Pints With Aquinas - Aquinas, Philosophy, and Stuff w/ Fr. Gregory Pine

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

In this episode, I welcome back Fr. Gregory Pine. Rather than focus on a single topic, we just kick back and talk about all sorts of things, such as:  - St. Thomas Aquinas’ tips for memory retention.  - What priests should—and should not—talk about in their homilies.  - The politicization of words such as “mercy.”  - How to discuss heaven and hell.  - Right versus wrong ways to approach tradition.   Sign up for my free course on St. Augustine's "Confessions"!   SPONSORS Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/   GIVING Patreon or Directly: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/  This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer co-producer of the show.   LINKS Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/   SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd Gab: https://gab.com/mattfradd Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas   MY BOOKS Get my NEW book "How To Be Happy: Saint Thomas' Secret To A Good Life," out now! Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx   CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day Father Gregory. How do? Do well. Good to have you in studio. Hey, delighted to be, thanks. Are you living in DC now? I am, yeah, for the summer. Oh, okay, that's why. So in Dominican land you can be assigned directly or indirectly. I'm assigned directly in Washington DC and then indirectly by reason of study in Freiburg, Switzerland. Sweet. Yeah. How's it been? How's the doctorate been? Is it progressing? Yeah, it is. Is it as hard as people say? So I think the thing that's hard about it is like looking in the mirror and realizing the only one that's not making the doctorate happen is you. You're like, ah, yes, it's me. I am the enemy. No, it's good. So in the American system, you have like classes to take and then exams and candidacy and then a proposal and then prospectus and then the

writing and then the subsequent defense. Whereas in the european system it's just like you propose something at the outset to a person that person says yes and the understanding is like you kind of are already motivated by the project so you just go to write that sounds like a better option it's great easier yeah yeah i mean there's a formation obviously that comes with classes and exams and stuff and it ensures a kind of consistency among doctoral candidates we're in the european system it's just like mixed nuts man and i'm just picking out the brazil nuts each time um so uh yeah so it's great insofar as you know with like house of study stuff i've studied saint thomas a decent bit so if i were to have another couple years of classes, I might be like, yeah.

So I'm glad just to be able to write, which is awesome. And I just heard from Father Bonaventure, Bonaventure? Yeah. That y'all had a God-splitting retreat? We did. Tell me about that.

How did that go? Yeah, so we went to Huntington, New York. I slow it down in pronunciation because there's T's and there's D's and I don't know which ones are soft and which ones are hard, so I just make them all sound silly. You don't want to say Huntington.

No, you wouldn't want that. I think it's Huntington. It's all T's. Okay, yep, my bad. We'll make this a clip for sure. T's and D's. So hard and soft pronunciation having been overcome. So it's this place on the north-ish shore of Long Island.

It's an old seminary called Immaculate Conception that was a seminary for the Diocese of Rockville Center, and it's beautiful. They have a made-up number of acres, 240 acres. I mean, that's definitely the right number. And so we had people come from all over. There's a person from Brazil, a person from Hawaii, a person from... There are a lot of people from Texas. I was sitting at a table on Saturday night, and I think the majority of people at a table of 10 were from Texas. I was like, how has God blessed this state so manifestly? Like you guys are testimony to his peculiar love. Yeah. And it was great. I mean, it looked like a retreat. So mass, confession, adoration,

divine office, some talks, a lot of time to hang out, smoke cigars, drink beer. It was great. I mean, it looked like a retreat. So mass, confession, adoration, divine office, some talks, a lot of time to hang out, smoke cigars, drink beer. It was great. I really want to do another Pints with Aquinas retreat. Yeah, let me know. Let me know if that's a possible place to go. Because my first idea was let's just do a Pints with Aquinas retreat. People can stay at the hotel.

We'll have Scott come here, give a few lectures, and we'll all just sit around smoking cigars angrily, drink pounding espresso. That's my idea of a good time that is a good time yeah i think having a bunch of people together who are angry is very powerful experience it is i went to a philadelphia 76ers game uh recently with my brother and i was like here are 19 000 of my closest angriest friends i just felt so embraced by speaking of angry conferences michael Michael Boris texted me a few weeks ago, and he's like, hey, you want to speak at this upcoming conference? I think what it's, I don't know what it's called. It's not like sick and tired.

He's like, the bishops are going to hate it. I'm like, why would you think that would make me into this? What do you think about me? But I'm like, I was busy, so I said no. But got it. It's my wife. Why would my wife be calling? I don't know.

You can take it. This is what happens. Let's see what she says. Hello? Oh, gosh. Oh, hey. Hey, I'm doing a live stream right now. Can I call you back?

Bye. That could have been so bad. What if my wife was super angry? Yeah. It's hard to say how that could have gone. It was my son. But you did it. I just thought it would be longer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that was great. Yeah. You all right? You've ruined me as a father. No, I'm just looking at that video. 164 people watching. This chat is for us.

It's not for them. It's got nothing to do with them. All right? Yeah. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so angry people in the same room. Retreats.

Retreats. Angry people in the same room. Yeah, so this place is beautiful. And the staff there were motivated to help us, which is cool. Is this upstate New York? So it's like you go to New York City, and then you go out on Long Island for 25 minutes, and then you just bop north for a bit. And so they have a commanding view of Lloyd Harbor, if I were writing the tourism video for it.

And they just have a lot of greenery, a lot of nice walks. They're building this kind of water worky amphitheater, which sounds like a strange concept, but it looked like they had terraced this part of their property so as to accommodate people for outdoor seating. But then it also looked like they had some water features running through it.

So I'm excited to see how that plays out. Is it like a Catholic family that just loves what you're doing? So it's the Diocese of Rockville Center, I think, that just continues to run it. Sweet. Yeah. Was it a charming place? Yeah, yeah. Catholic family that just loves what you were doing? So it's the Diocese of Rockville Center, I think, that just continues to run it. Sweet. Yeah.

Was it a charming place? Yeah. Yeah. Good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's oldie timey. So you get into your room, and to turn on your bathroom light, you do this thing, one of these numbers. And then you sit on your bed.

The bell rings. Oh, crud. Yeah, right, exactly. You sit on your bed, and it folds in half and embraces you, but in a good way. No, actually, it was just very simple, but in a kind of monastic simplicity like undistracting simple and then they have air conditioning window units which need to be on full blast in the middle of july if you're going to have any chance at sleeping but those are all the negative things yeah and i pitched them all as positive things so i would go back okay cool is it hot in here

a little hot do you want to crack that door just a smidge? Yeah, sure. What are the chances that I upset that camera? Decent? No, it's on autofocus, so it'll get weird until you just smash. Yeah, come. I've got Peter Kreeft coming in on the fourth. That's awesome. And I can't have him be dying. Dying. I can't have him die. I've really going to get this place cooler and some kind of event happening. But okay, cool. And have you all done your Thomistic Institute conference yet?

Yeah, so the TI had maybe six conferences this summer. So they have a few regularly recurring ones. The Aquinas Philosophy Workshop is one that people might be interested in. It's ordinarily in Newburgh, New York. This year it was in Greenville, South Carolina at St. Mary's Parish. I don't know if you've heard of Father J. Scott Newman, but he'd be a great guy to have on the show. Just, he's awesome. And his parish is beautiful. When the bishop assigned him there, the bishop

said, I want you to go here. He said, cool, just as long as you leave me there. And the bishop was like, maybe? Yes, yes. So, he's been there for 21 years, and as a result of the continuity, he's built a lot of I mean he in kind of coordination with the parish community the parish has built beautiful things

both like on the human scale and on the developmental scale so you like they have like a school and then another school and then they have a big parish center

and then now they're building a new church and they're they're like very engaged it's not just like a Catholic for us but they're also engaged with the wider community

and it's awesome it's really cool to see. So we were there. That was great. Aquinas Philosophy Workshop. And then the TI had a bunch of other conferences. I plugged into one called Chivitas Day, which is not Pro Chivitati Day, just a different one. I don't know what any of those things are. Yeah, it doesn't matter. So it's like Faith in Public Life and Tom Hibbs, who teaches at Baylor University, and then Philip Bibbs who teaches at Baylor University and then Philip Bess who teaches at Notre Dame and then Father Reginald Lynch each gave lectures on art meaning in the public square which was sweet interesting yeah so it spawned or it encouraged spawn sounds like aliens coming out of people's arms like it encouraged a lot of really excellent

conversation among a lot of really cool people. So I help with those too. And then since then, I've had a couple other ones, but I haven't had as much to do with them. Hey, speaking of art and public square, what do you think? I mean, have you spent much time thinking about how it is that people like our age and younger, like really are wanting a traditional liturgy, a beautiful liturgy? Yeah, yeah. Like I'm here in Steubenville and people my age it felt like 15 years ago we're doing what I was doing like the guitar masses things like that and the kind of charismatic carries a lot of baggage but

that kind of prayer and now I think all of us are just like traditional and it leads me to think did we do we just grow naturally and this is a good thing is this a pendulum thing was that a f pendulum thing? Was that a fad? And if that was a fad, is this a fad? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a great question. So I think that all of us have a kind of lingering fear of arbitrarity. You're not as conscious of it when you're little, you know, but you don't want to like show up for a thing that isn't going to last, right? Because it's like, is this here because it's good, or is this here because someone randomly chose that it be here? That's kind of like an abstract

way to describe it. But this idea of the pendulum swinging, I think that there's a sense in which the pendulum is bound to swing, right? And I think that there's a kind of healthy ecclesial and liturgical sentiment to like, well, how do we cultivate a common life of worship, you know, of prayer that can actually be handed on, you know? And here I think about the way that Chesterton describes tradition. He says, he gives this example, this is a paraphrase, but if you come to a fence in the woods, right, you got to know better what it keeps in or what it keeps out before you tear it down. So I think that there's something good to be said for recovering tradition,

but trying to recover tradition in a way that's organic rather than contrived. So I think sometimes just people exercise the preferential option for the ancient. So because it's old, it's good, but without necessarily evaluating the reasons for which it didn't last. So I think that that's got to be part of the conversation. There are these good things on offer. We tried other things, and it didn't seem to have worked as well. So if we go back to the good things that were on offer, we need to be critically conscious of the reasons for which they weren't fully received.

That's good, because I think a lot of us think of the traditions prior to Vatican II. It's like, it was great, there were some idiots, now it's bad. It must be a little more nuanced than that, surely. Yeah, no, it is. And I think that that's part of the way by which to better appreciate the Second Vatican Council. Like, people just think, sometimes they'll look at it and they'll just be like, oh, bad. But I don't think it's sufficient to say like, well, have you read the documents? That's kind of like a, well, actually type response. But I think it's good to be critically conscious of the ways in which things before the council weren't ideal, right, or were lacking or limited.

I mean, even church architecture. People just assume in 1965 everything got bad. But a lot of ugly churches were built in the 1950s. Okay, so, like, what's the reason for that? I mean, church architecture is kind of just downstream of wider architectural movements, and modernism had already creeped into the American city. And as a result of which, like, for instance, this building that you're in, I imagine, is on the historical register.

The only reason the historical register exists is because of modernism, right? The only reason for which cities started saying, we need to preserve certain buildings, is because they realized that they didn't have a coherent vision of what a city looked like. And they were like kind of reeling when things started disappearing and they weren't replacing them with durable, beautiful structures. And so they're just kind of grabbing at straws. So that's a way to approach tradition, but it's a way that approach approaches tradition with a kind of frantic spirit. It's like, yeah. So I don't think that we want to be like that. We don't want to just put things on the historical register because we're afraid of them disappearing, but we lack a substantive vision of what's good in its place. So yeah, when it comes to the Second

Vatican Council, I think that it's good to be aware of the history that leads up to it. And American Catholic history is fascinating for this reason. I don't know if, you know, everyone's like read, whatever, David Tracy, or what's his name? David Tracy Ellis? John Tracy Ellis? Ellis? No? Tracy? Hard to say. Or this guy, Perko, Francis Perko. There's a couple of books out there from the mid-20th century, mid-late 20th century, about being Catholic and being American, what that looks like, how it went. And it gives you a deeper sense of how very fraught was that relationship. And then that helps you to contextualize.

People like John Courtney Murray, you know, talking about religious liberty and things like that. So those are some random spitball-y thoughts. Have you ever read Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy? I have. If I'm remembering correctly, the church was fragmented into different warring sections. And if I'm not mistaken, there was the American church, which was headquartered in, I think the Vatican was in St. Louis. And they were celebrating the Tridentine Mass, and they would sing the Star Spangled Banner or something like that. I'm like, ah.

Because I try to be critical about, okay, I live in America now. because I try to be critical about like, okay, I live in America now. Yeah. Like I'm even aware that I have different opinions about, you know, what government should and shouldn't be doing, you know, compared to when I was living in Australia. And I'm trying to figure out, is that just because I've kind of grown

and thought about this more? Is that just because I've drunk the Kool-Aid? But something similar too, like with my love of tradition and the Latin mass and things like that. And I wonder how much of it is due to this kind of, what do they call it, like fluid modernity or where we don't have any kind of heritage.

We're not sort of connected with any sort of tradition. I wonder if that's part of why Ancestry.com is such a massive thing that we just want to be grounded somewhere. I wonder if that's part of our longing to return to something stable. Yeah. No, I think that's a good point. That is a good point. I think that where – so I think that sometimes recovery of tradition bridges on nihilism because what you have there is a choice for something, but you aren't receiving that thing in the ordinary way.

So ordinarily, a tradition is handed down. Yes, yes. Right? There's a kind of continuity. And you are normalized, right? You're kind of made a member of that community as you receive its tradition. So like, thinking about the Dominican Rite, maybe you go to a Dominican parish when you're a kid, you grow up learning how to serve the Dominican Rite, maybe, you know, just a Roman Rite priest, like a diocesan priest comes to fill in when your

priests are at their provincial chapter or something like that. And you realize there's something different to it. And you're like, huh, you know, you start comparing those differences and you have a kind of critical conscious as to how your experience is distinct and then maybe good, better, you know, you can appreciate it as distinct. And then as you're thinking about becoming a priest, maybe at 18, 19, 20, you're like, you know, the guys in my parish were this way. I benefited from their pastoral service. Maybe it makes sense. I like love their saints. I love the way in which they pray. And then you kind of step into that. And then you're taught to celebrate the Dominican Rite. And it's something for you that's already part of your memory of life.

