smile, they're happy. Africans are smiling all the time.

Of course, we speak about those dour Africans and those smiling Scandinavians, right? Yeah. And the surest indication of unhappiness is suicide. Yeah. Happy people don't commit suicide. Well, the suicide rate in Scandinavia is sky high and it's very low in sub-Saharan Africa.

I mean, life there is hard and it's poor and it's dirty and it's corrupt, but people smile. That doesn't count. All that counts is your bank account.

Mm-hmm. Idiots. And life expectancy, perhaps. Yeah. But then if you're not smiling and you're just concerned about your bank account, life expectancy is not going to help you yeah i think the future of the church is in africa oh okay good this was a question i wanted to ask you uh because you you've

given that answer about the the roman fellow who who or the jewish fellow who wanted to convert convert went to rome saw the scandal yeah you know but but maybe maybe i'd love to dig into this a little bit more i don't want to get gossipy i don't want to get into the whole fight that's going on but i mean shit has hit the fan um people are leaving in droves i think it's just going to get more and more we're going to see people leaving the catholic church 10 to 1 in europe 6 to 1 in america ex-catholics versus new catholics all right so what where do you see the church in 50 years? It'll be the church of the poor and the persecuted. It will continue to thrive remarkably in Africa, in Muslim countries, in China, wherever it's persecuted, wherever it's poor.

That's always happened. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. The Catholic Church is not infallible in its politics and I think Francis probably with the best of intentions has done a really really stupid thing in trusting the communists to appoint bishops China

idiot but this means that there will be more suffering it won't mean that things will be nice it's doing what Chamberlain did at Munich This means that there will be more suffering. It won't mean that things will be nice. It's doing what Chamberlain did at Munich. And not realizing that Hitler is Hitler.

But in such places, things will change. In Muslim countries, I am told repeatedly by people who live in Muslim countries that more conversions to Christianity are happening now than ever before in history. I have heard the same thing. And they're all miraculous and concerned with visions. Yes. Something radical is happening. So is it because we had this understanding of the church like here's our trajectory we're gonna you know youth ministries in every parish and this is gonna happen and we'll get the fish fry throughout Lent. A committee told us to do this. Here are the steps.

And so we're like, why is this not, why is this going to happen? We have a saying in Australia. I just found out it was Australian. Have you heard the expression pear-shaped when you say, it's going to go pear-shaped? No. Meaning it's going to fall to shit. It's going to go pear-shaped.

But yeah, so maybe that's it. I think the church should say what individuals say when they pray wisely to God. God, I'm going to give you a good laugh. I'm going to tell you my plans. Yes, the next 10 years. So then how do we, what do we do other than... Our marching orders are very clear.

We know the two great commandments. We better get on with them. So why is it that we look for other marching orders? Why is it that when you say that people go yes yes yes but because we have a big butt and we want to sit on it and do something comfortable yeah instead of well what are the most terrible words you can imagine sacrifice sin suffering mortification that's what makes saints. Give yourself away.

I see a lot of people crapping on McCarrick, and I did the same thing for a while, and I've just started praying for him more and more. It's like we like to scapegoat people. If you can point at him, then my stuff doesn't matter as much. Obviously what he did was terrible. What do you do when people start bringing this sort of stuff up to you? Do you try to avoid getting into specific persons? What do you do when somebody fishes in a toilet bowl and brings up a turd and says, how do you smell this? You

ignore them and you say, use the flush lever. Uh-huh. Good. So then how does that apply to this with cardinals and bishops? This is shit. You flush it away. By the way, shit's a good word. It's in the Bible. Scubala in Greek. Scubala, yes. What was that? Paul said that, didn't he?

In Philippians. Yeah. What was the line? He's going through all the perks. I consider everything shit. Compared with knowing Christ. Yeah. And scubala means?

And Paul had a lot of good stuff. Pharisee of the Pharisees, as to the law of blameless, Roman citizen. Yeah. A lot of perks. Yeah. And scubula means? And Paul had a lot of good stuff. Pharisee of the Pharisees, as to the law of blameless, Roman citizen. Yeah. A lot of perks. Yeah. And that word scubula does mean human feces or just feces? It could be interpreted either as human remains or garbage, either from the body or from the household. Okay. But Thomas Aquinas said something like that about his own works.

It's all straw. You know what they used straw for in the Middle Ages? What? To cover bullshit. Yeah. To cover animal feces. It's all straw. I had a priest once teach me something.

After I give a talk, you know, I'll pray. I'll say, Lord, use everything. Use my bullshit as manure for their growth. Exactly. Isn't that a lovely thing to pray? Because we think it's all about us. We have to say things perfectly with the perfect inflection. I will remember that prayer. Isn't that great? That's a great one. Yeah. Use my bullshit as manure for their growth. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he has very strange tastes. I mean, he he continues to jackasses to do his work to write into jerusalem yeah beautiful peter grave thank you so much it's been a pleasure it's been

a pleasure god bless you has the two hours gone by so soon i don't know has it two hours two hours nine minutes two hours nine minutes all right that's gonna have to do it here on the matt frad show thank you so much for watching now if you're a patron go to patreon.com and you'll be able to see the post show wrap up i just recorded it was really great i had peter sign about 20 books and we told each other the funniest jokes we know and they are very inappropriate so i'm kind of glad it's not going public on youtube so if you are a patron, head over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd right now and you'll be able to watch it. If you're not yet a

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It would mean a ton. Thanks so much. God bless.