Wendell Berry, Political Philosophy, & the Catholic Intellectual Tradition | Prof. Joshua Hochschild

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2019

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Texas at Austin on 24 October 2019.

Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What happens when a cabal of secular progressive technocrats
0:05.0	takes over an historic traditional liberal arts college?
0:10.0	In one vivid instance, things get out of hand pretty quickly.
0:16.0	Co-opted meetings with rigged agendas, intrusion of outside experts, intercepted mail, new offices
0:26.1	of pseudo-scientific analytics, propaganda campaigns and media manipulation, ugly architecture
0:33.3	and exploitation of hallowed land, sale of college property,
0:38.3	egregious law-breaking, installation of mindless figureheads,
0:42.3	rent-seeking self-enrichment, ruthless retaliation against the disloyal,
0:48.3	elimination of intransigent personnel, hatred of the crucifix,
0:53.3	the very denial of truth about human nature.
0:59.0	Now that's all pure fantasy, of course.
1:03.0	The product of the fruitful imagination of an Oxford dawn 75 years ago.
1:09.0	What I described was the vision of C.S. Lewis in that hideous strength,
1:14.9	in which a humble, humane campus becomes the field of cosmic spiritual warfare, with dark forces
1:22.2	mocking and subverting the classical ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness, and undermining the Christian vision of the human person.
1:31.1	I will have more to say momentarily about why Lewis chooses progressive technocrats at a small liberal arts college as agents of evil.
1:40.6	But I must acknowledge first that Lewis's imaginative exercise might seem rather far afield from the topic I was invited to speak about,
1:49.2	Wendell Berry's political philosophy and its relation to the tradition of Catholic social thought.
1:55.2	As I reflected on that assignment, I realized that part of treating those topics should include communicating that
2:03.2	Wendell Berry is not a political philosopher, and that what we today call Catholic social teaching
2:09.8	is a novel and even rather tenuous development with an uncertain future and a contested relationship
2:16.6	to the Catholic intellectual tradition
	...

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