Peter Kreeft | The Matt Fradd Show Ep. 10

hi my name is Matt Fred and this is the Matt Fred show and today I was so excited to interview one of my heroes dr. Peter Kreeft he is philosopher at Boston College he's 82 years old and I think has written more books than that 85 or something really brilliant guy we speak about philosophy we speak about the state of the church we speak about his conversion to Catholicism and all sorts besides Ollo bunch of other stuff besides it was really terrific really terrific one of the reasons I love these long-form discussions is usually when you're meeting someone for the first time it takes about 20 minutes until you get into a groove and man it was fun I love this man so much and you're gonna love this interview hey we have a new sponsor this week which I want you to know about it's called hallo as in hallo would be thy name H al L o W this is an app that'll help you to pray I don't know if you've noticed one up and there's lot of apps out there right now like calm these mindfulness type apps which could be really helpful if you're stressed out and you're trying to find peace in your day but the only problem is a lot of these apps are new agey you know they lead you into these new age practices and I remember thinking it would be awesome if there was an app that could plunge us into the Catholic tradition while being really sophisticated and well produced like these other apps were well I just found this app called hallo H al L o W you're on iPhone or Android right now seriously downloaded hallo I'm not just saying this because they're paying me to I mean they are paying me to but I also have it on my phone and I use it and it has these like Lexi o Davina walk throughs you know it's just it's just so beautiful it you know sometimes people say you should pray every day and you say okay I'll try that and they say start with 10 minutes and even that though it feels like how do I do that this helps you with that it's really really well produced you get to choose like a guide like a male or a female who reads the scriptures to you and then there's you can put Gregorian chant behind it or synth music seriously please check this out hallo check that out h al low:11 give me a promo code you should tweet at them or something to let them know that you heard about it from the Matt Fred show seriously a fantastic app download it's really great it doesn't get into New Age you staff super Catholic the second group I want to say thank you to is covenant eyes this is the best filtering and accountability software on the web if you're tempted to look at porn or if you have children you know that they're gonna be tempted to look at porn you need to install covenant eyes it easily goes on all of your devices it's very inexpensive and if you use the promo code Matt Fred ma TTF Radd one word you get it for a month free so if you try it for 28 30 days and you don't like it just quit and you don't have to pay a cent but I promise you that you won't I really feel like as parents we will be held accountable to Almighty God if we allow our children to be exposed to the filth that so often comes up online the best thing about covenant eyes it's not just a sophisticated filter which blocks the bad stuff it is that but it also is it treats us like responsible moral agents right it'll send a report to your accountability partner telling you where you went where they went what they typed in and things like that so be sure to check that out covenant eyes com covenant eyes calm and be sure to use the promo code one-word Matt Fred alright here's my interview with dr. Peter Kreeft who was a bear hunter okay and he believes in miracles and one day he's out hunting bear and he loses his rifle and this bear is very aggressive and very hungry and it's chasing him and he's running away and the bear is gaining on him so he says the only way I can possibly escape is by getting supernatural help so he falls down on his knees and prays God please convert this bear and make him a good Catholic haha and then he turns around and he sees that the bear too is on his knees and praying he says how am i broken hurt and then he listens to the content of the bear let's also Lord and he's like if we receive from those very good all right awesome leaders oh yes all right Father Son Holy Spirit amen amen Heavenly Father we thank you for this opportunity to record this interview we pray that it would be a blessing to people that they would know the love of God and grow in relationship with Jesus in your name we pray amen amen st. clare of assisi great for us painters have television hmm I think that was Joseph of Cupertino why the one who isn't a flood yes so why would he be the patron set of television well television nice images fly through space oh well very good okay I think I told you this last time you might not remember it first of all I don't know how they pick who who's the patron saint of what it's more of a public thing it's always something to do all right we'll check it out Thomas Aquinas was that is the painter set of universities yeah he died the same day his Bonaventure right also a doctor of the church and close friend or yes friend this is not made not making this up Bonaventure is the patron saint of bowel difficulties or bow abnormalities or bow movies have a bell I don't know huh but it doesn't seem right I mean they're both terrific men of the church Aquinas gets universities he should all be the patron saint of donkeys because he refused to ride a donkey when all the other monks did because he weighed well over 300 pounds and he loved animals very good you love Aquinas I do I did it why do you love Aquinas because I always lose when I I do sumo wrestling with that sumo wrestler he always wins what's the what's the best thing you love about Thomas Aquinas he speaks the truth yeah I find that when I read Thomas Aquinas I find myself fully convinced sometimes I'll read other authors I'm like yeah maybe yeah but after he's laid out the objections and then Houdini's out of them yes pretty impressive even Bertrand Russell admitted that in his autobiography he said I read Aquinas and I thought I'd get some of his objections and I I found that my own objections to his philosophy were not as good as his own objections that's amazing what an admission yeah now one of the things I've found difficult with Thomas Aquinas is the lying bit the lying bit yeah whether we should wear the lying is intrinsically evil that's tricky because tricky is the speech is much more culturally and socially relative than most other forms of human behavior if if your father is in hospital and he's just had a heart attack and the doctor comes to him to you and says when you visit your father please don't tell him he had a heart attack because if you do he's probably gonna have another one and die yeah so your father says tell me son did I did I have a heart attack I think you're commanded July Wow the Jews have to lie to the Nazis who are thinking that the Dutchman have to lie to the Nazis who are seeking the Jews because they promised the Jews they'd hide them so I think yeah but we got we got two options here either that's just not a lie yeah if to somehow play with language and call that something mental reservation or something or we it's not just mental reservation I think that there are some people who have given up their right to truth just as a violent aggressor has given up his right to lie and you're allowed to use lethal force if necessary to save your own life and how do you judge that book well that's that's Prudential judgment yeah yeah yeah God does not give us answers to all the questions he gives us the principles and we find the applications he is a weird a question are you an introvert or an extrovert well I'm an extrovert in that I don't like to think that much about myself or worry that much about myself or keep Diaries but on the other hand I'm an introvert in that I like to be alone and I don't like small talk mm-hmm me too most philosophers yes well is that right so I I don't like the categories I hate being in an elevator with somebody well that's only temporary just one other person yeah but it's temporary enough to make it it's awkward hey how are you good not bad just this is gonna insane let's just grin and bear it I've heard that in the intro it started like small talk I'm definitely like that I'm definitely in ah which is what might you say do you think this elevator can hold both of us very good hmm this you can use the old western line this town is too small for both of us and one of us is gonna have to leave and I'm staying mm-hmm Billy Connolly made a joke he said wasn't really a joke it's just she say I feel about as welcomed as a fart in an elevator very descriptive yes yes that's how I feel what I mean elevators I have a soft spot in my heart for forgers mmm why I'm a fart or myself hmm I actually fought too yeah it's great nice to know I farted i father's [ __ ] five four children oh that's what I'm into it nothing to do with my bottom of dogs and we've always had basset hounds yeah and why don't you smell a basset fart there's nothing quite like travels that long distance it's low to the ground it makes every other human farts see me same please no need to apologize I have a basset hound I have a Black Russian really what have a basset no no I have a Black Russian terrier home rat terrier thank you a terrier sounds like a small dog but it's not it's bloody huge it's hundred about 120 would you say hunter 20 pounds easy oh that's a different guy we had a fox terrier woods I am a fox terrier - oh I heard somebody say that if you can step on a dog and kill it it wasn't a dog to begin with what do you think about that no that doesn't apply to our lives ah why you can just flick your finger yes but you can also step on them yeah mmm so tell me how you uh tell me how you got to where you are you are 82 years old where I got to where you have your right 820 books how many I had in twatted I'm just taking a guess how many books have you written Duke it's in the 80 somewhere what's the first book you ever wrote love is stronger than death who published that originally Harper & row okay and then Ignatius press Wow actually it was three books in one there's a story behind that please like taught a course and death and dying at Boston College one of my students said I work for let's see what's the name of the publisher now what's the Unitarian publishing said in Austin forget what it is anyway he said I'm going to approach my boss because your course is fascinating and you said you're writing a book on it and he might want to publish it well I started the course by talking about what death was and how it appeared in various ways and then I asked about why we love life after death and seek and desire at the long for heaven and then finally concluded with a speculation about the nature of life after death they eventually became three books love is stronger than death heaven the harsh deepest longing and everything you ever wanted to know about heaven but now asking yes and I see that one around I owned the book yeah and I gave a student and she approached the publisher and the publishers agent contacted me and said we love to print your book I said well fine can I have a contract well I have to check with the president first but uh I've been here for 20 years and I've published 400 books and he's rubber-stamped every one of them so I got to work on the book and eventually he said sorry we we can't do your book I'll refer you to a friend of mine in Harper & row they probably will do it but we can't do it why not yeah I'm not a liberty to tell I said that's very strange I thought Unitarians published everything yeah you do you do Catholic stuff atheist stuff Zen Buddhist stuff everything he said no I'm sorry I can't tell you years later I met him on the street and he was no longer working for that publisher and I said can you tell me now why you turned down my book and he said oh yes it was two Christian ah well Unitarians have no idea what we are but we know one thing we're not Christians that's why I was flattered that's very good and so how old were you when you wrote your first book or these trilogy this trilogy let's see the kids were just in school so that was 1970 about 78 well I was 30 okay and you were working at Boston College yeah how long have you been working at Boston College for I don't work at Boston College I have fun at Boston College they pay me for it so my teaching philosophy and when did you get tenure Oh about halfway through very good do you think if you didn't have tenure some of the things you have been saying or the way you talk about the Catholic founded know Boston College is a good place because Catholic enough to be home and it's big enough to be wild and you can pretty much say anything and get away with it now you told me before we did this interview that focus are not on the campus focus is a series of Catholic missionaries who have a great sense of humor because missionaries always go to the ghettos in darkest places so they target American universities especially Catholic University yes but they don't it well I think there's a rivalry between the Jesuits and Opus Dei and focus so it's the kind of Indian house thing there are some very good Jesuits at BC amidst all the heretics ok so so we're going back into it you do I do ok this good Jesuit is very smart oh no a good Jesuit joke best Jesuit joke I know what I'm gonna say tell it Aquinas well what is the difference between a Jesuit in a Dominican this is gonna upset so many Protestants what the Dominicans were founded by Saint Dominic in the 12th century to combat the heresy of Alba jansenism the Jesuits reformed were founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century to combat the heresy of Protestantism now tell me how many Albert engines have you met lately zero yes yes it's very good joke so we're going backwards in time then so you converted when you're at college to Catholicism what college were you at Calvin College a very Calvinist College are very good where is that liberal arts college and Grand Rapids Michigan okay in the reform to Presbyterian tradition okay and they take scholarship very seriously mhm and a philosopher because of one of the professors there really Harry Gemma was one of the wisest men I ever met a kind of a living Socrates yeah and I read my way into the church I gradually fell in love with things Catholic thought it was a temptation took a course in church history the professor explained that the difference between our Protestant view of church history and the Catholic view of church history was that we Protestants know that we are the true Christians because we're in the Bible and the church in the Bible is a Protestant Church and it gradually became bad that is Catholic colleges and we're not the New Kids on the Block we restored the old church Catholics on on the other hand believe the opposite that theirs is the original Church so I remember asking the question professor if I take a time machine back to the first century and my Protestant my Catholic friend also does the same thing we both worship together that I would feel more at home than he and the professors that's a very strange way to put it for this I said I'm good I'll deal with my temptation by reading the early church fathers and proved to myself a Protestant they were mmm well you know the rest of the story yeah now this was something like you say it's a temptation you felt so when you were reading the church fathers it legitimately was to try to dissuade yourself from joining the Catholic Church at that point oh yeah yeah I did I had never knowingly talked to any Catholic at all Wow I had been told only on accident right maybe accident maybe the milkman who no that's right but I had been told that this was the [ __ ] of Babylon and it was basically paganism with a thin veneer of Christianity and I read a lot of people that I didn't understand like Saint John of the Cross yeah and some of Thomas Aquinas but I recognized that this was if this was a heresy it was a beautiful and great one hmm it's a mountain there's something remarkable here it deserves at least respect and investigation and the more I read the more Catholic it looked the Eucharist for instance not a single Christian for a thousand years