Pints With Aquinas - Tolkien, Philosophy, and Jokes w/ Dr Peter Kreeft

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

In this episode, I talk with Dr. Peter Kreeft, a Catholic author and philosopher. We talk about God, philosophy, and even some puns! We discuss: - Tolkien’s Catholic mind - The genius of Tolkien��s writings - The philosophy within “The Lord of the Rings”   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

Now we're live. Okay. So, yes, King James Version is my favorite, and this one has the Apocrypha in it, or the Deuterocanonicals, we should say. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. I've never been able to not like the King James. If you grew up with it, it's in your bones. Yeah.

It's beautiful. It is beautiful. And I was giving a talk in South Carolina, and there was a priest there who was an Anglican who converted to Catholicism and is now a Catholic priest. And he pulled this off. And I said, one of the problems is it doesn't have the Deuterocanonicals. And he said, well, this one does. And he gave it to me. Great.

Well, the key to ecumenical reunion is that everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, must read the King James Bible and the Latin Mass. Interesting. This is the interview, by the way. I don't know if you know that. We're live now. There's no introduction. Life itself is an interview.

Now, are you sure you don't want to taste some Sweet Baby Jesus chocolate peanut butter porter? Just a little bit. I'll take Sweet Baby Jesus, but I will not take chocolate peanut butter here. Look at that. That looks like something you'd put in your engine. No, no, no. Single malt scotch, yes. But motor oil no please i'll let you know what it tastes like here we go motor oil right not terribly good actually i'm really hoping it would i warned you tastes like

chocolate peanut butter porter why would anybody do that Chocolate peanut butter porter. Why would anybody do that? Sadism. Yes. So how has COVID been for you? It makes you appreciate real life. Back to normal.

Have you had it? Did you get COVID? Oh, no. Not at all. But we're just isolated like everybody else. Can't wait to get back into the real world. I feel as if I've been one foot in the matrix, one foot in the real world for a year. Are you an introvert?

Yes. Me too. A loner. If I'm at a party, I can chat with one or two people in a corner about something interesting. But the hostess of a party will always stop you from doing that.

Bloody hostesses. Yep. Ruining my fun. Of course. But for some reason, if it gets to be about five, six, seven, then I get burnt out, and I just want to go obese on my own. Well, you're forbidden to have fun at parties if you're an introvert. You have to make an impression. In other words, you have to put a face on.

So what are you like? Do you agree with that? Do you find that, too, if you have to put a face on. So what are you like? Do you agree with that? Do you find that too? If you have a couple of people, it's okay? But if it starts to get bigger, you find it more difficult? Well, this is why I don't like parties, because they don't usually tolerate just one or two people. In a corner somewhere. In a corner somewhere. They make you mingle.

Yeah. This is not a party. This is two people talking. How would you define introvert, and why do you think you're that? Not self-conscious. You're not? I'm not self-conscious, no. By introvert, I mean I enjoy solitude. I enjoy being alone. I enjoy thinking. I enjoy one-on-one conversations, real conversations. As soon as there's something between us, like a phone line, it seems artificial to me and I clamp up. And when there are three or four more people around, it's as if you have to have

three or four conversations at the same time. Like in an Italian restaurant, I can't stand Italian restaurants. Everybody's talking at the same time and I can't distinguish one voice from another. It's ADD. time and I can't distinguish one voice from another. It's ADD. ADD, I think I might have that, but I'm not sure.

Well, it's probably ADHD because I'm a philosopher and... High definition. High definition, exactly, HD. If I walk into a mall, you remember those things we used to have? Yeah, before COVID. Before COVID and Amazon. If I walk into a mall, I get exhausted very quickly. And I think it's because there's too much going on that's trying to grab my attention. My wife doesn't have that problem.

I wonder if that's somehow associated with ADD, not being able to concentrate on one simple thing, but having my attention being diverted in a hundred different ways i think it's a gender thing too because women are much better at multitasking than than men especially if you have large families you you're an octopus you have to keep all eight balls in here at the same time yes that's why we go away from home and specialize and and do silly things like scholarship whereas they stay home and do the important things. So in the entire history of Western philosophy, there's not a single woman philosopher of first importance, mainly because they have too much common sense.

What do you think of the gender confusion things going on today? Do you try not to think about it? I try not to think about it. Or are you heading the same? It's absurd. The worst thing about it is the manipulation by the media. A generation or two ago, everybody thought that transgenderism was ridiculous. And now because of media propaganda, this is politically correct. So you have to be online. And they're persuaded. Everyone's persuaded. I was reading in The Two Towers.

What's Boromir's brother's name? I forget. Faramir. Faramir said to Frodo regarding Gondor, we are a failing people, a springless autumn. Is that where America is? No, there's hope. Yeah?

You ride through places like West Virginia, and you find there are still people with common sense. They don't control the media, but it's still a democracy, and we can vote for whom we want. OK, this is interesting to me. So you're much more optimistic about the potential outcome of the United States than I am, I think. The United States as a government, maybe not. The United States as a government, maybe not.

The United States as a people, yes. Okay, and what's the difference, and why is one bound to fail? A government is abstract. A people is concrete. We're people. We're not government. Government is a set of laws and institutions and customs, which used to come from the people and is now being imposed upon the people. Not so much by government as by media, I think. Yeah.

And it seems like the media is in cahoots with this administration. Well, it's not just this administration. The media has been for, oh, at least three or four decades, what they think is a city on a hill, the shining light, the experts who no longer simply report what's going on but create what's going on. It amazes me not only that the media can change massive public opinion on sensitive issues like gay marriage, but even on issues like the Boston Red Sox. The Boston Globe, for instance, back in, I think, early 2000s, said, we need a new Fenway Park. Tear it down. And there were a few letters of protest, but eventually everybody came around and said,

yes, let's have a new Fenway Park. So they did a lot of research and proof that you needed one and pictures of the new one, and everyone was online. And then John Henry came in and bought the place and hired another agency to look at Fenway Park and said, this will last another 100 years. So they changed their mind again and said, now we can preserve Fenway Park. And public opinion changed once again 100%.

Now we don't want a new one. We want an old one. Now, the Red Sox are Boston's religion. Anything else is secondary. For the paper of record to change religious belief in a week from yes to no and then again from no to yes, that's miraculous, that's scary. But it happened. Yeah, I find it interesting too that we probably all think that we make decisions based on the facts and that

we're not easily swayed one way or the other. But I think for the most part, we tend to vote how our neighbors vote. So people around the country have very different opinions of the COVID restrictions, for example, or their opinion about Biden or Trump. And it seems to match up with whether they're in Portland, Oregon or in the South or... And which TV station they listen to and which newspaper they read. Yeah. So how do you get around that? Do you listen to one particular station or all of them or none of them? I ignore most of them. I have more important things to do.

Henry David Thoreau said very wisely, read not the times, read the eternities. So what have you been doing during COVID? Writing. Writing. How many books have you written now? I think it's about 100. That'll do. I'm not sure which one is number 100, but I'm still going strong.

And what have you been writing recently? Well, I finished a series of homilies for Bishop Barron's Word on Fire. And what am I doing right now? When you say homilies, you mean for priests to use? Yes. Or for just people to reflect on scripture passages. What am I doing right now? When you say homilies, you mean for priests to use? Yes, or for just people to reflect on Scripture passages. The three-year liturgical cycle, that's almost 1,000 pages long. And I'm doing one on popular philosophy,

what every Catholic ought to know, for Ignatius Press. Thinking of writing a book on humor. The one thing I know is it can't be a serious book. And most of them are. That's a shame. You wrote a book for, was it Augustine Press or something, on philosophy, 100 Philosophers You Need to Know or something like that? St. Augustine's Press, yes. It's a four-volume history of philosophy for beginners

called Socrates' Children. And St. Augustine's Press still does it, but Word on Fire is coming out with a new edition of it. And I'm kind of proud of it. It took a long time and a lot of research. And there's no book that quite fits the niche. What you find is either

one-volume histories of philosophy, which can't really go into depth, or Copleston's classic 12-volume thing, which is for scholars. It's very, very good, but it's hard reading. So mine is in between the two. Fantastic. Has it been published yet? Oh, yes. It's been out for a while. How do you go?

I think it's been read by a few New Zealand sheep farmers. I write rare books. Have you sent it to them? No. I got a letter from one you sent it to them? No. I got a letter from one of them. What did he say? It was about another book, but he liked it. It was the philosophy of Tolkien.

I was just in New Zealand a couple of years ago before COVID happened, and I got to go to Middle Earth. Yes. It was really beautiful. I'm sure. When's the first time do you remember picking up The Lord of the Rings? Oh, this was back in the 50s. That's when it was published, wasn't it?

Yes. Mid-50s or thereabouts? Yes. I've been into science fiction and fantasy, and I had a few friends who read The Lord of the Rings and said, you have to read this. It's a masterpiece. And I started, and I got about to page 50, and I said, well, this is Ralph Whitten, but I'm not that interested in hobbits, and it seems a bit slow, so I put it aside.

I'm an idiot. And then a few years later, I tried it again, and I've read it every few years since. I must have read it a dozen times. I'm going through it the second time now, and I'm picking so much more up than I was the first time. That's my definition of a great book, a book that you can pick up more stuff from every single time you read it.

It's like a cow that gives you not just a finite amount of milk from a bottle, but an infinite amount if you wait. And this time I've been following along on the map, which is something I didn't really do last time. Maps are very important in Middle Earth. It did a lot for me. Yes, indeed. It's really helped. We need a map of life. That's why we're so confused.

The old maps are gone. We need a map of life. That's why we're so confused. The old maps are gone. We have GPS now. We disappear into our technology. Yeah. One thing that I keep reading in The Lord of the Rings right now that seems applicable to us is people like Gandalf are saying things like, not even the wise can predict how things will end. This sort of humility, as opposed to a despair like I have of America, or wherever you happen to live. Pride and despair are, according to Aquinas, very similar, and motivated by the same demand to play God. So humility and a kind of practical pessimism in turn go together,

and that's Gandalf. And that was Tolkien. Tolkien described human history as one long defeat. He said, I'm a temperamental pessimist but an optimist by conviction. I think that's the right combination. How do they go together? Well, temperamental pessimism is really the key to cheerfulness. You don't expect much, and then every little thing,

like a single sip of a single malt scotch is a blessing from heaven. On the other hand, if you're not innately cheerful, then cheerfulness is a surprise, and then it's doubly cheerful. And to be a pessimist about human nature is simply to be realistic. Chester had said once that the only Christian dogma you can prove simply by reading the daily newspapers is the dogma of original sin.

Or like you put it earlier, he said, I'm an idiot, and then I've heard you say elsewhere, that's one of the reasons I believe in original sin. Of course. Wow. Tell us more about The Lord of the Rings and why you love it. How many hours do we have? Well, as many as you like.

