Can You Be Spiritual But Not Religious? | Dr. R.J. Snell

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2022

⏱️ 56 minutes

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Summary

This walk was given on September 21, 2021 at Yale University. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: R. J. Snell is Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. Prior to his appointment at the Witherspoon Institute, he was Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He has been visiting instructor at Princeton University, where he is also executive director of the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Life. He's written books and articles on natural law, education, Bernard Lonergan, boredom, subjectivity, and sexual ethics for a variety of publications. 892718

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by The Tamistic Institute.
0:03.2	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.3	Over the last couple of years, I've been really fascinated with the fiction of Michelle
0:15.9	Willebeck, the French novelist. I find him sort of horrifying in some ways. The novels are vulgar to the extreme.
0:23.5	And he himself is a person loves controversy in ways that I myself do not especially love
0:30.0	controversy. But I do think that Willa Beck, whatever his flaws and whatever his pros,
0:35.8	is very good at articulating concerns that he at least
0:40.1	believes are endemic in the contemporary West. His own answers to those are not necessarily
0:44.9	always mine, but he is articulating concerns that people have. He seems especially to be
0:51.7	articulating his own sense that we live in a civilization in a time that's dying of sorrow and is dying of self-discussed.
1:01.0	It's exhausted with itself.
1:03.0	It no longer believes its own stories. It's not sure whether it should have confidence in its own stories or not.
1:09.0	And that may be for the best. There are aspects of our own civilization, which deserve critique, aspects of our civilization, which perhaps deserve to be exhausted. But if you are a resident of an exhausted civilization, many of the pathways and cultural scripts that you would normally have to tell you what to do, what to do next, how to live, what's noble,
1:28.8	what's honorable, what's ignoble and base, you either don't have access to them or you don't
1:33.9	believe them because they appear to be exhausted. For several years now, I've been asking students
1:38.5	why so many of them are fascinated with Jordan Peterson. I don't quite get it. So I grew up about two
1:43.9	hours south where Jordan Peterson grew up.'t quite get it. So I grew up about two hours south where
1:45.0	Jordan Peterson grew up. And everything he says just sounds like everything my uncle and my aunts told me,
1:50.0	like, what is the fascination with this guy? And the best answer I've ever received from a student yet is,
1:56.0	well, nobody has ever given me an advice about what to do in life and so I'm looking for advice.
2:02.6	It's not easy to be a resident of a civilization when the civilization feels sad and non-confident.
2:08.6	It gives us new opportunities, but it also makes us feel some un-wee sometimes.
	...

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