For Your Consideration

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In the weeks leading up to our national election I found myself thinking more than ever about the question, “What frames what?”—not at some abstract level but in very personal ways. Most obviously, the intensity of our political divide had me thinking. For several years now I have felt a genuine sympathy for those whose largest framework for understanding human experience is politics. That has to be a hard place to live—even if you are on the winning side of the election. I remain concerned both for those who will see the results of this election as a disaster and for those who will celebrate it. I’m not sure that political solutions ever deliver at the levels we want them to, and I remain convinced that there are much larger frameworks in place. 

It is not just politics, however, that has been pushing me to ask, “What frames what?” Dante Alighieri has been pushing me too. If you read our Monday morning emails, you know that several of us are reading his Divine Comedy this year, and in recent weeks he has been doing some important work in my life. I won’t pretend that reading Dante has always been fun or always satisfying, and it certainly hasn’t been easy, but this fall we are reading the Purgatorio and with each ascending circle of purgatory, Dante’s great poem has become richer and richer and pushed me more and more at a personal level. 

I have had to admit that while I ask other people “What frames what?” I rarely probe as deeply as I might into my own answer to the question. I want the answer to the question to be biblical and Christ-centered, but when I examine my life, and extrapolate from what any given week actually looks like in order to figure out what my real framework for living is, I have had to wonder. As Jesus so succinctly put it, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and yet not do what I say?”

Reading Dante does raise one of the questions that many of us face when we read books worth reading. Namely: How important is it that you agree or disagree with the author? One of the lessons I’ve had to learn over the years is how to let authors, with whom I have significant disagreements, challenge and enrich my thinking. So often, I fear, we tend to think that the point of reading a book is to decide whether we agree or disagree with the author. We plod along simply trying to determine whether the author is “getting it right” or not. Please don’t misunderstand. I think truth matters—in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, of seeking a right understanding of reality. Having said that, however, I am so thankful that God has taught me to let a wide variety of voices inform and inspire me and take me deeper than I would otherwise go. 

The fact is that Michel Foucault has informed my reading of the psalms, Friedrich Nietzsche has deepened my understanding of the Ten Commandments, and Judith Butler has deepened my reading of Genesis three, so I am quite willing to let Dante lead me through purgatory. As Alan Jacobs observes in How to Think, we do best not when we “think for ourselves” but when we think together with people who will stretch us a bit. As my son-in-law recently observed, “Iron sharpens iron.”

I don’t always agree with Dante. In fact, I don’t think there is such a place as purgatory, and yet Dante’s reflections on purgatory are doing a lot of good work for me. He is making me think about what frames what in my own life, and he is enriching my thinking about becoming the person God calls me to be. Dante has me thinking about my own sanctification, about growing in holiness, about purging—or putting away—vice and cultivating virtue. Dante is exposing my idols, my indifference, and the poverty of my thinking about godliness. He has become a means of grace that God is using to remake me in the image of His Son.

It hasn’t hurt, in this case, to have Mike Sacasas providing guidance and offering the occasional gloss on Dante’s text. Since Mike’s earliest presentations at the Study Center a year ago, he has been encouraging us to see the moral life as a life of rightly ordered loves—of loving what we ought to love, not loving what we ought not to love, and of loving what we ought to love in the right ways and in the right order. Mike draws this way of thinking from ancient, medieval, and modern sources, and in recent weeks it has become clear that these sources include Dante. 

I am a novice with regard to Dante, so take my reflections with a large grain of salt, but one of Dante’s arguments that has caught my attention is that as love is natural to God, so it is natural in his creatures. We are created to love, Dante notes, and this natural love endures in each and every one of us. I would see this as an expression of the imago Dei, but Dante just focuses on the fact that as God is love, so we are all made to love. “As fire, born to rise, moves upward,” and “just like the zeal in bees for making honey,” so “this primal inclination” is innate in each of us. (XVIII, 28-29, and 68-69)

What’s in question, however, is how we direct this love. 

While it is directed to the primal good,knowing moderation in its lesser goods,it cannot be the cause of wrongful pleasure.But when it bends to evil, or pursues the goodwith more or less concern than needed,then the creature works against his Maker. (XVII, 97-102)

To bend to evil, in Dante’s view, is to give in specifically to the sins of pride, envy, and wrath—three ways by which we do harm to our neighbor, but that is only the beginning of the story.

