Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

to mystic institute.org. The title and the idea of this talk, the crucifixion of the desk,

came to me several years ago when I was going through a particularly dark stage of writing,

or rather of not writing my dissertation.

Somewhat ironically, I fell into the habit

of repeating the phrase to myself

whenever I was tempted to write about the crucifixion of the desk,

rather than about the topic of my dissertation.

The phrase also recurred to me in even less dramatic moments because the room in which I was supposed to be writing my dissertation had originally been built as a private chapel and the wooden desk was in the place where the altar would have been.

You'll be happy to know that I succeeded in resisting the temptation to research the phrase

Crucifixion of the Desk until just recently, a few years after I'd finished my dissertation

and a few months before I was invited to give this talk.

I started my research in my customary old school way by asking a handful of smart people who live nearby what they knew about the phrase.

After all of my usual sages gave me blank stares, I turned in desperation to chat GPT,

which unhelpfully told me that the phrase was a metaphor and then gave me a list of study hacks.

This talk will not be about study hacks. It will be a description and a rather long,

up-close one, of the activity of studying. But before you decide to take a nap, please know that my

primary intention is to give you a description

that is useful. My intent is to describe studying in enough detail that you're both convinced

...