It's something that you grew up with. It's something that shaped your Sunday mornings. It's something that's kind of... Natural, positive. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's organic, right? Organic, yeah. And so when you begin to celebrate it, it's not like, you know, ha, let's stick it to the Novus Ordo, folks. It's just like, this is who I am, and I have reasons for it, but some of those reasons, yeah, they're not the type of reasons that I could argue out in systematic fashion.

They're like reasons that are part of my family life and my church life and my general ecclesial life. So, yeah, I think that whenever you have a rupture in the communication of a tradition, then it always problematizes the way that you go back and then recover a thing. Because it's just like, is this an aesthetic choice, right? Is this a political choice?'s just like, is this an aesthetic choice? Right? Is this a political choice? What kind of choice is this? And I don't know that we're entirely capable of purifying our intentions or having unmixed motivations when we bring that about, but it's just, it's hard. Right?

And I think that we need to acknowledge at the outset that it is hard. But I think you see a lot of TLM communities do that well and do that beautifully. And it's not just like, we're going to have a ton of kidsM communities do that well and do that beautifully and it's not just like we're going to have a ton of kids to out populate the atheists you know they're like they genuinely welcome life's life into their families and they make of it a gift to their parish community you know to their school community to you know and it's it's awesome it's an invitation it's an invitation to a bigger beautiful way of going about things yeah I had this idea,

and I think I shared this with Scott in our interview, that almost like reclaiming tradition, there's going to be an awkwardness to it. It's almost like going to an antique store and choosing something that will now be a family heirloom that you will now be passing down. It's like it's not really yours, but you're making it yours, and there's a natural awkwardness to that.

And I think maybe that's kind of what we see sometimes when we complain about traditionalists or when people complain about traditionalists. It's like, it's bound to be awkward in the beginning when you're reclaiming something that you think was taken from you. Yeah. And I think too, it's, we feel like at this juncture of our modern lives, like if it's reasonable, you have to be able to give arguments for it. But I don't think that's true. I think a thing can be reasonable for reasons that you can't necessarily express. Like St. Thomas will say that a little old woman knows more of the faith than the wisest of philosophers, because it's given to her by faith. And so she can hear Father get up there and say, you know, the Father creates the Son, and the Father and the Son create the

Holy Spirit. And she's like, I don't know the technical language, but that sounds weird. You know, she's got a sense of the faith, and as a result of which she can sniff out error, and she knows the type of preaching by which she's nourished, and she's able to sort the wheat and the chaff. But she can't necessarily give you arguments as to why it's problematic to say that the Father creates the Son. But she'd prefer that you say begets or, you know, generates, but, you know, she can't quite put a finger on that pulse. And I think that when

recovering tradition, so when it's a matter of recovering tradition and people kind of come at you and say, like, why are you doing this? You know, state your reasons. It's hard because we don't have access to the ordinary organic ways in which reasonableness is communicated. Like, this is a part of my family. This is a part of my worshiping experience. This is a part of my tradition. Because those reasons, they just haven't come to you in the ordinary mode. And so you feel like you have to give arguments for it. Like, it's better for reasons 1 through 17, and I will now enumerate them in kind of indexical fashion.

It's like, yeah, I just don't know. It's tough. There's also situations where you encounter, like I was talking to Scott Hahn yesterday. He's always telling me not to name drop. I'm just joking. But he said he was at a baptism, a traditional Latin mass, and how glorious it was. I guess you put salt in the child's mouth for some reason that I know not. But I think when you encounter that,

you see that it is objectively superior to what we're doing in most parishes. And I think you can make that judgment, even if you're not sure why you're making it. Like you can make the judgment that all things being equal, it would be better to have a marble altar than a card table. Like one just seems more fitting. Right. Even if it's just because it's not common and it's more expensive to make and seems prettier.

Like even if those are your reasons. Yeah, yeah. And I think just like you can do that with physical objects, you can do that with other things. Like that music seems more appropriate to this thing that we're doing. That baptism seems more appropriate to this thing that we're doing. That baptism seems more appropriate. It seems to reveal what's taking place more fully in a way that this one doesn't. Yeah, so I guess within bounds, I agree with that line of argumentation because you can play that in a way where a baptism now takes an hour and 15 minutes.

It's more fitting that you have 216 pre-baptismal anointings. It's like, I don't know. That's fair. Maybe there's something good for the simplicity of it. So I just celebrated an extraordinary form of baptism maybe two weekends ago, which is awesome, but it looks very similar to the ordinary form. What's the salt thing going on? It's like you bless salt, so you exercise salt,

and it's part of these preparatory rites, which are like exorcisms, effectively. Yeah. So it's, there's this recognition, so in the kind of catechumenal way of the ancient church, a lot of people that were being baptized

would have been participants of pagan rites. Okay. So there'd be real concern there over demon worship. Mm-hmm. And so there are these extended rights at the outset for the sake of exorcism. And so, you know, you exercise, you bless and exercise the salt, and then you put it on the child's tongue in a certain sense to associate

that with like the bitterness, basically, of a past life of heathenism, right? So it's a preparatory right. But then there are these other both preparatory rites and explanatory rites that come after, most of which are exactly the same in the extraordinary form and then in the ordinary form. So like the epithet, for instance. So where you would make a sign of the cross over the child's nose and ears. That's also, so it's just kind of straight up in the old rite and in the new rite. And I don't, you know, I'm not like kind of making a side-by-side comparison of the different prayers as they're uttered, or the liturgical gestures if there's significant differences between them,

but just kind of having celebrated both, my feel for it, this is how I've kind of come to understand it. But like, you know, you have the pre-baptismal anointing with the oil of catechumens, you have the post-baptismal anointing with the chrism, you have the clothing in the white garment, you have the handing on of this candle, you know, so like a lot of it looks very similar. So there aren't huge changes, but that one with salt is one of them, and it reflects more the fact that there is, you know, our battle is not with flesh and blood, it's with principalities and powers, and so we need to be cognizant of the fact that there are demons, right? There's the evil one, there are demons, they want you to go to hell, and we need to kind of mark you for Christ and expel those

powers at the outset, which is a real thing, and it's a good thing. And I think that we can affirm that, but I don't want to say, as a result of which, we should spend another 25 minutes doing these. That's a good point. Yeah. Because if your argument is, it's more beautiful and more intricate, it's like, well, where does that end? Well, let's make it more beautiful and more intricate. Baby, you have no idea how intricate this is about to be. Yeah, exactly. It's a three-hour baptism. Don't you see how much more beautiful it is? Now, that's a fair point. I was actually complaining to my wife last night about what I call kind of a piety creep within the rosary. So it's like you finish your decade, and now there's 18 extra prayers that we've all added in. And so the rosary now takes an hour instead of 20 minutes.

And I find that infuriating. But I also find it difficult to explain why I'm upset about praying. Without sounding impious. Without sounding like a jerk. So it's almost like we have this idea, like, if it's longer, it's better. Which is interesting because the rosary first came to us just with that first half. Hail Mary, full of grace, always be blessed.

I am one who blesses, really am Jesus. And that was it. And have we talked about this before always be blessed, all the way among you, blessed is the Lord your name, Jesus. And that was it. And have we talked about this before? This is one of my things. I have like fives. This is one of them. Yeah, like that was how, that's how, well,

people prayed the rosary. Until when? The Black Plague? I think that was the other half was added. I've heard it attributed to Alain de La Roche, which would be like, yeah, Black Plague, 15th century. I think like some of the first Black Plagues are 14th century, but it keeps going for like another 200 years.

But it makes you, okay, now I see why Louis de Montfort could get on his knees and pray 150 Hail Marys, because he wasn't praying 100 prayers in between each decade, and he was only praying half the Hail Mary, you know. And then I thought to myself, if the Hail Mary was originally three times as long, I feel like there would be some circles in which there would be this desperate tradition to return to that, the original way of praying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no one would do that because it's shorter. I don't know if it's because we have this sort of shorter is not as good, not as pious,

so we shouldn't be going back to how it was originally prayed. Yeah. But a good response to that is, okay, but then there's those same traditional people who wouldn't go back to something that was shorter but would go back to it if it was longer, aren't necessarily praying like the luminous mysteries, which is additional. So they're not saying necessarily pray four rosaries a day. So like a principled thought and then a practical thought. Principled thought being that I think that prayer should be on a human scale. So it's for God. It's for divine worship.

But it's to lead us through divine worship to God. So St. Thomas will say, why the sacraments? Why do we have the sacraments as we have them? Specifically, why do we use physical things to communicate spiritual realities? And he says, that's how we learn right we go from the body well basically we go from experience of physical things to experience of uh spiritual things yeah what's more known to us to what's less known and then he talks about how it's humbling we send but we sinned by pride originally so it's good that we be humbled having to kind of stoop to pick up humble things

in order to be exalted. And then he says it's good that we take hold of something lest we fall into idolatry, because we're going to take hold of something, so it's better that we take hold of sacraments. So I think that the sacraments are accommodated to us as human beings, and then just the sacramental life or the liturgical life more broadly. So as a result of which, prayers should be on a human scale, right? They should be ennobling, so they should challenge us in a certain way, but they should also not be overly burdensome such that we flee from them, because then we're going to find something else. We're going to find an idol. And so I think with the rosary, it's good to have that sensibility, and there's always going to be a little bit of back

and forth between too short and too long, but we're going to find a human scale in our historical meanderings. So in the Dominican kind of tradition, as it were, we just get right into it. So, you know, you typically pray the rosary, you say the Apostles' Creed, the Our Father, Three Hail Marys, Glory Be, and then you say other things. You start with First Decade? We basically start with a half of a Hail Mary. So the first half of the Hail Mary, as you just described, and then Lord open my lips, and then God come to my assistance, and then Glory Be, and then First Hail Mary. So the first half of the Hail Mary as you just described. Yeah. And then Lord open my lips and then God come to my assistance and then a Glory B and then first decade.

Okay. So you just launch. And at the end, we typically don't say the St. Michael prayer. Yeah, yeah. So we just end with the Hail Holy Queen.

I've actually been making an effort to kind of like take out those extra prayers. Yeah. And partly because I have four kids that don't have an attention span. Yeah. So we just begin

with the first decade prayer. I didn't even add the Fatima prayer. We're just doing the, yeah, Glory B. We also remove the Fatima or we don't, we never added the Fatima prayer. We're just doing the, yeah, glory be. We also remove the Fatima, or we don't, we never added the Fatima prayer. So in a certain sense, you can harken back to a time during which it was not part of the rosary. But it does sound a little bit impious when you explain it to some people. And you don't want it to sound impious, but it's just like, I can tell you that if the rosary lasts 13 minutes or 13 to 15 minutes,

which is what it does in community, then more people will come, right? But if it lasts, I mean, unless you put them kind of under grave obligation to come, as it were, but if it lasts 17, 19, 21 minutes, a lot of guys are just going to pray the rosary on their own because they'll find it to be more prayerful because it's just easier to get frustrated in a community where you have a lot of things attached. And the same thing with the Mass. So like the Dominican Rite, for instance, has been in ongoing conversation with the Roman Rite, and the Holy Father will sometimes say, you guys got to add this to your calendar, you got to change this to whatever. And the prayers at the end of Mass, so you'll pray the St. Michael Prayer, the Hail Holy

Queen, you'll say some invocations of the Sacred Heart, things like that. So the Dominican Rite just never incorporated that. And the reason isn't because Dominicans are impious, but it's just like, mass should be about, you know, 23 to 25 minutes. What I'm doing on my phone right now is looking up what Aquinas has to say about prayer. And he's asking whether prayer should last a long time. I'm going to just try and see if I can get to this here. We speak about prayer in two ways. First, by considering it in itself. Secondly, by considering it as cause. the cause of prayer is the desire of charity what does that mean uh so he talks about prayer as interpretive it is a theory so like it interprets our desire so it wells up as a result

of love yeah that's where it from that's where he says that's where it ought to arise from and this and this desire ought to be in us continually either actually or virtually for the virtue of this desire. I think virtually, you think like internet today. What do you mean by virtually? Like present in a higher way. Okay. So like present in a power.

I love this from Aquinas, or from Augustine. It says, from this point of view, prayer ought to be continual. Wherefore, Augustine says, faith, hope, and charity are by themselves a prayer of continual longing that's nice your dad would like that sorry here's the main point but prayer considered in itself cannot be continual, I love the practicality of Aquinas

because we have to be busy about other works, translation can't pray at all times, I've got stuff to do yeah sorry, continue busy about other works. Translation, can't pray at all times, I've got stuff to do, right? Yeah. Sorry, continue. No, I was just going to say, so he'll say,

you know, you got to sleep in the most basic way, but you also got to take out the trash. And so prayer ought to be conducted habitually. Yes. Yeah. So it becomes that prayer should last long enough to arouse the fervor of the interior desire. And when it exceeds this measure,

so that it cannot be continued any longer without causing weariness, it should be discontinued. Like, again, that sounds impious, but it's not. It's taking into account our human nature. Brilliant. I love it. Boom. Yeah, so I think that at the same time, I mean, it's just a kind of sane anthropological point

that you should love praying in a kind of basic way. It doesn't mean that you should only pray when you feel good about it, because there are other comparable experiences in human life which I think help to bring out the point. What does it mean to love? Like, so you love your children, right? And when your children are sick, you would tend to their needs. When your children are happy, you would tend to their needs. When your children are whatever, kind of like fill out the rest of the details, you're going to tend to them, but it's going to be adapted to time, place, and circumstance. But the baseline is that you love your children, and then you perform different acts corresponding to the different places

or the different times or the different settings. And I think that prayer is like that. So we want to cultivate a habitual givenness to God, right? To have God as our end, to love him with our whole mind, heart, soul, and strength. But that kind of breaks forth in act throughout the course of the day, throughout the course of our lives, but in such a way where we're not like making of the other individual a personal project. Like, I am going to be present to you my young son every minute of every day so that you know how very much i love you it's like your son's like i know you know i know you love me this much not this much we refer to that as helicopter parenting yeah exactly and we see that as a

negative thing yeah so you don't want to like that it doesn't have to be smothering with respect to another human being but with respect to god you can think about it in the sense that like um you want to have an experience of god that is one of like a kind of genuine exchange, one that's like of a real friendship. And if you're always motivated by anxiety, you're just going to associate your relationship with God as an anxiety-filled, somewhat traumatic experience of like boredom and tedium, which isn't good, right? So maybe, yeah, that kind of introducing that human analogy is helpful for saying you got the baseline love which is habitual and then it breaks forth into these different acts but the acts

you know they should they should continue as long as is necessary as it were sweet i got that pensive beard yeah you know speaking of the kind of flip-flop or the pendulum swing thing, pendulum swing thing, I do think, too, that there might be something in regards to how we speak about hell today that might be a result of the pendulum swing. Maybe talk about that for a bit. But, you know, we constantly talk about not hearing homilies about

hell yeah what's interesting is i also can't remember how many homilies i've heard about heaven yeah yeah it's almost like we're just dull people who can't imagine one way or the other how good or how terrible things could be i don't know but but i wonder if as a result of that there is this push to be like everyone's going to hell uh faustina is a joke. Like the Divine Mercy thing, that's just... Do people say that? Oh, yeah. Have you heard this? Yikes. Yeah, this is one of those bad trad things.

