Guestsplaining 008: Matt Fradd on Community and Technology

[Music] welcome to godsplaining contemplative preachers contemporary age each week join the dominican friars as they consider all things catholic hello and welcome back to godsplaining i don't know that i had to have sounded surprised at the start of this episode on account of the fact that i'm the one who pushed record so why it always strikes me as something entirely unforeseen i have no idea but i'm here with uh father joseph anthony uh father joseph anthony in charlottesville virginia you want to say hello what's up a word what's crack-a-lackin uh yeah i feel i feel super like uh fascinated at this setup right now because i'm like looking like i'm recording from a basement in afghanistan somewhere and greg you're like you're looking good you're looking good you know good lighting and then matt you're immaculate my goodness i'm so impressed well the cat the camera quality is immaculate i don't know if what it's focused on is but hey man don't deflect just own it oh yeah so we here on god's planning are doing our best to increase audio and video quality and we thank you for uh the support that you've provided to make that happen a couple of us are in the middle of moves right now so i'm coming back from switzerland going back to switzerland father joseph anthony they just built a church and his present office space is in a dumpster um just kidding but seriously and then father father patrick is moving so we're all like oddsy enzy so thanks for your patience with our quality concerns but no more of that let's welcome our guest for this month's guest planning we're happy to welcome on this episode of pints with godsplaining on god with pine splaining uh guest lighting uh matt fred matt fred what's up how you doing i'm doing very well am i coming through clear with the microphone oh yes okay good now i'm doing fantastic i'm having a really fantastic day actually it's been just lovely yeah hey i'll leave it at that nice and cryptic [Laughter] it's like did you win the lottery or do you have a bunch of scratchy lottery tickets in your pocket and you're anticipating the fact that you're going to win the lottery these are only two options oh nice okay yeah yeah um so we thought on this episode that we would talk a little bit about community uh the reason for which is this well people are kind of coming back into the light out of the darkness uh after 15 months of coveted and um you know in a certain sense you just kind of get back on the horse or start again riding the bicycle that you hadn't forgotten how to ride right what a helpful metaphor but in another sense too it's weird because we've gotten accustomed to living life at a distance so maybe just a way by which to meditate on our relationships on our friendships talk a little bit about community so if you would maybe just uh describe a little bit you know maybe like some landmarks in your life because you have done some moving around you've experienced community in a variety of settings maybe just give us a give us a sketch grew up in a small country town in south australia became a kind of convinced catholic when i was 17 had a conversion to our lord came back just desperately wanted to be with people who love jesus and wanted to do life together serve with net ministries which is a group that travels around running retreats for high school students did that in canada and ireland my wife and i got married and i think it was because of that experience with net and living with other people and doing life in common uh that has just always we've always known it existed and so it's hard to settle for anything less and so january we moved our family to steubenville ohio and couldn't couldn't be happier about it here's an example of community just yesterday oh no saturday i texted one of my friends on my street i said hey can i borrow your lawnmower i didn't get a text back right away so i walked to another friend's house on the street got their lawnmower pushed it back and when i arrived i saw my other friend with his lawn mower so now i've got two lawn mowers on my front doorstep and i think that's just kind of a cool way to illustrate how beautiful community can be and at least is for us right now it's all walking distance so many good families and i don't know when i think of community i think being able to show up on somebody's door with a bottle of wine and just impose yourself upon them and they have the freedom to do the same um and that's coming from an introvert you know so um i love i love it um maybe maybe just talk a little bit about your experience with net so i think uh when people kind of try out these different evangelical groups or evangelical um kind of mission oriented partners i suppose uh there's this real emphasis on building communion not only with the people to whom you address the gospel but with the people with whom you address the god you know so like you you have a sense of the community of your team being an invitation to other people to join christian community and for you in a special way because you know you that's where you met cameron what's it like you know community as the setting for welcoming others into community what's your experience of that been like and maybe some word about that that's lovely yeah um on net you on our team we had six guys and six girls and we were encouraged to build up our brotherhood and the sisters were encouraged to build up their sisterhood the idea was if you had a strong brotherhood and a strong sisterhood you would have a solid team and that you wouldn't want to bring to a sister what should only be brought to a brother and this was really new to me at the time because i grew up going to parties in the weekends drinking too much and then reading poetry to some girl under the starlit south australian sky and wasn't terribly interested in