Systematically

This week we return to the question of divine freedom and, with it, the question of divine rationality. But first we talk about Jon’s boring hobbies, Robyn’s preoccupation with after market truck modifications and a surprising part of the male anatomy, as well as Ryan’s disappointment with your favorite Jane Jacobs documentaries. Then, before we turn directly to the question of divine freedom, Jon rehashes the account of extrinsic predication and Robyn raises a question about how human agency changes us as agents. When we do turn to consider freedom, we first present a couple of common, alternative accounts of liberty, one “negative” and the other “positive,” but then Jon drops his hot take: rationality makes agency free. But now we’re really backed into a corner, because we have to ask: what’s rationality? Even worse, how can this attribution of rationality be applied to God, in whom there is no discursive reasoning? How do we find our way out of this pickle? Listen and see, but here’s a hint: you probably learned the answer in Sunday School. We also circle back to Robyn’s questions about ethics.

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

This week Ryan puts a question to us about divine freedom and Jon takes us into the weeds. But first, #NoTwitterRobyn wants to know which figures from the history of Western philosophy, theology, and literature would have been good at Twitter. Hegel: not so much. Luther: you better believe it! Then we turn to Lonergan’s retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’ appropriation and augmentation of Aristotle’s theory of agency/causality, explain Lonergan’s account of extrinsic predication, consider why the grammatical functions of predication might help at all with metaphysics, and how that metaphysics might be applied meaningfully to God. Then we *finally* turn to the question of divine freedom… mostly by considering answers that we’re pretty sure are wrong. For the right(?) answer, tune in to next week’s episode!

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

This week we are very excited to have our friend Anne Carpenter on the show! She wanted to talk about how tradition works and she brought a couple of turn of the 20th century French Catholic thinkers with her to help. After discoursing on our favorite video games, Anne told us a little bit about her book, Theo-Poetics: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Risk of Art and Being (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). She helped us look at how Balthasar deploys poetic repetition to make important metaphysical points about the relationship of creature to the Creator. We also chatted a bit about the distinction between poetry/art and theology itself. Then we pivoted to Anne’s more recent interest in tradition, in doctrinal development, and in the theology of history. We started with John Henry Newman and his account of development, but then turn to Maurice Blondel and Charles Péguy. Anne spells out how “tradition” is Blondel’s alternative to extrinsicism and historicism and we see his influence in the theology of Vatican II. Finally, Anne shares her related insights into Péguy’s account of time, history, and revolution.

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

This week we have a conversation we recorded over the summer with Jon’s old friend, John Brittingham of Greenville College. Before we dig into John’s work in phenomenology of religion and decolonial philosophy, we explore the deeper mysteries of children’s television programming. Why do the male characters in Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood refuse to wear pants? Does that squirrel in SpongeBob SquarePants need that bubble helmet or is it just an affectation? Is Paw Patrol an instrument of the patriarchy? Then we turn to John’s work on Incarnate Experience, dwelling at some length on the methodological questions raised by the “Theological Turn” in French phenomenology. John then walks us through his account of what he calls "incarnate experience," using categories from Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, among others. In the back stretch, we pivot to discussing John’s more recent research in decolonial thought and the line of questions about race, nationality, identity, family, and his students that brought him there.

(Our apologies for the uneven volume. We did our best to even it out, but there remain some audio issues with this episode.)

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

This week we get Trinitarian. Robyn wants some help sorting out the Filioque question… systematically. But first, we discuss our favorite 3-in-1 products, Jon’s skincare routine, Ryan’s cultural philistinism, Robyn’s backcountry bathing habits, Winston Churchill’s early sense of what binds America and England in common cause, and the Stormy Kromer (Google it). Despite an apropos ghostly interruption, Robyn pivots us to her question (occasioned by differences of liturgical practice among her Anglican fellows): are there good systematic theological reasons to affirm, prefer, or reject the Filioque? Ryan distinguishes the historical, dogmatic, and systematic questions at play in and behind the topic. Ryan walks us through the last of these in some detail. Jon suggests the value of the Filioque for distinguishing the Son and the Spirit systematically. Ryan considers the question with some help from St. Augustine. Jon raises W. Norris Clarke’s question of a “positive perfection of receptivity” in the Son and Ryan responds by considering how begetting and giving might be thought differently. Finally, Ryan notes that none of this yet raises, let alone answers, the question about how there can be procession in a perfectly simple God, and leaves open the question whether the Filioque or per Filium might fit better with certain analogies. Then we read a listener’s Treasures Old and New! (Send us some and we might read yours on the air too).

