Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph,

and this is Pines of the Quines. In case you're wondering, I am somewhere between 6 foot, 3 and 6 foot 4,

for those of you who do better with centimeters, that's like somewhere around 192 centimeters.

Why do I mention this? Well, because when I meet people, they often say, you are taller than I

thought you were. So you have been forewarned. Is that pertinent to this video? Not at all. In this

video, we're going to talk about how to criticize the church. Why? Well, I don't think that we need

encouragement on that particular front because it comes quite naturally to many of us, but because I

think there are ways of doing it that are better and ways of doing it that are worse. So we want to

grow and virtue when it comes to this particular thing, because on the one hand, we don't want to

like whitewash our experience of the church as we communicate it to others, nor do we want to

demonize the church as we communicate that relationship. There is a good way to go about it. So

let's think about it together. Here we go.

Okay, I'm increasingly conscious of the way in which we somewhat unconsciously adopt the stance

of our contemporaries. And when it comes to criticizing institutions, I think that our

contemporaries can be quite nihilistic. That is to say, they have like no fundamental commitments

that tend to be kind of like bomb throwing and yeah, affiliation denying if it is convenient for

them. And I think that one way we can kind of get at this phenomenon is by thinking about how

we among stark contemporaries conceive of relationships or like how we conceive of the way in

which we belong to or are affiliated with are members of different institutions. And I think two

notes which are common in this 21st century experience is that we think of them often as

elective and we think of them often as political. So when I say elective, I mean I choose in and I

choose out and no one is going to condition whether I choose in or whether I choose out. It's just me,

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