having deep loving relationships with men unless i had like four or five beers in me and i was saying things like dude i just want you to know that i really respect you and stuff like just love you and i don't know how that sounds but like but um it really kind of taught me you know like that you can have beautiful friendships really you know with with men and that's who you ought to be kind of bringing that question of like how do i be a man how do i live this life how do i love god as a man to another brother so that was a really cool growing experience for me also the growing experience on net was was going on net thinking that we would never fight or annoy each other i actually had that thought in my head i actually remember people saying well just you know you have to live with them it gets kind of annoying and it can be difficult and really difficult sometimes i thought how could that be true like i'm coming from a small country town where none of my friends love jesus i'm going to live with people who want to proclaim the gospel but then three months in the way your brother squeezed his toothpaste makes you want to slap him um so that was difficult too and then like growing through that there being nowhere to go nowhere to escape and then seeing how through that through those difficult times friendships can grow all the deeper and so i've kind of carried that into living community here in steubenville where it's like you realize that it's not enough to have i don't know multiple friendly encounters there has to be something of substance and even sometimes disagreement and adversity to kind of forge that relationship but then on the on the flip side sounds like i'm speaking out of the other side of my mouth now um there's no sort of rep there's no substitute for history so like on the flip side it's like i can't just have one profound conversation with you and you and i'd be really close friends there is part of it where it involves just multiple mundane encounters where the two of you gradually come to know each other uh and and that bond becomes forged as well so in a day and age such as ours a very secular day and age it's pushing all sorts of uh perverse things upon us especially in this month it's i think it's really important that we that we have good friends that we can pray for and pray with and do life with and who as a married man my children can be around and look to them as good loving husbands and fathers yeah matt when you're talking about the like beautiful aspects of community where it's like hey you can just show up on the front porch and impose yourself into their life but also vice versa um there's i think sometimes this expectation that community is just easy it's just because we always like naturally click and it's super organic and just it hits the ground running but uh i think the strongest communities are those like you were saying that are kind of like built through kind of some aspects of conflict but how is it that you can like enter into um you know situations that are not naturally disposed to that or super organic easy way of community like how is it that when you're uh in different areas that you can actually intentionally build community in that way yeah before i answer that i'm reminded of a line from dostoevsky in the idiot uh he says something like it's it's important to get to know people gradually because otherwise they might do something that puts something in your mind about them that's not too easily dislodged as it were you know i mean like so if you met me on a day that i've just had five cups of coffee you know or or you've met me and i'm in a bad i'm in a bad mood i just don't want to talk to people like it's so easy for that first impression you're like oh that he's that kind of person as opposed to kind of allowing that person the same grace that we would like other people to allow us so we can sort of naturally unfold before them you know so i've already had instances in stubenville where i've encountered somebody and i i didn't say this in my head but i had this feeling like okay so like we won't be friends but already like this person i'm thinking of is one of my best friends here in steubenville already um and and so that's cool uh as far as how to build community intentionally one thing we did in atlanta and san diego before then is we would have monthly potluck nights uh we would call it open porch where we would just say everybody's welcome and everybody has to bring something to share um and then the only real prayer of the night was grace and then we would all just sit around have a drink have a smoke eat food be merry um usually at the end of the night if there's you know only a few people left we might pray together more intentionally say the rosary or something else but that was really cool i remember people being really shocked by that like i can just come around every thursday night or every first thursday or every first sunday yes it's always on you don't have to ask us just show up if we're not home like use the back door come in we don't care um so i've always really loved that i i think like i'm not really sure what i mean by this i don't well maybe i do but love seems to create a space for another like if you've ever known like a man and a woman who'd been deeply in love and are very comfortable in each other's relationship you just sort of felt feel brought into that it creates a space as it were um and and that's something i would like to ask to replicate as a family just kind of welcome people in that they can just come and be who they are now that's ideally and it doesn't always go great but i mean we've had you know open porch nights with well over a hundred people who are just showing up and it's just i love that now i i don't think everyone loves that um yeah but i i do so with respect to so love creating a space i think about that often