denied the real presence in the Eucharist how could the Holy Spirit of fallen asleep so fall I think that with baptismal regeneration the first person to deny battles regeneration was Ulrich Zwingli and in his work day baptism oh he says something to the effect of I can only conclude that all of the doctors and fathers were in error yeah I think well you can that's at least consistent but that's not that's like the job as witnesses they say the church went into heresy in the first century and we cover it only in the nineteenth hmm that doesn't fit the face yeah so that would mean for about 1,900 years the words of Christ you know if you have a disagreement bring it to the church were irrelevant look yeah there was no church so you were your parents and friends even a Calvinist or evangelical or all of them yeah how would they define themselves a Calvinist specifically like that Protestant Christian Protestant evangelical Calvinists all of it all of them yeah so how do they view Catholicism some of them with more respect than others all of them theologically negatively and I respect that because if the church isn't what it claims to be it's the most arrogant false prophet in the world it claims infallibility it claims that it inherits the promise that Christ gave to his apostles he who hears you hears me mm-hmm so it's either a true prophet or a false prophet and there's an immense difference between the Jo you can't just paper that over so when you started reading the Church Fathers how did you begin to disclose to your friends and family that you were maybe moving towards rum friends are easier to talk to than family and my father especially who was an elder in the church took it very badly and we had a lot of theological discussions we were very open with each other and we had a lot of nasty arguments and a lot of respectful argument okay time eventually healed it good and he eventually said Peter I still disagree with your theology but I respect your motives yeah we're trying to follow the will of Christ I think you're making a mistake but God is somehow using you he was a pasta or an elder in your chin his elder yeah and you say you grew up with him as an elder in the church yeah a very wise man yeah but how did you speak lovingly of your father before it's always lovely when you hit men speak well of their fathers his honesty gave me the first Catholic idea I ever had in my life we lived in New Jersey and we went to New York City a lot as tourists and I'd never been in a Cathedral before all the Protestant churches that I knew were rather plain went to st. Patrick's Cathedral I was overwhelmed it was a different kind of beauty I turned to my father said dad this is a Catholic Church isn't it he said yes I said the Catholics are wrong or inque he said yes they're very wrong and I said in my simple eight-year-old honesty and then how come their churches is so beautiful mmm and he said I don't know wow that was the first time I ever heard him say I don't know so I just filed it away yeah now when you were growing up I guess what so when did you convert you in college but what year senior year but what year in like 60 50 59 so this is before the nervous order came in yeah so you that's interesting so you became a Catholic just as a lot of the chaos was sort of revolving around yeah all that in the United States I came before the chaos yeah I didn't cause the chaos not to be clear I didn't I was baptized conditionally rebaptised at Yale in 1960 Wow why yeah or will you study that's where I work you okay it's a graduate school oh okay they were doing your PhD work there yeah and so and then I transferred afford him to get home ISM so I got my fantastic and so what was your specific PhD and what was your wonder why in Plato and agustín really the origin of philosophy I've always been a kind of a little kid with a sense of wonder knowing and whimsy yeah and I know philosophers who share that and the greatest ones always do yeah it says a lot about you and the work that the father's done in you that you are very wonderful you do wonder whereas you've made a lot of older folks who don't seem to be able to do that anymore life's beating them around a bit and they become cynical do you see that or not yeah I see that and I don't know how to deal with that that's a pity it's easy it's easy to take a naive happy believer and turn him into a cynic it's much harder to do the opposite yeah yeah I forget who it was who said something like cynicism a cynic is somebody who knows the the the price of everything the value the value of nothing yeah yeah well it kind of makes sense I mean we're thrown into life and when you were young you might experience certain traumatic events but they don't affect you a great deal but after a while you just kind of get beaten up and you start to bully and you get bored you've bored the border is one of the biggest problems in modern life the very word didn't exist until modern times it's that wrong there's no word in any ancient language for generalized boredom interesting yeah so things like sloth would have existed but generalized bored of age yeah I've heard you say this not boredom about any one thing in particular the border without life itself you say which covers us like the sky just everything that's a linguistic fact it puzzles me though I mean isn't somebody like Oh Caligula bored yeah that why he does what he does yeah well I think I like what Aquinas his differentiation between curiosity and studious Ness and most people today when you hear curiosity we think of it as a virtue he says it's a vice because he sees it as just accumulating useless knowledge difference is that vain curiosity which is a vice is arrogant it wants to know everything it plays God whereas humble curiosity is just the search for truth yes honesty that's so that's a virtue yeah and I think that's kind of what he would call studious Ness we have a we have a desire to know yeah yeah so why do you think why do you think we're bored I'm bored I'm bored all the time I'm bored with myself I'm bored with everything good like me you probably have a gg okay wait you have heard you say this when did you know you had a TD not are you diagnosed until my daughter was diagnosed with it oh really she's made in special schools or life yeah she's she's brilliant at things like computers and animals yeah not with language yeah so she's a mixture I think everybody in the world is very good at something and very bad at something Oh anyway we had her evaluated to justify putting her in private school and the psychiatrist wanted to evaluate the whole family and after a session with me he said you have a DG you know anyway they're 21 symptoms that I had them all what was some of the symptoms uh not just boredom but he could diagnose me right here thank you I can remember every word of a poem that I read once and love deeply and I can't remember the third thing that my wife tells me to do go down the cellar and yes the table and and the batteries and the sign is a mousetrap oh yeah and that's a sign of a TD or at least one of them academics have it yeah especially philosophers they usually have ADHD which is attention deficit Hyde effing ition they like to define their terms yes exactly to be clear yeah I think I I can't finish a movie we have Fred family I'm my last house friend so we call it Fred family movie night we all go down and we sit down and I always like the idea of watching a movie but about 25 minutes in I'm like there's something else I could be doing which is weird because I love the beach being from Australia oh me too yeah so I could sit on an ocean meet you I can I can sit not really much waves without being bored much more easily then I read a book through so why is that because well the same reason as in the palm trees poems are made by fools like me but only God can make a tree yeah but made by fools like me but only have to make a wave yeah there's something it's rhythmic it allows you to kind of to use Thomas Burton's would slow down to a human tempo yeah but so is a washing machine I don't sit in front of a washing machine okay Touche the Iroquois have a word for it's called Orinda yes the spiritual sugar that the Great Spirit put in certain things like moving water and stars on mountains yeah it just attracts us there speaking of books so you're reading any books right now somebody once said to me you must have written more books than you've read that's becoming increasingly true I really can't be true well bits of books and we read the whole thing 19 out of 20 books I read bits of it maybe only I know no fiction books I read bits off but fiction I mean you can't just pick up in the fourth chapter you either abandon it after 50 pages or you read it straight through I must confess this is this is almost a sin first time I read The Lord of the Rings I stopped after page 50 I said I'm not interested oh really that is a sin yes and then somebody said go beyond page 50 and then you'll get to the elves and Dragons and I was yeah I just read the first part to my kids so we're on the second book right now and it's just Griffing it's lovely masterpiece what's your favorite fiction book the Lord of the Rings certainly it's the greatest book of the 20th century for poles picked it everybody knows that except the critics hmm I have a toss-up between yeah a lot of the rings but probably I like Dostoevsky so I like yeah I think I like Crime and Punishment more than I think so that might say more about me than is both masterpieces but yeah the Lord of the Rings is not a novel but an epic The Brothers Karamazov asked me the greatest novel ever written and okay why do you say that it's profound yeah it's one of the few books that radically change my mind on a philosophical issue I always thought the notion of collective responsibility or universal guilt was a kind of a exaggeration or maybe a liberal guilt trip or something like that he persuaded me simply through the plot events okay every good that we do has consequences in everybody else's life and every evil that we do have consequences and everybody else's life so in this indirect way everybody is responsible for all the sins of the world this is Zosima isn't it very profound yeah maybe I need to read it again because I just found there were a lot of kind of tangents that you know if you were to tell yeah yeah it's enormous yeah it's just the opposite of a Tolstoy book which is perfectly now classically written this is all over the place I love him I just started reading Anna Karenina about 200 pages in and I'm a bit bored really now the chances of that says something about him is very unlikely so I get that it's my father think it's because it's hard to to love Anna yeah she's bratty and selfish yeah she gets her comeuppance at the end which is very sad right right right good heroes today good villains is easy yeah it was hard that's what that's what talking to the Lord of the Rings you've got real heroes yeah well what do you think that is let's think I mean or cynical but cynical jaded don't believe in her wisdom yeah yes it's true who's that the author from Georgia Flannery O'Connor and I love Flannery O'Connor because she has short stories now don't get bored my kids love it too I shouldn't read it to my kids they're like tell us that one where the old lady gets shot in front of people we don't read that but she could it was almost like she played into people's cynicism in them to bring out the grace that was okay she's a missionary and your missionary has to start with where people are which is down over there and then you bring them over here mmm so then what what about the idiots have you read the idiots about us to ask you I never got no I know the plot yeah I think he wrote it I read part of it actually okay wonderful style but but as far as off is an improvement on the idiot because el Yasha is the complete geezers and not just the Prince Myshkin if I'm not mistaken I thought crime and punishment was written first and then later on the idiot another Brothers Karamazov was last okay as he planned a sequel to it that's right yeah he did too and I thought that you know raskoln of all Michigan was like the mirror image of Raskolnikov yeah what's interesting about Raskolnikov is the name means sysm I think it comes from down over and what you notice about him is when he starts overthinking things he becomes evil does evil things yeah but he had he does he spontaneous acts of kindness for people like the woman he meets and he throws it gives money to the family whose husband had just died and this is because God designed the heart and we have a lot to do with designing our thoughts so there's usually a beating heart even under the the evil center yeah yeah in fact that's my only slight hope that maybe the Universalist is right and maybe the most wicked of us will repent and be saved in the end a wonderful well people so afraid of us hoping for that there are some people I think the churches told Blessed Virgin commanded us to pray for that that prayer that she added to the rosary to the three children at Fatima a little yeah we can't be sure of it but we have to hope work not that it's likely right I mean why would Jesus say of Judas it would have been better if that man is born yeah doesn't sound like universalism but we don't know it's it's it's good not to know some things one more thing about Dostoyevsky I think the reason you can't turn his books into good films it's because of a lot of the drama plays out within the psyche of the person right so brilliantly like he explains people's mental states in a way that you say I thought I was the only one to experience this where it had Lord of the Rings a lot of it is exterior that's a good question I teach a course in philosophy and cinema that's one of the questions we asked in the course why are so few great novels turned into great movies why are so many great films turned into great me why are so many great films not just movies the two versions The Brothers Karamazov were both very very conscious in a Russian version and again it's all playing on in the head he's telling you what they're going through and thinking on the other hand the BBC's version of A Tale of Two Cities I thought was a masterpiece okay have a very faithful okay I've read very little I only really started reading after my conversion in Rome in 2000 so I was an agnostic I thought that God was a cute idea invented by people to make death less scary and I went with a bunch of Christians to Rome you've heard of the World Youth days hmm so there was about 2.5 million young people there and I encountered Christians who love Jesus and weren't weird and were like saving sex till marriage and all these bizarre things I thought why are they happier than me and my friends that's the unanswerable question yeah that's what converted the world the happiness of the Saints yeah why are these people singing hymns and forgiving their enemies as we're feeding them to the Lions yeah you know answer to that question except the truth reminds me of Teresa Teresa of Avila's quote god save us from sour-faced nuns yeah so it was there that I came to Christ and it was just I came home so happy it made you sick yeah they're that kind please trying to hug everybody yeah did you ever have a moment like that you're from New England when I met you two down like handshake Joe's yes yeah but okay so but with when did when did your faith become your own so even as a Protestant I presume you love Jesus and there were steps I remember the first and probably the most brilliant idea I ever got in my life I was about seven years old we were riding home from church and my father and I were sitting in the front of the car my mother was in the back and I said dad you you teach in Sunday School and I'm a little confused we're learning all this different stuff and I tried to follow the preacher sermon every Sunday and I get a little of it but I'm really confused just it all come down to just one thing my father said putting me just one thing is very suspicious so I said well all you have to do is love Jesus and ask him what you want to hit us to do and then do it and he looked at me he says you know son you're right that's great you know it's all gone downhill since then yeah but I had one inside yeah yeah I think if I were to ask you what's the most profoundest thought