Often, our sinfulness lies not in pursuing evil but in failing to pursue the good in right measure. We pursue what is good, but “with more or less concern than needed.” This can take the form not only of loving too little but of loving too much. The fact that work or marriage or food or drink are all fundamental goods does not mean that we should allow any of these secondary goods to rise to the level of the supreme Good. The true goods in life need to be rightly ordered, and rightly loved. As we have just noted, when we lose sight of the “primal good,” and pursue “lesser goods” with more “concern than needed, then the creature works against his Maker.”

On the other hand, we can also fall short of loving as we ought, of giving less concern than needed. In fact, we often fail to give ourselves fully to goods that are truly good and that deserve our full attention. This is the sin of sloth or acedia, in which we love what is rightly loved but with less zeal than the good object of our love rightly calls for. We love with “a love of good that falls short of its duty.” We pursue “the good in faulty measure” and pull “the slackened oar,” not giving ourselves fully to the good that deserves our full attention. (XVII, 85-87)

We should beware, however, of thinking of sloth as simply being lazy. As Mike and others who reflect on the nature of contemporary culture have shown us, the sin of acedia can easily hide behind a great deal of busyness—busyness that consumes us and distracts us from the true goods we ought to be pursuing in any given moment. And while our digital technologies play a major role here, we ought not use them as an excuse for our own failings. My “to do” list, for instance, all too often created routinely and with little thought, can keep me busy, make me look good, and even help me feel good about myself, while also keeping me from the single, simple good to which the Spirit of God calls me in any given moment of the day. Paradoxically, getting free from busy slothfuness will almost certainly require stopping—doing nothing long enough to reflect and discern what we actually ought to be doing. Freeing ourselves from sloth may, ironically, require that we slow down, become more settled, unhurried, deliberate, but neither lazy nor frantic.

Ultimately, the issue of sloth, whether in its lazy or frantic form, matters not just in regard to how well we give our attention to any number of lesser goods, but with regard to our pursuit of the very highest of goods—the supreme or primal Good that is God and who alone gives true peace. He is that Good which frames all in all. “Everyone can vaguely apprehend some good in which the mind may find its peace,” Dante writes. “With desire, each one strives to reach it.” Sadly, we tend to seek that greatest Good in lesser goods that cannot give true peace. Our “appetites are fixed on things that, divided, lessen each one’s share,” and so our hearts fill with envy rather than with peace. 

As Pascal would put it several centuries later, when we reflect upon the nature of the sovereign good, we recognize that it is “impossible that this universal good, desired by all men, should lie in any of the particular objects which can only be possessed by one individual and which, once shared, cause their possessors more grief over the part they lack than satisfaction over the part they enjoy as their own. [We] realize that the true good must be such that it may be possessed by all men at once without diminution or envy.” (pensée #148)

Dante then takes us a step beyond Pascal, suggesting that when we fix our hearts on loving God, not only is the Good not diminished by being shared, it grows instead. The love of God is amplified as we give ourselves fully to him. Giving us this wisdom through the voice of Virgil, Dante writes: 

‘Because your appetites are fixed on thingsthat divided, lessen each one’s share, envy’s bellows pushes breath into your sighs.‘But if love for the highest spherecould turn your longings toward heavenly things,then fear of sharing would pass from your hearts.‘For there above, when more souls speak of ours, the more of goodness each one owns,the more of love is burning in that cloister.

Dante, the pilgrim, then asks:

‘How can it be that a good, distributed,can enrich a greater number of possessorsthan if it were possessed by few?

To which Virgil responds:

‘Because you stillhave your mind fixed on earthly things,you harvest darkness from the light itself.‘That infinite and ineffable Good,which dwells on high speeds toward loveas a ray of sunlight to a shining body.‘It returns the love it finds in equal measure,so that, if more of ardor is extended, eternal Goodness will augment its own.And the more souls there are who love on high,the more there is to love, the more of loving,for like a mirror each returns it to the other. (XV, 49-75)

Dante runs deep and always calls for still more careful reading, but perhaps it would help to see these lines as Dante’s gloss on the Apostle Paul’s image that at present, “we see in a mirror, dimly (enigmatically),” but in that day of heavenly glory we shall see “face to face” – to face to face to face. We will be like a hall of living mirrors in which the glory of God is reflected and amplified. And it should be noted that this thought from the Apostle comes as the conclusion to his own reflections on the primacy and enduring character of love.