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

This week we have a very special guest! Old friend of the show, Joseph K. Gordon (Johnson University) is here to talk a bit about his new book from University of Notre Dame Press, *Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible.* During guest questions, we hear about Joe’s Jr. High propensity for pattern-mixing and his favorite Adam Sandler movie. Then we turn to the book and its ambitious aims. Joe walks us through the many important notions crammed into the book’s title that help give him some traction on the topic. We push Joe to explain more what he means when he calls the Bible “technology” and that for which it is “useful.” In order to explain that for which Scripture is useful, Joe pivots us to his main title and the relationship between the divine and the human. Among other things, he describes how scripture can teach us that God has intended us to be historical and what our historicity means. We wrap up by discussing how his work might affect the relationship between historical criticism, theological interpretations, and contextual interpretations of the Bible.

Get 45% off of Joe’s book at the link below with code 14CONF19 (expires: 6/30/2019)

https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268105174/divine-scripture-in-human-understanding/

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Please consider making a much-appreciated donation. As always, your support is greatly appreciated!

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

In this episode, Robyn has a question about moral development. How do biology and culture function to direct and/or constrain our development as moral persons from childhood into adulthood? Before getting into the meat of that question, we take a wild detour into the perverse world of Christian media, talking Touched By An Angel lighting decisions and the plausibility of God’s Not Dead plot points. But then we get into Robyn’s question, which she frames by discussing the debates about the status of “childhood.” Is it something that every human experiences as a biological reality, is it constructed as part of only some cultures, or somehow both? She links this question to the problem of childhood moral development specifically. Jon pitches a distinction between symmetrical and asymmetrical causality between biology and culture and Robyn explains Extended Evolutionary Synthesis as intellectual tools for thinking about the question. In an effort to get a handle on the applicability of these tools, Jon adverts to Lonergan’s notion of “abstractive viewpoints.” Ryan spells out how this notion lets us distinguish lines of inquiry into single classes of data, like the data on the human being. From here, Robyn points us back to our central question about the moral development of children. Jon suggests that culture has a big role to play in providing the objects of childhood decision making, and so offers Piaget’s notion of “adaptation” as an open, dynamic model for thinking about moral development. Ryan discusses the ways in which this process of adaptation will involve a messy, but progressive realization of freedom and moral subtlety. Robyn suggests an interesting alternative analogy from language development and it reminds Jon of some articles he read once. We conclude by spending a little time talking about how adolescents become an adults and how our culture might do a better job of shepherding that transition.

Jon’s TS Article:

Jonathan Heaps and Neil Ormerod, “Statistically Ordered: Gender, Sexual Identity, and the Metaphysics of ‘Normal.’” Theological Studies, Vol. 80, No. 2 (2019): 346–369: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/CCE4TTRJ5EIP6EX747VA/full?

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Please consider making a much-appreciated donation. As always, your support is greatly appreciated!

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss Lonergan’s 1968 essay, “The Absence of God in Modern Culture.” Ryan helps us contextualize the essay in the arc of Lonergan’s life and work. Then Jon turns to consider the essay itself, the distinction between society and culture, and the central place that Lonergan gives to modern science (both natural and human) in modern culture. We pause briefly to dunk on the New Atheists and other scientific expressions of omni-competence before turning to consider the difficulty of applying these new methods of inquiry to religion and to God. We look in some depth at Lonergan’s appraisal of the state of Catholic theology in his day and consider the parallels to our own. Then we discuss Lonergan’s (perhaps surprising) conclusion that what is needful in the face of modern Catholic theology’s challenges is a renewed focus on theological method and what he thought it had to do with the exigencies of Vatican II. We wrap up by considering the way in which his consideration of those challenges and exigencies point us towards the Christ and the Holy Spirit. Finally, Jon acknowledges the existence of a pop song.

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Please consider making a much-appreciated donation. As always, your support is greatly appreciated!