You know, like I understand that trads online are different to trads in parishes. And we don't want to kind of confuse the two. But yeah, like right now, I'm sure in the live chat, there's probably some people who are like, modern-ass joke, things like that. And I wonder, though, if she spent her time talking about everyone going to hell, if they'd be doing that. I don't know if they would.

They'd either just leave it alone or they'd totally get behind it. But it seems to me that like we live in such confusing times, not just in society, but in the church. Like we need this message of the mercy of God more than ever. But, you know, it's been my experience where if I devote an episode to the mercy of God, there's a lot of people who try to correct me. I'm like, no, we should preach the gospel in season, out of season. So even if you think it's out of season, we still need to be talking about the mercy of God because there are certain people who need to hear that. All of us need to hear that. But yeah, what's your opinion on that? I mean,

I know you live in a different world to me, the tower of academia and all that, but have you encountered this? I mean, I live in the tower of self-imposed ignorance, which is like, well, whatever. That's where we should have the retreat. Yeah, there you go. So I, okay, so first thought is this. I don't think the homily, this is not your main point, but maybe I'm just going to take the opportunity to say it.

I don't think the homily is the place to address many things, right? Because I think the one of the principal virtues of a homily is that it proposes God for contemplation, right? But I think that in order to propose God for contemplation, you need to be attuned to this fact that we just covered about prayer, right? That it should be accommodated to a person's attention. And I think that for a daily Mass homily, three to four minutes is good. For a Sunday homily, I think maybe seven to ten minutes is good. And I think that there are certain doctrines that you can't teach well in a compact unit of speech without potentially upsetting more people than you actually console, help, encourage, instruct, admonish, etc. Right? So there are some things which are just,

by virtue of the present political climate, kind of incendiary, kind of upsetting, and I don't think that you should touch those things in such a way where your expectation would be more to upset than to encourage. Does that make of you a coward? I'm sure some people think that it does. I don't, because I think that if you preach the gospel, right, if you preach God and you preach his Christ, you preach the mysteries of, you know, the Trinity and the Incarnation, you preach the mysteries of the redemption and the dispensation of grace, that you're going to start getting people in other contexts where you're able to catechize them, instruct, admonish in a way that's more adequate.

And then you can begin taking on these more controverted issues in a way so that the other person doesn't feel like the homily has become a political space where they are now better disposed to receive the teaching. So I just don't think that a homily is always going to be the space in which it's best or most appropriate to address certain concerns. There are things, like in the American church especially, where I think it's good to preach a couple times a year about abortion, but I'm not sure how often or if one ought to preach about gender ideology or same-sex attraction or things like that.

Vaccines. Yeah, for instance. Yeah. I just, I'm kind of of unsettled mind, and I can be of unsettled mind because I don't have care of souls. I'm not preaching to the same congregation week in and week out, so I don't have to make these types of pastoral decisions. So it's like easy for you to say, punk kid. I mean, point. But yeah, but I was in a parish for

like a year and a half, and I thought about it during that time, and I made the decisions that I did, which I just reflected. So then when it comes to like things that you described, things that have become politicized, I think that you're always going to have people from either direction characterizing your speech in a certain way, shape, or form. So, you know, I don't know if people read comments, but I suspect that comment boxes are kind of a terrible place in which to encounter this type of acrimony. But I think that you start with God, right? And this sounds like you would say that, start with God. But you start with God, and then you move on from there. Not in the sense that you leave God behind, but that you explain everything in light of God. So mercy, for instance. St. Thomas talks about it in a

non-political setting, right? It's in the prima pars. It's in considerations which pertain to the one God. And he goes through those things that have kind of ruled out creaturely limitations. So he'll say, for instance, he's simple, which is to say he's undivided. He'll say he is infinite, which is to say he's not limited. He'll say, you know, dot, dot, dot. And then he moves into things pertinent to God's intellect and will. And when talking about the will, he talks about love and justice, and he talks about mercy. And there he just does the very simple work of saying, like, what is mercy? You see a sorrowful state, a miserable state, and then you work to alleviate it. In the human case of the kind of like the exhibiting of mercy, you're struck by that

sorrowful state. So that sorrowful state causes you misery of heart, and then that in a certain sense motivates, that pity motivates your response. In God's case, there is no pity, right, because God doesn't have passions in the way that we have passions. God pre-contains them, right, virtually, super eminently. So he has all the perfections proper to what we experience in our passionate life. But he does alleviate those things in the way that's most efficacious and excellent. Because with respect to God, everything is inferior, right? And mercy is from a superior to an inferior. Not to say that, like, if I, you know, perform some act of mercy for another individual, then I am superior to them qua individual.

It's just with respect to this particular difficulty, right? So that's eminently true of God. So when we're talking about mercy, we're talking about something that's metaphysically thick. Now, mercy may have been co-opted by certain voices on the right or on the left and made into something which is more or different than that. And then as a result of which people have a kind of reaction against it in discourse, they'll say it is what thus and such a person made of it. Okay. And especially this has been true like in the last five to seven years as mercy has become a buzzword. And I think that we want to stay kind of clear of that politicization

of discourse insofar as we can't permit our language, we can't permit our concepts to be co-opted by contemporary political debates. We need to like retain them in their metaphysical thickness and use them as they are meant to be used, but taking every opportunity to clarify our use of those terms so people don't think that we're falling into political tropes. Not because we're insecure, but because we want to give people access to the actual things that are being described so that they don't kind of cut off their humanity from the full breadth and depth of God's riches. And if God isn't merciful, then we've got ourselves an incredibly huge problem

because that means that God doesn't act as superior vis-a-vis inferior in a way so as to alleviate sorrow, which means that we're just a bunch of like half-bred infants wallowing in a pool of our own filth, which is... Yikes. So, yeah. I would say reclaim the discourse, propose it in a way that's coherent, that's loving, right? And then try to bring people back into a conversation that embraces both right and left. And I think you're good at this.

I think you're good at having conversations with people with whom you might not agree on every point, but kind of holding back. I think cancel culture has made it very, very difficult to host conversations among people who may differ on points, substantive or accidental. So encouragement, keep killing it. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Yeah, what are some ways that you've tried to help people understand

the depth and breadth of a particular term that may have been co-opted? I mean, words like that, mercy, justice, gender is a relatively new word, I suppose, in the sense of. But, yeah, sex. Can you think of kind of words that you've had to help your flock understand? Yeah, I think my, I feel very motivated by the desire to reclaim the word God and to reclaim the word Jesus. Yeah. Because I think it starts in that most

kind of fundamental place. I think when people hear God, they hear all kinds of different things. Yeah, I was gonna ask you that. What do you think people, I mean, this is a general question, but what do you think people typically think of when they think of God and how should they think of God? Yeah, I think that we- Go. Yeah, nice. I think when people typically think of when they think of God and how should they think of God? Yeah. Go.

Yeah, nice. I think when people typically think of God, they think of the one who threatens to punish their lifestyle, which in the Christian dispensation is called sinful, but which they have experienced as less difficult than struggling. Amen. What a beautiful way to put it. Yeah.

And I think God ought to be proposed not principally as a punisher, not because God doesn't punish or mete out justice in accord with the just desserts of those who commit transgression. But I think that if you bring the conversation back to, like, you know, this sounds like such a nerd thing, but Prima Parra's questions two and three, just, like, start with the fact that God is, but in a way that is more philosophically informed, right? To kind of like get some of that on the table, not because people need to think that the five ways obtain, or they need to be impressed by the rigor of their logic, but they need to think about God as the one who moves, you know, the sun and the stars,

to use Dante's language, before they think about them as one who punishes transgression, right? God who, I'm thinking about De Patencia, question three, article seven, which I just, blah, blah, blah, who cares, backstory, no one gives a rip. But God who gives us to be, who conserves us in being. God who gives us to act and conserves our act. So this sense that God is the primogenitor of being and of agency. If you think about the very fact of our existence, the very fact of our causing being itself God's gift,

you think about the fact that we are being on loan, right? But a loan that God has promised never to renege upon because such is the nature of his divine consistency. Like those types of things I think are actually helpful. And would I preach them in exactly those terms? No, but I think that you can preach them in terms which are receivable. Like that God has decided in you that it is good to be in this way. Right? That God has decided in you that it is good to be in this way. Like each of us represents a distinct notion in God. And like, in the background,

you're thinking about Prima Pars Question 15 and the divine ideas, the fact that God, knowing himself, knows all of the ways in which his divine life can be participated in limited fashion, right? And you spin that out, and that means that God has notions of singulars, which means that there is nothing that escapes God's knowledge or God's providence, which means that when God conjoins his will to that, not as like moment two after moment one of conceiving of it, but just in the sense of God in willing himself, wills us to be, he wills us not just as part,

but he wills us as a whole of sorts, which means that God doesn't love the you you are to become, but that means that God loves you, right? God gives you nature. God gives you grace in order to conduct you along that path of unfolding and of development. But God loves you. When I read Brideshead Revisited, I was very struck by the fact that it seemed that Lady Marchman loved what her children could be rather than loving who they were.

And you can see in God's choice to create as he has created that God loves you when G.K. Chesterton talks about patriotism I mean as a kind of broader concept to embrace like just our approach to all of reality he talks about this kind of broken down seaside resort in England called Brighton and he says Brighton will not be

transfigured by like an urban planner. Brighton will not be transfigured by one who wishes it to be other than it is. Brighton will be transfigured by one who wishes it to be other than it is brighton will be transfigured by one who loves it for what it is steubenville let's go you know exactly what's happening now yeah yeah so like and it's significant that a lot of the people that are investing in steubenville love it right they love what it is they love what it's doing they love the smell in the morning they love the smell of fried eggs yeah exactly you know so i think that like you start there and you can do a lot of conceptual therapy

with just simple things like God, right? And yeah, I think that discourse is obviously worth reclaiming because salvation hangs on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, gosh, there's a lot there. God loves us as we are and too much to leave us that way, as I've heard Dr. Hahn say.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you said something from Bride's Head Revisited, which I've never revisited since we haven't read it. I keep getting told to read it. Yeah, you don't have to read um but you just said that was really interesting about like this mother loved her children for what they could be not for what they were yeah this happened to me recently i don't know if my kids will ever watch this episode but we were at this thing called catholic family land which is not like a lame knockoff of like disneyland it's a big

you know acreage here in Ohio where families come together and camp, celebrate mass, hang out, go in baseball tournaments, swim in the pool. It's pretty cool. It's like kids just run wild, you know? And I was at mass and my kids were just all over the show,

just talking and not kneeling. What'd you do? Hit a button. Oh, is it back? We're back, yep. Okay. So yeah, so I was just sitting there with the imperfection of my children

and my own imperfection, but not seeing that. And one of my prayers was like, Lord, I renounce the lie that my kids have to be perfect for me to be acceptable. You know, I renounce the lie that my kids have to be perfect for me to be acceptable. You know, like that was the lie, but just that, yeah. What you said that, that just really struck me. I think a lot of us have that. I don't know if it's our kids or reflections of us or whatever, but like, it's okay if my, and I'm not saying I do, but if my kid eats weird or if he walks funny or if he like has really bad allergies or something it's like

I don't know I think as parents we can too often be concerned about what we want them to be as opposed to like loving him in the here and now yeah and we don't want to be loved like that like we want to be seen for the good that we do possess and for that to be brought forth yeah yeah no you think about it like well how do I about it? What I want is to be loved and to be trusted. And I, you know, you learn that from your parents, I think, in a big way, what it means to be loved and what it means to be trusted. And to be loved and to be trusted gives you the encouragement. It also gives you the freedom to grow into whatever, your humanity, to exercise the virtuous life, to become better in some recognizable way. But yeah, I think it's just most basic

that your children know that you love them and that you trust them. And yeah, it's kind of a wild thing. What do you say to people who are struggling with scrupulosity? I just was stopped by a father in the coffee shop this morning, and he said that new book I put out, How to Be Happy, I have a chapter there on scrupulosity

because that's something I dealt with in the past. And he said it was a blessing to her. I'm so happy to hear that because scrupulosity can be so crippling. I think it's important to kind of distinguish between a sensitive conscience, which we should all have, but we don't want to offend our Lord. We should get to that place where we love him like a friend we don't want to offend. But scrupulosity is just, it's killing a lot of people right now.