Whether you are celebrating the outcomes of the recent elections or fearful that the sky is falling, I encourage you to keep asking, What frames what? What provides your most basic understanding of human experience and history? If, like me, you want the answer to this question to be richly theocentric and rooted in biblical wisdom, let me ask you what I ask myself: Does your life confirm or call into question that biblical framework?

I also want to encourage you to ask, “With whom am I in conversation?” This is the second of the two questions that I have asked students over the years, and the more we all settle into our comfortable feedback loops, the more I want to ask it.  What conversation partners are feeding your thought processes these days? Do you read and listen to only what you know will confirm the opinions you already hold? Do you stop reading or listening the moment you encounter a disagreement? 

Is there a Dante in your life? 

I’m not asking you to be wishy washy. I’m not even asking you to change any of your views. I’m just asking you to give yourself to thoughtfulness and to recognize how hard it is to do this if you don’t have thoughtful friends feeding your thoughts. Thoughtfulness is a worthy goal, and nothing keeps us from it more effectively than the slothful sin of staying busy, busy, busy.

So, let me grant Dante the final word in pointing us to the sovereign Good who frames all in all and who is the source of greatest peace. Beware “the slackened oar,” He tells us. Let not “the love that draws you on” be “laggard to know or have that peace.” 

And if you want some help in finding worthy conversational partners, allow me to invite you to join us in “Breaking Bread with the Dead” this spring.

Richard V. Horner

November 6, 2020

Study Center Resources

At the end of his essay, Dr. Horner invited you to join us in “breaking bread with the dead” next semester. In doing so, he was alluding to our reading of Alan Jacobs’s recent book by that title, which encourages us to connect with authors from the past in order to better ground our experience in the present. That same reading group is currently concluding another book by Jacobs,  The Year of Our Lord 1943. You can join our Zoom discussion this Monday, November 9th at 8:00 p.m. You can join the meeting with this link. The group is open to the public, so feel free to join in.

Associate Director Michael Sacasas was recently interviewed on the podcast of the The Institute for Policy Research, an interdisciplinary policy research center of the Catholic University of America.

Recommended Reading

— Craig Bartholomew on biblical wisdom for uncertain times:

Wisdom is not a technique that you simply take and apply so that you have it. It has to be lived, and we have to be formed into wise people. Job’s struggle is different from that of the Preacher. Job’s is existential whereas the Preacher’s is intellectual. Both are excruciating experiences, and both felt that their very existence was at stake. How did they find resolution?

The answer, but never simplistically, is God. Experiences like that of the pandemic bring us quickly to the very real limits of our own wisdom. That is the message of Job 28. But does this mean wisdom amid uncertainty is unavailable? No, because as Job 28:23 says,

God understands the way to it

and he alone knows where it dwells

God knows the way to wisdom because God is wisdom.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week eight of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which explores the ministry and teaching of Jesus as presented by the gospel according to John.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the eight session of Michael Sacasas’s Director’s Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”

The class talked about place and memory as well as the relationship between place and community.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week seven of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” which continues to explore the ministry and teaching of Jesus as presented by Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the seventh session of Michael Sacasas’s Director’s Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”

The class talked about how we the experience of being grounded in a place, how devices mediate that experience. We also began our discussion of place and memory, which will carry over into next week

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

I’ve been thinking about tables of late, literally and figuratively. Chiefly, what I’ve had in mind is the table as an emblem of hospitality, and, relatedly, as an example of the material infrastructure of our social lives, the stuff of life that sustains and mediates human relationships. As we think about the conditions of human flourishing, it’s important that we consider not only the ideas that shape our moral, political, and theological assumptions. We should consider as well the material structures of our experience, which often do more to shape our lives than most of us realize.

Thinking about the table has drawn me back to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, first published in 1958. This work is notable for Arendt’s discussion of the distinctions among, on the one hand, private, public, and social life, and, on the other, among the activities which Arendt calls labor, work, and action. I won’t take the time to explain all of those distinctions at great length here—it’s a dense book—except as they relate to Arendt’s use of the table as a recurring metaphor, a metaphor which will, I think, usefully illuminate aspects of our digitally mediated experience and certain of its characteristic disorders.