you've ever thought you would probably say what would you say what what's well that's like the question that the the pious monks in Connecticut said to me they invited me to speak to them once at a monastery I don't know what I said but at the end they said we do this to all of our guests yeah we asked you to pray for us and if God would grant anyone gift because of your prayer to every single monk in this monastery what would you ask and remembering that little incident I just told you about I said well that every one of you would fall totally in love with Jesus every moment for the rest of your lives and they all began to laugh yes especially and the abbot said we're not laughing at you were laughing with you because we had mother Teresa here last week that's what she said yes okay yeah that's a Grand Slam so you became Catholic in college tell me what it was like as as the Vatican two changes and of course a lot of the changes that were implemented weren't outlined in the documents we just started happening I hear horror stories about I've always been suspicious of the press newspapers the media the TV everything really and always always loved books so I actually read some of the documents yeah and compared them to what was being made out of them by off your press and so the immense gap so I had no problem with that I can do it didn't throw anything out it added modern stuff to the ancient stuff and I loved at all yeah as did John Paul and Benedict yes so I never any problem so what about the implementations over that you began seen because you grew up you saw the Tritton teen mass presumably that was part of what you were saying to your father even if you weren't at Holy Mass so like the beauty a masterpiece an absolute masterpiece how how how could how could the devil endure such beauty it must it must pose an immense pain it's a beautiful finger so yeah yeah and that's 2,000 years old there's not dying so I have no problem with with with with Vatican 2 at all sure but the implementation of it so was stupid it was silly I knew I knew from the beginning that's the only church that can possibly exist is the Church of idiot sinners that's what we are yeah one of the books my Calvinist friends gave me in Calvin did you turn me from becoming a Catholic was Boccaccio's Decameron which was a lot of anti-catholic short stories written by this Renaissance humorist and one of them takes place during the Borgia papacy when basically the Mafia controlled the papacy mm-hmm and a couple of popes were spectacularly wicked and the story is about - this pious French bishop in Paris who has a neighbor who's Jewish and who was a businessman is very smart name is Abraham and the bishop thinks Abraham's on the verge of conversion and one day Abraham comes to the bishop and says Bishop wish me good speed I have to take a trip to Rome and do some business deal there I have to do business with the Vatican Bank and I'm gonna live with the papal family and the bishop said look Abraham I know you're on the verge of conversion let me baptize you before you go well I don't know if I'm ready yet but why before well it's foggy down there you won't see things clearly the air is clear up here and Abraham says nope business first and pleasure that's my rule I'll see you in the spring yeah he leaves the bishops I've lost him you'll see the corruption there he'll never become a Catholic comes back in the spring says I'm ready to be baptized what you you didn't go to Rome in yeah you didn't do business with a Vatican Bank yeah you didn't live with the papal family yeah I did and now you think I don't get it Abraham said look I don't know that much about your theology but I know a heck of a lot about business and one thing I know for sure no merely earthly business that stupid who grew up could last 14 days yours has lasted 14 centuries it's a miracle I'm convinced right I thought that was a good argument yeah it is pretty good yeah the other thing too is if you were looking for the perfect religion based on the moral purity of the the adherence you would have missed the true religion in the Old Testament you know I'm saying the Jewish people when you read the story of David and Moses and the stiff-necked impossible yeah arrogant yeah people us yeah are you seeing a template among Catholics that you interact with maybe at your college and others to leave the church right now given the current scandal in the church yeah when I think that's always an excuse for a weak faith to begin with yeah I haven't met anybody who once was a serious moral intelligent Catholic who was leaving just because of the brief scandals yeah that's right I've met nice naive people who said it's all come by her and now it's all trash but you've got to be naive to begin with to Gillette scandals Drive your way yeah so when do you go to a Latin Mass or do you go to a Novus Ordo or strong preference I love all forms the mess but I go most of the time to an Anglican use mass where the the priests and half of this congregation used to be Anglican are now Catholic he's married yeah and we have the other great masterpiece of English language The Book of Common Prayer yes it's beautiful she's very beautiful I have to admit before all my audience we're gonna be upset with me I don't know what you think but my favorite translation well I know if it's my favorite but I love the King James so do i do you it's only way but my problem was of course I could never find one with a deuterocanonical books until I met an Anglican priest who had this big Bible at the Common Prayer had the Deuter Chronicles and the whole thing was the King James yeah why do you like the King James it's affect it it's not only beautiful and it's not only accurate by the way I know enough Greek to compare the King James New Testament to modern translations a more literal as well as more poetic yeah the modern translations take it away that's glorious so it's not only more beautiful but it's much easier to worship in King James language yeah if you call God bow instead of you that keeps him up at that level and the fact that he comes down that much to you and intimacy is much greater than if he or gentleman yeah now we're here let's let's sit at a bar and drink together yeah baseball that's not how you deal with God yes Oh talk a bit more about that about how language affects how we pray I mean Benedict implemented those changes in the novus ordo so we would say different things and maybe there were some people who felt that there was a waste of time but language does affect how we understand ourselves and God yeah it does let's take a little example isil's old translation of the Gloria in the mass eliminated repetition and the result was okay this is like a philosophical treatise point one point two point three the old version was you say it over again you repeat it well you don't have to do that there's no utilitarian reason yeah yeah but it's like the songs the prism yeah gets under your skin and into your soul yeah and hammers the same nailing twice and they don't understand that I've been going to a business ain't for four years and talked about repeating there's a joke in the Byzantine church there's nothing the Romans can do in ten minutes that we can't do in an hour you know but it's the same thing you know everything is prayed three times in a row and it's glorious well i think john paul ii must have a de two because his favorite prayer was the rosary yeah and that's full of repetition yeah but it's not boring repetition is like the waves yeah and not like the washing machine yep how long have you been praying the rosary for let's see since I thought of becoming a kind of like really since my senior year at Calvin College is this something you choose to pray daily or is it something yeah when do you pray it usually when I'm driving yeah ATD right that helps you doing something while your prayer the rosary I think obstacle many people have to the rosary or prayer in general is that they think they have to feel a certain way for their prayer to be effective or meaningful this was one of the most liberating discoveries I made in in reading the Catholic saints they all said don't pay so much attention to your feelings feelings don't count they're God's gifts they're fine they help but so will that counts and when you will something not only do you strengthen your will but you're accomplishing something feel like feelings don't accomplish anything it's like watching a movie it's entertaining and it's helpful but then it's good but praying the rosary isn't meant to be interesting is meant to be an accomplishment with every word a prayer changes things yeah you wrote a book called prayer for beginners that was that was that was a almost a plagiarism of brother Lawrence is the practice of the presence of God which is in my favorite books because it's very very simple yeah what does it say you you you use this analogy where you say oh a way to pray you do the same thing when you kind of come to the end of a sidewalk to cross the street you stop wait and listen talk about that yeah there used to be signs around railroad crossings it says stop looking listen oh okay uh and before you can either look or listen you have to stop we're like flywheels we keep moving and moving and more yeah and it's much harder to stop than to start yes so the first thing you have to do in order to pray is stop doing everything else and when I wake up every morning my mind is racing at the beginning this is what I have to do this is what I have to worry about what I have to accomplish and you have to stop that you have to you have to kill those little gremlins that are attacking you with their with their little sword stuck into your brain yes I love st. Benedict's interpretation of psalm 137 by the waters of Babylon which ends in that horrible verse o babylon destroyer blessed is he who seizes your little babies and smashes their brains out against the curbstone right how can a Christian pray that Saint Benedict says well those little babies are baby thoughts and everything starts with thought and Babylon is of course the Jews enemy and a symbol of evil so as soon as this evil thought occurs to you have no mercy upon it bash the little bastards brains out love it so stop but then then you stop though because you can't just will yourself to stop having those thoughts can you you say you wake up in the morning they will rush at you yes you can't they still come but they don't touch you you're not saying yes to them you're ignoring them they still come you're still distracted but you know that that's not you you don't identify with them you don't find your identity in them do you have a morning ritual prayer routine sort of no just the morning offering my friend let's say a somber to at night and I try to remember during the day I'm not good at praying in general I'm not good at praying for a long time mmm I get bored so easily so for me the most important thing about prayer is that not just that it's something you do for a few minutes a day but it's something you do all day implicitly the morning offering permeates into all your prayers God take this I'm gonna forget you but you're not gonna get me ya hear this this this little drug here called caffeine may be doing me a little good and a little harm and I'm not thinking about it right now I'm just doing it but I'll drink this coffee for you I don't know what that means you want to do it ya can't childlike dependency and submission to a good father well this I mean have you heard of the you've heard of course of the Jesus Prayer yeah in the Eastern Christianity Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue and the sumer as to whether we should pray at all times and he said in one sense yes in one sense no one sense no because you have obligations to fulfill you can't be praying all times but he quotes Augustine in saying that we can pray at all times by desire yes exactly what does he mean by that hey before Freud understood the power of the subconscious designers aren't always conscious designers are also subconscious and the subconscious ones come from the depths of the heart their the deepest desires of all and if your deepest desire is to do God's will you're gonna go to heaven no matter how badly you you act on that desire might be take a lot of purgatory but yeah it's what Karl Rahner calls your fundamental option you're not consciously aware of that at all times the reason you have to keep going back to formal prayer is to remember that to get the rest of it but it's there all the time mmm what do we do then with those desires that come up that that make us afraid like sexual desires or desires to hurt people or desires for money any sort of wicked desire that we're very ashamed of we don't bring it to other people because we're afraid if they knew that about us they wouldn't like us but as you say they're the subconscious desires are speaking to us well the more hidden in subconscious they are the more dangerous they are because they're not in the lights the first thing you have to do is is bring them to the light be honest sometimes we treat God in the same way that we treat other people were afraid of him and we were afraid to confess these things and we were afraid to deal with them and even if you deal with them badly just that you're dealing with them in the presence of God helps and even if he doesn't give you the the answer that you want you know that you're honest bringing this into God's presence he's going to make a difference and if he doesn't heal those desires and you're still bothered by them that's his will - Thomas Aquinas says gods like a doctor he'll sometimes deliberately not heal a certain disease because he knows that if he does more harm is going to come yeah that's interesting isn't it especially pride it reminds me of Paul talking about that thorn in the flesh and we speculated as to what that could possibly mean but this idea that pride is the worst sin yeah we don't think that a lot of us do you tell me we don't although when we see it in others we hate it more than any other sinner yes so if my friend is lustful I feel sorry for him and maybe this is if he's prideful I find that the most us you know a lot of us confuse pride with vanity you know look into a mirror and say how beautiful I am well that's a fault that's that's not pride yeah pride is I want to play God yeah mine will be done not yours I want to instrumentalize God I want to use him to gratify my desires which I'm so identifying with you don't do that you have to give him everything how do you know if you're prideful you don't that's what's a tough road oh it doesn't matter that's that's a trap the devil likes to get us in - let's see what's going on in me how can i how can I deal with that yeah is is this bad me or is this good me the real me that leads nowhere stop look that's the problems stop looking out is that the answer hey if if you're in the presence of somebody that's much more beautiful than you and much wiser than you much better than you regular yourself how do you want to forget yourself yeah because this is the thing I mean you meet people and you think this person is extraordinarily arrogant and they don't know that about themselves but then you but then you think well if they don't know that about them what don't I know about me Touche Touche yeah that's the helpful thing about having a wife my wife's always willing to tell me this this is why one of the best things that happened to see us Louis was his marriage to Joy David Mann who was not a sweet nice beautiful wife but she was wonderfully honest and he exposed she exposed his baloney and he loved her for really you know what's fascinating is when you know we talked about the problem of evil and how we have a pastoral approach and a kind of philosophical approach when you put side-by-side the problem of evil with what was the book he wrote after the death of his wife observes grief observed you see the difference I mean the wonderful honesty in that bond that is the best book I know to give to someone who's grieving do you know the story of he he wrote that as a under a pen name oh yeah yeah and then I was told that people kept giving it to him did you tell me that you told me that back there yeah but that first line nobody told me fear felt so much what do you say no one told me grief felt