And I don't know if we're struggling. Like some people talk about it as a sort of variant of OCD, like in a religious context. And I think we can like fall into the trap of maybe making a virtue out of scrupulosity. And we ourselves think if I'm more scrupulous, I'm more holy. But this seems to be something I'm encountering people more often. And then my fear is that all this kind of re-emphasis on hell,

which again is hell exists. People go to hell, all of that. But my fear is that it's just crippling people and kind of preventing them from encountering the love of the Lord. So yeah, what kind of advice do you give to those who come to you with scrupulosity? I have thoughts. Here we go. So I think that God illumines our conscience in a kind of promissory note. So he shows you certain limitations, certain defects, but with the intention of healing those things and of kind of growing you beyond them. And I think that sometimes the illumination of conscience will outpace the working of grace in the sense that we become more acutely aware of our faults, our limitations,

but without the complementary or like the companion sense that there's a grace that's operative in our life, which grace can heal us, which grace can elevate us. And as a result of which, there's a kind of despair that sets in. And as a way to confront it, we try to exercise control over just the knowing of our conscience, since we feel like there's no control over the genuine healing and elevating beyond the limitations. So my general sense is when talking about the life of sin and the life of virtue by which it ought to be replaced, I think it's better to think about it as not so much a rooting out as it is a kind of crowding out. So if you focus on rooting out sin from your life, it can be a thankless task or a potentially infinite burden to bear because weeds will always crop up if you think about just weeding your garden.

They're just going to keep coming. Until such time as you fill those beds with big, beautiful flowers, with whatever, perennials and annuals, with a variety and a mixture of good things that make it so that the soil is being drawn upon for the reasons it was made, rather than just kind of laying fallow and then you just find all these dandelions or mulberry

trees and things just kind of filling it out. Because if you just focus on pulling it out, pulling it out, pulling it out, that's all you end up doing. Whereas you focus on crowding it out, then you're engaged in a more kind of productive enterprise. And so I think that, one, you have to affirm the primacy of grace. So God is the one who illumines conscience, and God is the one who grows you beyond your limitations. Two, you're never going to root out sin entirely from your life, except as God gives you leave. It's better to focus on crowding it out, which means focusing on the virtuous life. And that's not just like the power of positive thinking. That's actually like, think about God, live with God, like love God and those with whom he has made you to be. And then just kind of go from there. And then,

yeah, you're never going to have a firm handle on all of the different aspects or facets of the sin that still kind of wells up from within your heart. And I think that you can kind of set that aside, because if you make of it a personal project to understand it comprehensively, it's just punishing, right? So what am I saying? Like, don't examine your conscience. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying examine your conscience within bounds.

So I think it's helpful in the practical way just to think about it in like, okay, I'm only going to examine my conscience with this frequency or for this length of time. I'm only going to go to confession with this frequency and with this length of time. I am going to talk to a medical professional for at least this many sessions, based on this recommendation.

And if I find it to have been effective, I'll go back for up to this many, but I'm also gonna have an accountability partner with whom I talk. Maybe it's kind of like in an external forum type way, I would just talk about the basic things without getting too deep down because that might potentially embarrassing

and actually prevent me from doing the thing. Like I don't have to confront my shame. Like I think a lot of people will go to face-to-face confession because they were thinking, you know, I was thinking about going behind the screen, but I knew that I had to confront my shame. It's like, you don't need to confront your shame.

God will heal your shame. You're not gonna heal it of yourself. You're not going to grow beyond it of yourself. That's the work of grace. And it's fine, right? It's fine to be behind the screen. It's for you. It ought to be as easy as it can be made to be. So kind of keep some of those things in mind.

Yeah. What's hard is when you have an Australian accent and you're behind the screen and you know they know who you are. There's been one time where I've put on an American accent. Nice. Hey there, father. He's like, what's wrong with this guy? yeah yeah or you do a south african accent that is the strangest accent it's weird it is strange yeah yeah i don't know what's more insulting saying weird or strange i was trying to go for the least of the insulting ones but interesting yeah it's a different kind of accent it's remarkable i uh one of my favorite interactions here in america i love that we just went from scrupulosity to jokes I was going through some grocery store in San Diego and the lady's like oh wow you're from Australia yeah yeah and she said and it's because it was summer at the time she's like and it's cold there right now

is it sorry about my accent I'm'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's cold. And then she said, and yet you call it summer. And then there was this awkward pause where I was waiting for her to be like, just joking. But it didn't come. So she thought that we called our winter summer because that's what Americans do. And I let the awkwardness fall on her and then walked away nice and i've also had a situation where i was at a coffee shop this is still hard for me to understand maybe this guy was just like deep punking me i don't know but he said oh my gosh you're from australia we're about south australia oh my gosh do you know justin i really thought it had to be a joke because you know

people joke about those sorts of things yeah and I was waiting for him at least to say the last name I still wouldn't have known bloody Justin but he just looked at me and I know don't know Justin no yeah so I've had that with Europeans who will ask if I did you know you tell him you're from the United States like oh what part and I'll say I'm from between yeah you know, Washington, D.C. and Boston, because I don't expect them to know our states, because I don't know their states, and I have no anticipation that they would care more about America than I do about Switzerland, for instance. So I'll be like,

yeah, I'm in between Washington, D.C. and New York. And then just as soon as I've given a couple of people, a handful of people, that geographical location, then they'll come back with, do you know Susan? Okay. This is not a specifically american thing no i've gotten that before from europeans who are i think as a as a continent far more enlightened you know or at least they self-style as dutch and their interactions with foreigners so i don't think you have to worry about that he wasn't deep punking you i think he was just genuinely concerned crazy yeah he wanted to he wanted to establish common ground. Next time, I'm going to be like, Justin.

Oh, like with the face? Yeah, and the eyes and the hair? Yeah, he's dead. Shame about Justin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I forget that I have an accent now. It's kind of diluted a lot. Okay.

Do you ever meet Australians and be like, Matt's not bloody Australian. He's English. I haven't thought of that, no. I don't know that I can distinguish all the time between New Zealand, Australia, South Africa. You want to hear what my mum sounds like? Yeah, sure. My mum.

Debbie. Is this... This is Marco Polo. This is Marco Polo. Yeah. You can keep talking while I find it. Right, which reminds me of oh that's my sister hang on oh oh oh oh oh sorry keep talking yeah no keep be interesting quickly while i look

this up all right so here's leslie stop being interesting now i found it uh here's deb. Here's Debbie. There's Debbie. What does that sound like to you? I have no idea what they're about to say. Here's Gary. Hello, Peter. Happy Easter. And hello, Liam and Avila and Chiara.

Don't they sound way more Australian than me? They do, yeah. Yeah. They do. When I talk to them, I start sounding more like that. Okay. Point is, like, when you move here from another country, at first it's cute that people think you're different and sound whatever, but after a while,

you just want people to understand you because you're in Walgreens and you need this drink and you don't have time. Yeah. Well, maybe this is an opportunity for bridge building in the sense that, okay, you think about the like LGBTQ kind of movement and a lot of it is accept us on the same footing.

Wow. Sorry. Wow. Scrupulosity, jokes about accents, LBG. We're going back there. All right. So let's think about it this way. So this is your experience of having an accent, of being Australian in the United States. I have an experience. It's not the same. Maybe it's comparable. You can make that assessment. Being in Switzerland? No. So this would be in the United States States wearing a habit. A lot of times when Catholics talk about, oh, you know, like, you're religious, it must be awesome, you wear this great habit,

it must be such an awesome opportunity to evangelize wherever you are. I don't experience it like that often, okay? So what I experience it is, so like one of the first times that my family visited me in Washington, D.C., we were walking around downtown, and I looked back at my mom, and my mom was just crying. And I was like, whoa, what's going on? And she's like, do you see the way that they look at you? Is she sad or happy? She was just sad. Oh, because they looked at you

like you were some kind of freak. Yeah, because I am, just in a very kind of particular context. But they didn't have to stare like that. Exactly. So I find myself often when I'm walking down the street, you have two options, which is just to avoid eye contact and just content yourself with the fact that you are a freak. Or I try to actually grab people's eyes. So people will look at me. They're trying to make sense of it. So they're looking at my rosary. They're looking at my scapula.

They're looking at the fact that my habit evidently got caught in the escalator when I got off the metro because there's a lot of black grease on the bottom. And then I just try to kind of grab their eyes and bring them to mind so I can have a human experience where I'm like, here I am. And they keep walking or what? I like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes, you know,

and sometimes I get them and I'm like, smile. I see your point though. Like you can see through this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like I'm here. Like I'm a human being. And oftentimes for me, it's very dispiriting when I go to places

which self-stylize everyone's welcome. So I like hipster coffee shops. I like my espresso to taste like tangy weird. And so I'll bop into this place in whatever town when I'm doing thus and such, and that's the most specific sentence I've ever uttered. And I'll go to a little hipster coffee shop, and the barista's there just looking awesome with a cool haircut, sweet tattoos, you know, awesome outfit, and I'm just like, let's go.

And then that person will be like, literally everyone is welcome here except for you. They won't say that, but their eyes will communicate like literally everyone is welcome here except for you. And I'm like, I just wanted a stretch. But I had this experience at this coffee shop in Louisville called Safai. And there was this awesome, really sweet woman there who I subsequently met at a brandy distillery called Copper and Kings. But that's for another day.

And I walked in and she was genuinely delighted just by life, I think, in general. And as a result of which, her delight with life spilled over into an encounter with me. And she's like, hey, what can I get for you? And I was just like, thank you. I was like, I could hug you over the counter right now, you know. And so I think that like we need, so when, you know, hosting conversations, I think you need to tap into that. So you have your experience of being Australian. I have my experience of wearing a freak outfit.

But I think a lot of people have experiences of being different that they find very distressing, sad, traumatic, and they just want to be on equal footing. So it's like, how do we host that conversation? And I'm motivated by that. I don't know exactly how to do it, but I want to. I like that, yeah. Do you find you're less, people stare at you less in new york city um because everyone looks crazy in new york city you don't even have the time to register whether people are staring at you in new york city because there's so many people yeah yeah

right whereas i mean in coffee shops and things like that it feels like people wear all sorts of crazy outfits in new york city yeah but to your point i actually went to a coffee shop in new york city and the barista behind the counter i suppose was a bloke who identified as a woman and had a very kind of effeminate sort of lisp or something um but yeah i i think i was i was i really wanted him to know that i was glad he existed like i'm so it's same thing with my wife like because he got super angry at someone who just left and i don't know if it, I don't think the guy did anything. I think this guy was just super sensitive and a hurt kind of person. But it was just, yeah,

I really wanted him to be like, how are you? Tell me about your day. But that's it. It's a really lovely and sympathetic and dare we use a word that's been co-opted, but yet still means something, empathetic way to kind of encounter someone.

You want to know how they feel and you don't want them to feel like a freak. Yeah. We talked about this before too, just in basic human interaction. You don't want to know how they feel, and you don't want them to feel like a freak. Yeah. We talked about this before, too, just in basic human interaction. You don't want to go straight into problem-solving mode. So if your wife says, like, bad day, kid's crazy, car broke down,

feel like jumping out of a third-story window, you're not like, hey, do you want me to board up the window? You know, you want me to grab the car? You know, she doesn't want you to go straight into troubleshooting so much as she wants to hear to say, I'm sorry. You know,. You want me to, you know, she doesn't want you to go straight into troubleshooting so much as she wants to hear to say, uh, I'm sorry.

You know, like tell me about that. You know, like people want their experience validated and that's not condescending. It's not like I'm going to validate your experience so that we can move on to the next step that I actually care about. It's like boarding up that window. Yeah, exactly.

So this is another human being. And until such time as you make a human connection, what happens afterward, like what happens next doesn't matter too much. It's like I'm not thinking about that yet. I'm just thinking I haven't seen you in a while except on Zoom, right, or on FaceTime. And it's just like, you know, here we are in living person. It's like, wow, another human being. I'm having a human interaction.

This is great. You know, it's like let's start there. And maybe just in a basic way, I think that that's part of what's missing in the conversation, like things we talked about earlier with how one worships in the Novus Ordo or in the traditional Latin Mass or navigating conversations about things that have been politicized. I think that even just saying it in these simple terms, a lot of people will be like, weak-willed, totally blah, blah, blah, beige nonsense. It's like, okay, whatever, you know, fine.

But ultimately you have to be able to meet somebody on common ground, and I think that the most basic common ground is our common humanity. Speaking of habits, what is the best religious habit, and why is it the Benedictine one? You asked me about the best religious habit and why is it the Benedictine one? You asked me about the best religious habit. I know I did. I just thought it would be funny to phrase it that way. I don't really need you to answer.

All right, next question. I had Father Boniface Hicks in the studio. Dude, that Benedictine habit is so cool. Yeah, yeah. It's cool because it kind of looks like a legit monk. Like when you think of monk, it might also be his five-foot-long beard, but yeah, it's neat.

Yeah, good, good. Yeah, I mean, their habits are a thousand times more practical because they actually conceal stains. So for instance, I can tell you right now, I am wearing, what am I wearing? Soup. I mean, this thing is coming to pieces. I'm wearing three cigars that I smoked a couple nights ago that I haven't washed since then.

I am wearing some of the Metro Escalator right now. I sat in sap maybe on Thursday. So I have like eight little sap things, and I already went at them with some Goo Gone, but they're still there, and I'm just despairing of them ever leaving my habit. How many habits do you have? Two. But I only pack this one, and I'm traveling for 16 days so there you go but um yeah so but their habit none of those things pose real problems they're killing it they won the practical game it's so cool and not not only is it practical in that it's black and hides things it just looks

cool like i feel like if father boniface were to walk into a coffee shop, they wouldn't know they might think he was an eastern monk they might think he was Buddhist or something. Whereas I think yours is just altogether unusual and not in a cool like I think it's cool because I'm a Catholic and I associate it with Thomas Aquinas.

Also though it looks like Gandalf. I don't think you look like Gandalf. I think you look like Gandalf. I only use wizard in highly joking context when people are like, what are you? I'm like Gandalf. Yeah, I don't think you look like Gandalf. I think you look like Gandalf. Well, I only use wizard in highly joking context. When people are like, what are you? I'm like, wizard. They're like, moving on. Saruman the what?