when you're sometimes when you're with couples i had this experience in college sometimes you're with couples and the couples are like always touching each other slash like looking into each other's eyes slash being annoying and you're like i don't want to spend time with you ever again but then sometimes you'd be like in college you'd be with couples who um who were great you know they just kind of like welcomed you into a conversation you found that their relationship was a kind of invitation for you to be at ease and to enjoy their company and i found that really delightful and i think that that's i don't know exactly how it's related but i feel like chastity is somehow related to that insofar as the love is ordered and so far as the love is open to life concretely in terms of you know like children when you're married but like just kind of like the lives of others it's kind of promotes the lives of others uh it's it's better as it were and i'm i'm thinking so with respect to chastity with respect to building community you also do a lot of work you know with strive 21 and beyond that giving talks about pornography and then you just talked about you know the struggles that a lot of men have with with building you know good male friendships maybe maybe just like your thoughts on on this idea of so pornography addiction growing in chastity creating a space like the opportunity for love um men i suppose many of whom feel at sea when it comes to friendship like what's what's what's the hope that lies in store for them what's the hope that lies in store for who men who aren't used to having good male friends or yeah yeah that in part yeah but just like guys for whom this conversation is still a little bit like i don't know i think i mean i think all men desire it i i it's sad that we live in a day and age where all affection is sexualized yeah and i know there's a lot of fear for about the you know amazon adopting or bringing in the new lord of the rings and what they'll do with that it's like does does modern man know how to portray a loving friendship between men without sexualizing it i guess we'll see but i think it was done really well obviously in tolkien's masterpiece but even in you know uh jackson's trilogy you just see this tremendous love and affection between two men and a man who knows who he is and what he's about um i i don't think is is intimidated by that um or or easily put off by that maybe that's part of the fear we have for growing in strong male bonds is that everything's sexualized and you know that might be part of it uh what was your question about pornography pornography with respect to so i suspect that men i mean men revert to pornography because they're addicted to it because they're exposed to at a young age in part because they don't think they can get over it but also because they don't they don't have a an alternative to it right in the form of friendship in the form of genuine community in the form of others who kind of invite them welcome them into a place of freedom of human relationship i don't know like maybe just some of your experiences with people that we've chatted yeah i think i think 10 years ago if you were to listen to a catholic including myself give a talk on pornography you would have heard a lot of tips and tricks you know like move the computer into a high-trafficked area and get carbonized and make sure you never do this and and be aware of your triggers and and all of that still important we should continue saying that today but i think uh at least the conversations i'm in today with those who are helping people overcome pornography are going much deeper right yeah it really we're beginning to realize that when i turn to pornography i i'm i'm seeking in this thing what i ought to be finding in christ my actual refuge and so if i'm honest i'm i'm calling porn my refuge and for many of us who grew up with pornography uh to quote my friend father sean kilculley it's become like a friend that i don't want to have to leave you know my friend was there when my dad was angry with me as a kid and he was with me through my parents divorce you know not my parents divorce but you know people might think that they were with me when i was rejected in high school like this friend of mine pornography was always there for me and there's like a real grieving almost that has to happen where you have to fire pornography and say i i don't need you i don't want you anymore i and i need something else to fill that void so i i think thinking of pornography like that can be helpful as a sort of refuge to deal with our kind of emotional chaos and turbulence but i think when we're in kind of right relationship with others and they are helping to meet our needs and we are helping to meet their needs in that place of community i think temptation to pornography is still going to happen but it's a lot less enticing i found that especially with our college students the men of our ministry and the men here at this university um they they're not so much seeking pornography because of the intense pleasure they're seeking it because of the desire for intimacy and they find that like because this is the dealings with pornography and masturbation becomes really the only place of how they know how to deal with the intimate desires of their heart then they struggle uh to overcome that unless they have a proper space with their male peers to start to overcome that and know that they have a support and structure with that and i see it often with men that are starting to discern priestly vocations you know i sit down with them and i'm like hey like who else have you talked to about this oh god nobody nobody i haven't talked to anybody because at the core a priestly vocation is a movement of intimacy in the heart and they've been trained the way you deal with intimate desires and intimate longings is in