so much like a fear I keep swallowing something like that yeah and he goes to all these places and they're not the same nothing's the same without her how could the death of one person be like the sky spread over everything yeah the idea that if I travel to all the planets throughout all of space I'll never seen everything her voice wonderfully on I I was weeping after reading that first page it just really broke me then there's one line in that book which is the fundamental solution practically to the problem of evil is it conceivable that a loving God should give us such pains and such griefs well if we don't need them he's not a loving God and if he is we need them yeah that's it yeah everything we get all the sufferings we get we need which is so hard to believe when you consider how much certain people go through yeah it's a bloody difficult problem yes it's interesting when you look at the Sumer Aquinas sometimes puts 12 or 13 or if you read de Marlow his other work you'll have like 24 objections yeah and here he has to to the existence of God yep oh we do and the other one isn't really a conclusive proof that God doesn't exist in explain anything but who knows yeah yeah what do you think the best so what do you think the best argument for atheism is problem of evil certainly yeah how can I trust a god who lets us horrible things happen yeah and not just to us but to animals of course why do animals need it they don't need it there's no clear answer to that question we're told what we need to know and we're only given hints about the animals and I think Lewis's chapter in the problem of pain about animal suffering is the best answer their answer has something to do with our answer they're not to be understood in themselves within their relation to us their thoughts on our family mm-hmm he goes so far as to say that the pet is the more truly natural animal than the wild animal because if God made everything for us he made animals for us mm-hmm so the most important animals are cats and dogs and the least important animals are the ones they can't be tamed cats I would have thought no I guess they know the peasants but they'd be doing that whether they had us or not if I had a little books well dogs have the problem of despair and cats have the problem of pride they're equal when I grew up I thought dog old dogs are boys and old cats were girls everybody thinks that yeah I wonder why do you remember misconceptions you had as a kid all awful one just kind of show you what I mean when I was a kid I thought allergic meant afraid of so I remember going to the doctor and they say are you allergic to anything and I'd say yeah those big moths with the eyes on the back my mom when she's angry now so what are some misconceptions you hid I remember reading a book no listening to a sermon which called God the Supreme Being and I thought it was a supreme beam like beans he felt guilty my friend John father John Park said he grew up by a car yard sales lot you know and it would have the number of the year the car was made so eighty to ninety seven whatever and he would drive past I think only parents are so stupid that they would pay ninety seven dollars for a car you know how many much candy you could buy for that yeah so why you said it was when you were at your college Calvin College you decided to be a philosopher yeah did you have any inkling towards it prior to then no I write a lot of poetry in you know in high school yeah and I wanted to become a writer I thought I wanted to become a poet I was an English major yeah and the first philosophy course I ever taught was taught by somebody who was probably certifiably insane yeah what do you say that he would put his chair on the desk and say I am the king and this is my kingdom and you are my subjects and he would march up and down the aisles and point at our heads and say it's there but it's not there but you remember him oh yes he was so absent-minded that he was constantly going across the street reading a book and getting hit by cars knows the hospital a few times no charge I'm not joking so was he bright or just stupid both Sophia both anyway the chamber of the apartment William Harry Gemma who was probably the best philosopher I ever met said to me when I said I don't want to take any more philosophy courses he said you probably took doctor runner I said yes he said give somebody else a chance so I did and I gave John my chance and he was great I took about six of his courses most I think of our vocational choices are due to models we see somebody who's who's successful in the field I want to be like that and when you started studying and your undergrad imagines that you may in philosophy neither did you know you wanted to go on to a PhD in it yes I did yep I thought of going to seminary and at Yale I thought of becoming a Dominican Wow and I worked my way through that and I concluded that what I wanted all the other kind of father oh yeah fantastic so did you go stay with the Dominicans I had some German teachers at Kelvin actually I went to Aquinas College if she's also in Grand Rapids and took a course from a Dominican yeah I didn't understand Aquinas very well at the time but I respected the teacher he was a very wise and holy man yeah I love the Dominicans I do too father Thomas Joseph Wyatt it's a brilliant man he just wrote a book on Catholicism I forget the name of it it was excellent yeah I discerned with the Franciscans mm-hmm I think I like the idea I like that you're being a Dominican but I think I'm a Franciscan at heart father Groeschel type yes I'm just more wild here's a funny story for you I woke up one morning the house was a mess suitcases busted open kids were loud 6:00 in the morning and I was laying on my wife in ER I said honey you know that sign that we saw that said if I could do it all over again I'd find you sooner so I could love you longer she went yes I said I think I'd be a Dominican I had a priest friend say to me he's like the grass isn't green no brown everywhere just brown everywhere right yes father krischell you knew him I knew him tell us about him a New Yorker sense of humor and irony mm-hmm coupled with deep piety but not behind yeah no BS right on target utterly honest tough minded mm-hmm did you know him when he founded the CFR's or basically the Capuchin or afterwards I think both before and afterwards Wow time I met him I was very impressed and was he a New York Yankee fan well we have to make a loved one of the questions I'm going to ask God if I get to heaven is why for 86 years for you a Yankee fan very good no but Bob Epps because the boston red sauce needed the suffering it costs right oh well New York has 10 times more people than Boston and Boston has ten times more philosophers than New York and the reason is that philosophy is the love of wisdom and wisdom comes to suffering and we have the Red Sox very good do you think that baseball is the greatest sport yes good I'm glad you didn't waffle on that and just like Michael Novak wrote an article called take me out to the liturgy in which he proved that proposition ah and George Carlin has a famous thing about two philosophies of life baseball and football in which he shows that football was the devil sport and baseball is God's sport very good yeah growing up I watch cricket you ever watch cricket before yeah you Brits are I mean I'll forgive you for that that's so I'm not a Brit well allsey that's like my mom calling all Americans Yankees you sound like a bloody yank she says hey mom yang refers doesn't matter you know excuse the insult yeah I wouldn't promise but you did so you don't watch it cricket it never watched again no they go on for hours nothing on for five days that's not an exaggeration a Test match can go for five days it's one day and you have a TD you get bored easily in five days here's why I think I like it if you go away and come back an hour later nothing's happened maybe there's less shook the grass growing in your backyard just make it interest well that's true too but it is interesting it's there's something about the culture around it you know you fill the fridge full of beer sit in your chair and it's great and watch grass grow and watch grass grow yeah they even stop for tea and lunch and sandwiches and they roll it it's lovely yeah but now they're making it more like baseball they're condensing the games from five days to one day and now they're doing it and afternoon and so all of the we're pretty upset about it in Australia yeah it's too bloody American everyone says well what you call football is what we call soccer no again we prefer our American football well which is much more violent and much more like war well we have our footballs different again we call soccer soccer but we have aussie rules for ball which is a variation of Gaelic football but more violent and we have rugby but those are the two big games in Australia yeah but I don't like sports a great deal well how do you sit through a baseball game if you have a DD it's like life it's like history it's unpredictable mmm it's not only that you admire the skill you also have hopes and fears mm-hmm and the more you identify with the team the more acute your hopes and fears are mm-hmm you can overdo it or you can under do it if you're under do it you're bored if you overdo it you're an addict so do you like football I do yeah I do my father-in-law is from Boston he's a huge Red Sox fan and the first American I ever met she was on my net team you know dove net ministries new travel around high schools run retreats and she was from the Bronx so I knew nothing about nothing and she told me that I have to go for the New York Yankees I said all right my wife is was drunk Bronx her father was a fanatical Yankee fan so was she so I wouldn't marry her until she converted and she became a Red Sox fan and then she said she did I suspect that deep down in her heart she's still y'all really does she watch baseball with you sometimes yeah so my but when I met my wife and we were dating and she said okay but you can you just have to say Red Sox you cannot her on there I said done right there you go my son dated a lot of girls at Boston College the two questions he asked of them or are you a Catholic and are you a Red Sox fan and if the answer to both was not yes he wouldn't take them seriously that's not mixed marriages don't work no tell us about um I'm sure we have a lot of men who are new fathers and we're trying to do a good job failing getting up again what what do you what do you how was it for you being a dad what advice do you have for dads the first memory I have of being a new father is exhausting okay the kids will just tire you out their bundles of energy and you feel very very old I feel younger now at 82 you know I feel now yeah yeah I remember realizing just how selfish I was yeah because before that my wife and I would go to the same movie we wanted to go see we want to go to this person so I got invented children is this why exactly okay the Peters they don't give us the point you don't have children tend to be selfish yuppies and self-absorbed if this is our life and you don't know you're selfish though you exactly and when you have kids you realize that you have to be there for them all the time and you are their servants yes I swear sir yes this is your life I love kids I love my youngest son his name's Peter actually Peter Francis is a beautiful boy and he asks the most interesting questions so he was peeing today with the door open of course and while he was peeing he said dad what happens if you don't pay better philosophical discussions with my four-year-old than more intensive sound question you know there's no philosopher who ever deeply philosophized about the fact that everything comes in one end and out the other hmm we we philosophize about the one end but very rarely about the other hmm all right we'll come on and elaborate on this well yes yes the closest thing to that is in the Hindu mystical tradition where breathing is a spiritual exercise the good air comes in the bad air comes out and we have to do that with our souls the bad stuff goes out the good stuff comes in so God has given us bodies as images of that just as sex is an image of divine love Trinitarian love so eating and excreting is an image of yeah yeah yeah that make sense I like it that's good now do you think a lot of Catholics because the New Age movement have become afraid of things like you should breathe deeply you know I find people have this perhaps unnecessary skepticism when somebody talks about centering yourself and Britta taking deep breaths in and out as you pray and these things can be helpful with other course they've had of course they've done you have to use them with discernment yeah they're gonna be used for slakey and silly purposes but without some sort of deliberate mindfulness without cultivation of the mind you're not you're not fully human you're not able to perform well in any field their academic or spiritual yeah there's a you don't know I'm very tech savvy you've told me I am proud of the fact that I am probably the least tech-savvy person who has ever existed in the entire history of the world do you have email yes I do and I always make mistakes about it yeah and I've been using Microsoft Word for the last 30 or 40 years and it always tricks me with new hoops to jump through which I fail to do and I am in awe of the devil's power of controlling that medium I speak of my digital demons I don't really mean it but it certainly looks like that and then do you know what Twitter is Twitter yeah somebody has started a dr. Peter Kreeft Twitter account me yeah well that was funny because it started and then it was just all these your fantastic tweets from quotes from your books and I thought I don't think that can be dr. pity and then somebody said no he's deeds no way I said a lot of free downloads on my website which I never visited and I'm told that the one that gets the most hits is a little essay called why I hate computers ah so there are a lot of other cyber other IDEs out there so do you have a smartphone I have tried a number of times to master a smartphone and I am absolutely and totally incapable of doing it so do you know what apps are sorry I'm not sure I know what the word is I don't really know it's like a program the reason I was getting to this is there's a new app called hallow like hallowed be thy name hallow and it leads you through these prayer experiences I wouldn't know how to put an app into this would you have a smart phone no I don't I have always go down by Hallowed for you I have this old-fashioned flip phones fantastic which is more than phone and if if I can disable its non phone come over as I would well yeah but the reason I was bringing this up is hallo this app thing for young for Catholics is it helps you integrate these things because there's a lot of New Age apps right now that took about breathing in these sorts of things but this thing's a hundred percent Catholic based in the tradition and yet at the same time talked about things like being calm and mindfulness do you think that we're all running around a lot quicker than we used to know yeah which we're all talking about being stressed but yeah is this why is this well Anthony Esalen calls the abolition of childhood Jorge Medford says the same thing childhood is when you're supposed to play and waste time yeah nobody's allowed to waste time anymore one of our neighbors was worried about my wife also often gets people into private schools or colleges and his kids going into kindergarten yeah and he was worried that his kid would never get into Harvard because he wasn't getting into a prestigious kindergarten so he had to somehow write a letter saying this kid is bright enough to get into your special kindergarten now that's crazy see I don't think I'm not full physical harm usually but people like that should be slept it's stupid I'm very proud of the fact that we are we regulate very them very little TV they're homeschooled so they're usually beautiful yeah hitting each other with sticks and yeah my son do they found a rat that the cat killed and he's running around and yep it's lovely and you must be human chester has an essay on sticks being the primary toy no sticks good dick being the primary toy yeah you know it can be a sword it can be a or it can be the