“To live together in the world,” Arendt wrote, “means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”

Our life together in the world is built upon a world of things, which, like a table, gathers and distinguishes us. The point may at first seem somewhat trivial, until we do a little work to unpack the meaning that Arendt has given these terms.

“The term ‘public’ signifies the world itself,” she explains, “in so far as it is common to all of us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it.” She goes on to clarify that the world is not simply synonymous with the earth, which she thinks of as related to our “organic life.” The world, in her sense, is related “to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together.” 

We might say that the world as she means it is more or less co-extensive with what the historian Thomas Hughes called the human-built world, it is our cultural habitat and also what I’m calling the material infrastructure that sustains it. In this light, then, the table is not simply a metaphor, it is a case in point, a microcosm of the larger social order, which itself takes shape around an array of material artifacts. 

This world of things turns out to have important psychological and epistemological functions in Arendt’s analysis, and this is were her line of thinking gets really interesting. We might say that Arendt takes the world of common things to be an epistemic backstop that keeps us from sliding into pure subjectivism, nihilism, or egoism. As we’ll see in a moment a world of common things grounds a common sense. 

So, for example, she writes, 

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves, and while the intimacy of a fully developed private life, such as had never been known before the rise of the modern age and the concomitant decline of the public realm, will always greatly intensify and enrich the whole scale of subjective emotions and private feelings, this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men.”

This is quite a remarkable claim. The inverse correlation she posits between an intensification of subjective emotion and private feeling, on the one hand, and an assurance of the reality of the world on the other seems particularly striking given present concerns about the degree to which Americans appear to have not only conflicting beliefs, but to live in alternate realities. 

Elsewhere in The Human Condition she writes, “the existence of a public realm and the world's subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

Arendt’s insistence on a measure of permanence and stability across time naturally recalls to my mind Simone Weil’s discussion of a stable ground upon which a human life may be rooted. In The Need for Roots, Weil argued that rootedness was an essential human need and, she added, “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

For Arendt the permanence of the world of things not only grounds our common experience of the world but also human identity. “The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life,” Arendt wrote, “and their objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.”

But let’s come back for a moment to the epistemic implications of Arendt’s notion of a common world. 

Arendt argues that to live an “entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life.” She expands on this by explaining that it means one is “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.” 

Here again is the notion of being gathered and separated but with an emphasis on an “objective” relationship with others. Of course, it is not the nature of reality itself that is at issue here. Rather, Arendt has in view our experience of reality, or, to put it another way, the measure of certainty we attain from knowing that we inhabit a shared reality with others. We see and hear and are seen and heard in turn, and somehow the intermediation of the common world of things is essential to this dynamic. This certainly does not at all preclude vigorous and intense disagreement about what is good, right, and just; but it does suggest that such debates can unfold meaningfully within shared horizons of the real. And this is what Arendt understands as “common sense,” which she calls “the sixth and highest sense.” Common sense was not just a set of mundane observations that are widely assumed to be true. Rather, it was common in the sense that it was the product of the senses working in tandem on a world held in common with others. 

“Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.” However, in the modern world, Arendt argued, common sense “became an inner faculty without any world relationship.”

“This sense now was called common,” she continues, “merely because it happened to be common to all. What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of their minds.” This is a critical point aptly stated. Moreover, she observes that “a noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world.” Again, she does not mean alienation from the earth, but alienation from a common world of human things that constitutes a public space of appearance within which a common sense can take hold and bind individuals to a commonly shared reality. 

Without a common and stable world of things to ground our experience with others, without the table around which we might gather, the mind is cut off from a common sense and set loose upon itself in ways that become self-destructive. 

Thus, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she also makes the following argument: 

Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect. [Emphasis mine.]

Only, along with “totalitarian propaganda” let us also include “conspiracy theories” and the relevance of this analysis will be all the more apparent. The loss of a common world and the common (or communal) sense it sustains engenders not only heightened subjectivity but also leaves individuals susceptible to propaganda and conspiracy theorizing. 