the shadows alone in isolation and to like then try to pull that out is like actually what you do how you deal with intimacy is in the community of of fraternity and men to strengthen you and so pornography has really just wreaked havoc on community um and it once once our men are starting to have freedom from that then the fraternity and vocations both to marriage and the priesthood are just uh are cranking up because they have a proper place and know how to deal with the intimate desires of their heart i'm reading lord of the rings right now so i'm reading i'm hearing everything through that lens yeah but there's that beautiful part in the beginning of the fellowship of the ring where gandalf's talking to frodo about gollum and it talks about him going into the shadowy dark places away from grass and tree and stick where the ring ate his mind and he found that there was nothing to find there was nothing there just bitter remembering or something to to that effect and i think that's what pornography does it it promises us this world of joy and intimacy and and ecstasy and it gives us some of that initially or whilst we wouldn't be tempted to it but it just we just end up in a dark cave bored and bloody miserable and less just kind of in a shadowy world with shadowy brides and that's that's no good place to live and i don't think anyone sober would say they want to remain there um at this point in the episode we usually take a break but if we're honest it's completely artificial and we don't need to so let's just keep going um so i want to i want to follow up yeah exactly i don't know what it says i remembered at one point what it says but let's just keep going um so okay so out of the out of the shadows into the light i think about this too in the present setting right when we've kind of gotten accustomed to doing things online and we've discovered right that it's possible to live online and that you don't actually need to see other human beings like when i explain to people that in freeburg i don't have courses uh they're like wait a second then why would you go back right because you could just write your dissertation here and then occasionally zoom with your director and then you could just you could do that and i'm like yeah yeah but i'm going to go back and here's 18 reasons why and it's not a rejection of you it's an affirmation of something else now in your case so you have this excellent ministry with pints with aquinas and you are you know of service to a lot of people online but then there's also this desire to kind of humanize the things so you know you planned this kind of summer seminar in norcha that was canceled by kovit but then you you know like you were one of the first people to have a retreat in the north georgia hills when such a thing became available so how does one you know so with the availability of everything online what how do we address or how do we realize this need for genuine human communion in person and like what can we do in a certain sense to push against the tendency or to push back against the tendency just to move everything onto zoom and then die at our desks that's such a great question i imagine everyone in the world would say at least theoretically that this isn't entirely healthy even if we haven't reaped the repercussions of it yet even if we aren't seeing the consequence consequences of it yet i would imagine that most people would realize we should get together again right like there was something about that incarnational gathering that you can't replicate over zoom i was actually having a chat with a friend of mine today a good friend and he said to me matt if i'm honest sometimes i feel like you only text me when you need something and that may and my fear is that you don't actually like care about me you know and he knew that that wasn't true but he was just sort of expressing his heart to me i said well i think both are true like i do care about you and i do text you when i want something and it made us get into this conversation about how weird phones are right because i would imagine like it's very unnatural this is very unnatural we're meant to live life with the people in our area but then when you bring a phone or a computer into the situation and you can now have this intimate relationship with somebody at a great distance you don't meet with an encounter with day to day and i suppose that's better than nothing like if your only options are small country town no one my age to commune with or i can chat with people every day on zoom that's obviously a better option but what i want and i think what most people want would be to live in a thriving human flesh and blood community so here in steubenville we have what's called first fridays so the first friday of every month we have a massive street party downtown and we all just kind of get together and be together and it's it's just beautiful there's nothing quite like it so i don't know if you're asking for a solution i don't know if i have one i guess i would just say that like zoom can be something of a counterfeit but it's still better than nothing but we shouldn't settle for better than nothing you know we should settle for best or what could be a community i could enter into and really participate in and give myself to i remember when we got back to to school when the fall semester started after a summer of covid and all that fun stuff there were students that i would talk to and they're like it's so nice to be at mass again like father is it okay if i really hated live streaming mass i was like yes exactly you should they're like but like is it bad to hate that i was like no because there's a difference between being connected and being present and i think everybody was longing to be in the presence of the lord now it was good to be connected it was in in times where we that was all we had but it's still