Yeah, it's one of those things where when I first saw Dominicans, I was struck by the habit. But I had already fallen in love with St. Thomas Aquinas in the sense that I had heard him talked about, and then I'd read about him, and I loved him. And then when I saw Dominicans, I recognizing I wasn't uh discovering yeah and then I saw certain things about the Dominican habit and I was like that's weird so white habit white socks black shoes yeah exactly and then I got on the inside it's like well this may as well happen

you know you just kind of concede but you're on vacation right now with a brother, Dominican, and you're all wearing the habit. I mean, is it part of you where you're just like, let's just make a pact. Can we just go in shorts? It's a vacation. I'm tired of people looking at me. Does that ever happen?

Yeah, I haven't done that. Was there a decision to both wear the habit? Because, I mean, I saw you this morning. You're all out having coffee. You're vacationing. Yeah, yeah. Was there a decision that we're both going to wear the habit or that's just what happens i think that's just what happens yeah so you know there's no there's no law as to you have to wear the habit

in this setting you don't have to wear the habit in this setting i mean you just if you're at your house you'd wear your habit to most things i don't know i mean there's no real strict delineation as to point by point but i think you just kind of get in the custom. You get in the habit of wearing the habit. And I think that's part of the deal. For me, it's like a lot of people will talk about it in terms of penance or they'll talk about it in terms of witness, testimony, evangelization. I think about it most fundamentally in terms of identity. Just when I'm getting ready to go to bed, it's like I just, here we go,

taking off my habit. It's like I'm hopping in bed. You know, it's just kind of like you just, how do I express that in a way that's accurate? I don't know, like you're associating the removal of the habit for nap time? No, no, no. I'm just thinking in terms of,

like the most fundamental thing about it is identity. So if, no, maybe bed's not the best thing, but if I were to be out and, so like I'm going hiking or something like that. And if I were to see somebody mid-trail whom I knew, I think my first reaction would be like, so I'm not wearing my habit in this context. My first reaction would be like, hey.

You know, I'd be like. Like you caught me with my shirt on. Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, ah, you know. So I don't know. I don't know how to describe it in a way that's actually helpful. The Dominicans, are y'all kind of exploding right now?

Like with vocations or say, if you were to look at the last five years, is there some momentum here? That's what I'm picking up on. I think it's because of Pints with Aquinas. That's gotta be it, yeah. Yeah, certainly. Pints with Aquinas would be the number one.

They show up. Where do we drink? That's not what we do. Damn it, Manfred. No, I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of people have come to the knowledge of St. Thomas, come to the knowledge of the Dominican order through this, which is awesome.

But no, I think that, I think you've seen for maybe the past 15 years folks checking into the... I'm a son of the eastern province, the province of St. Joseph, and I don't know as much about the other provinces, so I can't really speak to that. But yeah, I think there's a desire for the intellectual life, for a preaching apostolate, for something that's contemplative, right? So I think that a lot of the features which are present in the Dominican life are attractive to people, and that's not to say that like everyone is a perfect fit insofar as I don't know that anyone is a perfect fit for anything, but I think

that given the state of the church in the 21st century, given the state of religious life in the United States, a lot of people are like, I think this is it. So yeah, which isn't a grounds for self-congratulations, because it's like, what do we do? Nothing. Next point, you know? I think it's just a kind of peculiar expression of the mercy of God. I think I'd be, like, the idea of running a parish would be enough to drive me into religious life, where I don't have to do that. I mean, a lot of religious do run parishes, so. Oh, okay, well, I might just get married then. There you go, nailed it. All right, why don't have to do that. I mean, a lot of religious do run parishes, so. Oh, okay. Well, I might just get married then. There you go.

Nailed it. All right. Why don't we take a break? And then when we come back, I want to look at an article from the Summa in which Thomas Aquinas talks about how to, what do you say, better at memorizing things? Yeah, growing memory. He has real practical suggestions on how to be better at memorizing things. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to do that,

and then we're going to take some questions from our patrons. Boom. All right, cool. All right, I want to say thank you to two of our sponsors, the first being Homeschool Connections. If you are a parent who is homeschooling or who is considering homeschooling, you need to check out homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt. There is a link in the description below. This is an amazing program. It is 100% Catholic, so all of

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and make sure you go to homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt so that they know that we sent you. Yeah, they have a parent community for meaningful connections to other parents just like you. So it's not just something you show to your children. It's something that you as a parent are engaging in as well. homeschoolconnections.com slash Matt. I also want to say thank you to Halo. Halo is a really amazing app that will help you to pray and to meditate. I've been advertising these guys for a few years now and they just keep getting better and better and better. I actually downloaded the app the other day because I got a new phone, so it was off my phone,

and I bought the year subscription, and I've been really loving it. It leads you through rosary meditations or Lectio Divinas or night examines. It even has sleep stories from people like Jonathan Rumi from The Chosen or Father Mike Schmitz or, yes, myself, but whatever, you don't have to listen to that one. It's really, really excellent. And I'd encourage you to go check it out. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. And when you sign up there at hello.com slash Matt Fradd, you'll get a month free to everything on the app.

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Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd. And then finally, I would just like to ask you if you would consider supporting us at pintswithaquinas.com slash give. You can give directly or you can, you know, go to Patreon and give there. We're trying to raise money for a full-time video guy. We're also trying to launch our Pints with Aquinas Español channel, which will be called Tequila Con Aquino. So if you're enjoying this work and you want to throw us a few bucks every month, that

really adds up and we really appreciate it. All right, back to the interview. In five seconds? Yep, we're going. Perfect. I love it. Hello and welcome back. I am not Matt Fradd. I'm Father Gregory Pine. But you already knew that on account of the fact that you had tuned in to the first half of this here episode. So I suppose we've covered some ground at this point, but rather than recapitulate it, because you already watched it and don't need a recapitulation, I can just describe something new and distinct in the absence of the actual host

of the show. So what are things that I'm thinking about? I just finished a chapter of my dissertation on instrumental causality. And one of the things that I think that is cool is this, namely, that when you ordinarily use the instrument, the kind of main cause just kind of works through the instrument, but in such a way that the instrument itself isn't changed so somebody who builds a bed uses an axe there we go uses an axe but it doesn't change the axe just uses the axe to make a bed whereas oh wow I got another bottle of water in the case of our Lord Jesus Christ his being the instrument of the Godhead makes it so that his humanity is actually changed.

You're like, okay, this doesn't make sense to me, but maybe if he explains it further, it'll begin to. So, Carpenter picks up axe, uses axe to make bed, bed is made, axe is discarded, axe is really unchanged by the encounter. Whereas Godhead takes up the human nature, uses

the human nature to save humanity, but the human nature is so full of grace, with a quasi-infinite grace, that it itself as instrument is changed. There's so many things going on right now. So I think that the way in which our Lord interacts with his own human nature, interacts is probably a bad verb to describe it, but it's indicative of the type of change that can be wrought in our own humanity. The Lord doesn't want to just pick us up like a saw and make a bed with us as if the Lord were a kind of divine carpenter. Yeah, head scratch. All right? He wants

to transfigure our humanity in such a way that it's actually divinized, such that we become like God. And so I've been thinking about this and writing about this. And as a result of which, it's been cropping up in a lot of my preaching and it's awesome. So that is my thought to share. That was such a deep thought for just for me to pour my espresso. I was like, just go in and say something.

My bad. No, it's fantastic. I just missed the beginning. So hey, why don't you crack that open so you don't die of heat stroke. Crack it open. Do we need this camera? You can crack it even more.

I think that camera's on me, right? We're good? So look at that. Look at that. All that lovely smoke. You can crack it even more. I think that camera's on me, right? We're good? So look at that. Look at that. All that lovely smoke. We're killing it. All right. So before we get to questions from our patrons,

we're going to take a look at what Aquinas has to say. Am I in the right place? No. You started flipping at some point in the episode, but we're about to be in the right place. Good thing you know exactly where it is. According to my calculations, if I flip one more page, I will have it upon the article.

All right. So this article, whether memory is part of prudence. I can even just read the second sort of reply since that's primarily what we're interested in, I think. Yeah. Can I do a little background? Yeah. Yeah. So St. Thomas in the Treatise on Prudence, which goes from Secunda Secunda, question 47, to Secunda Secunda, question 46,

he first describes prudence in se, and then he devotes a question to the different kinds of parts of prudence. So we've talked before about subjective parts, about integral parts, and about quasi-potential parts. integral parts and about quasi-potential parts. So an example of a quasi-potential part would be like something that looks a lot like the virtue but doesn't wholly share in the perfection of the virtue. So like justice, for instance, is a virtue. Religion is a quasi-potential part because it's justice towards God, but in the case of justice towards God, you can't be wholly and entirely relieved of your debt because you're always going to be in his debt. Look over here. Yeah. Sorry. So, and then with subjective parts, that'd be like species of the virtue. So like in the case of prudence, you've got monastic prudence, which is prudence for oneself.

You've got economic prudence, which is prudence for your household. Got military prudence, that makes sense. You've got renative prudence, etc. So there's different species of prudence depending on the setting. And then integral parts, when St. Thomas describes it, he says it's like the foundation, the walls, and the roof of a house. So it's the things that, taken together, go up to make the virtue. So he describes eight integral parts of prudence. Memory, docility, understanding, reason, providence, caution, and circumspection. I think that was it. Maybe I forgot one, but it doesn't matter too terribly much. Oh, shrewdness.

That's the one I forgot. And each of those goes towards building up prudence in its integrity. So when he's talking about memory, he's talking specifically about our experience of the past. Because when we're seeking to be prudent, right, to be prudent is to exhibit or to events right reason and things to be done, you need to have a good sense of what's gone before. Because if you're like, try, try again, and eventually things will magically change, that's because you're dumb.

So like bringing up the papacy to your Protestant family over Thanksgiving, after you've said pass the gravy, you should remember that that didn't go well last time. Exactly. Yeah. So he's talking about the fact that being prudent, right, being reasonable in your daily affairs, whether ordinary or extraordinary, requires that you have a good sense of what has gone on before.

So there's a real value to memory, and he's talking about it in that way. Okay, cool. So the reason I'm interested in this especially is because... Oh, come on, don't say I flipped again. Which article? I think you're good. So I think it was the second article.

Right, so it's... There are four things whereby a man perfects his memory and so here he gives us where were we um first when a man wishes to remember a thing he should take some suitable yet somewhat unwanted illustration of it since the unwanted strikes us more and so makes a greater and stronger impression on the mind. And this explains why we remember better what we saw when we were children." That's really cool. Now the reason for the necessity of finding these illustrations or images is that simple

and spiritual impressions easily slip from the mind unless they be tied as it were to some corporeal image because human knowledge has a greater hold on sensible objects for this reason memory is assigned to the sensitive part of the soul all right break that down because that's fantastic yeah so when saint thomas talks about memory often when he describes it he means at first in the sense of sense memory so you got the five external senses which everyone knows and then you've got the five external senses, which everyone knows, and then you've got the four internal senses. The common sense coordinates your sense experience. And then the imagination furnishes these phantasms, right? So it takes that collated image and it presents it, as it were, to the intellect. This is real rough and ready. And if there's like 700 epistemologists

watching right now, they're like, I find this to be very imprecise. And then those sense images, those phantasms are stored in the sense memory. And St. Thomas will say that when we return to a thought about something after having cognized it, right, after having abstracted, he'll say that we often return, well, we do always return to the phantasm. So we need to appeal back to the senses in order to recall even intellectual knowledge, because that's how our minds work. And then the fourth of the internal senses he calls the estimative power, the cogitative power, which is like a kind of animal reason.

So for him, he's very insistent upon this connection between sense and intellect, and that the way to the intellect is through the senses. And you can't get over, under, around, or behind that. It's just how human intellection works. It's what's distinctive of us as discursive, embodied, etc. So when it comes to retaining a memory for something, like laying hold of some intellectual insight and having kind of perfect recall of that thing, or being able to appeal to it at the desired time, it's got to be associated in some ironclad way with your senses. So you can think about

simple sense images, and we were talking about this earlier. They say a good technique for remembering where you laid your keys down is to, as you lay your keys down, picture them exploding. And then you're more likely to remember their setting. I think also when we use mnemonics, for instance, I have an easier time use mnemonics, for instance, I have an easier time remembering mnemonics that are silly. Yes. So I can tell you, like, 10th grade chemistry, Mr. Seidel taught us the first 20 elements in the periodic table.

H-he-li-be-k-nof-ni-na-ma-ga-o-sips-k-la-ka-ka. Let's go. Same thing? Yeah, exactly. Really? Because it sounds funny. It just sounds silly. And then the diatomic particles, he taught us another one for that.

It's like honkelbriff, right? The different things that they only appear in a free state when they're paired. I just remember those because when he did honkelbriff, he would sneeze. He'd be like, honkelbriff, you know? And that's hilarious. Yeah. Right? So I have this association, ironclad association, between the sense experience and then the intellectual retention.

And so St. Thomas is saying that if you're going to be prudent, you're going to have to have recall over past experiences of things. So like, for instance, when you overeat, you can at the time remember acutely what it felt like to be overstuffed, uncomfortable, unable to sleep, filled with regret the next morning. But the question is, next time you're tempted to do such like thing, will you recall that? Yeah. And I think that there it's helpful to like have a handle for that experience. Maybe the last time you overate, it was on those Cheetos, which are really, really hot. And not only did you eat way too much of them, but also your mouth was scorched. And they got all over your habit.

Not me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Father Bonaventure. And then your wife asked you if you had, you know, been in to the pantry and you're like, no. And she's like, I have your fingerprints here in Cheeto dust. You know, so you associate it with all these bad things. So it might be helpful to return at times to the Cheeto experience or to refer to it as like the Cheeto catastrophe, just to have some way by which to have a handle.

And then when you next have the opportunity to overeat, you're like, wow, look at these rich and sumptuous foods. You're like, I feel like I'm staging a 15th century Renaissance fair. Just like you'll have the Cheeto experience as a kind of handle in the past on which to hold so that you can retain some modicum of control. You're like, I want to not hate myself tomorrow. And there was the Cheeto experience, right? So I think that it's things like that that he's appealing to. Yeah. What does unwanted mean? Like undesired.

