Aquinas and Religious Pluralism: How to Engage Without Sacrificing the Truth | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2022

⏱️ 76 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on December 7, 2021 at George Mason University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Thomas Hibbs is currently Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. He is the author of books including Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good and Shows About Nothing, one of two books of his about film. He has nearly completed a book on Pascal, tentatively entitled Divine Irony and is at work on a book on Nihilism, Beauty, and God, an application of Jacques Maritain’s aesthetic theory to the arts of poetry and painting in the 20th century. He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in publications including Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Temistic Institute.
0:02.8	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:11.1	I want to talk a little bit about Aquinas at the beginning, and then I want to make some observations about our contemporary situation and then go back to Aquinas for some
0:22.9	guidance. I do want to talk about religious pluralism, but I want to talk about pluralism more
0:28.9	broadly, how to engage in a pluralistic context. I think it's often more difficult now to engage in a pluralistic political setting than
0:42.7	it is a pluralistic religious setting.
0:45.6	So at least it seemed that way to me.
0:50.3	And one of the things I want to say at the beginning, and I'll come back to this later, which is that we can think about refuting, persuading, defending views that we have, persuading others, refuting opposing views and defending views that we have.
1:08.2	One of the things that's sometimes difficult to do, especially if you're
1:13.5	trying to convince others of it, one of the things that we ought to aim to achieve when we can
1:19.5	is rational disagreement. Disagreement is easy. Rational disagreement is hard, and it's sometimes a significant achievement just to get to rational disagreement.
1:32.3	And I'll say more about that later.
1:35.3	What I want to suggest to you about the situation that Aquinas found himself in in the 13th century, is that Christianity, Western Christianity,
1:47.8	was facing, I think, one of the biggest crises
1:52.6	that it would ever face.
1:53.6	I think actually it's one of the two biggest
1:57.1	intellectual crises that Christianity has faced.
2:00.0	I think the other one is Darwinian evolution, and that's not because of the conflict between
2:08.9	an evolutionary account of creation and a six-day account of scriptural creation.
2:16.2	After all, St. Augustine, way back when, argued in a book
2:20.1	called On Genesis to the letter, a literal interpretation of Genesis, argued that Genesis
2:26.4	should be interpreted literally as teaching that there's not a six-day creation.
	...

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