What especially interests me, however, is the degree to which our digital media environment differs from the older analog order of things, specifically with regard to its role in sustaining a common world and public life. I’m tempted to speak of this difference as a move from a material order to an immaterial order, but I realize that this is not quite right. After all, digital media is a thoroughly material reality built on tubes, cables, satellites, servers, and rare-earth metals mined at great human cost, none which are any less material in nature simply because they are ordinarily hidden from public view. 

Nonetheless, it is important to account for how digital media reconfigures the material infrastructure of social life such that the dynamics of human experience are also transformed. And a good deal of this transformation involves the scrambling of the relationship between bodily presence and action. What happens, for example, when large swaths of our social world no longer emerges within a world of things we simultaneously occupy. In other words, the question may be simply this: What are the consequences of a social life increasingly dependent on varieties of tele-presence? Which is to say, unmediated by a common world of present physical things.

Tele-, as you may remember from some long-ago middle school vocabulary lesson, is the Greek root that means far or distant and suggests operating at a distance. Consider three common words: telegraph, telephone, television—writing at a distance, voice at a distance, sight at a distance. All of these are varieties of telepresence, and, as the example of the telegraph suggests, telepresence is not uniquely tied to digital media. Digital media, however, has made it possible for telepresence to mark more and more of our experience. 

Early debates about the internet were sometimes framed by an opposition of digital activities to “real life.” It seems to me that we would have better spent our time had the question of telepresence framed our discussions. Regarding life online, “Is this real?” now seems to me to have been a far less interesting question to ask than “Where am I?” 

When we gather, as we so often do now, on a service like Zoom, where exactly are we? Where is the interaction happening? And, what difference does it make, say, that there is no here we can easily point to and much less is there a table? What sort of world is this that now harbors so much of our social and political life, and how might we distinguish it from the world of common things, which for Arendt was so important to meaningful public life?

It is clear that the digital realm lacks the permanence that Arendt thought was essential to a common world in which individuals could appear and be seen. Consequently, it fails to stabilize the self in the manner Arendt attributed to a common world of things. It also seems that Arendt’s fears about the epistemic consequences of the loss of a common world of things were well grounded. By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbols, digital tools appear to undermine our capacity to experience a common world which generates a common sense. Increasingly, we come to feel that individuals are occupying altogether different realities.

There are, of course, many more questions to be asked about how digital tools transform human experience, but reckoning with the seeming worldlessness of the digital realm and its abstraction of experience from bodily presence may help us better understand some of the challenges we face as we seek to faithfully navigate this digital world together.

Michael SacasasAssociate Director

Study Center Resources

This week, we especially want to draw your attention to our Zoom reading group on Monday, October 26th at 8:00 p.m. This will be our first discussion of Alan Jacobs’s The Year of Our Lord 1943. You can join the meeting with this link. The group is open to the public, so feel free to join in.

Recommended Reading

— Brazos Fellows hosted a discussion [video] with Alan Jacobs and others about Jacobs’s new book:

Our time is characterized by information overload, hot takes, and a preoccupation with the immediate. What’s more, there seems to be a growing consensus that history needs to be left behind—that the past has nothing to teach us. In this moment, why read old books? What, if anything, can we learn from the voices of the past?

Alan Jacobs, Elizabeth Corey, and Paul Gutacker discuss these questions in honor of the release of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind.

— In “Democracy and the Nuclear Stalemate” at The New Atlantis, Taylor Dotson and Michael Bouchey tackle nuclear energy as a test case for the broader and vexing issues undermining the prospects of democratic governance in the face of large scale problems:

America’s nuclear energy situation is a microcosm of the nation’s broader political dysfunction. We are at an impasse, and the debate around nuclear energy is highly polarized, even contemptuous. This political deadlock ensures that a widely disliked status quo carries on unabated. Depending on one’s politics, Americans are left either with outdated reactors and an unrealized potential for a high-energy but climate-friendly society, or are stuck taking care of ticking time bombs churning out another two thousand tons of unmanageable radioactive waste every year.

…

If we cannot make headway on nuclear power — and do so democratically — there would seem to be little hope for similarly complex challenges: climate change, artificial intelligence, collapsing biodiversity, sending humans to Mars. We must end the nuclear stalemate. Whether we can is a crucial test for democracy, and for humanity.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to week six of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he reviews key episodes in the ministry of Jesus as presented in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

In this installment, you can listen to the sixth session of Michael Sacasas’s Director’s Class, “Displaced: Exploring the Moral and Theological Dimensions of Place.”