See, that's very interesting. Because he's not just saying think of something outlandish he's saying think of something that is undesired like undesired or maybe it's on is it w-o-n-t-e-d yes maybe that's just out of the ordinary yeah that's what i'm as i was wont to do as i was ordinarily to do yeah maybe that's what it is out of the ordinary that's what that means okay yeah i know i do this all the time but it's escaping me right now yeah which which ones have no i think that it's it's just easy to forget in the sense that we we constantly tell ourselves it'll be different this time but if it is going to be

different this time you have to have a reason for which and it can't be like a cult appeal to body chemistry it's like i probably had a bad reaction, you know, the last two times because of something else that I ate earlier. It's like, no, I think it's just, I think it's just when you sit down to eat a bowl full of Cheetos, you lose your mind. Like I'm this way with Chex Muddy Buddies, for instance. Okay. They're incredible. Right. But for me, it's a two-step process. Reach hand into Chex Muddy Buddy bowl, and then step two is wake up covered in powdered sugar. So because I don't have that intermediate experience, because I've just blacked out in a fit of consumption, I need to recall both the beginning and the end and appeal to that when I'm next thinking about eating an incredible amount of Chex Muddy Buddies.

This doesn't just apply to like moral actions. It applies to like things we actually want to store in our memory, like thinking of ecumenical councils in order, for example, or the seven sacrament. Yeah, there's a mnemonic for that too. Go and do it. Do you know it? The question is, do I remember it?

Where's the handle? Where's the handle? Where is it? It's Nico F. Calcoco Nico, la la la la Lulu, Vico Flola Trivava. Let's go. Let's go. So do the first like syllable? It's Niko, F-Cal, Coco, Niko, La La La La, Lulu, Viko, Flo La, Triva Va. Let's go.

Let's go. So do the first syllable? Yeah, so it's just the first syllable of each city. No, but say the first part of that. Oh, Niko, F-Cal. Yeah. All right, now tell us what those are. Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon.

Amazing. Yeah, Coco, Niko, Constantinople 2, Constantinople three, Nicaea two, Constantinople four, Lala Lala, Lateran one, two, three, four, Lulu Vico, Leon one and two, Vienne Constance, Flola, Florence, Lateran five, Trivava, Trent, Vatican one, Vatican two. Okay. Now one more time for those at home who really want to go like 10 seconds behind, 10 seconds and keep listening to this. Say that one more time. Nico, F-Cal, Coco, Nico, la, la, la, la, lulu, vico, tree vava.

No, la, la, vico, flo, la, tree vava. I'll do it from the start. Nico, F-Cal, Coco, Nico, la, la, la, la, lulu, vico, flo, la, vico. I'm wondering about those I'll do it from the start. Nico F. Cal. Coco Nico. La La La La. Lulu Vico. Flo La Vico. I'm wondering about those who are just now tuning into the live stream. Exactly.

They're drunk. I mean, they're actually drunk. Drunk on espresso. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, but back to that. Yeah. Specifically to, it doesn't seem to be a purely moral thing. St. Thomas doesn't understand prudence as a moral virtue in the way that we think of prudence as a moral virtue. Okay. Because,

and we were talking about this earlier, we have a way of subdividing our lives. So there are things that you do, and then there are moral things that you do. Yeah. Whereas human acts and moral acts are synonymous with Thomas. Yeah, so for St. Thomas and for Aristotle, it's just about being a good, happy human being. And, for instance, like you read the Nicomachean Ethics and you're talking about, you know, all kinds of things that seem immediately pertinent to the moral life, like prudence and justice and fortitude,

but they're of a piece with, like, wittiness, for instance, and friendship and contemplation. So for Aristotle to live ethically means to be a good human being. And it's not like, okay, so a good test of this is do I want to hang out with this guy? Right? That's a good test of whether somebody is a good human being or whether somebody is moral in the more robust sense that Aristotle and St. Thomas would say. Because you might say, you know, he's very prudent, he's very just, he's very, you know, like, courageous, he's very temperate, but he just can't, you know, he just can't conduct a conversation.

He just turns every conversation into a Q&A session, or he just turns every conversation into a listing of baseball statistics. Well, that's because he's boorish, which is a a vice kind of on par with intemperous like cowardice injustice etc because the point isn't to be you know just a moral human being and then if you have all these other defects of character then you know whatever it's not that big a deal because they're not moral it's like no the point is to be a good human being the moral life embraces all of what it means to be a human being and everything is moral the moral life is just shot through all human activity and so when it comes to being being prudent, it turns out you don't just

memorize things so that you have nice moral tropes to which you can appeal when making a moral decision. It's good to remember your life so that you can conduct your life in the present in accord with what you have learned from it. And that's a matter of when it's a big moral decision, do I steal or do I not? And when it's a seemingly non-moral decision in our contemporary understanding of the matter, like should I tell this joke or should I, you know, it's whatever.

So memory just matters because it's part of a good human life because it contributes to the flourishing of prudence, which contributes to the flourishing of the human being. Yeah, yeah. There is, I forget his name now. He's written several books on the memory and incorporating Thomas Aquinas. And one thing he'll do is he'll have you imagine walking through a room and seeing particular

things. And the kind of placing memories there. So for example, what are the first three of the Ten Commandments? I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Keep holy the Sabbath. Keep holy the Sabbath.

And then honor your mother and father? Yep. Right. So what he does is he's like, okay, imagine you walk up to a door, and you open the door, and you hear a loud crash. And the next thing that happens is you look down and the mat is cursing and saying all sorts of awful things with its big lips coming out of the mat. And you walk into the room and then you look out of the left window pane and see a beautiful sun and a lovely sunny day. And then on the right side of the door is a portrait of your mother and

father you know and it's you you make your way through this building this is so easy then because okay the loud crash represents the destruction of the idols as we worship the one true god the mat obviously representing blasphemy and things like that and the sun representing the sabbath and is this kevin vose yeah memorizing the faith? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd really, if people like this thing that we're talking about right now and want to kind of get better at memorizing things, I would highly recommend him.

Like a mat with lips talking to you, that's hard to forget. You know? You don't move on from that. Okay, here's the second thing he says. Secondly, whatever a man wishes to retain in his memory he must carefully consider and set in order so that he may pass oh here we go this is exactly what i just talked about so that he may pass easily from one memory to another hence the

philosopher says sometimes a place brings memories back to us, the reason being that we pass quickly from the one to the other. Yeah. And this, so there are a lot of things that you could say about that. But I think the kind of foundational principle is that it pertains to the wise to order. And you're more likely to retain or to remember those things that you've placed in orderly fashion. So, like, the idea of a memory palace is just one way by which to order, but you can also articulate arguments in the sense that like you recognize that this depends upon this, depends upon this, and as a result you can recall that whole chain of argumentation

rather than just having a bunch of facts scattered about. And I think that's one of the reasons in part where you find Aquinas resonating with people nowadays, because I think when we first come to the knowledge of the faith, it feels eclectic to us, because the Catechism, for instance, is a beautiful document, and it represents the faith in a way that's very compelling, but it's also trying to give you the Church's tradition without tipping its hat as to lowercase t traditions. It's not like, this is the faith as Aquinas taught it. It's like, this is the faith as taught by the church, the scriptures, the church fathers, the tradition, medieval theologians, saints. There's the sense that there are all of these different ways by

which the church's life is mediated to us, and it wants to give you a sneak peek into all of them at the very least, or a kind of indication of them. But sometimes it'll feel eclectic, because St. Therese of Lisieux doesn't necessarily express the faith in the same way that St. John Damascene does. So you're kind of picking things up. But then how do you put them together? And when you read St. Thomas Aquinas, you'll often see how it all is to be put together because St. Thomas reads all these people who came before him, like St. John Damascene, for instance, and then he's able to incorporate them in arguments. So once you've learned some principles from St. Thomas, you feel like you're able to argue your way through the faith, and that gives you a confidence that this thing is intelligible, it's coherent, it can be communicated,

it can be learned by those to whom I testify. So when it comes to memorization, there's a sense that order is very important, and association is very important for memorization. Yeah, I wrote an article once on what I called the apologetics mansion, where the base was the theistic apologetics, the second was Christian apologetics, the final was Catholic apologetics. And my suggestion was it helps when somebody's pressing you on a particular topic to wonder where in the mansion are we. Because someone might say, I don't believe in God

because the Bible's filled with all sorts of fantastical false things and you're like okay so you're not in the first level because of something you should accept on the second or third level like okay maybe the bible's false that wouldn't show the you shouldn't be in the first level cool yeah i again i think i think i might get that book again by kevin vose because I remember that being really, really helpful. He goes through the Beatitudes, he goes through the Ten Commandments, he goes through, I think, even the Councils. Not in the way you did, although that was more fun. Thirdly, says Aquinas, we must be anxious and earnest about the things we wish to remember,

because the more a thing is impressed on the mind, the less it is liable to slip out of it. What does he mean by that? I don't know exactly what the word anxiety is there. I can't imagine that it's like anxietos. What would it be? Like solicitude, I imagine, is probably what he's describing. So for him, it's a kind of exercise of volition in a particular direction. So if you're going to retain memories, you're going to have to want to retain memories. So you're not just going to be able to say, here I am in my Barca lounger, reclined, with my dog at my feet, my beer on

my paunch, and my television, whatever, lighting up whatever image before me. And I'll lay claim to it. I'll hold it because it's a human activity. And so it demands of you that you continue to rehearse it. Yes. So for instance, reading books is not enough. Reading books is not enough. And I think that this is important. So I think a lot of people want to have read the books, but they don't necessarily want to have assimilated the things that the books propose. So you've got a list, maybe you found a list online of the 100 most excellent books of all time and you want to read them all. There is no gold stars awarded for speed.

There are no gold stars awarded for completionism. You get something, I suppose, from having read it. But if it's worth your time, it's worth reading once, it's worth reading twice, it's worth outlining, it's worth trying to teach to another human being. So for instance, I remember those things which I have read multiple times, I have outlined, and that I've had to communicate. And like sometimes, you know, like if I'm kind of stuck up against something in prayer, and I feel like I'm drifting, or I feel like I'm tired, I'll just try to preach it out to the Lord. And I'm like, I know you don't care, slash you know this already, but this is my way by which to rehearse the insight, and I hope that it might be deepened

as a result. So I think that there's this sense that memory is not just a passive receptacle, it's an expression of human agency. So when it comes to reading books, we're not just trying to dominate the intelligible universe by checking things off a list, we're trying to exercise our mind in such a way that the use of our intellect is perfected. So the content is important, but also the use of the intellect is important because, yeah, I mean, we're called to the perfection of knowing and loving in act, right? Not just as passive repository of content. Yeah, that's a thought. Yeah right that's good yeah this remembers this reminds me of when i was um here's another mnemonic device i remember one

of the first bible verses i remember was john 10 10 where christ says a thief comes only to steal kill and destroy i have come you may have life and life to the full you're like well 10 out of 10 it's like a full life like there's an easy way to remember it. But yeah, I remember like spending some time doing that for a while. I had kind of amassed a number of scripture verses that I memorized and somebody said, how do you do that? And I was like, you have to try. Like, have you tried? Well, no.

Well, then, yeah, well, you won't be able to do it. Companion thought, the, what do you call that? Oh, man, if you can't remember the name of the prayer, that doesn't go ahead and prove anything about memory. The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, the Angelus. Yeah. So I am not especially good with the order of things, call and response, blah, blah, blah.

But a good mnemonic for that is A-A-B-B-A-A. Okay, so the angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived by the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, et cetera. Yeah. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done and she conceived by the Holy Spirit. Hail Mary, etc. Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word. Hail Mary, etc. And the word became flesh, and dwelt among us. A-A-B-B-A-A. Simple things are helpful like that.

But I'll lead that prayer, depending on which convent I'm living in, or depending on whether I'm preaching a retreat, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't matter. But I'll lead that with some frequency, and I still appeal to that. So that mnemonic is made helpful insofar as it's continually exercised so yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well another one is i this is back in the day like romans 3 23 that talks about all of sin and fallen short of the glory of god i thought i have 23 michael jordan best basketball player and i don't know how that kind of, maybe because none of us are as good as him or something like that. But the point is, I guess,

not even just to try to adopt other people's mnemonic devices or unwanted images, but to come up with something that's super strange. And somehow it does stick like that. I wouldn't have remembered Romans 3.23 being that unless I had of, you know. Had come it up with your own. Come it up with like that. Like I wouldn't have remembered Romans 3, 23 being that unless I had, you know, had coming up with your own, come it up with your own. I got to learn how to speak.

Unwanted. Okay. Fourthly, we should often reflect on the things. Have we done this? No. We wish to remember. Yes.

No, we haven't yet. Hence, the philosopher says that reflections preserve memories because as he remarks custom is a second nature wherefore when we reflect on a thing frequently we quickly call it to mind through passing from one thing to another by a kind of natural order yeah recollection you can also think about that again, this shows where it's not just a matter of prudence as a moral virtue for doing moral things by comparison to other things which

are not moral, nor is it just memory exercises so that you can show off as to how much of the faith you've memorized, but this has application in prayer. So when you think about our lives before the Lord are the lives of a forgetful people, when you think about it in terms of covenant fidelity, we read in, I think it's one of the letters of St. Paul, that though you be faithless, yet I remain faithful, for I cannot deny myself. So God remembers. Right at the middle of that story of Noah, people talk about a chiastic structure where the first resembles the last, and so too the second resembles the second to last, and it kind of comes to this point where it's,

and God remembered Noah. So God remembers his people. He recalls his people, and you could talk a lot about anamnesis and what it means to recall. It doesn't necessarily entail forgetting, but God brings his people to the front of his mind, to speak somewhat metaphorically. And part of, I mean, a very significant part of Christian life, or maybe the way in which you could describe Christian life in its entirety, is bringing the Lord to the front of your mind as we're calling the Lord. And so when we talk about prayer, as we did at the top of the hour, prayer is sometimes described after the manner of recollection, right?