First of all, I don't like your question, because tell me about The Lord of the Rings is something that Tolkien himself did, and I can't do it better than he did. Tell me what you love about The Lord of the Rings. That's like, what's the meaning of this book? The meaning of the book is the book. It's a story. Read it. What do I like about it? It's the real world. You turn from reading that book. You close the covers and you look around the room and you see your refrigerator and your radiator and you don't get the feeling that you're entering a more real world.

But a fantasy world. Between the covers of that book the world is somehow more real. Everything is more itself. Tolkien was a bit of a Platonist in the sense that the Platonic forms are the absolute and essential essences of things and everything in The Lord of the Rings is essentially itself. The horns are more horn-like and the swords are more sword-like and the villains are villainous and the heroes are genuinely heroic. Peter Jackson didn't understand that. He cut down all the heroes a little bit, especially Faramir. That's the one

thing that's almost unforgivable. He's allergic, I think, to Platonic ideals, but Tolkien is not. And somehow that Platonic idealism comes across as not unrealistic but realistic. Perhaps because it's environed by this rather pessimistic view of history and that there are going to be tremendous losses as well as gains, and even if you win the war, there are going to be casualties, which is what you get at the end. It's not simply a they all live happily ever after. Even Frodo had to leave the Shire. All three protagonists in one sense die. Gandalf literally dies and resurrects, and Aragorn goes through the paths of the dead and dies to his old life. He is a kind of reluctant king, and Frodo has to die to the

Shire. He dies to save the Shire. Very Christ-like. In fact, on the very last page, he explains to Sam when Sam says, I thought you did this for the Shire and you could go back and live in and enjoy the Shire that you did so much to save. And Frodo says, well, that's the way life is, Sam. Sometimes somebody has to give something up so that somebody else can have them, which is the essence of Christianity. Christ gave up his life so that we could have it. Could I ask you to get that book off the shelf? Because the last several lines of Return of the King, I remember finishing reading it to my kids, and I had to leave them in order to weep,

because I found it. I was going to say. I wasn't sure what you'd think about that, so I'm glad that you approve. Yeah. No, I don't weep very easily, but when I came to the end of Lord of the Rings for the first time, I wept. Me too. I had to go into my closet and shut the door. Well, I'm back. And Tolkien himself, in one of his letters, says that there's one fault that I agree with my critics, although the critics didn't mention this. The fault that's inexcusable about The Lord of the Rings is that it's too short.

What is so short? Too short. The Lord of the Rings is that it's too short. What is so short? Too short. The Lord of the Rings is too short. It's only a thousand pages long. You want more. Yeah. Here it is. At last the three companions turned away, and never again looking back, they rode slowly homewards, and they spoke no word to one another until they came back to the shire,

but each had great comfort in his friends on the long gray road. At last they rode over the Downs and took the East Road, and then Merry and Pippin rode on to Buckland, and already they were singing again as they went. But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on and there was yellow light and fire within. And the evening meal was ready and he was expected. And Rose drew him in and set him in his chair and put little Eleanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath. Well, I'm back, he said. That's what it's all for. That's what these cosmic battles are for So that you can have a little Eleanor on your lap and say, I'm back That's what all the armies and all the governments are for So that you can enjoy your children, your family

He was Cheston who said that good warriors don't hate what's in front of them so much as they love what's behind them Of course And that's exactly Faramir's explanation of why he's a warrior. That's right. Which was cut out of the movie, by the way. What did you think of Tom Bombadil? Delightful. I love him the second time around. The first time I thought I was being,

someone was playing a prank on me. I didn't understand it. I thought it was stupid. There's no explanation for Tom Bombadil. He's just there. He comes bounding into the book as he came bounding into Tolkien's imagination. And he's not an allegory for anything. And if you try to explain him, all the explanations fail. He's just himself. There he is. Utterly unnecessary, like most delightful things in life. Okay. And do you think Tolkien thought about him in that sense, or was it just a random thing? No. That we shouldn't try too hard to explain or understand? He justified him occasionally in saying something like he represents the contemplative ideal

or the pacifist ideal or something like that, which is legitimate. But he doesn't know where he came from. I don't think any author really understands completely where his ideas come from or where his characters come from. They just bubble up. If they come from the conscious mind, then they're either moralistic or allegorical. You control them. I've written one novel, and I'll never write another one because I had no idea how patient I had to be. It took me almost 20 years to

let the characters develop themselves and tell me who they were because any attempt to manipulate them is obviously going to fail. Yeah, I think it was Flannery O'Connor who said in her advice to authors something to that effect that you have to respect these characters enough not to make them a mouthpiece for your ideas. Of course. They show you who they are, like real people. Maybe we shouldn't think too much about Tom Bombadil, but I think that when I read him this time around,

it seems to me that he's sort of representative of those people I encounter and have no idea how to categorize. Well, maybe they're angels in disguise. Angels are very good at disguising. Maybe. Are you one? You'll never know, will you? Okay, yeah.

My dad was in the Navy, and this was before the time of phones, of course, and he said that they had an old big copy of The Lord of the Rings, and there was a waiting list for people to read it. And I thought, my dad's generation was far more interesting than mine. We'd be watching cat videos on TikTok and not able to sit through a long book like that. Well, cat videos are probably the most interesting thing on TikTok. Have you ventured into TikTok? No, but I've ventured into cats. We've always had cats.

How many? One at a time, usually. But they are startling. I love cats. So do I. I'm allergic to them, but I love them. Oh, what a pity. I love dogs, too.

Cats and dogs ought to live together. It's so broadening to them both. It's like men and women. Exactly. How are you and your wife different? Oh, in almost every possible way. I'm Dutch. She's Italian. She's from a big family. I'm from a small family. I'm patient. She's impatient. I'm able to do one thing at a time. She's a master of all that she surveys. She's smarter than I am,

and I rarely lose arguments to male human beings, but I lose every argument I ever have to my wife. She's usually right and I'm wrong. Really? What do you think of the temperaments, the choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, et cetera? Oh, I think that's simply true. And modern psychological terminology might change, but the temperance don't change. So you and your wife, what are you? Oh, we're both melancholic. Okay. This is probably why we've always had bassinowns. They look so melancholy that they're more melancholic than we are, so they make you look happy.

I'm melancholic choleric. My wife is, if you will read in a dictionary, choleric. Her face would be next to it. She's a powerhouse. So there you go. God has a sense of humor. The funniest thing to a man is a woman, and the funniest thing to a woman is a man.

He didn't have to do that. He didn't do it with any angels. Although one is not sure whether angels have anything like gender. Maybe they do on a spiritual level. That's not certain. Now, if Aquinas is right and every angel is its own species, what would that mean for their gender? What would that mean for their gender? Well, there couldn't be the kind of gender in angels that exists in humans as a genus,

because each angel is its own species. Let's see, how does that go? Aquinas is certainly right about angels. He's called the angelic doctor. He may not be an expert on animals. In fact, he thought there were no animals in heaven, which is an inexcusable fault, which God deliberately made him do so that we wouldn't idolize him.

But he's almost certainly right about angels. So when you say Aquinas is wrong about angels in heaven, do you mean angels in this life survive death and enter heaven, or that there just will be animals in heaven? No, I don't think Aquinas is wrong about angels at all. No, I mean animals, though. Oh, animals. So you think there's animals in heaven, but do you think they survive death? No, no.

God recreates them. Right, good. I mean, it's a new heaven and a new earth. He recreates the whole universe, so why couldn't he recreate animals? Why would he put us into a universe with everything else in it? People and rocks and butterflies and angels and no animals. It makes no sense. That's almost a supernatural mistake.

That's a little bit like C.S. Lewis not becoming a Catholic. There's no reason he shouldn't become a Catholic. He was so deeply Catholic in every way, but he was born in Northern Ireland, so God deliberately stopped him from doing that so all the Protestants would read him. Yeah, that's good. I like it. And then Lewis, he seemed to accept purgatory.

Definitely. He was good friends with Tolkien. What was their little group called? The Inklings. Do you know much about them? A little bit. I'm not an expert on it. They would meet regularly, I suppose, to read their little stories to each other? Yes, to each other.

And Lewis was once asked, did you influence Tolkien in writing The Lord of the Rings? And Lewis said, you don't influence Tolkien any more than you influence a bandersnatch. Tolkien influenced me, not vice versa. Very good. Yeah, what about that, Lewis and Tolkien? I appreciate both of them for different reasons. I mean, Tolkien seemed to be more of a brilliant storyteller, although Lewis was good too. But Lewis's little, I just read Men Without Chests the other day, that little sermon, or maybe not a sermon, but lecture he gave, that was excellent. In The Abolition of Man, yeah.

Right. Lewis was more of a thinker, more of an abstract arguer, and Tolkien a storyteller. They respected each other very deeply, and they didn't have a falling out, as some maintain. out as some maintain. And Tolkien certainly helped Lewis see his way into Christianity and to respect Catholicism. Tolkien was something of a curmudgeon. Tolkien was? Yes. And he didn't like the Chronicles of Narnia. He thought they were too allegorical. He was kind of allergic to allegory. And yet you often find Christians trying to allegorize Lord of the Rings and how they explain it. Do you think Tolkien would

have had a problem with that? Of course. But we do it anyway. Tolkien himself wrote an allegory, one at least, Leaf by Niggle. Tell us about that. It's a little short story. I haven't read it. It's autobiographical. He's a niggler, So niggle is himself and he spends most of his life working on just one leaf and he wants to create a tree. He's a painter. And he's interrupted by so many things, especially his neighbor, whose name is Parrish, that he never gets to do anything more than a leaf. And then he goes through a work camp, which is purgatory, and enters heaven, and there is reconciled with his neighbor, Parish, rather, and he sees that there is the tree, the complete painting, which he has made with his life,

not with his brush. So Tolkien wasn't that allergic to allegory, since he at least wrote one. But to allegorize a story is to make it not a story, or at least to make the story not indispensable. You can tell a point through a narrative, or you can tell the point without a narrative, but the point is the same.

That's allegory, but that's not literature. That's not story. I don't know if Tolkien said this or not, but I hear that he said to Lewis, if you want people to read the New Testament, tell them to read the New Testament. Of course. Of course.

Well, there's a general principle I found in my reading and my teaching that the better the book, the worse the commentary's on it. That's a great point. The New Testament is the greatest book in the world, and the commentaries on it are some of the dullest books in the world. And some of the hardest philosophers, Hegel, Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, the books about them are very good.