it still didn't satisfy everything because our hearts are made to be with one another and to be in each other's presence and so i i think when it comes to that community that there's this deep need as we're coming out of covet and taking masks off and traveling like everybody wants to be with each other now because that we've experienced this total lack of forcing to only be connected but never be present in or in each other's presence and how deeply we hunger for that and we're made for that yeah and even if we don't feel the sort of artificiality of zoom and we don't really understand what we're talking about right now i still think you should try to be with people because um just because we're not detecting something within ourselves like no i feel totally satisfied i think there's the answer is well you shouldn't be like you shouldn't be satisfied so if you are satisfied with zoom masses and zoom meetings and no face-to-face interaction you're wrong to wrong to be satisfied with that and even if i don't know why i somehow know that that's true um so getting together with with a friend or a couple is a lovely thing over this is why i'm a big fan of cigars as father pine knows i understand it'll give me throat cancer but the other thing it does is that it forces me to sit down for an hour with a friend who must also sit there because a cigar isn't fun walking unless you're like really addicted you probably wouldn't do that you know you smoke smack one down if there's something lovely about sitting with somebody and committing to a time of just communing a cigar does that beer does that of course other things do that board games do that uh cups of tea do that but these are it's so sad that we're talking like this like man we are suck we suck our ancestors would be shaking their heads like what the hell is he talking about so here's a question all right so i think a lot of people are on the experience they're in the kind of circumstances where much of their lives will be you know through zoom and they don't have any choice in the matter it's like the company realized over the course of the last 15 months that they can basically produce that just as good a clip and then they don't have to pay for office space so congratulations you're working from home you're working from a coffee shop see you once every three months when we get together for a community i've got the perfect perfect answer for this all right so the question is how do you how do you humanize i'm thinking about you in terms of like pints of aquinas so you could you could zoom with everybody under the sun but you have people into the studio it's important to you to like meet with them in so far as that's possible stuff like that so so how do you how do you humanize when everyone else seems content to to drift well here i think here's an answer to this if you are working for a company that has realized that you no longer need to be in the office necessarily and you can do a lot of your work online move to steubenville move to run down broken down drug addicts and prostitutes and and scott hahn not in hanging out together but like wait what are these three is not like the other come and be here and live here or find some community go be a part of i mean in a way that's kind of liberating you don't have to be stuck in that one place where you have to drive 40 minutes to a friend's house and 30 minutes to mass and an hour through traffic anymore okay then find a solid catholic community where you can come and plant yourself and commit yourself until death and then do community with them while you do your zoom things in the office hours but yeah i um for pints with aquinas so we're really getting to the point now where i don't really do online interviews anymore we're trying to schedule out all of next year so we're flying somebody in uh almost every week so that we can just sit in person and talk um there's no substitute for that there's not i was thinking about this the other day because i was having a text exchange with some folks and it was like yeah maybe we should like make this really important decision and we should do it you know in a text message and i was like uh um i was like maybe not because i can't hear the tone of your voice and you can't hear the tone of my voice and the chances of us kind of upsetting each other without even realizing it or trying to do so are decently high and uh it strikes me like this is the type of thing that should be you know chatted through and determined in person and that's not yeah it's not just a matter of like higher stakes things ought to be determined in person or potentially sensitive things ought to be determined in person but it's just like uh human things ought to be determined in person um the observations that you made with respect to your friend like uh if you're if you're the type of communication signals that this is a friendship of use or this is a friendship of pleasure but if you really want to communicate in the communicating of whatever information or whatever request like this is a friendship of virtue or this is a a true friendship it seems like the proper setting and meeting them are yeah it's just it seems like you got to get close for that i don't know exactly what's interesting is um i think one argument in favor of the fact that we ought to be together is the fact that no one who's doing a meeting these days seems to be okay just doing a phone meeting like we're all doing zoom so why is it that we need that additional thing why do i need to see you if i can just hear you if i hear you i can do it in the car i can do it while i'm running errands it's it's almost like we want to make it as natural as possible so one way to make it as natural as possible is actually to try to meet with a flesh and blood human being and so that's interesting that's uh yeah yeah no i guess they're like there