So you want to be continually in the presence of God. How do you do that? It's by recovering this Godward gaze. It's by having God always before your mind's eye. Why? Because you're afraid if you don't that you'll lapse into huge sin? No, but because this is what it means to be in the presence of the beloved. This is what it means to be caught up in covenant fidelity, right? To think longingly on, you know, he whom my heart loves. And so memory is part of every aspect of human life, and if that's so, then it's present at the summit of human life in our relationship with God. And so being prudent, memorizing things, prayer, they're all not so much distinct facets of a human reality as they are kind of distinct expressions of the exercise

of the intellect, which intellect, as made to the image of God, has a kind of upward trajectory, which comes to its perfection in prayer and worship. And you and I were speaking before we went on air today about how we often kind of offload memory onto our spouse or our friends or those we live with, and how today it's like we offload stuff onto Google. and how today it's like we offload stuff onto Google. And I've thought about, I'm beginning to find myself a little disappointed when people quickly, like, what's the name of that song?

Oh, and they pull out their phone. And I haven't realized why that's been disappointing me. A lot of things disappoint me. But yeah, why is that a problem and how does that negatively impact our memory? Yeah, so I mean, just at the level of a gut reaction i don't like it when people pull out their cell phones to settle trivial disputes in conversation because i think one of the delightful aspects of conversation is just making stuff up you know okay not not not in

the sense of like making up false answers but like a free space of speculation because it's very fun and because of the type of exercises that it entails so it's like who won the nba championship in 2014 how was it yeah yeah it's like yeah that's kind of at the end of the golden years for the celtics you know garnett had come over from the t-wolves and they had rondo at that point and paul pierce was still a good basketball player and but i think that their star had kind of begun to descend and who was coming up at that time i mean the spurs they they won four over the course of 20 years. I think it was Tim Duncan, it was Kawhi, was it Danny? I think, because then you've just rehearsed your knowledge of the basketball universe over the course of a decade,

and you've been kind of reawakened as to the things that you did at the end of college, at the beginning of religious life. I didn't watch basketball in religious life at the beginning because I didn't know what was going on. I came back into my inheritance as it were later. But like you have those kinds of conversations which are meaningful human encounters because the point of a human encounter isn't to settle trivial questions

so that you can be like, ah yes, it was the Spurs. It's like who cares? Yeah. Right, it's like moving on but to what? Because the thing that we could have done. Something else we can settle by Google? Exactly, yeah, to what? Because the thing that we could have done. Something else we can settle by Google? Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing that we could have done would have been delightful. Yes. And I think you just miss out on a lot of the delight of ordinary human interaction by settling, by appealing. And also, I mean, just as soon as a phone is on the table or just as soon as a phone is brought out, the quality of the conversation just decreases. And I think everyone experiences this. I'm a little tired of us complaining about all the negative things the phones do to us without us taking manful decisions to get rid of them. Because it feels like more and more we're all

kind of realizing this, but we're not doing anything powerful about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked about this when you came on Godsplaining, the idea that a phone is for... Yes, I've thought about that a lot, what you said. A phone is for my convenience, but it interacts with other phones which are for other person's convenience. And so you find yourself at a kind of convenience crossroads. Yes. And that when you take a violent decision for your own sanity, it does inconvenience others. Yes.

And others don't necessarily have the wherewithal to process that in a way except as like, blah, you know? This just happened today. Sister Miriam texted me, a friend of mine, and I wrote back to her and I'm like, thank you so much for checking in. I'm so glad you did.

I'm going to be taking August off of the internet. I won't have my phone. I would have hated for you to reach out. But there's that initial fear the first few days of August. People are going to be texting me and I won't be texting them back

and they haven't watched this episode or they don't know that I'm giving it up, and they're going to be offended. So every time I go from Switzerland to the United States, I switch my SIM card, and it's not like I send out a group text on the Swiss number. It's like people will continue to text the last number, and then they'll be somewhat confused for a couple days, and then they might remember, oh, yeah, I'll bop over to the other number, or they'll be somewhat confused for a couple days and then they might remember oh yeah i'll bop over to the other number or they might not and that's that you know because if i send out

a big text to everyone that says hey then i'm not going to get any work done on my dissertation for three days because i'll just be like finishing up a bunch of text conversations with delightful people who are wonderful to communicate with and i'm not posing that as like an obstacle in life it's just it's not why I'm there which is tough to communicate without making it sound overly severe but you know it's just it's just what it is so I don't want people to think that I'm not I don't care for you but I also don't want to be available in a way motivated by an anxiety to express that care so how do you thread that needle that's the question yeah I think it looks different in every yes I mean you do August do SIM card switch. I also don't respond to text messages in certain circumstances. So it's like, I don't want to have a text

string. Yeah, I often don't. Especially if someone's not even asking me a question like, hey, went to the beach today. Cool, don't care. Like, care a little bit. But if I say, awesome, what was it like? Now I'm committed to yet another thread of... Yeah. So initial thoughts are, I think that we could do with more silencing of cell phones. And it doesn't have to be from this time to this time, but I think that it can just kind of be intermittent.

So I went to mass, I silenced my cell phone. I forgot to turn, like, unsilence it a couple hours later. Because if there's something urgent that had come up, either it will or it won't. is this frustrates my wife to no end yeah I not only have a full inbox people like your inbox is full I know that if it wasn't you could leave a message and then I'd have to get back to you but I also leave it on do not disturb all day long all day long so people have to text and I don't even hear it vibrate and then I check it my wife's just like would you please take it off?

And that's fair, but I won't. You say, okay, this phone is for other people. For you, we have walkie-talkies. Yeah. And then also people have, I think, differing degrees of being able to cope with this amount of information coming in. Also, certain people just get a lot more text messages and emails than other people. Yeah, that's true.

And I think that's probably true of me. Like I think I do probably get a lot more emails and random direct messages from people than some other people. And then I cannot imagine being someone like Scott Hahn, like that guy must be bombarded all day long. Although he's probably not on social media, but or if he is, someone's running it.

No, I think, I mean, it's kind of tone setting too. There are different ways in which to be available to people. I was thinking about this this past weekend because of this retreat. So, right, internet ministry. You talk to people in a certain way on the internet, but you don't necessarily have a relationship with them. If you do have a relationship with them, it's kind of a relationship of goodwill or of, you know, interest of a certain sort, but it's not of benevolence in the kind of

thick way that you would see it described, Aristotle, St. Thomas. And then here we are, all together, there's five of us friars, there's maybe 70 people on the retreat, 70, 71, and there were just so many golden moments. We were sitting out on Saturday night. I was at a table with eight, nine, ten people from all over the place, and we're smoking cigars and drinking beers and just talking about the good life, and it was like, yes, this is exactly how, this is exactly the trajectory that the podcast ought to take. It's like two human communion, right? In a way that was really seamless and natural. And it was cool because, you know, we had a shuttle from LaGuardia that took folks

to, that took folks to, like, to the retreat center so they didn't have to navigate Long Island on their own. And just from the moment that they got on the bus, everyone was talking to everyone else. Because they knew that they had a kind of common ground. And that's what it ought to provide. A common ground for genuine communion.

And, you know you find this or you well that was my experience of the pints of the qantas retreat last year it's like these people are so cool yeah and i didn't know them and now i do and it yeah but it is also weird like you'd have that experience people listen to god's planning so they feel that they know you so when they see you like ah and you're like who are you you know yeah but like most people are just cool about it you know they're they're like, hey, I appreciate the podcast. That's why I'm here. Very grateful for it.

And then it's like, so what's up? You know, so you just kind of get over that in seven seconds. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you're just on to normal life. And I just met a handful of people by whom I was like, yo, these people are awesome. Yeah, I know. I'm just I'm impressed. I frequently have that experience of meeting somebody

and then realizing, I think to myself, yesterday I didn't know you existed, and now that I know you do, the world is better to me. I often have that. I'll encounter these incredible faithful priests with these amazing families. I'm like, wow, yesterday I had a view of the world and where we were headed and what it was like.

And if I could have inserted you into it, it would have made it better. And lo and behold, you do in fact exist. And yay. No, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's always surprising, but surprising in a way that kind of keeps our cynicism or our sarcasm at bay.

Like a lot of times I think we tend to just be a little bit dismissive of reality. We feel as if we've seen enough of it to know that it's just not that good. And then it keeps crashing in on us in such a way that we have to be open to the prospect that there are other people out there doing, not just doing, but being wonderful. You know, not just doing wonderful things, but being wonderful people. And that that broadens our horizons or opens up our experience in such a way. Like we can't say, you know, I'm going to close the door on this. I'm going to close on that. It just keeps being good.

It just keeps being beautiful. Well, let's take a few questions here from our patrons. Let's do it. Thanks for being a patron, patron. Catholic Jamie should be arriving 1st of September. Catholic Jamie? So Joe Rogan, who you don't know because you're cooler than me, has a podcast.

He has a guy who runs his cameras and computers, and we have John Paul who's graciously doing it right now, but we have a full-time person moving in to Steubenville. Yeah. So that's going to be great. For this? For pints? For pints.

It's just like a big investment. Yeah. So I said to everybody, please become a patron immediately. And a lot of people have stepped up, and so we're going to be able to afford it. That's right. Ben Hutchinson says, Father Pine, I am of the opinion that the problem of divine hiddenness is the best argument for atheism. Do you have any books or articles, recommendations on this topic? Yeah.

I recommend an article by Travis Dumsday in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly called, I think it's just called The Problem of Divine Hiddenness. I actually just wrote an essay for a Word on Fire collected edition. I don't know the title of it, but it's going to come out soonish about divine hiddenness. So yeah, I can send you that essay. Slash, check out Travis Dumb's day. Because mine is just, I don't know what you would call it, but it's a theological extension of a philosophical argument that he gives.

And also, Ben, we've done a whole episode on divine hiddenness. You can go to pintswithaquinas.com, click on episodes, and search that very topic if you're interested. Boom. Paul Binner says, Is it better to have a valid, although illicit, Mass or no Mass at all? Where do you draw the line? We have an assistant pastor that takes great liberties with the structure of the Mass,

but the consecration seems to be valid. I've discussed this with him and the main pastor. He feels he's okay doing this to make things more understandable for the congregation. The main pastor doesn't feel he'll be able to change this pastor, and he doesn't want to lose the help. So the main question again, is it better to have a valid, although illicit, Mass or no Mass at all? Valid but illicit. Jack's-

And sorry. valid but illicit Jack's and sorry yeah yeah it doesn't mean it's not I once went to confession because I just stood up in the middle of a homily and left Sunday Mass

with my kids and I can't do it can't do it it's weird stop playing guitars that homily was awful and probably heretical and then I went to confession

and it was like a sorry not sorry but kind of sorry if i have to be you tell me one of those things i i was talking to a fellow friend of mine priest friend opus dago and i was complaining about the level of liturgies in my area and he was he started saying yeah like yeah this isn't fair and yeah matt I don't know what this accent is, but he eventually said, like, Matt Fradd doesn't deserve a good liturgy. Matt Fradd deserves hell. I'm like, whoa, all right, good.

Let's keep going. It's so good. Savage. His point isn't we should just have a sloppy liturgy, but the point was let's keep things in perspective. Sure. That hurt me. Jack Skian says,

This is a question that I've been trying to think through for a while, and I'd love Father Pine's insights. Is the blood of Jesus Christ redemptive in and of itself, or does redemption come from Christ's self-sacrifice? In other words, is Jesus accidentally skinned? Sorry, if Jesus accidentally skinned his knees as a child, would the blood that he shed be redemptive in any way? What a question. And I know you're ready. I am ready. So it's efficacious in virtute divina, so in or by virtue of the divine power. And so the Lord Jesus Christ's body, blood, as it were, is made efficacious for the attainment

of salvation by virtue of the fact that it is conjoined to the Godhead, and that the Godhead has associated it in the work of salvation as an instrument. So that's true of Christ's human nature in its entirety. So that's true of his soul and body. That's true of his intellect, will, passions, the defects that he assumes, kind of in solidarity with sinful humanity. That's true of all that kind of goes to constitute his human nature. So the Lord performs certain acts in his human nature which kind of correspond to the divine efficacy. So we speak about the divine efficacy as the divine efficiency,

St. Thomas uses that language in Tertziapar's question 48, article 6. But then he'll talk about the human contribution as kind of like the human element of this divine efficacy. So his sacred humanity is associated with this divine work as its instrument, and so what the Lord does by merit, what he does by satisfaction, what he does by sacrifice, what he does by redemption, all are invested with this kind of divine efficacy. But we would talk about it principally in terms of what the Lord does in his intellect and in his will. So he knows us on the cross, he chooses our salvation, he offers himself to the Father as a pleasing sacrifice to make, you know, satisfaction for the debt of sin and punishment, which we incurred in original sin.

But that this choice, right, this act of intellect and will resonates through his body. And so even his precious blood is an expression of this human dimension of a divine efficacy. But you'll kind of want to take them all together and speak about it in a principled sense as a matter of God giving God. That's just what salvation is. God gives us God, but he translates it through the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ such that every dimension of our humanity, which he assumes is touched, is transformed by it. So if Christ skins his knee accidentally, we wouldn't talk about that as, invested with a divine purpose in the same way as the passion, death, and resurrection. But there's still a sense in which it's saving, insofar as Christ takes to himself every aspect

of our human experience consonant with the communication of salvation. So when Christ is, you know, presented in the temple, when he's lost to his parents, when he preaches on the Mount of Beatitudes, you know, all of these temple, when he's lost to his parents, when he preaches on the Mount of Beatitudes, you know, all of these things have a saving dimension, but we would talk about salvation kind of coming to its climax in the Paschal Mystery because God intended that it be such. So all of his deeds and suffering save us, but there's a kind of concentration of salvation in the Paschal Mystery because God has ordained it that way.

So by virtue of the divine choice, it takes on the shape. Okay. Yeah, that's good. Let's see here. William Crowett says, What are some of the vices you find young Catholics today are particularly susceptible to in this society, climate, culture? How can we combat these vices within ourselves and correct each other with charity?