But they're all terrible writers. But a great writer like Plato, nobody's ever written a good book on Plato. Plato dwarfs everybody. So the better the book, the worse the secondary sources. Is that because they were able to express themselves just as they ought to have? Yeah, this is the same reason why

there are no good Jesus movies, none. And not even any good Jesus novels. Protestant fundamentalists try to write them. They're embarrassingly bad. They're astonishingly bad. Because the real thing so dwarfs any attempt on our part to create one in our imagination, to extend the figure of Jesus that we see in the Gospels, that it's impossible. We can only make ant hills compared with that mountain. And that's a very strong apologetic, I find, to somebody who's sensitive to storytelling.

Why can't you make a good movie about Jesus? You can do that about any other historical figure. Caesar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler. Buddha. Joe Stalling, Buddha, anybody. Can't do it with Jesus. Hmm. What did you think of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings?

Was he depicted well? Perfect. Yeah, I thought so too. Perfect. The archetypal wizard. He did a great job. I mean, you said you didn't like some of the things that Jackson did, but. The casting is excellent.

Oh, excellent. Yeah. Even Aragorn they tried to get Daniel Day-Lewis who would have been even better if he had done what he did in the last of the Mohicans but he bugged out

probably regrets it yeah I think so but Viggo Mortensen who doesn't look like a king did a wonderful acting job and Gandalf was perfect and so was Frodo and Sam the only ones that were not perfect and I don't think they could be perfect did a wonderful acting job, and Gandalf was perfect, and so was Frodo and Sam. The only ones that were not perfect, and I don't think they could be perfect, were the female elves.

Galadriel and Arwen, they were too human. They weren't ethereal enough. What do you think of Galadriel? Well, she's an elf, and she's like us in many ways. She has a checkered history. She fought on the wrong side of a war between the elves back in the Silmarillion, and she's come through it. I didn't much like the acting.

The actress was good, but she sounded a little too much like a Southern California valley girl into psychedelics a little bit. And Arwen was just too beautiful, too sexy, not ethereal enough. But you can't really do elves. Nobody's done elves perfectly. I wonder if that's similar. But you can't really do elves. Nobody's done elves perfectly. I wonder if that's similar. Tolkien's elves are, well, they're named perfectly. Everything is named perfectly. And they're described fairly well. But the attitude towards elves, especially on the part of the hobbits,

especially on the part of Sam, that's perfect. And Gimli, too. Yes. When somebody speaks against Galadriel, he wants to take their head off. Yes. Well, elves are sort of halfway between us and angels. And I'm unimpressed by almost all angel art or angel movies. Yeah. That's true, too.

What angels are must be so superhuman, so transcendent, that to try to express them in human terms can't be just right. And that's perhaps why you think the same about elves. Yeah. Because they're halfway between us and angels. Yeah. I think angels are what abstract modern art is aiming at. I don't like most abstract modern art.

But if an artist came to me and said, how can I depict an angel? I would say, well, study 20th century art, not medieval art. Okay. Do you know a lot about the backstory of the Lord of the Rings? Or enough? You mean in Tolkien's own life? Yeah, in lore. Yeah.

How he understood them. Yes, if it weren't for C.S. Lewis, nobody would have The Lord of the Rings. Tell us about that. He pressured Tolkien to keep trying. Eleven times it was turned down by publishers, mainly because Tolkien insisted that they publish the Silmarillion with it

or parts of the Silmarillion. And Tolkien had just given up until Lewis brought something that both of them weren't familiar with, a technological gadget called a tape recorder. And he said, why don't you try reading one of the chapters of your manuscript into the tape recorder and seeing how it sounds? And Tolkien finally was persuaded and did so and said, you know, it sounds good. Maybe it'll sound good on print too. I'll try again. And he did.

Do we have that tape? I don't think so. We do have a tape of Tolkien reading part of The Lord of the Rings. It's the Ents. And he sounds exactly like an Ent. Yeah. Can you give it a shot? Can I give it a shot?

No. Can I imitate Tolkien, you mean? No, the Ents. I mean, the way Tolkien imitated the Ents. I thought they did a good job on the movies. I did. It's amazing that you find yourself believing in Tolkien trees. Yeah.

Astonishing. Tolkien was a very eccentric character. How so? Well, I had one of his students as a college teacher in English, and he told us stories about Tolkien's strange antics. It was a course in philology, and Tolkien came to the class the first day with a wagon full of books. He said, this is philology. Philology

means the love of language. Love is in your heart. So right now, the secrets of language are in this wagon. If I am successful in this course, they will no longer be in the wagon. They will be in your heart. The students were skeptical. It was a required course. No one wanted to take it. After the course was over, Tolkien was so successful that he took the wagon with all the books in it up to the platform where he was lecturing from. And instead of a concluding lecture, he simply dumped all the books out of the wagon onto the floor and said, they're in here now. You don't need any more. Goodbye.

And left. My friend who lives here, his name is Jacob. His godfather was the secretary of C.S. Lewis. Sear, his name's Jacob, his godfather was the secretary of C.S. Lewis. And so he has told Jacob this story that an American was visiting Lewis and offered him a cigarette. It was one of these cigarettes with the butt on them. And he said, no, thank you, as he pulled out his own and said, I prefer mine without contraception. That's wonderful. That's wonderful. Where was Chesterton in relation to Lewis and Tolkien?

Well, if there's one book that above all converted C.S. Lewis, it was Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. But they never met. Chesterton died in 37, I think, and Lewis was just coming up at Oxford then. Is that right? And so he read The Everlasting Man, and that helped his conversion. Yeah. Wow.

Especially the chapter on Christ's relation to mythology. I haven't read The Everlasting Man. Oh, it's a masterpiece. It's almost as good as Orthodoxy. There's nothing like it. See, I've heard you say that certain students, when they read Chesserton for the first time, get frustrated with it. Oh, yes.

Because they feel like he's playing with them. I feel like that. Yes, but I love it. Yeah, what do you like about that? He exposes my stupidity. He makes me stark naked and laughs at me. Why would you like that? You see, we're all upside

down and he tells us that we're upside down by turning us right side up. That's why he has so many apparent paradoxes. We're the paradox. He's unparadoxicalizing us. I just invented a new word. I like it. Unparadoxicalizing.

No, bad word. Too long. He was Protestant when he wrote Orthodoxy, wasn't he? And then I think converted. Yes. And one of the books that helped me to become a Catholic was Orthodoxy. I said, if this man is not a Catholic now, he certainly will be. He wrote it in 1908.

And I thought he was a Catholic when I first read it. It's such a Catholic vision. Well, Anglo-Catholics are sometimes very Catholic in their sensibilities. If only they could get over that thing about being poped. They're just continuing the heritage of Henry VIII. They have a great sense of humor, though. I love it when Anglicans call themselves the Church of Henry's Hormones. Oh, I like it.

I was at a Russian Orthodox church about a year ago just praying, and someone chatted with me, and I said I was Catholic, and they said, oh, do you still have the Pope? Well, there's two questions about that. Well, I'm not terribly sure. But, yeah, help us understand how you've been viewing this whole saga regarding Pope Francis. Oh, well, we've— As much as you'd like to share.

Well, we've... As much as you'd like to share. Popes are people. And there's a little good in the best of us, a worst of us, and a little bad in the best of us. And Pope Francis has genuine Franciscan instincts, and he's a holy man, and he loves the poor, and he wants to be a good Catholic, but unfortunately he's a Jesuit,

so there's some obstacles there. And I think he's made some ridiculous decisions, especially with the Chinese communists and in appointing people. But I don't think he's a heretic or a very bad person. He's just, you know, he has his pluses and minuses. And we'll get over him and we'll get another Catholic pope. I worked in the kind of world of apologetics, I would continually reassure my Protestant brethren that believing the Pope to be infallible

is not the same thing as to believe him to be impeccable and that we can criticize the Pope and that's okay. But since Pope Francis came along, it's like many Catholics have forgotten that we're allowed to criticize the Pope. Well. And seem to be giving the opposite impression to our Protestant friends.

Unfortunately, Catholics, like non-Catholics, are increasingly divided into the two camps, so the right and the left, so they can't see that the other has any insight at all. I think God, in creating us so different, wants us all to expose ourselves to the things we don't know. I mean, for the Franciscan side to see the Jesuit side and vice versa, for the male to see the female, for the liberal to see the conservative, for the heart to see the head, for the cat to see the dog. This is the rule of all areas of life, so it should be in the church too.

The Holy Spirit knows what he's doing. Oh, that's good. He doesn't make mistakes. And therefore, he uses the same animals that Jesus used to get into Jerusalem, jackasses, all of us. And the more saintly we are, the more we admit that and laugh at ourselves. Yeah. This left and right paradox

I believe the language comes from the French Revolution though I'm not sure. What do we mean by it today and why do we need each other? What is it that both sides seem to have that the other should listen to? Well one answer to that is the rather bad joke about the experimental operation they tried to carry out in having a mutual heart and brain transplant between a conservative and a liberal to see what happened. And the experiment didn't work for two reasons.

One, they couldn't find any conservative who would give his heart to a liberal, and they couldn't find any liberal who had any brains to give to a conservative because his brains had all spilled out into the universe he was so open-minded yeah yeah but you've got to do better than that i mean you've got to actually what's what is it that we need to learn from those on the left as it were and maybe part of the problem is that the liberal is being increasingly identified with the left. Maybe we have a new category here. Well, there's two issues here. One is the role of government. Anarchism at the one hand, totalitarianism on the other hand.

Where in the middle do you get? That's one aspect. Another one would be head versus heart. Liberals are, they think with their heart. You know, do everything you can for the oppressed, except for unborn babies. Liberalism ends there. And that's a good thing. If you don't have a heart, you're not human.

And conservatives say you have to be responsible, and you have to have law and order and truth and structure, and that's true too. Hierarchy. That's absolutely true too. You can't cut off your head or cut out your heart. I think one of the reasons young people, as I once was, find such passion about social issues, not always but sometimes, is that very often nothing's required of us. Now you've got people like Mother Teresa's nuns or the Friars of the Renewal who do

give up their lives to serve the poor. So I can trust them when they tell me to love the poor and to be concerned about certain social issues. I find it more difficult to be open to someone's advice if they still have their smartphone, still drive around their very nice car, have done nothing to sort of sacrifice from their own life, and then tell me to love the poor. There's a character in one of Dickens' novels, I think it's Bleak House, who is described as a telescopic philanthropist. His heart burns for everyone that he can't see.

He's too far away. He's looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The closer they are to him, the less he loves them. That's Dostoevsky. That's Dostoevsky too. That's, well, Raskolnikov, but also, who was it? Ivan? Yes, it was the brothers who said, I say I love humanity. Or maybe that was the Father's Awesome, who talked to the lady about that. Yep, yep. Was that her? She said, who was it in the brothers? I know you all know this, who said, the closer they are to me, I find I can't stand them, how they eat, how they do this and that? Madame Holokoff, I think, confessing to Father Zosima.