used to be a genre for that you know like the voice call um but now voice call is interpreted as a rejection of the video call yeah it's like if i do a voice call with you it's because i'm folding my laundry and i don't want you to see that you know if i'm doing a voice call for you that's like because i'm in the car and i'm driving from a to b and if i were to do video then i would end up in a fiery wreck it's like it's it's fascinating it is yeah so there's there's a movement in that direction well every uh every year i take a month off of the internet and uh that's coming up this august and that's just a way for me to i don't know i think i have a real love-hate relationship with technology and uh i just get so excited about this month off i've been doing it for three years now the last day of july i literally give my phone away give my computer away have someone change the password because i have no self-control on my desktop and then get a dumb phone and just spend a month just reading and walking and trying to remember what it was like to live that way and i just find that so incredibly rehabilitating and i understand that most people can't do that and that really is a luxury and a blessing in my life i mean i've got to work my butt off through july to get to have there be enough shows to release in august but you know i i just failed to see how people can't incorporate something like that into their week like leave the phone at the office or leave it somewhere over the weekend and that's just something i've been doing more and more fully aware that i'm going to be upsetting people or people will be texting me and they will be wondering why i did not get back to them and i i don't want them to be upset i don't want them to be offended and it's really nothing personal but i would rather offend them and be present to my family than for my family to feel neglected while i check my email for the fifth time when i ought to be playing legos with my son so that you feel validated who lives 100 miles away and who i chat with you know a couple of times a year or a month like you aren't as important to me as my family so why am i treating you that way people text each other today like they're in the same room as each other today so you text me and say hey how are you and then your phone tells you whether i've read that or not and if you see that i've read it you're offended if i don't reply to you in the same time frame that i would if you were in the room with me this is insanity am i the only one who realizes this is insane we shouldn't be bloody living like this anyway that's how i feel there you go so the the episode am i the honest honest question though because i do sometimes think i'm insane here because i don't see people with the same outrage that i seem to have about this technologically obsessed culture do you not feel that way as well you can say that way no no i do feel that way in certain part because i i think of the the phone is in like in large in large part it is a tool for my convenience right but it's connected to tools for your convenience persons a b c d e and f and i think it's in the process of that interconnectivity that things get somewhat ambiguous like expectation wise because this is for my convenience but it's it's hooked up with a thing that's for your convenience and you're interacting with your device for your convenience i'm interacting with my device from my convenience and it's like so we kind of have to establish the grounds on which we meet and i think for you to say what you said you know helps you establish those grounds with your friends it's like when i say my convenience i mean like this is entirely subordinate to my family life when i when i say that it means something different because i don't have four kids and i no longer play with legos um i play with puzzles just kidding but seriously uh just new parenting so yeah that's fascinating father that's really really insightful i'm gonna i'm gonna have to think about that more yeah i mean but see the other thing is like how technology changes the way we communicate obviously so i remember last year i i went down from a smartphone to one of these light phones i lasted a month and i had to go back and the reason for that one thing i didn't realize upon getting the light phone is that many people text instead of calling and so they will text paragraphs to you and unless you have comparable technology you cannot with as the same amount of ease text paragraph answers back so here i am with this dumb phone it takes me five minutes to write a word and you've just asked me hey how's it going what are you up to today like how's cameron my wife yeah how's she doing call me or something you know so it's like i don't know like at some point i don't want to have to be a slave to the advancement of technology i'd and again i don't want to offend people i want people to reach out to me i'm always gratified to hear from people and and there can certainly be an element of selfishness in that as well i suppose if i if i want this for my convenience i can ask you something whenever i want but i don't reciprocate but yeah i just i just know the experience of being with my family and wondering whether i got that email yet and even if i don't go and get my phone my brain is now divided between what i ought to be focused on and what i don't need to be focused on um yeah and i don't have the same actually i i take that back i don't think i'm special i think most of us don't have the kind of self-control to deal with that and so i think putting like real significant barriers in between technology and those people we wish to do life with is important and i'm probably not doing it nearly as much as i ought to be yeah they've done sociological studies like if a phone is on the table at which persons are conversing you know like the quality of that