What do you think? I mean, it sounds boring, but like sexual sins. Also sloth. Something I've been thinking about more and more is how leisure takes effort. Dissociating is easy. And I think we often think of sloth as a sort of couch potato doing nothing, but it can just be distracting ourselves to death to avoid doing what we ought

to be doing. I think that's probably a big thing as well. Yeah. Yeah. I would say sloth is probably more insidious insofar as it's a more serious sin. And it really gets at the root of what animates our efforts to respond to the grace of God, you know? Yeah, so St. Thomas will describe sloth as a kind of sorrow at the divine good because it seems unattainable. So, you know, maybe you hear preached you're destined for a life of beatitude, God wants you to be happy. God wills that you overcome the habitual sins in your life. And you hear those things and you're like, yeah, not for me. And that just descends upon your soul as a kind of paralysis, a spiritual paralysis. Like you said, it might be expressed as a kind of frenzied running to and fro so as to fill up what is

lacking in your experience of human relationships or a relationship with God. So you busy yourself so that you don't have to confront that emptiness, right? So yeah, I think that's a real problem, and I think that there are many things about modern life which conduce to sloth, and I think that the availability of a lot of content that is passively consumed is part of that story. So like Netflix, it's just fascinating

that people talk about a show becoming available on a certain date with the expectation that you watch all of it within a day or two. It's like you can push pause on your life when a television show comes out. It's very fascinating. And I don't say that as like fascinating is a euphemism for I'm judging you right now,

but it's just, it's kind of wild. It used to be that, you know, these things were serialized and now they're just binged. So there's a kind of lack of balance, I think, that comes with content gluttony, specifically like passive content gluttony. So maybe one of the ways by which to confront it is to meditate more upon and to exercise more one's agency, to think about oneself as the protagonist. Because there's also things in our ambient culture which really suggest that you're not the protagonist, you're just the victim.

So if you can't be the hero of the story, the next best thing to be is the victim. The martyr. Because the victim has a kind of power. The victim can make other people kind of quaver in fear. Yeah. You know, because if you claim some sort of oppression, you can really ruin the lives of those who wrought it.

But I think that we want to step back into the role of protagonist. You've been dealt a certain hand. It's for us to play that hand, even if that hand isn't ideal, or even if there are things about that hand that we would wish, at the moment, otherwise. And so, like, what does it mean to be an agent? What does it mean to be a protagonist? And I don't know if people have seen the movie Tenet,

which came out, was the first one that came out at the beginning of the pandemic, but there's a real cool meditation on what it means to be the protagonist in there. I mean, the main character's name is just the protagonist. He is not named otherwise. And while we may feel ourselves to be done unto by life, we can still engage it in a way that's meaningful,

even if thin, you know, even if it doesn't look like you can be an astronaut or you can change your reality to reflect your desire, you know, that might not be the case, but you can still do something insofar as God gives you to. I'm a big fan of Jordan Peterson, and he does a good job, I think, of expressing the natural virtues that we've seen to have forgotten, and one of those things he says is,, of expressing the natural virtues that we've seen to have forgotten.

And one of those things he says is, what's something you could do that you will do that will make your life better? I love how he phrases that. Yeah, and like when you think about the way that St. Thomas talks about fraternal correction, there's this realistic idea at the heart of it or there's a realism to it. Or he'll ask basically, can this person change?

Does this thing matter? We're asking these types of questions before we say, this is bad. I will correct it just robotically with a frustrated anger. Does this matter? Can this person change? And I think when we ask those questions of ourself, we need to be responsive to the grace of God rather than just saying, ideally, I look like this tomorrow. I'll set about it. It's like, ah. like this tomorrow. You know, I'll set about it. It's like, ah, you know.

Grond James, thanks for being a patron, says, my best friend is Hindu and interested in learning more about Catholicism. Where can I find a good information or good information that compares the two religions? I don't know that specific thing that would compare the two. I don't either. But if he's interested in learning more about Catholicism, what would you suggest? So I would do...

The Mystic Institute. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, right. I would say there's some basic kind of Christian apologetics, which I think a lot of people have found super helpful, like Mere Christianity.

I'm all for the popular at the outset. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great book. I don't recommend G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, for instance, because I think it's just too...

It's too playful. Yeah. It's annoying. It's just kind of cray-cray. So Mere Christianity... It's a great book. I don't recommend G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, for instance, because I think it's just too... It's too playful. It's annoying. It's just kind of cray-cray. It's like being with a friend who's continually sarcastic and you can't tell which he's being. Yeah. Like Father Bonaventure. Exactly.

So, yeah, I'd start with Mere Christianity. Honestly, I just read a lot of C.S. Lewis. Problem of Pain, for instance, or Screwtape Letters. They just give you a good Christian worldview, as it were. They kind of introduce you to it, but by indirection or obliquely. James McKee says, if you could recommend one practice for the body,

or book if you prefer, one for the soul and one for the mind, what would they be? One practice. For the body, soul, and mind. Yeah, so what would I say? Body. Brush your teeth.

Yeah, that's a great one. I would say don't look at your... So one practice for the body is set your alarm on something other than your phone. Because when you set it on your phone, you typically pick it up at the end of the night to change it, and then you typically go to ESPN.com and find out who's doing what in the Olympics, and then you're all of a sudden devastated the US placed second in the gymnastics preliminaries,

and then you're just clicking on, did Simone Biles do as well as she ought to have in the vault, and I know that she had this real cool trait, and then 22 minutes later you're like, I didn't care about gymnastics 22 minutes ago, but now I'm very much wrought up, or kind of wrapped up in the concern thereof. And I think that for me, the big thing is get sleep. For your body, get sleep. I think life is difficult as it is. I don't think

you need to make it more difficult by being constantly exhausted. So get sleep. And one way to get sleep is set your alarm on something other than your phone. When it comes to your soul, for me, mind and soul, it's just answers to the same question because the powers of the soul among which the mind is included are kind of how the soul is given expression. So one thing for your soul, I would say, is forgive. And that's exceedingly difficult. And I think that it takes work and it takes daily work. But if you find yourself bound up with sadness and anger directed at another human being,

you have to choose to forgive that human being, and you have to choose to forgive that human being basically every day until such times you find yourself no longer bound up. That's what I was going to ask you, because people say forgiveness isn't a feeling, it's a decision, but sometimes we make the decision

and still feel as upset as we did at the moment before we made that decision. And so have we really made the decision? I think it's a decision that has to be ratified. Like you chose to bring children into the world, but that's a decision that you have to ratify every day because you're like i could take them out of the world and will unless they start behaving okay yeah that's really good um this is funny.

Patricia Miller. Father Pine, I'll always hold your mom in great esteem for her butterscotch pancake recipe. Carly's mom. Do you know what that means? I don't know who Carly's mom is necessarily. Does she make good pancakes? My mom makes killer butterscotch pancakes. Chances of her having made that up is unlikely. That's super unlikely.

She makes the best licorice. No, she doesn't. Dan Lindstrom says, Father Pine does an awesome job of explaining the ordinary way of sanctity. What amount of esteem or regard should we give to the extraordinary, like miracles, healings in charismatic groups,

or speaking in tongues and prophesying? Right. So St. Thomas talks about the charismatic gifts in Secunda Secundae questions 171 through 178. That whole section, questions 171 through 189, are dedicated to those things which pertain to some but not to all. So in Secunda Secundae, questions 1 through 170 are dedicated to those things which pertain to all, and that's where he describes the life of virtue. And then subsequently, he describes the charismatic gifts, states of life or lives, as it were, contemplative and active, and then states of perfection, the episcopacy and religious life. And he says this just pertains to some. So those charismatic gifts, which are listed in 1 Corinthians 12, which are described by St. Thomas as gratia gratis date, which is

grace is freely given. So it's to distinguish them from gratia gratum faciens, grace making pleasing or sanctifying grace, are things that are given to the individual for the upbuilding of the church. So they have a good end, obviously. I'm like here validating in the sense of saying, yeah, absolutely. So they have a good end, but it's not necessary that each be given them, and they're not necessarily for one's own personal sanctification. So I think that in the order of charity, you're responsible for the worship of God, your own sanctification, and then those who come next, those who immediately pertain to your good, like members of your family or those who are in your pastoral care, etc. And I think that once you kind of go down in the order of charity, you begin to

entertain this question of, what gifts has the Lord given me for the upbuilding of the church, and how do I best exercise them? So I think it's good to want to cultivate certain charismatic gifts like tongues, interpretation of tongues, prophecy, word of wisdom, word of knowledge, mighty deeds, etc. And St. Thomas gives beautiful explanations of those things in those questions 171 through 178. I think there's a kind of danger of focusing exclusively or inordinately on them, and you might encounter that in some communities, but I think a lot of the charismatic settings where I myself have worshipped, specifically in college at Steubenville, I think that it's done well, I think that it's done beautifully, but it all ought

ultimately to lead back to a sense of the contemplative end of Christian life, the primacy or importance of sanctifying grace and cultivating sanctifying grace. So I think it's good to have a kind of holy esteem for these things, to be open to the Lord's gift of them, even to pray in prayer groups in such a way that you might more readily receive them. They're outpouring, but within that setting, within that context. Here's a good question that I know a lot of people have. It comes from Dorian Walker. He says, Father Pine, if loving means willing the good of the other and we're meant to love God, how do we will God's good given that there is no good that God doesn't already

possess, or is love for God best expressed by some word other than agape? Right, so that's a great question. And I think the basic example is you will that God be God. Right, so you can think about it in the way it's expressed in the Our Father. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. You're not praying that it come about as if God needed you to pray that it come about, right? Nor are you trying to change God's mind. You know, we've talked about this in the context of conversations about prayer.

Prayer isn't about you being the one on whom it all depends. Prayer is about God sharing with you in the unfolding of his wonderful plan. And so I think that when we talk about willing God's goodness or loving God, we're talking about it more after the manner of affirmation than we are about giving him something that he lacks. So when St. Thomas even talks about God's will, he'll distinguish the way in which God wills from the way that we will. So when we will, we typically go out to a thing that we lack

as a way by which to assimilate it or one we love. So I love, you know, butterscotch pancakes. Let's bring it around. I go out to butterscotch pancakes so that I eat them, and then they become part of me, and then they're subsequently expressed as energy or as a nap. Whereas God loves not because he lacks the thing towards which he inclines, but because love just issues spontaneously from intellect. So when you know a thing, you are inclined toward the kind of expression of that thing, not in the sense that you desire it as lacking, but in the sense that it spills over.

So I think that when we talk about our willing the good to God, we don't will it to him as something that he lacks, but we have to reaffirm him to be good. So God wills himself, and we are invited into or caught up in God's willing of himself. Yeah. Yeah, great stuff there. Oh, that's funny. We've talked about this. Dominic asks, Father Pine,

what techniques do you utilize to remember what you read? You've sort of addressed that. I bet if you want to have another shot at it. Yeah, big thing for me is outlining. And then... What do you mean outlining? So when I read a book, I will highlight and annotate. And then I'll go back through the book, and then I'll take notes on it, but not just notes in the sense of write down every usable word, but try to summarize it. So for instance, when I'm writing my dissertation,

I'll read a text, I'll identify those things in the text that are helpful, and then I'll go back and I'll just do my own version of the things in those things that I find helpful. And then I'll just put, you know, Jean-Hervé Nicolas said this in Réactualisation, you know, page 38. And then I'll make outlines of what I want to say in the chapter that I'm writing and I'll come to that point and I'll be like okay I want to say something about this and I feel like I have a good sense of what I wrote down here but maybe I'll peel back to the text to say exactly what he said but I'm always trying to put it in my words like I'm always trying to wow that's a weird image that occurred to my mind I was like like a mama bird pre-masticating worms to feed them to her baby chicks.

And you're like, I'm wanton. Yeah, exactly. So I'm trying to interiorize it and I'm trying to kind of teach myself. So I'm cognizing. I'm not just a typewriter. I'm not just a scribe.

I'm not just a court reporter bailiff. I'm engaged, right? So I think that when I'm processing text, I'm doing it as one, I'm trying to do it reporter bailiff. I'm engaged, right? So I think that when I'm processing text, I'm doing it as one, I'm trying to do it as one who's engaged. And then it helps then to teach it. It helps to preach it.

It helps to journal about it. So I think insofar as you can be the protagonist of your intellectual work, you're more likely to retain it. There's a guy here, Jacob Imam. I don't know if you know him. Yeah, I just heard about him. Oh, Jacob Imam. I don't know if you know him. Yeah, I just heard about him. Oh, great guy. His godfather was a secretary for C.S. Lewis.

No way. And so at Jacob's house, he has a copy of The Divine Comedy, and it's from C.S. Lewis. And all the pages have been written on the back and front. It's pretty neat. All right, let's do one more question here from Joseph Fierro. He says, As somebody who finds the extraordinary form

and the Eastern Divine Liturgy tremendously beautiful and helpful for worship, sometimes I wonder if I'm worshipping worship instead of itself rather than worshipping God. How do we know whether an attraction to a particular liturgy is genuinely helping us worship God or if we are turning it into an idol? Yeah, I'd say just take the criteria from the first letter of St. John, which is to say, do you love your brother? I think that's got to cash out there. So I think love, so Hans-Joseph Balthasar says that love alone is credible. And I think that the way that

St. Thomas describes the life of grace, he says you can't know insofar as it's immaterial, it's invisible. You can't know whether you're in a state of grace, but there are certain evidential signs. So are you drawn to prayer? Are you making good use of the sacraments? Are you engaged in good Christian friendships? Do you have a modicum of penance in your life? Are you studying the faith? Do you love the Blessed Virgin Mary? Are you faithful in your commitments? Are you becoming more so thus that and the other? Not just in the sense of self-improvement project, but do you have some experiences of being kind of born on by the life of grace, or do you find yourself becoming more embittered, more angry, more sad, more vengeful, more etc., etc., etc.?

And if the answer is yes to the latter consideration, then maybe this is part of the story. Not necessarily, but your spiritual life is going to require some revisiting in conversation with your friends, your family, maybe with a priest. But yeah, if things continue to grow, then I think that you can have confidence that you are where you are. Terrific. Yeah. Then finally, why are you in Steubenville? Are you just here for a vacation? There's a Bible conference starting this Friday.

Nice. And then an apologetics conference this weekend. How long are you here for? I'm just here for three days. Sweet. Just hanging out. Cool. Well, thank you kindly for being on the show. And that is it. God bless you. សូវាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពាប់បានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបា ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത� Thank you. Bye.