beginning of a house it can be anything now we've talked about boredom in the negative sense but part of why I want my children not to have phones not to be playing games you know with some with some exceptions is that I want them to be bored but maybe I don't mean bored in the negative sense I mean stimulated to do something original and creative themselves instead of disappearing into their screens yeah that's it I observe kids today addicted to their their phones one of the assignments I give to my students is you want to do an extra-credit essay write on how my world changed when I resolved not to look at any screen for 24 hours and I've gotten about a dozen essays back and about half of them say the same thing I couldn't do it I thought I could I cannot live without my ID my iPhone that's addiction hi I just want to take a pause for a moment and say thanks to our third sponsor Exodus 90 Exodus 90 is an ascetical program for men where men get together in small groups and for 90 days read the book of Exodus give up things like alcohol and hot showers they take on things like reading more bring the scriptures more praying in adoration more it's really difficult quite frankly but it's also really life transforming I think a lot of us want our lives transformed but we don't want to do anything about it Exodus 90 is a very masculine response to the scandals in the church today go to Exodus 19 calm that's Exodus 9 zero calm to learn more about it and I think gonna be really really impressed with it I did it for a while I had health issues and stuff was different but it was really great really great and the men I speak it was just a Google recently and they they told me they started an exodus 90 group in Google and they said was totally life transforming so if you want to take your spiritual life to the next level go to Exodus 90 calm Thanks I did this last year and doing it again this year I give up the internet for a month so all of August something that why not a year because I wouldn't have a job anymore on my children would never third or is that a lot may that's a yeah the spiderweb is encompassing us its encompassing us I mean this is it I mean this is I consider this to be good work that's going to go out to all these people with this of course it will evolve into the matrix yeah but I find it bloody hard like I used to drop off my phone I'd put my phone in my laptop which were the only kind of devices I had into a bag and I'd take it to a friend's house Friday night and say I'll pick it up Monday if I come early and make fun of me and don't let me have it and as I would back out I would reach for my phone and this can't be good well if there's anything that you can't live with that is less than yourself that's your master it is anything you can't live with yeah gotta have it yeah that's not your well servant that's your master coffee's my master I can do without coffee and yeah is there anything you can't do without that you're working on breaking right now I don't think so I guess there is I guess God will show it to me whatever it is but no are you afraid of death no I'm very dying I'm a coward I don't really play count it so the death bits okay he died in your sleep course I don't know I know I know as a Christian I know I'm not gonna go to heaven because I'm good enough I'm good to go to heaven because God loves me period end of story mmm it's not the death it's the it's the pain that might be yeah yeah but only this if you could die in any way I guess the answer is however God wills it but if you got to choose well there are special privileges for martyrs oh my gosh it's not the top of the head is very merciful very quick yeah yeah favorite movie of all time is a man for all seasons Saint Thomas More oh I love a man from the seasons I think that's probably yeah one of my jokes he corrected that remind me remind me I forget oh he said something to the to the man about to chop his head off didn't he yeah please spare my beard it at least has not committed treason against a good king that's amazing it's amazing because I remember being more stirred by that movie on a low budget than I did with Braveheart all the way I loved Braveheart who yep why am most Saint movies crap oh that's a good question they certainly are yeah embarrassingly bad embarrassingly bad I don't know that's clear I think for Protestants than for Catholics because Protestants right Jesus novels and they're all horribly bad embarassingly bad amazingly bad I haven't worked seen any of these Jesus novels in fiction or fictional fictional series novel they're terrible yeah the fact that you can't write Jesus fiction proves that he's different than anybody else you can write fiction about Alexander the Great or really a Caesar or Stalin anybody yep you cannot write fiction about Jesus Dostoevsky came closest to it the Grand Inquisitor doesn't say a word lovely doesn't do a deed except one kissed him yeah yeah but okay so I don't know why is it because piety understand that a lot of these movies with Saints they look effeminate oh is it quiet quiet II meant as you look that they do I think part of the answer is we are so into pop psychology and feelings and so into niceness that we think to be a saint is to have nice feelings so let's portray them yes as nice and it's comfortable and smiling all the time yeah it's not honest enough to deal with this crap yeah well Mother Teresa what she had to say about this virtual life that came out after she died shows yeah let's talk about tough bloody hard did you even meet mother Teresa I did tell us she came she came to our local parish and there was a line outside the church afterwards about a hundred people long mm-hmm just simply say hello and shake her hands and it took about two hours because she spent some time with everybody Wow and I got up to her and shook her hand and she simply said hello God loves you something like that but it took 10 seconds but it was like there was nobody else in the universe it was just me and her and there was no time and no it didn't matter whether it was 1 second or 10 hours that was the only way what is that because I experienced that with a book called father Bob Bedard who founded the Companions of the Cross up in Canada very holy man it kind of messy unkempt madly in love with Jesus I remember the same thing happening he came up and he shook my hand and everything melted away yeah and I'm like what is happening total attention and I heard that about people would say that about John Paul - the opposite of ad D total attention all of you was there your whole heart your whole mind your whole will it he looks at you as God does God doesn't say all right I'll give you one tenth of my attention because I have all these other people they give you all of it yeah is that something you actually purposely try to do because you must meet a lot of people who are thrilled to meet you I'm thrilled to meet you no I am shy and I get easily embarrassed so I back away yeah I get easily embarrassed I feel very awkward around people I can speak to 10,000 people I don't do a great job and I'll be fine but if I meet people one-on-one afterwards I'm aware how I look as they're looking at me and I'm afraid I sound silly and I just I know what that is I don't work this is why I don't like to read my own books and I don't like to listen to my own podcasts because I sound wrong hmm I used to live in Ireland and I binge to Peter Kreeft for several months listen - oh is that is that the embarrassment bit there yeah I'm sorry but what do you do because you could have chosen augustiner a quieter there's something well I think I eventually binge on them because you talked about them in a way that actually made it interest okay then my existence is justified good but then how do you respond to people who come up to you just like you met Mother Teresa and I'm sure you were wanting to meet her excited to meet her it's probably humbling to recognize that people see you and they have that same crowd experience no no I don't mean when they meet you but I mean they at least want to meet you like you may have wanted to meet militaries yeah so how do you how do you how do you sort of validate that I'm an absent-minded professor who is congenitally unaware of other people and their deepest needs yeah another so I live on the surface if they ask me a question I answer it did you ever feel a temptation to not be embarrassed and I'll be okay I've got to be better and then eventually just went out screw it this is me deal with it or we have you always been just this is me sometimes sometimes you know that there is a sudden transition I remember once I was going to a very important something or other I don't know what it was being a German or a meeting and I had a new suit on and it started to rain and I lost my way and it was getting dark and then the tire blew and I still had a half hour so I tried to change the tire and I was by this road cursing yes 18 wheeler came by and totally splashed my new suit at that point I broke out into uproarious laughter did you really it was healing yes that was a divine gift that was the suffering you need it yeah yeah yeah cuz I'm always aware of that like on a much smaller level people will come up to me and thank me for a book that I've written of course I've only written to but you know and I am tempted to dismiss it but then I realize it's important to them that I hear it you know yeah of course yeah I tried but I'm not very good I mean psychologically I am the last kind of person that ought to be a parish priest yeah holding old lady's hands and comforting them that's not my job I don't have time for this okay if you tell me what you need I'll do it but I know it's a guy thing I think God thank God for women do you know I met you at a goddess conference in Florida a couple of years ago I had the unfortunate I had to speak after you which no one would want to do don't be ridiculous yeah you gave a talk and then I gave a talk and then I met you and I said hey how you doing I think they want us to do some panel discussion you know I was gonna go surfing which I thought was excellent oh I didn't know I think you said did I know I know that I'm not sure okay well maybe I'm just gonna go anyway I don't a few remember that I'm gonna skip this yeah yeah I like that too I like being alone here's how I knew I was introverted if I go to a party I love going to the bathroom and I love going into a bathroom and shutting the door and locking it and I just feel this instant relief for two reasons relief because I let things go to it but I specially like it if there's two types of locks the one that slides over and the button that gives the satisfying click now if there is no satisfying click I'm on hang on one edge in the bathroom thinking at any point someone can burst end and my I hate parties - I don't usually go to the bathroom but if you can seek out one other person you could have a deep conversation without a party yeah and if the party hostess isn't one of these intrusive people who breaks up such conversations come on this is a party yeah when I go to a party I find a spot get a drink get my pipe or cigar I sit and I just don't move and hope that someone interesting sits next to me yeah that's supposed to do that certain Ingle we go certainly now my wife on the other hand is very extroverted she's afraid if she leaves a party they all stop having from my wife is a women are like that they they are experts in relationships we're not that's true that bits definitely just probably this is probably why among the 100 most famous philosophers in a single woman yeah they have to bring us into the world and educate us and love us so we can become philosophers but then what do you say to the retort that well that's just a matter of sexism people like Eleanor stump and their eyes I know you're not saying this none there are some but I imagine some of them would say that yeah I don't know this is just a matter of 6 I think you're right I'm just pushing back to see what you'd say again so you know Larry Summers the president of Harvard was fired because he suggested at a faculty meeting that perhaps just perhaps probably not but it's just throwing it out there were happy one of the reasons why Harvard is not attracting more women to the hard sciences is that there's some physiological differences between the female and the male brain you get crucial forces are improved by logic yes he got fired for suggesting that they discussed that same thing happened at Google there was a memo that was released where he was like in order to bring more women into Google maybe we should consider this and he was fired no we're not living in a free country no you see so how are you experiencing all of this craziness being at a college you know there's safe spaces where you go no Boston College is not yet Yale and when Trump got elected you know it yielded Ohio they normally create a safe spaces but they brought to the students who took refuge in those safe spaces the ultimate answer Donald Trump puppies to pet god I would not have saved us I would have seemed that way bogger them they're on their own it's not no I don't get involved in campus politics it's a waste of time I heard of a college that they the professor's had to stop writing on the papers with red ink because it was triggering and they had to now use black it's good that you can just laugh at that what else can you do just get super we have an excellent chairman in our philosophy department and we have an agreement he and I I don't do committee work as most of the other people in the department and I teach an extra course instead because I allows you a committee work and I'm good interim yeah what do you like in meetings I don't like meeting I thought you'd be terrible if I hated meeting so much has anything great in history I've never accomplished by a committee no no I mean even if the last supper was a meeting Judas went out after that and went crazy so now famous Arab definition of a camel a horse designed by a committee that's very good I haven't heard that one yeah what's your favorite teach what's your favorite course to teach in philosophy what most interest to us in one philosopher probably the best course I ever taught was of course on just one book the confessions of San Agustin yeah okay and the students were so into it that they all chose to write journals and most of them are longer than the confessions itself really wrote journals you say yeah how do you mean react to analyze argue with each chapter in the convention that's interesting why is it that do you think that Augustine speaks to modern man in a way that maybe Aquinas doesn't immediately seem to or do you disagree with the premise no the premise is true Agustin speaks with the whole of himself at once Aquinas is wonderfully analytical and wonderfully clear and he'll not only separate theses and objections but he'll separate the parts of himself yeah and talk about the head with the heart and talk about the will with the mind and and so on he's he's he's the perfect philosopher for a man the end oh yeah yeah clear thinking Agustin is much more complex much more messy and much more accessible I mean instinctively accessible you know medieval statues of Agustin always had a burning heart in one hand and an open book in the other hand that was perfect yeah he's beautiful in a different way to Aquinas yeah I heard someone say it may have been peeper Joseph peeper mm-hmm the Aquinas is beautiful like a tool might be you might say at all or I think you said mathematics or what did you say geometries geometry say whereas Augustine is beautiful like a garden I mean there's yeah and thus new kinds of gardens - there's the Victorian garden which is very formal yeah and there's the messy country English garden which is deliberately messy a natural well what is this I mean there are different authors that I find really compelling and they I don't know if they're in the kind of more the Platonic tradition so when you're Gustin Pascal Yan sounds yeah and then there's key dost s Keys he really I think so is that is that an Eastern Orthodox thing though do they seem to be more yes atonic traditionally definitely suspicious of Aristotle yeah and Aquinas to rationalistic mystical mystery there's no mystery and if you try and nail things down they go so yeah we need