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

Another podcast no one wants! In this week’s episode, after some talk about the sleep schedules of newborn infants, we return to some of Jon’s thoughts about the problem of the supernatural. We begin with Lonergan’s retrieval of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of action and in particular Thomas’s account of “extrinsic predication.” Then we consider how this account of action is applied to God and Robyn raises some questions about whether or not that works. Jon suggests that what Lonergan calls the “theorem of the supernatural” is at work both in the theology of grace, but also in an account of divine transcendence and God’s providence. Indeed, the theorem at work in the latter can be an analogue for the former in a speculative theology of grace. Jon then considers human freedom as one of the effects of God’s ad extra agency and the odd, deflationary implication of philosophically affirming the universal efficacy of God’s agency: God’s action doesn’t seem to make any difference. Robyn wonders what this means for miracles and Jon denies that “miracle” is a philosophical category. Then Jon spells out his account of the fundamental ambiguity that philosophical ontology faces using Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Blondel’s Action (1893) as examples, turning back to consider human freedom in light of it. Does our freedom have a fundamental meaning/purpose or does it not? Then we turn to consider the products of human freedom: cultures and their inextricable place in posing the modern problem of the supernatural.

TITLES REFERENCED:

Blondel, Maurice. Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984.

Larsen, Sean. "The Politics of Desire: Two Readings of Henri De Lubac on Nature and Grace." Modern Theology 29, no. 3 (July 2013): 279–310.

Lonergan, Bernard. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Translated by Hazel Estella Barnes. New York, NY: Pocket Books, 1966.

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Please consider making a much-appreciated donation. As always, your support is greatly appreciated!

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!

In this week’s episode (which we recorded… a long time ago now), Ryan interviews Jon about his take on the problem of the supernatural in light of its Twitter-mediated contemporary relevance. To start out, Jon gives a quick-and-dirty review of the history of the problem of the supernatural, from the problem of merit and the necessity of grace to the Dei auxiliis controversy to the Surnaturel controversy to the present Anglophone controversy over the natural desire for God. Along the way, Jon gives some attention to the implied political questions at work in and behind the controversy. The major contention is that the political questions are assumed to be resolvable at the level of metaphysics. He thinks this is a mistake (“the problem with the problem of the supernatural is that it is, in fact, two problems and they’re irreducible to one another”). At Ryan’s prompting, Jon outlines what he thinks the two problems are: a medieval, metaphysical problem and a modern, hermeneutical one.

TITLES REFERENCED:

Bernardi, Peter J. Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, and Action Française: The Clash over the Church's Role in Society During the Modernist Era. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

Blondel, Maurice. Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1984.

———. Une Alliance Contre Nature, Catholicisme Et Intégrisme: La Semaine Sociale De Bordeaux, 1910. Bruxelles: Lessius, 2000.

———. The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.

Feingold, Lawrence. The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters. 2nd edition. Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010.

Hütter, Reinhard. "Aquinas on the Natural Desire for the Vision of God: A Relecture of 'Summa Contra Gentiles' III, C 25, Après Henri De Lubac." The Thomist 73, no. 4 (2009): 523–91.

———. "Desiderium Naturale Visionis Dei – Est Autem Duplex Hominis Beatitudo Sive Felicitas: Some Observations About Lawrence Feingold's and John Milbank's Recent Interventions in the Debate over the Natural Desire to See God." Nova et Vetera 5, no. 1 (2007): 81–131.

Larsen, Sean. "The Politics of Desire: Two Readings of Henri De Lubac on Nature and Grace." Modern Theology 29, no. 3 (July 2013): 279–310.

Lonergan, Bernard. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Long, Steven A. Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010.

———. "On the Loss, and the Recovery, of Nature as a Theonomic Principle: Reflections on the Nature/Grace Controversy." Nova et Vetera (English Edition) 5, no. 1 (2007): 133–83.

Milbank, John. The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Renewed Split in Modern Catholic Theology. 2nd edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2014.

———. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. 2nd edition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

Nichols, Aidan. "Thomism and the Nouvelle théologie." The Thomist 64 (2000): 1–19.

We have a Patreon! Check out the page at www.patreon.com/systematically

Please consider making a much-appreciated donation. As always, your support is greatly appreciated!

Our theme music is “14 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, available at archive.org/details/nineinchnails_ghosts_I_IV

“14 Ghosts II” is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. We would like to thank Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails for the use of this track.

Follow and chat with us on Twitter @SystematicPod

Email us at [email protected]

Subscribe and Review us on iTunes: Systematically Podcast

Lastly, if you enjoy our conversations, please share them with your friends!