conversation you know is reduced by a factor of whatever 35 percent made up numbers you know 100 statistics yeah statistics are just that way you can just say whatever the heck you want and then just say like a bit more or less um so yeah on account of the fact that when a phone is introduced there's another person present and that person is just a clamorous source of demands that that person is a sea of infinite needs uh because the internet's a place and it's a place containing people and those people are all are all available uh insofar as they make themselves such so yeah maybe maybe just kind of by way of rounding out the scoring and bringing it back like community right community is a thing that's ordered hierarchically not in the sense of like the people on the top are there to oppress the people on the bottom but in the sense that like there are communities that are more principled there are communities that are more important in your case you know that of god and family in our case you know that of god and god and also god and the brethren just after like four mentions of god um so and that that those relationships actually give shape to the other relationships that come in turn you know they should they should contribute to those relationships they shouldn't detract from those relationships and you know every couple you know every every partner who has tried to troubleshoot problems with his or her spouse knows that that's a source of frustration it's like you love your work more than me or you're escaping from me to go with your friends or you are you know whatever you're gossiping about you know it's just like we we feel it uh in you know in the mirror of our bones when those loves that ought to be principle are kind of undermined by those loves that are less so yeah maybe maybe you know one of the keys to community is the fruit of our conversation is that it's it's like it's about ordering one's loves so it's like about growing in virtue yeah and what's but what's crazy is that one of those loves is designed to be addictive that's what's bloody difficult about it and so yeah one of those loves is a big advertising machine exactly which is why i think we have to violently carve out violently and intentionally carve out space in order to be present to others that's my goal boom all right well typically these episodes are about 30 minutes and we're beyond that so thanks thanks for joining us but um cool things on the horizon for you i know you just uh you're publishing a book here so you want to tell our listeners about that a bit yeah so i wrote a book called how to be happy saint thomas's uh secret to a good life it's with saint paul center no emmaus rhode i know the name of my book of the publisher shut up emmaus publishing is on amazon i'm happy with it it's uh just yeah certainly not based on my wisdom but just seeing what thomas has to say about what we're made for and two different types of happiness the happiness we can expect in heaven the happiness we can expect in this life what things we keep thinking will make us happy and why they can't um remedies for sorrow the virtue of play and so it was a fun book to write and uh it'll be on audible i think in the coming weeks i had to read it recently but for now people can get the book on amazon if they're interested boom well congratulations on that that's awesome i read it it's good so it receives my commendation and so far as that matters for anything thanks um how about father joseph anthony any uh any final thoughts anything that people should know about what's up in charlottesville virginia or more broadly no i think i mean as far as what's happening here is like as we move out i just did a two weeks worth of travel and it was so good to be able to like start traveling again but it also opened my eyes to like yeah we're we're coming out of covet and i think we're actually coming out stronger uh because we you know looking at our parish and how many new families are coming out and how excited people are to be together again be together in communion worshiping god to travel across the country just to be with each other like i think there's a there's an excitement about you know maybe re-prioritizing and getting back to the basics in in real sense so yeah we're coming out of it all but i think you know if we if we continue to learn and grow we're going to come stronger and build each other up in that so i'm excited for all of that boom building up stronger let's go uh all right so thanks so much for having listened uh to this episode we appreciate you liking and sharing and leaving reviews um please do if you haven't yet subscribed to the youtube youtube it's like she's speaking in party in english and please subscribe to the youtube channel um if you do that that'd be great uh also please pray for uh the upcoming retreat that we have at the end of july um a special thanks to all of our patrons who have made things like that and increased quality of the podcast possible uh no of our prayers for you please pray for us we certainly need it uh we rely on god's mercy and yours and uh until the next time we'll catch you on guest planning live-splaining godsplaining all the above all right cheers thanks for listening to god's planning a work of the dominican friars of the province of saint joseph follow us on facebook twitter and instagram leave a review on your podcast app and visit us at godsplaining.org

Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 3,109

Rating: 4.949367 out of 5

Keywords: catholic, dominican friars, theology, philosophy, religion, faith, order of preachers, godsplaining, seekers, Truth, preaching, questions, searching, prayer, meditation, Matt Fradd, Pints with Aquinas, Fr. Gregory Pine, technology, opeast, catholic priest

Id: pRhhsrInNRA

Length: 38min 45sec (2325 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021