both the two lungs of the church the two wings yeah it's interesting because going to a Byzantine church the the chanting almost sounds like we're drunk everything's rounded there's incense and it's all very you know babies are crying but no one's getting pissed off yeah but you go to a Tritton teen mess you hold your hands like that you kneel down you know I think I imagine that he is a throw this ever see what you think I imagine people who go to the Latin Mass are a lot more susceptible to scrupulous 'ti that knows either in East and Orthodox or Eastern Catholic yeah but in art it's not neither or to both and in theology it's an either our proposition is either true or false yeah but this art form is very different than that well Vivian love difference yes indeed yeah yeah okay but back to this Aristotelian tradition and platonic tradition I I find myself more moved by what I would consider more platonic type people like even when I read Aristotle like I love Aristotle but when I read Plato I'm like oh I had a crisis of philosophical faith at Calvin College I fell in love with Plato yeah Wren Aristotle was convinced that rationally and philosophically and logically Aristotle was right and played it was wrong about forms and about soul of the body and I said okay I have to choose between beauty and fascination on the one hand and truth on the other truth trumps everything yes I still love Plato and love to teach them much more than Aristotle but but they're cells right but then I think sometimes people make a sharp distinguished tension between Plato and Aristotle that may not necessarily be so I think there do you think more than that I would say that Aristotle is 90% Plato oh wow a tailor who wrote a very good book on Plato also wrote a short run Aristotle proving that Aristotle was basically a plate inist how did he do that where are the forms located well Aquinas synthesizes them by saying that the forms exist in three places they exist in the mind of God in themselves they exist in thing in actual things as Aristotle said and they exist in the human mind as abstracted from things and that also says right so that's basically 2/3 Aristotle and 1/3 Plato yeah but plato was right about God and ourselves right about us yeah who's your favorite philosopher other than Aquinas Pascal I love Pascal my students too they are moved by speaks to modern man he just comes right in and he speaks clearer than I'm very sensitive to sounds and a teacher usually knows how engaged students are by how much they're shuffling and how much they're talking and and how quiet they are and there's maybe four or five different levels of sounds there's the the talking which is kind of intrusive and there's the shuffling of papers which means I'm bored and there's just the moving around in the seat we're saying I'm slightly bored and then there's the sudden attention and beyond that beyond that if you're a small classroom you can tell when students stop breathing Wow Pascal and Agustin are the only two philosophers I know they can make students stop breathing Wow with a directed quote do you teach a whole course on Pascal half of course I do Pascal and I compare with jean-paul Sartre is existentialist talk to me talk to me teach me well I think Sartre is a is a a missionary that God put in a camp of atheists to convince that atheists to run screaming into the arms of the nearest priest really because only an idiot can read and love Sartre aha you scare the hell out of you life is meaningless it's empty yeah life sucks then you die that's sergeant yeah this is something I think we like we could intellectually assent to but not live like that no no I I mean this is something that would have it fascinated me as a 17-year old who just wanted to burn everything down and was pissed off anyway for a couple of months or a couple of years yeah but you can't live like it's moral relativism if you take Sartre seriously when you're an adult you have serious mental problems hmm Nietzsche is a bit different why isn't it you different Nicci's more complex in science more sophisticated not just an intellectual he's a poet and he has some profoundly positive things to say and some profoundly negative things to say he's he duels will scare the hell out of you yeah but after you run out of his arms you keep looking back and saying I want to read him again yeah he's also totally honest I think Sanne is a hypocrite yeah he's a simply liar he's faking it so Pascal the Ponce's is anything else did he publish anything the provincial letters which are an elaborate joke on the Jesuits which is much too sophisticated for ordinary tastes okay mine yeah I think one of the reasons I love Pascal is because I may have a DD as we're discovering during this thing so breeding little snippets exactly it's very helpful exactly I think God in His mercy killed Pascal at a very young age because those little snippets were notes for a book and Pascal was going to put them into a nice ordered book which would have been boring mm-hmm let's talk about two things regard to Pascal let's talk about distractions and then we'll get to Pascal's wager I one of the my favorite things he said and I've heard you say it to all of the ills of society or modern man can be traced back to the fact that he cannot sit alone in a dark room silently no brilliant it's like a litmus test if you want to see how depressed you are go give that a shot see how long you last that's when my student stopped breathing when I quote Radley and I say it's so test him you wonder whether that's true or not do it literally dr. Troy put yourself in the bathroom with a noise machine so you're not distracted save you can last an hour almost nobody does but see this is something I was I got better at last August when I quit the Internet I felt like my head was running around like a one of those rotating fans and I pulled it out of the wall that took a while for it to slow yeah but it got to a point where I could sit and breathe a lot and I read the brothers in 20 days yeah brothers Gareth I'll do that now I couldn't read that in two years given how much internet I use well Pascal is suggesting something much more radical than that you don't read in that room no I know you don't even think consciously about X Y or Z in that room we're just saying Who am I do you what's going on here so why can't we do it well maybe you can what can't I can't do it either huh I think it's because I don't like myself I like the fact that I don't like myself if I like myself I wouldn't like myself if you might like I don't I don't respect people who think highly of themselves yeah I respect people who are honest enough to say I'm a 90% failure and I've got to patch myself up and gods gotta help so here's well here's my idea you're at a party someone walks over to you you don't like them you don't want to talk to them you move away from them it's easy to do but if you don't like you it's a little more difficult to evade you and I think that plunging yourself headlong into a myriad of distractions in a sense does that it fragments the internal life I don't have to be with me yeah that might be too too simple but that's the first thing true but what's also true is something that seems to contradict that namely that God designed us to look outward the eyes can't see themselves without a mirror we have two ears and only one mouth so we should listen more than we speak yeah we exist for other people not for ourselves and we can find who we are only by going outside of ourselves which is why porn is so bad it drives inward that which is designed to be outward you give yourself to the other but you don't do that in porn you create your own other well then is Pascal wrong No Pascal's right because if we were made for the other and made not to be self-sufficient maybe that says why we can't sit for a long period of time every once in a while you have to take your temperature you have to be honest with yourself it's not pleasant but but there it is and and it's at least a lesson in humility to realize that you can't stand your own company for an hour and you know it's funny I was just about to ask you how would one do this but see that's part of the problem the problem is I don't like the simple answer sit and put a noise machine on I'm like no give us five steps what exactly you know that's what I want we're techies tech technology is a way of making something that's hard into something it's simple yeah for instance the lights in the studio mm-hmm all you have to do is press a button that's easy yes we didn't have electricity you'd have to gather wood and you have to put a bonfire on and you have to worry about it other things catching yeah okay so technology is a way of making things easier there's no such thing as spiritual technology life isn't meant to be easy okay it's meant to be hard so the how question is the wrong question how do I do this give me 12 steps if I do a that'll cause B if I do B that'll cause C like dominoes we're free and therefore we transcend that kind of causal determinism you just do it you just choose to do it mmm well how do I choose to do it you just do it I remember talking to a guy once who was deeply troubled and he said I want to believe in God but I can't do it mm-hmm I said why can't you do it there's a problem of evil or what no no no I know all the arguments yes and III know these people of faith and they're happy and I envy them I can't do it I said yes you can he said no I can't I said well who do you love the most I said my wife I said okay suppose your wife appeared on the other side of that door there was a glass yeah a frame in the door you knew it was her and the door was locked and she said Harry opened the door what would you do he said I'd get up out of my seat and open the door I said how would you do it he said what do you mean I mean well your comes a step by step how many servants do you have to take in order to open the door you have to grab the handle and in order to grab the handle you have to twist your arm and in order to twist your arm you have to be by the door in order be by the door you have to walk to the door and in order to walk through the door you have to get up before your seat and in order to get up off your seat you have to make the decision to get up off your seat and what's the connection between the decision and the muscles he says I don't know I said but you're doing anyway wouldn't you yeah he said yeah I said so just do it with God you mean it's that simple I said uh-huh yep that's that's excellent the problem though is we don't have the same receive the same the consequence isn't usually as pleasant for people who then just do it if I could get off my seat and open the door for my wife I know what to expect and I'll probably get what I expect but when you say to someone just do it just pray that's where faith comes in these these unpleasant experiences these difficulties this fact that you have to be utterly honest and humble with your sins the fact that God is going to cast you and he's not going to make your life easier you have to trust him you have to say yeah I know you're a doctor and this is gonna hurt ya but you need it yeah even I think like realizing like what the Holy Spirit in our lives now you know sometimes we don't know what's going on with our emotional life and just sort of submitting ourselves to the Father almost like a patient I go to work father I trust you this is why you have to be a little kid yeah trust that you're good you know anything more to say on Pascal it's logical to trust because unless you're an atheist there is some being that deserves the name God no no being deserves the name God who is stupid mm-hmm so he's got to be omniscient no being deserves the name God was weak so he's got to be omnipotent and no being deserves a name God if he's wicked so he has to be good and good means unselfish and loving all right so God is unlimited wisdom unlimited power and unlimited love from those three premises it logically follows that everything that happens in your life works out for good if you just trust God he's bringing this stuff into your life for one reason and one reason only he knows that it's good for you yeah that's logical that's logical you can't escape the logic it doesn't feel like that it doesn't but thanks so I can feel like death yeah but that was due for the value of the shed it was that without death where would we be there's a bunch of idiots in Silicon Valley who are working on the immortality pill it's not a pill it's a immortality by genetic engineering yes the transhumanists who say we're we're about to evolve technologically into the next species and we'll be immortal if they ever attain that goal I think that would be the end of the world I don't think God would allow a world of immortals to exist that would be Hell incarnate we would be like a dozen eggs left on the kitchen table for six months we would go rotten yeah death is absolutely necessary I heard a story it was a science fiction story you may have heard of it I'm not sure it's from he was this astronaut was on a planet and he the ship broke down and he had two pills one was for suicide and the one was to live forever and so cuz he was stuck on this planet no way out he chose to kill himself but he took the wrong pill and they had to sit there alone forever that sounds like a short story by Ursula Guin okay and title or as a canister of Sidonians who walk away from and then there's some foreign word that begins with an O like omean there's this ideal society on another planet in which everybody's happy no problems no poverty no prejudice and some of them discover that the reason for their happiness is that there's one little girl who was constantly tortured inside a little building outside the city and her horrible physical and spiritual screams are transformed by this machine into good energy and pumped into all the other millions of people so their happiness depends upon her misery I've got to read this story and some say I cannot endure this and I'm going out into the wilderness to live normally and some say this is this is utopia and they stay there yeah so implicitly it says what what do you choose yeah this is the consequentialist argument right yeah well they're utilitarian argument yeah what do you think the best argument or not just the best argument for God's existence because there might be something that's more convincing but convincing can be relative what do you like if somebody said to you sitting on an aeroplane Peter why should I believe me if you're talking purely logically I think they are the best argument for God as acquaintances five ways the cosmological argument all the intelligence all the intelligibility in the universe the greater the scientist the more he approaches the kind of a theism like Einstein if you're talking about the human side I would say the moral argument you can't be a saint without god I love Albert Camus you know reluctant atheist and I love his hero dr. rue in the plague who liked the move couldn't believe in God and he stays to help these people with the plague there's the only doctor around you know is he gonna catch the plague he's gonna die and they ask him why and he says well I don't know the meaning of life except that the meaning of life is to be a saint and I can't believe in God and I know you can't be a saint without God and one of those three propositions has to be false and I can't reject either one so I'm just confused hmm that's that's good honest atheism do you find that your students are more kind of inward-looking as opposed to sort of so rather than Aquinas is cosmological arguments beginning from facts in the world that we know about looking inward yeah that's that's typical of the modern mind in the good sense as well as the bad sense of the word yeah for instance Cardinal Newman's a new version of the moral argument instead of starting with an objective natural law which all societies believed and we don't yeah it's time he starts with private conscience do you believe that we all have our own law you have your Ten Commandments I have mine different strokes for different folks yeah or we're all just fine do you believe that it's ever wrong for you individually to violate your own private conscience to do something that you honestly believe is morally reprehensible of course not