Yes, I could become a nun. I could give up my money, but I can't stand to be in the same room with somebody who has different opinions. Chesterton had a poem about that, something like, Oh, how I love humanity, with love so pure and pringlish and how I love the hard French will never will be English. We need a scapegoat. We need to feel superior to somebody. So either that is political or that is personal. And the personal doesn't spill out into politics.

So when it becomes solidified in politics, then everyone on the right is dangerously inhuman or everyone on the left is dangerously inhuman. And that breaks up families. That's a shame. We're so into politics now that we're making a religion of it once religion declines that religious passion does not decline that comes from the human heart you get rid of metaphysics you have politics maybe well if you don't if you don't have a god up here you have one down here

and he's either in the white house or he ought to be in the white house that's the problem yeah how do we stand on guard against that? I think a lot of people had the same experience as I did, that they felt that this election was everything, and they had their person that they wanted to win, and then after the election was over, we all realized we were just kind of all whipped up into a frenzy. Well, the scary thing is that the real election,

as one Southern Baptist preacher famously put it, is what's going to happen at the last judgment. God's going to cast a vote for you, and the devil's going to cast a vote against you, and you're going to cast the deciding vote. And if we don't have that politics firmly in mind, we're going to be tempted to absolutizing the one that we have here below. Was there a watershed moment where politics became everything for people in America? 1992, when the media fell in love with Clinton.

And I still remember newscasters and commentators explicitly saying on TV, we were wrong. We thought our job was to simply report the facts, to report the news impartially. Now we realize that we are responsible for making the news. They said that? They said that. They said that on TV. I heard them say that. Respectable commentators. And it's very rare that you find a genuinely neutral media outlet that will listen sympathetically to both sides. That used to be the standard. In Australia, it feels like there's a monopoly on news. We don't have the Fox and the MSNBC.

We have a sort of homogenous news outlet that cranks out the line, the party line. And I don't know why that is. It seems like you don't have another sort of news outlet that can mobilize a significant number of people against the main narrative. So in Australia, there doesn't seem to be much questioning about the very, very, very strict lockdowns that continue to happen. There was one case of COVID in the city of Brisbane, and this was about three weeks ago. My sister lives there. She said the city shut down for three days. My goodness, from one case. Yes, isn't that crazy? But they don't think it's crazy. And if I say, gee, that seems a bit much,

they sort of press back against me. And the public opinion that was behind George Pell's false conviction, that's scary. I mean that case was so incredibly flimsy. Absolutely. And people don't see through it. I got to go there two years ago. I prayed outside his jail. I got to sit in the sacristy where this thing was said to have occurred. And couldn't possibly have. Couldn't possibly have. Right. And it, yeah, talk about the the madness of crowds to quote one book title. Well that was the the great fear of de Tocqueville. Great weakness of democracy from Athens onward is demagoguery. In Athens it was the individual demagogue. In us it's a collective media demagogue. How do you know if you're part of the crowd that's

getting whipped into a frenzy? Is there a way to... Well if you think you're not you certainly are. Okay. That's like if you think you're not proud then you certainly are. Yes, yes. So it's something to be aware of and on guard against, yes. Let's talk about Pascal. Oh, yes. I love him so much, and I know you do too. Yeah, I wrote a whole book about him. Yeah, yeah, it's great.

Christianity for Modern Pagans? Yeah, yeah. I think it's my best book, mainly because Pascal is my best philosopher. I let him speak. And I find that students are more impressed by him, especially if they're coming from a kind of agnostic position and looking at the Christian faith without firm conviction for or against. They're more influenced by Pascal than anybody else,

with the possible exception of Augustine and the Confessions. I mean, Aquinas is certainly a greater thinker and a more complete philosopher, but they're not as impressed by that as they are at Pascal's psychological insight into themselves and their lives. Yeah. Is that part of the reason we love him? He lived, he was a contemporary of Descartes. He lived in a skeptical age as we do.

Do you think that's partly why we resonate with him? Yes, he's quintessentially modern. He's defending the medieval worldview to the modern mind. So he's got a foot in both worlds. He understands both. His line about all of men's ills can be traced back to him not knowing how to sit alone in a dark room silently or something to that effect. I assigned that to my students as an essay. I said, if you feel insulted by that, and I confess that when I first read that, I felt kind of insulted. So I tried to do it and I found it extremely difficult. What did you do? How did it work? Well, I first had to get free from distractions. And the only room in my house that was free from

distractions was the bathroom and then there were still some noises so I put a fan in there for some gray sound yeah and I said I can stay in this room for an hour and I didn't take a watch with me and after five minutes I thought an hour had passed and I said what it's only five minutes, I thought an hour had passed. And I said, what? It's only five minutes? And then I thought, wait a minute. There's something wrong here. If the most boring person I ever met was with me in this room, I would be less bored than I am. Does that mean I am more bored with myself than I am with anybody else?

And I started thinking about that. And there were some disturbing thoughts, some emptiness and some darkness and whatnot. If you're honest with yourself, you see not only your good points, but your bad points. So it's a very useful exercise. It's not fun. And the thing that almost everybody gets about it

is how difficult it is. The other difficult assignment I often give, always as an option, an extra credit, is tell me how your day was different when you didn't look at a single screen for 24 hours. Not a TV screen, not a computer screen, not an iPhone. And more than 50% of the students who have given me essays on that subject

have said the same thing. I thought I could do it, I couldn't. This is me, this is my identity. I cannot live without my iPhone. That's scary. The word for that is addiction. I think I'm addicted. I told you prior to this that I'm not on the internet for the month of August. I don't have a phone. I'm not seeing people's comments today because I don't want to. I don't want to. So sorry to everybody who's commenting in the live chat. For the month of August. I love it.

The way I've described it, it's like one of those rotating fans on the highest setting. And then you yank the cord out of the wall and it slowly calms down. That's what's happening to my brain. You went cold turkey. Yeah, it's great. I have a, well, a friend of mine, his name is Dave Rubin. He's quite a popular political commentator. He is in a gay, quote unquote, marriage, lives in California. He's been doing this for about five years now, takes August off of the internet. About three years ago, after that third August,

he quit being an atheist. What does that say about what technology is doing to us? It says that Pascal was right about the empty room. We have to enter into it. Know yourself, know God. The two always go together. Not necessarily in a chronological order, not necessarily in a logical order, but if we're made in his image, then you can't know yourself without knowing God, just as you can't know Hamlet without knowing Shakespeare.

Yeah, it's the distraction, isn't it, which we willingly dive into. It's like if you were at a party and someone you didn't like approached you, you'd find a way to accidentally walk away and not notice him. But when you don't like yourself, it's a little more difficult to get away from you. Well, if you look at the difference between the average life today and the average life 1,000 years ago in the Middle Ages, the obvious difference is the difference between the average life today and the average life a thousand years ago in the Middle Ages, the obvious difference is the technology and the complexification. We would be bored out of our minds in the year 1000.

And they weren't. Why? Why are we bored so easily? Kierkegaard explains that problem of boredom very deeply, I think, in Either Or. Kierkegaard explains that problem of boredom very deeply, I think, in Either Or. For the person he calls the esthete, the typically modern man who wants just a succession of subjectively satisfying experiences, boredom is the supreme evil. Not pain, not sin, not fear, boredom.

Which is why even stupid risk-taking and war in horror movies, we love them. They're not boring. Remember that first time you saw the images of 9-11, if you're that old. How interesting. I mean, killing and being killed are certainly not boring, and that's what war is. So I think it's not mainly politics, but psychological boredom that leads us onto battlefields. Now, we've got safer battlefields today.

War is not popular anymore. Red Sox. Well, yeah. But that's so obviously a game that it's not that addictive. Until you get into things like gambling and how much of this drug can I do? That's a very dangerous and more like an addictive game. We're so bombarded with stuff that the question, what are we going to do with it, isn't a natural question, but the question, why did we invent so much stuff, is a more fascinating question. We don't need all this stuff. Thomas Aquinas says, there's only three reasons why anybody ought to do anything.

One, because it's their moral duty, it's good. Two, because it's a practical necessity, like eating. Three, because it's fun. Yeah. And there's no other reason to do anything. Now, if we went through our lives and asked, do I find this book fun? Do I find this extra pair of shoes fun? Do I find these friends fun?

Do I find these parties fun? No, are they my duty? No, are they necessities for fun? No. Are they my duty? No. Are they necessities for life? No. Throw them out. Simplify your life. Why do we love the Rose Walden so much? That one word, simplify. We find it very hard to do. So why do we complexify? Why do we put ourselves in a spider's web? Why are we so harried and hassled? It doesn't make us happy because we're bored.

Because we can't stay in that empty room with nothing but yourself there. And if you can, then, like your friend, you're probably not going to be an atheist for very long. You've got a sense of order. What you need, what you don't need. You appreciate things only when you can do without them. And there's only two things you can't do without, yourself and God.

They're the only two persons that you can't ever avoid in time or eternity. And everything else we are, in fact, going to lose. The whole universe. So we better practice. It's called detachment. We make a virtue out of this sort of frantic productivity. Frantic involvement, yep. And we always feel the need to say, oh, I'm busy.

Or I'm very busy. If somebody said, I'm sorry, you're probably busy. I think most people would feel bad saying, no, actually I'm not. What do you need? If you don't believe in a real heaven, you have to try to make a heaven on earth and that's going to keep you very, very busy forever. Wouldn't it be terrible if the people on Silicon Valley who are working on artificial immortality by genetic engineering succeeded? Got what they wanted. That would be hell on earth. You'd never get the rest. You'd never be able to say

finally I'm done. I'm a failure. I didn't make heaven on earth but there's a real heaven. Hello. Yeah. That would drive us crazy. We often think that sloth, we often misunderstand sloth and so maybe there's a fear of slowing down, fear of cutting things out of our day so that we can actually just sit. We can't sit and be contemplators because of sloth.

Yeah, so tell us, what does it mean by sloth? Suitable passion in the face, lack of suitable passion in the face of an object that's truly good. The inability to love something that's lovable. And whew. Distraction makes us incapable of loving what is truly lovable. Exactly.

Exactly. It's like making money so cheap that there's no gold anymore. There's just pennies. There's millions of pennies and you put one in every jar because you have millions of jars but there's nothing that's made of gold. Nothing really intrinsically good. Except people.

So if you had a... I think we have not yet come to the point where it's popular to instrumentalize people and say you're just a penny, you're just a an instrument. If you had a student come to you and say, okay, I tried the tech fast thing, not looking at a screen, and I did it, and I want to do something more.

I want to be more radical in eliminating distractions from my life, but I'm also afraid of becoming lazy. What advice would you give them? my life, but I'm also afraid of becoming lazy. What advice would you give them? Well, if they're a Catholic, explore contemplative orders. Okay. I suppose I'm asking this because I want those who are watching to be able to begin living this way. So maybe not just for contemplative orders, but those who might be married with a child or, you know, have a nine-to-five job What are the sorts of things? All right?