The class talked about how we inhabit a place through attentiveness and self-directed navigation, including a discussion of how our disposition or way of being in the world shapes our experience of place.

The latter part of the class reviewed Ari Schulman’s excellent 2011 essay, “GPS and the End of the Road.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com

You can listen to the newsletter by clicking the play button above or you can click the “Listen in Podcast app” link and follow the directions to open this feed in your podcast app. Currently, you may find the feed on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.

It was my pleasure to interview Matthew Lee Anderson for our podcast last month. I’ll start with the usual introductory matters.

Matt is an Assistant Research Professor of Ethics and Theology at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion and the Associate Director of Baylor in Washington. He’s also an Associate Fellow at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Oxford University, where he completed a D.Phil. in Christian Ethics.

As you’ll hear in the interview, Matt is the author of two books:  Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter To Our Faith and The End of Our Exploring. Matt is also the founder of Mere Orthodoxy, a site that has consistently published thoughtful, irenic, and theologically informed Christian writing for over 15 years. Moreover, Matt’s writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Finally, Matt’s newsletter, The Path Before Us, offers moral and theological analysis of contemporary culture and politics.

In our conversation, we ranged over a variety of topics, but I’d say that reflection on the moral life was a unifying theme. Below is an outline of the conversation with timestamps so that you can navigate your way to places of interest. I especially enjoyed our discussion of the role that literature can play in shaping our moral imagination beginning at the 40:34 mark.

1:54 — Matt’s vision for Mere Orthodoxy and the nature of writing online

10:20 — Earthen Vessels, issues related to the body

19:05 — The End of Our Exploring, the distinction between doubt and inquiry, and the art of asking good questions

28:13 — The work of theologian Oliver O’Donovan, author of Begotten or Made? and Resurrection and Moral Order

35:37 — The task of moral reasoning

40:34 — Literature and the moral life

51:33 — Shakespeare

1:01:47 — The value of memorization

We hope you enjoy this conversation. You can look forward to others like it in the coming weeks and months.

Peace,

Michael SacasasAssociate Director

Study Center Resources

Our Readings in the Christian Imagination reading group is now reading Alan Jacobs’s The Year of Our Lord 1943, which focuses on the work of five Christian intellectuals—C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Simone Weil—who, in the middle of World War Two, turned their attention to the question of education and the life of the mind. We will discuss the first half the book on Monday, October 26th over Zoom at 8:00 p.m.

The rest of our program is in full swing. Our Director’s classes are meeting via Zoom and in-person and our Dante group meets via Zoom on Wednesday afternoons. If you have any questions about taking part in these events, please email Mike Sacasas at [email protected].

Recommended Reading

— Samantha Rose Hill explains why Hannah Arendt believed that loneliness could make individuals susceptible to totalitarianism.

‘Totalitarian solutions,’ she wrote, ‘may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man.’ When Arendt added ‘Ideology and Terror’ to Origins in 1958, the tenor of the work changed. The elements of totalitarianism were numerous, but in loneliness she found the essence of totalitarian government, and the common ground of terror.

— Earlier this year, Jay Parini reflected on his meeting with W. H. Auden:

"I've learned a little in my life," he said. "Not much. But I will share with you what I do know. I hope it will help."

He lit a cigarette, looked at the ceiling, then said, "I know only two things. The first is this: There is no such thing as time." He explained that time was an illusion: past, present, future. Eternity was "without a beginning or an end," and we must come to terms with what underlies time, or exists around its edges. He quoted the Gospel of John, where Jesus said: "Before Abraham was, I am." That disjunctive remark upends our notions of chronology once and for all, he told me.

I listened, a bit puzzled, then asked: "So what's the second thing?"

"Ah, that," he said. "The second thing is simply advice. Rest in God, dear boy. Rest in God."

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In this installment, you can listen to the fifth week of Dr. Horner’s class, “Reading the Gospels: Distinctives, Contradictions, and Commonalities,” in which he discusses the ministry of Jesus as presented in the first several chapters of Mark’s gospel.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit christianstudycenter.substack.com