why where's that authority come from yeah it's conscience just an accident of evolution is it just your parents word is it just society's consensus why do bow down to that as if it were a prophet from God that's a very good argument yeah it might lead you into Raskolnikov or I've been Carla's off yeah you know there's no God therefore everything is permissible but more likely it'll lead you well I can't say that I shouldn't be a saint and therefore I'll have to believe in God but my simplest argument for the existence of God is Jesus if God doesn't exist Jesus is the biggest fool who ever lived he wasn't the biggest fool that ever lived therefore God exists yeah Pascal's wager I find really impressive I find that this is often misunderstood people think it's an argument for God's existence it isn't about that of course it's addressed the skeptic it's worthless for the believer yeah it's better arguments but the skeptic wants because he's open to things he wants truth he wants happiness mm-hmm and he thinks that the truth is not ascertainable neither theism Rory he isn't good reproved so he asked a bet on the red chips instead of the blue chips on happiness instead of truth all right how can you attain the happiness that you want but don't get we all have a lover's quarrel with the world this world is not enough there is suffering there is damn man I want more than that I'm not sure what it is you know I want something more than that the only chance of getting that is one God in heaven exists and two you buy into that you accept his offer that combination is your only chance of attaining happiness so why not buy into it mm-hmm now of course this the Pascal's wager would only kind of get off the ground if I think that the arguments for or the likelihood of God and atheism are equal right if I think there's better arguments for atheism I might just choose to be an atheist right because I had people who come up to me quite regularly who say I just I've looked at all the arguments I've been watching all the YouTube videos I really don't know what to do both seem convincing one day or the other before I've had my coffee I'm an atheist you know but what what do I do and so I know Pascal said something after that though didn't he he said so suppose you bet on God and then he tells us what to do he imagines his interlocutor saying I just can't make the leap of faith yeah can't do it so Pascal says well you don't need more arguments you need to live it yes here's a suit of clothes put it on see what it feels like go to church light some candles go to Mass use holy water and what do you say neighbor what do you say to the person who says but if I do that I'm a hypocrite no you're not you're you're you're not buying the car yet you're just test driving it yeah and of course if God doesn't exist there's probably nothing wrong with being a hypocrite so that's all right yeah yeah you can't if you can't prove or disprove that God exists then there's no conclusive proof either way and you're not a fool nobody can prove this your fault whichever way you choose that's when he shifts from the mind to the heart and the hearts at least as important is the mind God made us to demand two things truth and happiness mm-hm unless your happiness is just comfort and contentment if you can say oh I'm just contented with three good meals a day and no terrible pain that's all I want that's what the beasts desire there yeah yeah deep down you know that's not you yeah but nobody else can tell you that you have to search your own heart and realize that that's not gonna make you happy now Hevy did you find that there was an uptick in atheists in your class during the New Atheism thing that went on with Dawkins and the rest of them now that seems to have died down what's been gold but I think Boston College is not typical ah I think most of the kids there come from a vaguely Catholic or vaguely religious background and they tend to be kind of pragmatic they're in college to get a good job and make a lot of money not to find well whether God exists or not and the students that come to my courses are usually much more motivated for the big questions than the average student all right well yeah yeah well hopefully yeah that would have obviously intellectual curiosity presumably if they're taking philosophy yeah and then have you taught master students and own doctor students yeah yeah yep BC is one of the I think 2% of universities in America that still require two philosophy courses for every student yeah philosophy is not not that popular anymore why have we replaced it with psychology no we've replaced it with technology ah ninety nine point four percent of all research and development money in American Universities goes to the stem courses zero point six percent go to all the arts and all the humanities combined we're becoming technocrats and why is that an issue why is that a problem would you say to them because if you don't know yourself which is what philosophy does you don't know who's using all these things and becoming so powerful in the massing of the world that's right and that's worthless it reminds me of Augustine's comment about going throughout the world and seeing mountains and passing by himself without caring a doctor nobody on his deathbed said you know I spent too little time working on this problem of how to make more efficient drains and too much time worrying about Who I am and what's the meaning of my life yeah nobody ever said that do you think we don't think about death enough of course we don't if you do that makes you lively if you think about people who have new death experiences always take life more seriously yeah and appreciate it more because we're fools we appreciate things only by contrast in heaven you won't need able to appreciate good but here we do and we need suffering to appreciate joy and death to appreciate life so if if your first thought in the morning is I might die today mm-hmm in light of that how shall I live that improve your life yeah who is one of your in the Catholic world who are you seeing that you're glad exists you know things like whether they be alive Catholics Yeah right now how are you like wow this person's impressive Michael O'Brien who I think is the best Catholic novelist alive okay Tony Esalen who I think is the best popular Catholic writer alive he's vented to stay awake yeah yeah actually just a couple of days ago I interviewed a bloke called Timothy Gordon and he had a child who was very sick brain-damaged and he wrote to Michael O'Brien and said what do i do I'm not really into my faith he I don't know why he reached out to him but Michael O'Brien wrote back and said you should pray to the Holy Spirit and so he began to pray to the Holy Spirit and he said one day they were in Mass and the child was about four or five or so forget them the age but the child who hadn't spoken started saying Holy Spirit Holy Spirit Holy Spirit repeatedly and he he took the why he's had the head of his wife and pulled her down they were both listening to it remarkable hey it's remarkable what what the human spirit is capable of my mother had Parkinson's disease my dad has that over the last 20 years of her life and as it progressed she became incapable of speech but not of song really she always loves to love certain him so she could still sing those hymns but quite eloquently when she couldn't speak it's amazing isn't it yeah it was your mom and even a Protestant when she oh yeah dad did you feel a great responsibility to try to convert them how did you deal with not being able no I felt more of a responsibility to comfort them they were shocked and saddened and they were loving and not nasty or condemning or anything you know like like a doctor seeing a patient contracting a horrible disease so there are a lot of arguments my mother was very simple soul not not brilliant not terribly aggressive just sort of sat there and listened nicely and I remember one discussion my father were having about purgatory and it was becoming very heated and he said doc if you believe in purgatory you don't really believe in justification by faith and all of that we were going round and round and we stopped for a minute my mother said John my father's name was John I think Peter really believes the same thing we do but he's just using a different word John in certain no of course not so my mother said Peter you believe everything in the Bible don't you I said yeah and she said well you believe that we're all sinners right right if we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us okay so on our deathbed we're still sinners okay and you believe what the Bible says about heaven that no sin enters us and heaven is absolutely perfect yeah I believe that and you believe that the difference between sin and holiness is immense they wouldn't can't pledge that I said right well then she turned to my father John I I think we just don't use the same word but we're really the same thing guys gotta do something to us we something yeah that's right that's right who cares if you call it purgatory or not no that's right I think sometimes as Catholics we get too hung up on the terminology rather than trying to help somebody understand it's the same thing with mortal and venial sin oh well forget those words for a second guessing we're in Philosopher's mm okay and okay so tell me who was your most impressive student you've been teaching for how many years now decades yes well my probably most intellectually brilliant student is someone who's probably retired now he told University of Texas name it's fantastic humic Ann yeah he got 100 every test another was another student who got a hundred every test and he's now my colleague father Ron to Sally oh but there were two students from the Camacho family Paul and Michael who both wrote masters theses on the theology of the body and they were both brilliant I don't know where they are now okay so speaking of that book a handbook for Catholic apologetics excellent book we talk about what the first book you wrote was or the trilogy what's the book you're most proud of if you're allowed to be proud of a book oh jesus shock oh it's very simple Boston press or um I love it you've written so many books you don't know it's see I heard that first as a talk and it blew me away I remember going to Mass I was living in Ireland at the time so I listened to it from your website I was so moved by it and I had never been so excited to go to Mass hmm so there you go for a different reason I think some of the soma has helped the most people get into Aquinas yeah I like to bridge the gaps between great and difficult philosophers and ordinary people yeah I think though my book I'm Pascal was the best written because I quote Pascal so much yeah and my novel an ocean full of angels although it's not a great novel I put the most blood sweat and tears and time into yes now tell us about that how long have were you writing that voice is your first fiction work my first and only one it took almost 20 years to finish you've started 20 years ago oh yeah thirty years ago it's ten years old now kuraki but it's uh it's it's a messy thing it's it's an angel's eye view of a connection between let's see Jesus Christ dead vikings mohammad post abortion trauma uh catholic universities russian prophets two and a half folks in one year the great blizzard of 78 armless nature mystics Dutch Calvinists seminarians philosophical Muslim surfers in the end of the world among the world happened in the book no no but it's discussed and no but it's sort of apocalyptic in the sense that Michael O'Brien means the term now what feedback what's your feedback pain from people you respect like Michael O'Brien I imagined read it did he yes and gave some good suggestions for it yes I've gotten one or two letters not too many but the ones I've gotten said I love your book yeah I think I got one from a sheep farmer in New Zealand which is really technically that's lovely I was just in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago so and then um how what's the difference for you it's like writing fiction versus writing nonfiction Oh what's the difference in a process you do not control fiction ha I thought I control it I had it plotted out yeah all the characters changed before my eyes as I let them that's really cool so you just have to wait until the plant grows and it takes a long time and all you do is cultivate it and you let your characters teach you instead of that place versa and speaking to other authors do they say the same thing like they don't plot it out strictly or yes in fact famous authors often say that Tolkien said that Jesus Eliot said that Paul valéry the art of poetry says that yeah that's that's how it works so you've written so many books and this is a tremendous gift that you have because you don't BS that's why people like you as an author it sounds like you're just speaking like a human speaks rather than trying to sound so hard I mean really laughter well you wouldn't think of but when I try to write I try to sound sophisticated no this is I don't know you don't know I do and that's why I'm not a good writer well you certainly heard speaker don't think you're right on target I just have to speak yeah right how I speak so compromise what is your how do you think you have to develop a speaking style in writing hmm the best compliment anybody ever gave me for any of my books was given to me by a guy who wrote one of the best in fact the best biographies of CS Lewis it's called Jack and his name is what's his name I forgotten his name I don't know anyway he was about 90 years old and this was Oh 30 40 years ago a I just come out with between heaven and hell the dialogue between CLO is John F Kennedy and Aldous Huxley we had supper together and he said how many times have you met Louis and I said never he said that's impossible I said why he said well it's easy to imitate Louis's writing style yeah but you've imitated his speaking style you must have heard him speak that's I said never yeah so there you go so what's your how do you write don't just say just do it there's gonna be some inspiring Catholics out there who want to take up the mantle and start I don't know I don't ask that question I'm not good at that question I'm not interested in that question I'm not a techie not even an intellectual spiritual jockey how do you do it what's your mess alright we're not a method then but what you must do devote time per day to write oh no not at all when important things taken care of when the house is not falling apart and they're not screaming then I go to the typewriter the laptop yeah and oh maybe I'll be there for a minute and something distracts me maybe I'll be there for five minutes and maybe I'll there be there for an hour that's that's what I do do you think the computer has made you a better writer or less of a good right reason is because I feel like as befits when you type right there's no room for error so you have to be intentional about the words you're right oh yes yes I don't know the answer of that question I know it's faster on a laptop I tried to go back to writing by hand I can't do it so that ability has dried up in me I can't handwrite it anymore yeah I have to type because it's just just faster is this how you did your original manuscripts back in the day would you hand write almost any publishers no I didn't write them and then copy them down on a typewriter oh I see yeah yeah and I've been looking for an old-fashioned word processor which is fast but it's just a fast typewriter they don't exist anymore ah so my writers do the talk about it still yes well yeah but they take too long and it's hard to revise them yeah yeah so I've done my best to accommodate to Microsoft Word and we have wrestling matches all the time yeah and it usually wins so I gotta get that book now which book the fiction book an ocean full of angels all right privacy I'm not proud of it because I know that by the canons of literary criticism is not a great novel yeah but there's so much stuff in it that it's gonna hit a lot of people in a lot of places I think my sister and I began writing short horror stories together like 20 page little things you know and we're terrible well that's not true we have we have interesting ideas that we both bounce off each other but I I would imagine part of the