First of all if you're in a family do it collectively not individually because that's gonna split the family Steubenville secondly do it gradually what Which which toys can your kids give away to charity? You're not playing with anymore, right? Which clothes don't you really need? And some other people do. Well, that's a fairly easy thing

because it's for other people and not just for yourself. Yeah. And once you see that that works and it makes you happy and not unhappy and you're not longing for those lost treasures anymore, then extend it a little bit. Activities. Do I really need to join all these clubs?

Or should I put all my effort into one? And do I have to have all these phone conversations? And do I have to have all these friends on my screen? They're not really friends. I'm distracting myself. From what? From something better. Well, it'll do something better.

And if what we both think is true, then as you do that gradually and reasonably and together, you'll be happier. So you'll be motivated to do more of it. And you'll come to a point where you have a reasonable amount of stuff and you won't overdo it if you're not a fanatic and say this is an intrinsic good. It's not an intrinsic good, it's a practical good.

We're unbalanced, we've got too much. You can also have too little, Poverty is no fun. And you'll come to a point where you're balanced and keep your life at that level. Do you have an ideal day? What would that look like? No, I don't. And if you had it and then did it.

I take each day as it comes. All right, but... I think that's an unhealthy thing to have. An ideal day? Yeah. My first instinct was to say, well, first of all, I'd go to the beach all morning

and there would be great waves. Then I'd come back and watch the Red Sox defeat the Yankees in the afternoon. And then I'd have a gourmet dinner. And then I'd watch a great movie on TV. And then I'd make mad passionate love to my wife at night. That would be the idea of what day. Sounds great. And then I say well wait a minute I've never done all the five of those things in one day and therefore I'm a failure. So I don't think that kind of ideal is helpful at all. I think you just take these things as they come.

I also wonder, though, if you were to have that sort of day, you might realize still how wretched you are and that happiness won't be had here. Yes, that's true. That's true. That's why, in a sense, being rich and famous and powerful can be a learning experience. You learn that that doesn't make you happy. And then you either despair and put a bullet through your head, or you seek a more

true and deep and lasting happiness. I think Jim Carrey said something like that recently. He said a lot of things, but a lot of which I wouldn't get on board with. But he said something to the effect of, I wish everybody could be a millionaire so they could learn like I have that money can't make you happy. Well, Harry Truman once said, in this great land of ours, every little baby that's born an American citizen has a chance, an equal chance, of someday winding up in the Oval Office. That's just the chance the poor little bastard has to take in being born. That's a wise man. Why don't we have people saying such terribly funny, clever things like that today?

Or do we, and I'm not paying attention? We do. Stephen Wright, Emo Phillips. We have one great comedians with one-liners and wisdom, yeah. Most of our comedians are angry and not really very funny. Do you have any favorite modern comedians, people who are still? Two that I mentioned. I don't know of either of them.

Who are they? Oh, Stephen Wright is from Boston. Stephen Wright? Stephen Wright. He says something like, you know that feeling that you get when you're leaning back in your chair and you're exactly halfway between falling forward on your face and falling backward on your back? That's how I feel all the time or i came back to my apartment and i found that someone had stolen every single piece of furniture and replaced it with an identical item how do you know that's very good he plays with your your mind yeah

and who's the other fellow emo Emo Phillips. Emo Phillips. Emo Phillips. Here's a liner. He's addressing a beautiful woman. My darling, you look so slinky there at the top of the stairs. Very good. The shorter it is, the funnier. Yeah.

Are you familiar with people like Jim Gaffigan or Norm MacDonald or Jerry Seinfeld, these fellows? Seinfeld, yes. I've heard Gaffigan recommended to me. I haven't looked him up yet. He's got some... He's very quick.

He's very punchy. His jokes are very, very quick and very punchy. Timing is everything in comedy. And sometimes in life. You've heard the joke? No. What's the most important thing in comedy? People laughing.

Yes. Yeah, I see how I said it over here. Very good. That moment of hesitation. Just long enough for an angel to fly through. Yeah. You told me about a movie last time we were together driving to the atlanta airport that i watched because i said to you i i like movies with a lot of dialogue so i don't like a lot of

action that bores me but i like engaging dialogue and um you told me of a movie which i actually went home and watched it was um it was a fellow who tried to jump in front of a train and he was saved by someone who worked there. Oh, yes, the Sunset Limited. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I thought that was great. Thanks for the recommendation.

Good movie, yeah. Sunset Limited, and they sat together throughout the night. What's your favorite movie of all time? Oh, I need to think about that. Why isn't it coming to me? My favorite movie of all time. You're going to be so disappointed. No.

You'll probably say It's a Wonderful Life or Casablanca. I was going to say something much less sophisticated. Dumb and Dumber. That is really dumb, yes. But it's hard, isn't it, to say your favorite movie? It's perhaps more easy to say your favorite movie from which genre, do you think? What's yours? Drama.

A Man for All Seasons. Yes, excellent movie. Perfect. Absolutely excellent movie. It doesn't fade no matter how many times you see it. Yeah. And it, oh yeah, that's good. Dumb and Dumber, Man for All Seasons, Braveheart, I like that.

Mm-hmm. You watch any of these superhero movies? Yeah, they're pleasant distraction. Yeah, they are. They're just kind of like candy. The early Superman movies were pretty good. Were they? Yeah.

Here's a question for you. Where did we get this notion of cheese from corny cheese and i asked because i was in africa a couple of years ago and it occurred to me that they seem to have no understanding of what i mean by that um and i mean cheesy you know cheesy you know if we find things cheesy like oh that's cheesy that's cheesy, that's corny. Yeah. And I'm wondering if that is somehow tied with cynicism and sarcasm. Because these fellows, these people I was with. Well, Africans don't have that much to be cheesy about. Yeah.

We've got so much stuff that most of it is cheap. And here, here's a bottle of water. It's a cheap bottle of water. And compared with beer or scotch, it's only water. But in Africa, a bottle of water is very special. That's water. They appreciate water more. They don't have that much beer or scotch or whatever.

It was more the kind of Jesus-y songs that they would play. And they would do hand motions and things like that. I thought, gosh, if I tried doing this in America these days. Well, I find Africans wonderfully, what's the word I'm looking for? It's not just honest, not just childlike, not just happy. They're smiling all the time. they're smiling all the time. I mean I have no desire to live in Africa. It's poor, there's a lot of political corruption, people are starving, people are fighting wars and yet they're smiling. Why are they smiling? Because well they're like children and that's not an insult. Children appreciate simple things.

Our children are bored with $10,000 worth of complex video games in their room. African children aren't bored if they have no toys, but they invent games with sticks and stones. It's just so true. Like, I almost want to say we want to be careful with generalizations, but I don't know if you can be going wrong here. I was in Uganda and just the joy people had

and they were running down the road with a stick and a tire and banging it. Yeah. I said to my host at one point, I said, don't take this the wrong way,

but I hope you never become a developed country. Yes. Yes. Yes. There is an organization called the Global Happiness Project, which rates countries on the happiness of its citizens. And they give some sort of award to

the five happiest countries and some sort of warning to travelers to stay away from the five unhappiest countries. When I first read about this, I thought it was a joke. Yeah. How can you measure happiness? But it's not. They're very serious. I think they're sponsored by the United Nations and they've got scientists on board. And almost every year the five happiest countries are the five Scandinavian countries. The five happiest? Happiest. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. I'm not kidding. Aren't they blowing their brains out? And the five unhappiest countries are all in sub-Saharan Africa. When I first read that, I thought this is a great joke.

Yeah. For two reasons. One, everybody knows that the sincerest and most unfakable expression of happiness is a smile. And, of course, we speak of those smiling Scandinavians, right, and those dour Africans. Secondly, everyone knows that the most obvious expression of unhappiness is suicide. And Scandinavia has a horrible suicide rate and there's a very low suicide rate in sub-Saharan Africa. But no, no, it's not a joke. It's serious. So happiness is defined by the amount of dollars in your bank account. Period. End of story. Even if you put a bullet through your head,

you must be happy because you're rich. We said so. That's insane. What I love about Aquinas in his Treatise on Happiness is that he says what my mom said when I was a kid, but he backs it up with syllogisms. Yes, that's a perfect description of Aquinas. Yes, Aquinas is your mother.

Yeah. Well, even when he talks about his five remedies for sorrow, I love what he says about tears and groaning. He says something that my mom said. He said, because things hurt much more if they're kept shut up inside. That's bloody true. They have to disperse through the tears and come outwards. His cure for depression, a large glass of wine, a good bath, and a good night's sleep.

Yeah. That sounds good to me. But what he said about money was also good. One comedian said this. They said, well, they say money can't buy you happiness, but it can buy you a jet ski. And I've never seen anybody sad on a jet ski. But Aquinas' argument is brilliant. It's like, well, you don't want money for its own sake, like to kind of swim around

in. You want it for something else. So, okay, money might be the means through which you can be happy. Perhaps we can get happiness by being powerful or something. But it can't be your ultimate good because you only want it in order to give it away, as it were. It's a means by definition. It can't be an end.

There was a great episode on The Twilight Zone, that old science fiction classic, which was almost as good as Star Trek. Three criminals are robbing a bank, and they shoot some cops, and the cops are chasing them, and they go down a blind alley, and they're trying to climb the fence, and the cops say, stop or we'll shoot. They don't stop. down a blind alley and they're trying to climb the fence and the cops say stop or we'll shoot they don't stop they shoot they all fall dead and the one that you follow is Blackie he's a really nasty guy and then there's two fingers and the rifleman and and Blackie wafts up into the air among fluffy clouds and he sees some angels and some halos and he says wow I made it and there he's on the

golden street and he's entering heaven and there's St. Peter at the door in a white robe with a black beard, with a quill pen and says, your name is Blackie. You are welcome here. You must have made a mistake. I'm in the wrong place. No, no, sorry. Don't make mistakes here. Oh, well, what do you do here? Anything you want. What can I have here? Anything I want? Oh, well, what do you do here? Anything you want. What can I have here? Anything I want? Oh, well, what I want was gold. You know, I was poor and, you know, they kept me poor and I had my rights and, oh, no problem here. How much do you want? He said, well, a stadium full. Fine. St. Peter flicks his fingers. There's a stadium full of gold. Blackie goes into it and he throws it up and down, plays with it for a while. He's kind of bored. So he rings for St. Peter. St.

Peter comes, yeah, what do you want? Well, I'm bored. I want something else. You got harems here? We got the best harems in the world. Palaces, harems, whatever you want. Oh, okay, let me see what you got. I'll take that one, that one, that one. So he's in this palace, and he's on this king-sized bed, and he's going to bed with three women at the same time, and he gets bored. So he smacks one in the face. He says, wake up, bitch, and she just kisses him, and she's happy. And he takes a chair and smashes it over ahead of another woman, and she says, oh, I love that. do it again. So he rings the bell, St. Peter comes and says, look, something wrong with this.

Where's Two Fingers and the Rifleman? Oh, they're in the other place. Oh gee, I think you made a mistake, no? We make no mistakes here. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Isn't heaven supposed to be the place where you're happy? He said, yeah. And he said, well, I'm not happy.

And he said, well, I'm sorry, we can't send you to the other place. Oh, very good. So, okay, drive it home from my thick head here. Well, the place where you get whatever you want is hell. Oh, I see. That's fantastic. Everybody who enters hell sings Sinatra's song, I did it my way. So he assumed he was in heaven this entire time. Oh, I see. That's fantastic. Everybody who enters hell sings Sinatra's song, I did it my way. So he assumed he was in heaven this entire time. Yes, yes.

That is fantastic. Then he sees the horns behind St. Peter's head. That is profound. Yeah. Oh, you'll like this story. I was at a monastery in Wisconsin chatting with these monks. I had an eight-day silent retreat. And one of the monks said, if you want to see how the amateurs sin, go to Vegas, fornication and all this. If you want to see how the adults sin, come to a monastery. Envy, pride, backbiting. Yeah, but at least they're aware of it.

Yeah, exactly. Gee, that's a really, that's excellent. You know, when I first started reading the saints, I was impressed by two things. One, how they all called themselves horrible sinners. Yeah, that frustrated me. It was like the girl in my math class who said, I'm sure I got a bad grade. And I said, shut up.

We know you didn't. Are they smart or are you smarter than they are? Well, they're smart, so they must be right and you're wrong. And the other thing was how all of them said methods are not important. There's no 12-step program, there's no yoga for sanctity. You just love God and your neighbor with your whole heart. So simple, it's what your mother said.

Why do we get caught up in programs and rituals and... Because they're technology. We can control them. They're techniques. Yeah. Now, that's not to say there's no purpose or value to them. The rosary, you know, wearing.

But they're like money. But it's true. They're means. They're not ends. But I mean, I've found this in my own life that it's, yeah, that's a good way to put it. That it's, I forget who it was who said, there are many devotions within the church's treasury. Choose only a few and remain faithful to them.

Yes. Sounds like Escriva or somebody, but I tend to hop around from one to the next. That's true of friends too. There are many people in this world. Choose a few and be faithful to them. Yeah, that's good. Do you have any pet devotions, as it were, daily devotions you try to stick to?

Simple, simple. The rosary, the psalms, the Our Father. It's all in there. Do you try to pray the rosary at a particular time? When I'm driving. Or walking. I was thrilled that John Paul II said his favorite devotion is the rosary. So simple.

Yeah. We can get a bit neurotic, though, wondering if we're doing it properly or wondering if we're meditating appropriately. We can get a bit neurotic, though, wondering if we're doing it properly or wondering if we're meditating appropriately. No, I don't find that in me because here God gives us this, and he says use it, and he must be right, so you use it. Well, wait a minute, it doesn't feel right. Who cares? Shut up.

Just do it. Shut up and do it, exactly. Shut up and dance with me. There's a song that goes like that. I think God is saying that to us all the time I love it, that's what God is saying to us right now Yeah How well did you know Benedict Groeschel?

Oh, I knew him quite well He was a wonderful man A tough New Yorker and a tender Franciscan At the same time, perfect combination He was Gandalf Was he? I never had the opportunity to meet him I was supposed to speak at a apologetics conference

in Steubenville 8 years ago maybe or 6 years ago and he was supposed to come but his health was failing so I never got to meet him he also had a terrific sense of humor oh I know yeah the reason I brought him up was he said that he'll sit on the subway and when his mind

couldn't think anymore he would just offer a Hail Mary for'll sit on the subway and when his mind couldn't think anymore, he would just offer a Hail Mary for each person on the subway. Isn't that probably, yeah? Yeah, sure. And there's power there. God gives you little dynamite sticks. Put a match to them. I'll do something.

Should we take a break? Yes. All right, let's take a break and we'll be back. Thank you. Thank you. so Thank you. សូវាប់បានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបានបា Thank you. next time that's why I believe in original sin we good alright

why don't you just like there's a little bit I haven't put my mouth on this do you want to just let it drop into your mouth and see what you think

no why would I pollute a good single malt scotch with that stuff yeah that's fair you know you know the one

about the two Irishmen with the Irish whiskey, don't you? Tell me. Well, it's Pat and Mike, and they're both getting old. Pat says, look, Mike, one of us is going to hit the bucket before the other one. And if it's you, Mike,

I want you to tell the world that you're my best friend. Oh, yeah, I'll do that for you, Pat. How do I do that? Well, you're going to go out and celebrate by buying a bottle of gold stuff. The gold stuff, you mean? Yeah, $100 bottle of Irish whiskey. Yes, yes, I'll do that for you, Pat.

And you're going to pour it in my grave. What? The gold stuff? Pour it in your grave? Mike, if you don't do that, you're not my best friend. Will you do it for me? Yeah, Pat, but you'll understand I'll have to run it through my kidneys first. That's very good.

I told you the joke about the new guy who comes into town and says he teaches deductive logic at the school, didn't I? Yes. Very offensive. Yes, yes, yes. Well, we won't tell it again then. The one about the lawnmower the lawnmower no well you tell me yours and then i'll i don't know if i can say this on public probably can't but i mean what are they gonna do to you well probably a lot actually

well hang on lawnmower what do you mean do you want to give me a few hints in case the American who comes into cleanses bar oh no I don't know that one no that's not what I'm talking about well since I set it up I've got to tell it all right goodbye YouTube oh dear Pat's a regular customer. And one day he's the only one in the bar. Clancy's polishing glasses behind the bar and an American comes in. Looks funny, talks funny, walks funny, dresses funny. So Pat strikes up a conversation with him.

Just bring this in front of your mouth a little bit. Yeah, thanks. Are you from the other side of the pond, maybe? Yeah, I'm a New Yorker. I thought so. What are you doing in our fair isle? I'm teaching at the university. Oh, what are you teaching?

Philosophy. Philosophy? We don't need philosophy. We're Irish. What kind of philosophy are you teaching? I'm teaching logic. Logic? We don't believe in logic.

What do you believe in? We believe in magic. Well, you know, logic is a kind of magic. What do you mean logic is a kind of magic. Well, you know, logic is a kind of magic. What do you mean, logic is a kind of magic? Well, ever hear of deduction? Deduction? No, I don't think. What does that mean? Well, you tell me something that you want me to know,

and I will deduce from that some things that you don't want me to know. You can't do that. If I don't want to tell you, I won't tell you. No magic can do that. Yes, logic is a kind of magic. I can do that. If I don't want to tell you, I won't tell you. No magic can do that. Yes, logic is a kind of magic. I can do that. Prove it to me. All right.

Pat, I think I can deduce the secrets of your sex life from the contents of your garage. No, you can't. That would be a magic. Well, let me tell you. Have you got a lawnmower in your garage? A what? A lawnmower? You know what a lawnmower is, don't you? Yeah, I know what a lawnmower is. Well,

do you have a lawnmower in your garage? Yes, I do. So what? Ah. If you've got a lawnmower, I deduce you've got a lawn. Of course, that's no magic. Of course, why would I have a lawnmower if I didn't have a lawn? Ah. If you have a lawn, I deduce that you have a house. Well, true, true, true.

There's still no magic there. Ah, but if you have a house, I think you have a family. Oh, this is true. This is true. Never told you about the family. Hmm, well, maybe some magic to this after all. You want to see pictures of my 12 kids? I got them here in my wallet.

No, no, no, not interested. Now, one more step. If you have a family, I deduce that you are a heterosexual. It's true! The secrets of me sax life! Revealed from the contents of my garage. This is strong magic indeed. Can you teach me to do this deduction sort of thing, magic? Yes, I can. Come to my class tomorrow morning at the university and I'll give you a lesson in logic. Oh, I'll be there. I'll be there. Thank you. Thank you. The American leaves. Clancy comes up and says, who is that guy? Well, he's from the other end of the pond. I thought so. He's an American. I thought so.

He's a New Yorker. I thought so. And he's teaching philosophy. Philosophy. We don't need philosophy. That's what I told him. What kind of philosophy is he teaching? He's teaching logic. Logic. We don't have logic. We have magic. That's what I told him. But logic is a kind of magic, Clancy. See, you see, he deduced. Well, let me show you the magic. What? I'm going to deduce the secrets of your sex life from the contents of your garage. No, you can't do that. Yes, I can. Watch. Clancy, have you got a lawnmower?

A what? A lawnmower. You know what a lawnmower is, don't you? Yeah, I know what a lawnmower is. Well, have you got one? No. Clancy, I've been coming to your door for 30 years, and it takes this foreigner to teach me that you're a queer.

Yes, that was it. That was the one. But you said it way better than I did. No. Mine was a new guy comes to town, and he says, and he asks, do you have a playground?

And from that, he deduces he has kids, and he deduces he's married, but that was way better. Yeah, yeah. Gosh, now I'm going to see if I can find one. That's not really a joke

against queers, but against the Irish. Against the Irish. Poor Irish. The Irish can take a joke better than anybody else. How come almost all comedians, all good comedians are either Jewish or Irish? Why? How? Are you asking? I don't know. Suffering, I guess.

Yeah, there's a sort of world weariness in the Jewish humor, isn't there? Yeah. Let's not get started on Jewish jokes all day. Actually, you know what's funny? When I had you in the studio last time down in Atlanta, we did some jokes for my patrons. It was off air. And after we wrapped up, you walked out, and the man who was filming us, I didn't know him.

He was a hired hand. He came up and went, wow, that guy knows a lot of Jew jokes. I went, yeah, shut up. Just keep it to yourself. But, of course, they're all in very good jest. Yes. Yeah. I'm trying to think of one joke.

Let's see if I know if this is any good. Teenager comes downstairs into the kitchen.'s lost his drugs and he's very nervous about it and he says to grandma grandma have have you seen a bottle of pills they say ls lsd on them it's just um it's a medical pills she says forget the pills let's do something about this bloody dragon. In other words, yes. Trying to think, what's the sign that somebody... Dragons. Why does every culture have dragons if there are no dragons? Do you think it comes from our discovering dinosaur bones? No, I think

it's Jung's collective unconscious. I think that the serpent in Eden was a dragon and we sort of remember that no matter where we are. Nahash? What's the Hebrew? Nahash? I don't know. But it doesn't mean snake. I don't think. I think it was more like a dragon or a sea monster. Winged snake maybe. Have you been following the work of Jordan Peterson at all? No, but I hear a lot of people talking about him, and I'm eager to read him a reader. Oh, good. He sounds like a wonderfully uncommonsensical person.