success being a successful fiction writer is just enjoying the craft and not wonder at worrying so much as to whether you're good or not well that's necessary we're not sufficient if you don't enjoy writing you're not going to do it well yeah but just because you enjoy it doesn't mean you're gonna do it well as being a professor for so many years has shown you when people hand in their papers I suppose I want to ask you about surfing mmm when did you start surfing in my mother's womb under Jersey Shore as a kid yeah we didn't even have surfboards we had canvas mats okay but that was good because you couldn't control it very much so you had to go where the wave went so I've always been a soul Surfer rather than a hot dogger oh what's that well somebody who whose attitude towards the wave is get down [ __ ] I'm the master yeah yeah yeah which is why I don't like stand up surfing beside you effect I have a balance problem so a bodyboard yep yep and you can do anything in a body boy do you can do it a stand up surfboard it's always easier yeah I once won a surfing contest I was down in Florida my son had just graduated from fi T he's a pilot and he left the car down there so I went down to bring the car back and along the way I went to Sebastian Inlet which is where Kelly Slater grew up and there was a surfing contest going on so I watched and there were these really good surfers who were doing amazing athletic things I was about 55 then I think and then they said we're now we're gonna have two other contests one for the groms that's the little kids under 12 and one for the old fogies anybody over 50 very good so the grounds were doing their fantastic thing too and there were just four or five old fogies all of them overweight except me yeah so they gave us all boogie boards and I just happened to catch the best wave and I want a surfing contest I came over day late and my wife met me at the door and said yeah you phoned me you'll be a day late but you didn't say why what you just said you had something important to do yeah I want a surfing contest you've got a did you get a certificate or a trophy no I think no no just the memory and then do you get to do that up in Massachusetts much yeah there are waves in westeros is believe it or not I remember one in 1978 no you have to okay when you're on a wave you lose your ordinary consciousness yeah you become one with the wave I'm a coward I don't take chances the one time I did something really foolish was when I was very much younger a hurricane had just hit the Jersey Shore and we were at Wildwood and nobody was in the water and there were no policemen to kick anybody out of the water because only a fool would go in yeah and the waves are still pretty big and there were rip tides all over the place and I was so naive I didn't know how dangerous rip tides were yeah and I started swimming and body surfing in those waves and I felt the rip tides carrying me back and forth fortunately they didn't carry me out but a syllogism almost killed me I thought I have become one with the ocean the one thing that can never drown in the ocean is the ocean itself therefore I can never drown I lost all fear I the kids carry me fortunately God said to the riptide don't carry him out dump him off the beach yes premise one was incorrect well there was equivocation being one with the ocean or some but it was mystical therefore I must have insurance I love the syllogism nearly killed a surfer who once warned me that's fantastic I learned to surf in Ireland believe it or not bloody freezing cold you had to wear those hats or the gloves of this thing and then I moved to San Diego and did it a bunch there did you ever see that surfing video where they're teaching professional servers are teaching Irish kids to surf no I never saw such white smiles in my life I really was on those kids face yeah you told me or you said at one point about a poll of surfers would you rather give up sex or surfing and the majority said they'd rather give up sex well this was from I think your New Yorker magazine interest in New York Times and it was a cross-section of surfers at various levels and that was the question and eleven of them said they would give up surfing and 89 of them said they'd give up sex and as a result the publication got very many angry letters from surfers saying this is a fake you couldn't find 11 people who would give up very good speaking of sex you've said one other thing that I thought was brilliant and I always always quote this you were saying I'm asking will we have sex in heaven is like a like a child upon hearing about sex for the first time asking her mum when we have sex can we have candy now oh honey you won't want candy like most of my ideas that was plagiarized from CS Lewis was it yeah almost everything is everything good so let's talk about just heaven and the fact that we can't we talk about not being able to pick Christ or the saints yeah heaven I can't think of it in a way that's not boring well that's because the best definition of heaven is the one that you get into adjustment eye has not seen ear has not heard nor has it entered of the heart of man mm-hmm trying to explain to an unborn baby what life in the world is like can't do it yeah it's more of everything yeah but in quantity not quality not just quantity so this is why when we read books about heaven or near-death experiences where someone goes to heaven and they tell us what it was like it bloody miserable yeah yeah there has never been a good movie about heaven yeah never okay because if you ask yourself like what do I most enjoy and you might say sex or surfing or eating tacos and drinking tequila well if you're honest I think you have to give as an answer to that question the very best answer what gives you the most joy and therefore what you enjoy the most is love loving other people loving God loving yourself yeah and Orford in order to do that you have to really know them I mean not only to love reinforce each other or you know the more you love the more you love the more you know so those are our six tasks on earth to get to know and love God your neighbor and yourself mmm and somehow we'll do that in heaven in a much better way than we do it down here so is this why when we're kind of deprived of love we we cease to be I don't know we kind of humanity lessons to a degree right oh yeah yeah that's like being deprived of food or air or water you shrivel up people keep telling me a story about babies who have left unattended will die I heard that enough that I assume it's true if you heard that yeah I also heard that Skinner boxes are outlawed because when you put the baby in the Skinner box you gave it all the technological to Skinner books Oh BF Skinner the Atheist materialist behaviorist psychologist at Harvard invented this box for ordinary babies that substituted from others it gave the baby everything but mechanically without human contact okay and this was his vision of the ideal world Oh God and some of the babies died no reason at all they just died yeah that's that's fascinating what are we living in right now brave new world on 1980 brave the world we're scared making 84 there's too much violence and suffering there so we're not gonna go back to the Nazis well we're gonna go forward to bury what we're already in brave new world yeah Huxley in the 50s he wrote brave in the world of 1932 I think in the 50s oh he already said I was wrong I thought it would take 300 years we're halfway there Wow we're now three quarters of the way there so for our listeners the difference between 1984 and brave new world 1984 is what the Tocqueville called a totalitarianism of force or a heart to italic arianism brave new world is a soft totalitarianism a totalitarianism of comfort yeah so it's almost like one's imposed from the top down and ones from the down up we choose our own slavery as opposed to thing imposed on us the first time I use brave the world as a required text in a course in philosophy and literature at Boston College I gave the students no guidance at all I said just read this over the weekend or over the vacation yeah we'll come back and talk about it in class and the discussion was not going anywhere for a couple of minutes until I realized that most of the students thought that Huxley was for brave in the world that it was a utopian sheet oh yeah I am not joking they read the whole book they read the whole book and they were they were disappointed that the the savage committed suicide yeah but he was a savage after all yeah and who wouldn't want to live in a world where there's free sex free drugs yeah free entertainment it's basically you know advanced Scandinavia yeah I read amazing article in The Boston Globe last year there's apparently an organization called the global Happiness Project which rates all the countries in the world but the happiness of its citizens having some sort of prize to the five happiest countries and some sort of warning to the five unhappiest countries and according to this bunch of experts the five happiest countries in the world are the five Scandinavian countries Oh Finland and Sweden and Norway and Iceland and Denmark the five unhappiest countries in the world are all in sub-saharan Africa I said this is a joke right because everybody even a baby who doesn't even know how to speak it knows how to recognize happiness when people smile they're happy Africans are smiling all the time we of course we speak about those dour Africans and those smiling Scandinavians right yeah and the surest indication of what not beerus is suicide yeah i people don't commit suicide the suicide rate in scandinavia is sky-high and it's very low in sub-saharan Africa I mean life there is hard and it's poor and it's it's dirty and it's but people smile that doesn't count all the counters your bank account mm-hmm idiots and life expectancy perhaps yeah but then if you're if you're not smiling and you're just concerned about your bank account life inspectin cease not gonna help you yeah I think the future of the churches in Africa oh okay good this was a question I want to ask you because you've given that answer about the the Roman fellow who were the Jewish fella who wanted to convert convert men to Rome saw the scandal yeah you know but but maybe maybe I'd love to dig into this a little bit more I don't wanna get gossipy I don't wanna get to the whole fight that's going on but I mean [ __ ] has hit the fan people are leaving in droves I think this is just gonna get more and more we're gonna see people leaving the Catholic just ten to one in Europe six to one in America xx vs. no Catholics all right so what where do you see the church in 50 years it'll be the Church of the poor and the persecuted it will continue to thrive remarkably in Africa in Muslim countries in China wherever its persecuted wherever its poor that's always happened the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church the Catholic Church is not infallible in its politics and I think Francis probably with the best of intentions has done a really really stupid thing in trusting the Communists to appoint bishops and trying to China yeah idiot yeah but this means that there'll be more suffering it won't mean that things will be nice it's it's it's doing what Jane really did it Munich and not really a thing that Hitler is Hitler but in such places things will change in Muslim countries I am told repeatedly by people who live in their own countries that more conversions to Christianity are happening now than ever before I say the same thing and they're all miraculous that's right it's concerned with visions yes something right so is it because we had this understanding of the church like here's here's our trajectory we're gonna you know youth ministries in every parish and this is gonna happen role will get the fish fry throughout Lent and a committee told us today yeah and so were like why is this not good we have a saying in Australia I just found out it was Australian you have you heard the expression pear-shaped when you say it's gonna go pear-shaped no I meaning it's gonna fall - it no but yes so maybe that's it I think the church should say what individuals say when they pray wisely to God but God I'm gonna give you a good laugh I'm gonna tell you my plans yes the next 10 years so then how do we what do we do other than our marching orders are very clear we know the two great Commandments we'd better get on with them so why is it that we look for other marching orders why is it that when you say that people go yes yes yes but because we have a big butt and do something comfortable yeah instead of well what are the most terrible words you can imagine sacrifice sin suffering mortification mm-hmm that's what makes sense give yourself away I see a lot of people crapping on mckarrick and I did the same thing for a while and I've just sorted praying for him more and more yeah it's like we we like to scapegoat people you know you can point at him then why stuff doesn't matter as much obviously what he did was terrible but how did what do you do when people start bringing this sort of stuff up to you do you try to avoid getting into specific persons what do you do when somebody fishes in a toilet bowl and rigs up a turd and says how do you smell this you ignore them and you say use the flush lever uh-huh good so then how does that apply to that I this with the the Cardinals and bishops [ __ ] yeah you flush it away find the way [ __ ] to go two words in the Bible school ah yes what was that poll said that didn't he in Philippians yes say what was the lawn I was going through I consider everything [ __ ] compared with knowing Christ yeah and scuba means and Paul had a lot of a lot of good stuff I'm Pharisee the pharisees as to the law blameless Roman citizen yeah a lot of perks yeah and that would Scoob Allah does mean human feces or just feces it it could be interpreted either as human remains or garbage either from the body or from household okay but Thomas Aquinas says something like that about his own works so it's all straw yeah I don't think you straw for in the Middle Ages what do cover [ __ ] yeah do cover animal feces it's all straw I had a priest once teach me something he said after I give a talk you know I'll pray I'll say Lord use everything use my [ __ ] as manure for their growth exactly isn't that a lovely thing to pray because we think it's all about us and we have to say things perfectly with the perfect inflection I will remember that prayer they're great at it for that's occur yeah use use my [ __ ] as manure for their growth yeah yeah well he he has very strange tastes I mean he continues you jackasses to do his work to ride into Jerusalem yeah beautiful Peter Craig thank you so much it was a pleasure I bless you has the two hours gone by so so I don't know who has it two hours nine minutes alright that's gonna have to do it here on the mat Fred show thank you so much for watching now if you're a patron go to patreon.com/scishow wrap up I just recorded it was really great I had Peter sign about 20 books and we told each other the funniest jokes we know and they are very inappropriate so I'm kind of glad it's not going public on YouTube so if you are a patron head over to patreon combat Fred right now and you'll be able to watch it if you're not yet a patron and you want access to a bunch of free material sign books all sorts of cool stuff please go to patreon.com/crashcourse a month there is a team of people working here about seven of us have I pay monthly to get the Matt Fred show and pints with Aquinas out there and so you would really be blessing us by choosing to become a patron and also we would bless you in return by giving you a bunch of bonus content like this post Show wrap-up video we just did if you don't like patreon for some reason some people don't and you want to just give to me directly you can give to me at pints with Aquinas comm flash donate it would mean a ton thanks so much god bless

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

Views: 68,103

Rating: 4.926477 out of 5

Keywords: Peter Kreeft, philosophy, catholic, christian, protestant, atheist, boston college, thomas aquinas, fradd, Jesus, pascal's wager, pascal, pope francis, vatican 2, vatican ii

Id: aLqf5EptHJ4

Length: 135min 14sec (8114 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019