Yeah. In other words, commonsensical. Yes. Do you try to keep your head out of a lot of the modern church and political drama on purpose, or do you find you've been doing it for so long you're not even that interested anymore? I'm an absent-minded professor. I don't find it onerous to keep my head out of it. I don't want to get my head into it.

Yeah. What's your favorite class to teach? A class where I can teach just one book, like Augustine's Confessions or Plato's Republic or Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and go deeply into that. Now, you teach at Boston College, which, I mean, I'm sure they have good Catholic faculty and even good Catholic students. Yes. But I think generally it wouldn't be thought of as a solid Catholic school in the sense that the majority of the students coming are solidly Catholic. What's been your experience of trying to evangelize students? Any good stories there?

Well, the students themselves sometimes have to evangelize the professors. It's their joke that BC means barely Catholic. And there's a lot of students that are searching for a deeper Catholic faith. It's a place where you can lose your Catholic identity or you can find it. It's a little bit like New York City. You know, a lot of opportunities. It's a great place. I love it.

I'll be there until I die. And most of the students I get in upper division classes already are in love with Aquinas or Augustine or C.S. Lewis or Tolkien or somebody like that. So you don't have to evangelize them. Freshmen, on the other hand, I haven't taught freshmen for quite a few years, but I find that they're astonishingly naive. They know very little about history. They know very little about literature. They know very little about literature. They know very little about logic. They know a lot about math and science. Interesting.

I saw some statistics a while ago that I didn't believe, but it was in a respectable publication. The amount of research and development money that modern American universities put into the STEM courses is 99.4% of their budget. All the humanities and all the arts together that get 0.6% of the budget. So the humanities are in steep decline.

You know the joke, what's the difference between a philosophy student and a large pizza? Oh, let me try. The difference between a philosophy student and a large pizza. No, I don't know. A large pizza can feed a family of four.

Yeah, that's good. So why is that happening, and why is it a problem? It's happening partly because the humanities are being corrupted by deconstructionists, and partly because the sciences are so financially successful and there's a payoff and it's happening above all because we've changed our hearts what we love is no longer wisdom or truth or goodness or beauty but success and power and technology what technology does deliver what do you mean by deconstructionism and how is that oh dear well in a broad sense it means a kind of cynical attitude towards everything reductionism reducing the complex

to the simple reducing reality to appearance reducing something that's been constructed to the elements out of which it's constructed which are usually simply human passion and desire and power. And especially reducing all arguments to arguments about gender, class, or ideology. And to put it technically, the essence of Derrida's deconstructionism, the most famous kind, is that nothing is itself. There is no such thing as a true identity. There are no platonic forms. Good is really evil. Evil is really good. At the heart of justice is injustice. At the heart of injustice is justice, etc. In other words, a denial of the fundamental law of

identity, which is quite consistently Nietzschean. Nietzsche said we have not killed God we atheists until we have killed grammar because grammar is order in language. I wonder does that relate to 1984 the book where they're getting rid of words. Yes yes It's all about language. Confucius was a master of language, and he had something like 600 different suggestions in the Analects. And someone once asked him,

which of your suggestions, if you could choose only one, would you want the whole world to obey? And he said, restore the proper names to things. Call things by their right names. That's the first. What do you think about this, that we should continue? This actually is kind of a quote from Man for All Seasons. We should keep ugly names for ugly things.

So fornication, self-abuse, not masturbation or playing the field, sodomy, not gay sex, adultery, not cheating, these sorts of things. It's important that we keep those terms. Well, we're allowed in this country to do any of those things, but not to say them. We can't insult people's feelings. So it's almost illegal to call things by their proper names. How have you found that teaching? Have you been in situations where you felt like you may offend people?

If I were in a public school, I would be in trouble, I think. In a Catholic school, I don't think we are. There was a movement a couple of decades ago by the radical feminists to insist on penalizing professors for wrong pronoun use. This was even before the transgender movement about he and she. But to use the generic he or the generic man would be an offense. It almost passed, but it didn't. And I think we're commonsensical enough not to raise it again.

Yeah, proper names. You know the story of how they solved the pronoun problem at Harvard Divinity School? Yeah. The feminists said, we can't call God he anymore because that's male chauvinism. So the faculty said, well, we'll call it he or she. And they said, we're not satisfied because he comes first. And in reparation for that, we want to put she first. Well, fine, we'll put she first.

So now the pronoun for God is neither he nor she, nor he or she, but she or he. But then the tree huggers and the environmentalists said, but you've forgotten Gaia and the planet and subhuman things, and you forgot the other pronoun, it. So they decided that the appropriate pronoun was she or he or it, and that was too long, so they condensed it to one syllable very good it's hard though how do you keep being how do you maintain your humor in the face of such you know degradation the thing falling apart if there weren't if there weren't

silliness in front of us, there wouldn't be anything to joke about. Yeah. It's easy. You just make yourself an echo chamber of the society and you say ridiculous things. God must have a wonderfully patient sense of humor to put up with us.

Yeah. You know, he used a jackass to get into Jerusalem, and he's continually using those same instruments. Yeah, I don't think I'd have God's patience. I'd be done. Yeah. And I wouldn't save us either. I'd be like, no, you're gone.

Yeah. Done with you. Well, I'm glad you're not God. I'm glad I'm not God too. I hope so. Yeah, indeed. Well, I'm glad you're not God. I'm glad I'm not God, too. I hope so.

Yeah, indeed. Have you encountered or written or spoken much on the topic of scrupulosity, religious scrupulosity? No, no. I know there are such people. I think there were more such people in the past than there are in the present. And that's always a perennial danger. Looseness is much more popular and much more fun. Yes, yes. Although I see a pendulum swinging. It seems like we didn't talk about hell. That's always a perennial danger. Looseness is much more popular and much more fun. Yes.

Yes. Although I see a pendulum swinging. It seems like we didn't talk about hell. God was nice, and we made little lambs of God with fluffy little, what do you call them, those cotton ball things on plates, and we'd say, there we go. It was all lovely. And we realized, goodness gracious, we have to begin talking about hell again. And I wonder if we're not swinging back too far in the opposite direction in certain quarters.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. We have a moral streak in us. And if we have subtracted that moral streak from the really important parts of human life, then we're going to put it somewhere else. And we're going to be extremely scrupulous about recycling bottles. Yeah, golly, you're not wrong. Or about restrictions.

Yeah, or about eating too much cholesterol. Yep. If you don't have religion there, you'll have it somewhere else. Now, that is interesting about recycling. You have your little bins that you... Nothing wrong with that, but to be very angry and intolerant to people who are a little careless there is puritanical.

Any good Catholic authors you've been reading lately? Michael O'Brien. Michael O'Brien. He just came out with a new novel. Did he? What's it called? The Sabbatical. It's called? The Sabbatical. The one last year or

two years ago was The Lighthouse. It was his shortest one. Delightful. He's a genuinely good writer. I agree. Wonderful observer, psychologist, wonderfully Catholic. Though it's difficult to go from Tolkien and Dostoevsky. Oh, you don't go anywhere from Tolkien and Dostoevsky.

That's the problem. That's where I started, would you believe it? Would you believe that by the time I finished high school, I had read one novel, and it was a stupid novel. And I never developed a love for reading, unfortunately. I had a conversion to Christ. It's not too late. Well, I do now. I had a conversion to Christ when I was 17, and then just became vociferous. I wanted to read as much as I could. And I began reading Dostoevsky

because I wanted to be the sort of person who read Dostoevsky. Total pride, absolute arrogance. And then I accidentally fell in love with him. Yeah. Yeah. It's very significant that you developed a love for reading after your conversion. Yeah, it is. Because Christ is the Word, and the Word is not just an abstract concept. The Word is a story. The Lord of the Rings is one big, long word. Yeah. And all the other religions of the world give you principles, but Christianity gives

you a story. It's an essential connection between Christianity and story. It's an essential connection between Christianity and story. What do you think of this idea that we often...trying to explain Christianity without reference to the demonic is like trying to explain the Lord of the Rings without reference to Sauron. Of course. And we often do that. Of course. Of course. Even if you don't believe in supernatural evil,

if you believe in a genuine and genuinely evil human evil, you can still have drama. But most of the people who don't believe in supernatural evil also don't really believe in human evil. I've encountered very serious thinkers who say we shouldn't use the word evil. It's only bad. Evil is a fiction. I agree with you, except that what seems to be happening is the further we pull away from God, as to use your

line, we're putting religion elsewhere. I mean, there are certain mortal sins in the secular culture, as it were, that are unforgivable if somebody is found to have said certain racist things. Well, you and I would agree as Christians that that would be an evil thing, but I'm not sure how you go from not having an objective lawgiver, no objective law to saying something is evil. And it seems like we are demonizing certain things. Like your imposition upon my sexual morality would be seen as evil. The Boston Globe had a front page story last month

about the discovery that there was a student in one of the middle schools who, in private but on school grounds, told his friends a racist joke with the N-word in it. This made the front page of the paper. And in that story, it was also revealed by the reporter upon questioning that the student did not agree with the Black Lives Matter movement. That also made the front page. Right.

Ideological divergence is not tolerated. Absolutely. So I do find that interesting. As we're distancing ourself away from an objective moral law, given a moral law, we're becoming moralistic in certain ways. Where evil is said a lot donald trump evil orange man that's true yeah yeah well let's not talk about trump

i don't have a trump card in my back. He talks enough for himself. He does, he does. You know, I used to classify myself as a liberal, and I voted for some Democrats, and now I usually vote for Republicans and don't classify myself as a liberal, but I haven't changed my opinion on any issue. They've just changed the labels.

I mean, I used to think a liberal was in favor of human nature and freedom and protecting the innocent and they stopped on the abortion issue. They protect all other innocent human lives but you stop there. Why? And conservatives, why don't they conserve the environment in a reasonable way? Why isn't that a... Why are they afraid even of the topic being broached? Yes. Or allergic to it?

Yes, that's not true conservatism. The sex one seems obvious. The abortion one seems obvious. Anything around sex, as you've said, becomes multiple choice. Anything, yeah. Like, I wonder if, imagine if COVID was an STD. Ooh. How would COVID restrictions look? Write a novel about it.

All right. It would be too fantastic. Yeah. Hey, what do you think about horror? I about it. All right. It would be too fantastic. Yeah. Hey, what do you think about horror? I like it. I do too. Yeah, okay. I do too.

The fact that we go in for horror means that we still believe in evil. Not just inconvenience, not just incorrectness, but evil. Something truly terrifying. And the fact that we like to play with it means that we're afraid of it. Kids play with things like guns and war and stuff like that because playing means putting it at a safe distance. Without that sense of play, without that sense of theater, you either have to avoid it altogether or become so involved in it that it's terribly dangerous. There's a lot of Christians, though, who would say you should under no circumstance

find entertainment in horror. And I suppose that's because horror is a broad sort of category. It depends what we mean by it. But I'm not sure how you could demonize it altogether without having to then demonize things like Hansel and Gretel. Like that's a fairy tale, but that's one of the most terrifying things I've ever read. Yeah, yeah. Dracula.

That was good, I thought, until they got into the epistolary back and forth between the two ladies. If there is no devil, then Jesus is a fool or a hypocrite in talking so much about him. I mean, he's not the center of religion, but it's part of the package deal. And if you begin throwing away that package, you can throw away any part of the package you want. What's your favorite horror novel or movie? It's certainly not just Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

That's utterly unsupernatural. The Exorcist. Yeah, God, that's terrifying. That actually killed people. I think two people had heart attacks when they saw that movie, because it was based on an actual case. Peter Blatty was a good Catholic, and the book isn't that well written, but it's carefully researched. Oh, interesting. Would the movie be better than the book? The movie is better than the book.

Occasionally that happens. Jaws is another example. Now, why is that the case? You said earlier that it's not often that a commentator is better than the original unless the original be able to express himself. So it's something similar here, maybe. I think in both cases, the author of the book

and the makers of the movie were very serious, but the writers were not that good writers. Neither Peter Benchley nor William Peter Blatty. They were competent, popular writers. They would write good airport novels,

but not classics. But the movie makers were, well, Stevenielberg is his genius It's what he did. He did jaws, but did he do I didn't do the exorcist? No, I think so No, but that was based on an actual story. Yeah, and believe it or not either CBS or NBC ran a special on the background of the Exorcist movie and it was very true and very reverent. And they showed the actual exorcism of this boy in St. Louis

and how he was delivered by a miracle by St. Michael the Archangel. I was amazed that this was shown on public TV. What else other than kind of Christian horror, which I suppose that could be categorized? Well, I interpret Dracula as a great piece of Christian horror. Yeah. Because Dracula is the reverse Christ. Yes, I see what you mean.

Say why. You know, Dracula sucks your life, your blood, and Christ gives you his life, his blood. Christianity is a blood transfusion. For me, and I think it was Stephen King who who said that horror and comedy there's a fine line between the two because you're just making something slightly strange is very off-putting like a man who might suck your blood yeah um but if you make it too dissimilar then it might become comical but i'm not sure if you remember that movie It. Yes. You've got a clown in the sewer. I mean, that just sounds silly, you know, giving away balloons.

Scary. That almost sounds comical. It's not. Yep. But it's close, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you can combine the two in a program like MASH. I didn't watch much of it.

My dad did and showed me a couple of episodes, but... Well, the humor isn't relief. It's not comic relief. It's in the situation itself. You realize how absurd war is. Oh, I see. Somewhat similar to what's the Peter Sellers movie where he plays three parts? Dr. Strangelove. To make fun of nuclear war sounds irresponsible, but it's a hilariously

funny movie. What do you say to those Christians who might have problems with horror or this sort of thing? You shouldn't expose yourself to problematic content. Certainly, I'm sure in The Exorcist there were certain actions that would be like awful and evil and we shouldn't subject ourselves to that.

We shouldn't put those sorts of ideas in our minds. Well, that's a serious argument. There are certain things that should remain private. How many of those things are there and where do you draw the line is a question of prudence and discernment. But there's a case to be made for that. But the attitude and the treatment is much more important than the content. You can have an anti-religious

treatment of profoundly religious themes or vice versa. The life of Brian? I'm sorry I find that so funny. I find it hilarious. I know I shouldn't. I don't interpret that as a parody of Christianity but as a parody of pop psychology where in the crucifixion Jesus teaches the two thieves to sing the behind every cloud there's a silver lining alright crucifixion yes very good

no they said I could go actually well you know the gospel is the greatest joke ever told on the devil. What a piece of classic, total, topsy-turvy, upside-down comedy. The devil wins, and that's how he loses. He takes the bait, exactly as in Lord of the Rings. Sauron does exactly what the devil does. He takes the bait, and that's his downfall.

No, it is. And I know we have to maybe try not to analogize Christianity and the Gospels with the Lord of the Rings. But it's funny that we have these both on the table. But you've got this little hobbit who's completely stripped of power. And that's funny, too. I mean, Christ could have become a wizard or an angel or an emperor, but he became a little hobbit.

Yes. A little carpenter's kid. And went to Mordor. Yep, yep. Right into the teeth of it. Now, something I didn't realize before reading The Lord of the Rings again is that Sauron and Gandalf are the same species. Tell us about that. Maya, isn't that what it's called?

Yep, the lower version of wizards. A 12-year-old girl wrote a letter to Tolkien asking, who is Gandalf? And he wrote back, many critics have asked themselves that question, but no one has ever asked me that question. And therefore they're all wrong, and I'll tell you the true answer. Gandalf is an archangel. Ah. So there. So when he's on the—when he's fighting the Balrog and he says,

I am the keeper of the secret flame, what does that mean? That's the Holy Spirit. Is that what Tolkien meant it to be? I think so. I think so. Whew, that was such a powerful— Is that what Tolkien meant it to be? I think so. I think so. That was such a powerful. There's a book called The Secret Fire by Caldecott that makes that point. And it's well written and it's pretty convincing.

Yeah. No, I love Gandalf so much. Who doesn't? Who couldn't? Gandalf for president. Who doesn't? Who couldn't? Gandalf for president. Yes. Stickers. Have them made now. Of course, Saruman would win. Yes, Saruman would win. Yes, the pragmatic traitor.

Well, Judas Iscariot was an ordained Catholic bishop. Yeah. Having Gandalf sort of shame Saruman in that chapter, the voice of Saruman, was very delightful. Yes. Satisfying. Yes. And it shows you at the same time the power of propaganda. Yes, it does.

Because as you read what Saruman had to say to the king and you're like this makes perfect sense. Everybody else is saying hurrah for Saruman. Yeah. Except Gandalf and Gimli. Got you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah I often wondered if Donald Trump had anybody in his inner circle who told him his hair looked bad. Maybe not. Well, I think he became elected president mainly because people thought his hair looked good. Until Obama, no recent American president was ever elected with bad hair. I mean, if you look at the candidates, the one with the best hair always wins. Sort of like electing Saul, the man of great stature yes yeah we want we want a king instead of little David yeah very good so what are your

plans for the next few weeks if you want to give God a good laugh tell him your plans you must have some plans. Are you getting tired of, I mean, you say you're doing nothing. Maybe you didn't say that, but I'm assuming that because you're not going in to teach. But what is it you busy yourself with other than writing? Well, there's always family needs and the house is a mess and we're still helping our four kids in various ways. And I'm writing off and on when I get time to and I'm getting old and... How old are you now? 84. Yeah it's pretty impressive. And I find it increasingly difficult to to keep from

my consciousness the fact that I'm getting old. You know, you can't go on forever. Yeah. And you've got to make plans for the future. How do you feel about death and you dying? Oh, I'm not afraid of death. Dying's a bugger. But death is nothing.

Have you always felt that way? Yeah. Yeah. Death is a door. And it's all dark on this side and it's all light on the other side. Which is easy to say when you're not close to dying, but I wonder what it's like when you are close to dying. Oh, I think it's even more true there. Finally all my troubles are over.

Finally all my responsibilities are met. That's something to look forward to. Of course it's going to be purgatory for both of us probably, and that's going to be intensely painful, but you're going to want it. You're going to choose it. You're going to say, Lord, please give me more of this purgatory so I can become more like you.

Somebody said recently that it occurred to them that the number one question people will be asking after their funeral is, sorry, where's the potato salad? people will be asking after their funeral is, sorry, where's the potato salad? Who was it that said, I plan to be late for my own funeral? Was that Churchill?

I don't know. I'm so absent-minded, I probably won't bother to show up. Do you spend a good deal of your time, or have you in the past, thinking, meditating upon death? No, no, no. My first book was about death. I called it The Five Faces of Death.

They changed the title to Love is Stronger than Death, which is better. And I guess I wrote that in my 40s or 50s, midlife. You're supposed to have a midlife crisis. It wasn't an existential crisis. I've had a lot of problems and worries and depressing moments and so on, but I've never been afraid of death. I mean if death is not a passage into heaven then the whole of life is meaningless and a big lie. What about dying though? Are you afraid of dying? Yeah I guess everybody is. The pain? Most people don't die in pain anymore. There's good drugs. I'm yeah I guess everybody is the pain most people don't die in pain anymore

there's good drugs I'm afraid of inconveniencing other people and making their lives miserable that's in God's hands he gives you different fruits and sometimes it's lemons, and you can make lemonade.

I like to suck lemons, actually. Yeah. People are so concerned about being dealt the right set of cards instead of playing them right. But you can't control being dealt a set of cards. You can only control what you do with them. That's Gandalf. Yeah.

That's Gandalf to Frodo. Yeah. So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to ask. Exactly. That's the lesson of Job. Lord, why me? I'm not telling you.

Just be faithful. That's hard. Well, there's no alternative really. Yeah, that's a good point. Look what we've done. We've said something very profound in the last five seconds. Silence. We brought ourselves to silence. Maybe that's where we should end. Yes.

Give God a chance to speak, as Job did. The best words in the book of Job are Job's last words. The words of Job are ended. Then God finally gets to speak. Well, it's about time. And then the worst advice in human history is also found in Job. What's that? It's when Job's wife said, curse God and die.

Yes, yes. Not good advice. It's terrible. Yes. Well, one of the most wonderful words, to my mind, in the book of Job is what Job is sitting on. Yes. The Greek word for it is skubala. It's the S word. Yes. In Hebrew, too. It's a d sitting on. Yes. The Greek word for it is skubala. It's the S word in Hebrew too.

It's a dung hit. Yes. Well thank you for taking the time to be with us. Since this has been a lot about Lord of the Rings, give people a sort of 30 second pitch. Why if they haven't, they should cease everything that they're

currently doing and read the Lord of the Rings? Because Tolkien tells you what human life is and what you are by putting it all in a fantasy world. There are no hobbits or elves or dwarves or wizards or dragons, but there are people, and there is good, and there is evil, and there is divine providence, and there is free choice, and Tolkien weaves them together in the most realistic story you could imagine. Very good. Thank you so much for taking the trip down from Boston to be here. This was a delight. Yeah I enjoyed it very much. God bless you and all your fans. Thank you. That was lovely. សូវាប់ពីបានប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប់ពីប្រាប� ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത്ത� សូវាប់ពីបានប់ពីបានប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពីប់ពី Bye.