452 - Hillsdale talk - Mythological Thinking: The Crossroads of Psychology and Theology

The Symbolic World

Jonathan Pageau

Education, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 933 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2026

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a talk I did at Hillsdale College in March 2026. In this talk, I explore mythological thinking as a way of understanding how facts become meaningful. Facts do not present themselves to us neutrally. They are always organized by care, relevance, attention, and story. I look at examples from Genesis, Icarus, Spider-Man, the Tower of Babel, and modern science to show how myths preserve deep patterns of human experience. Rather than treating myth as fiction or primitive explanation, I argue that myth reveals the structures by which we perceive reality, understand purpose, and connect psychology with theology.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/DEShUddn8HY

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Timestamps:
00:00 Coming up
01:38 Intro music
02:03 Introduction at Hillsdale College
06:59 Talk begins: hope, fragmentation, and new conversations
09:19 “Facts don’t care about your feelings”
12:12 Care organizes facts
16:50 Facts are always contained in a story
19:15 The Fifth Gospel course announcement
20:10 Why stories survive across generations
24:04 Mythological stories vs. scientific descriptions
27:14 Origin stories and why we care
30:37 Genesis as more than a scientific text
33:34 Genesis, relevance, and human categories
37:38 Why the mythological story should be primary
39:36 Myths are not primitive explanations
41:47 Babel, Icarus, Prometheus, and repeated patterns
44:16 Applicability vs. allegory
47:40 All remembered stories are mythological
49:24 Psychology, theology, and human care
51:27 The Incarnation as the myth that came true
54:34 How story unites psychology and theology
58:29 Returning to mythological thinking
59:55 Q&A: Bringing mythological thinking into science education
01:02:58 Q&A: How to recognize false myths
01:07:37 Q&A: Speaking truth in hostile circles
01:08:53 Q&A: Original sin as a true myth
01:11:13 Q&A: How artists discover truth through story
01:13:42 Q&A: Why live by Christ’s story rather than another?
01:18:21 Q&A: The modern fall into cold, hard reality

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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson: https://matthewwilkinson.net/

Transcript

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0:00.0	These stories that contain the structure of human attention,
0:05.0	they're very different from what we could call taxonomic
0:09.0	or scientific descriptions.
0:12.0	They're very different in their nature, the way they look,
0:15.0	what it is that they're doing.
0:18.0	And unless we're able to understand the difference between them, then they're going to be very
0:22.8	mysterious to us. And if you grew up in a world in which someone tried to tell you that, let's say,
0:29.3	Genesis 1 was a scientific description, it's going to become very odd to you because it's not. It's not a scientific description. It's a story.
0:41.8	Scientific descriptions are not stories. Scientific descriptions are, you know, category,
0:49.6	calculation, you know, measurement, prediction, reproducibility. That's what scientific things care about.
0:56.5	For several centuries now, sadly, we've had this situation
0:59.5	where in some ways, because the scientific way of thinking
1:02.6	was very, very prominent, there's been a dismissive attitude
1:07.9	towards those stories.
1:10.0	But if you remember this,
1:13.6	is that as, let's say,
1:17.6	scientism took over the world,
1:21.6	at some point, the lack of story started to become apparent.
1:25.6	And then the incapacity to see the story
1:29.3	in which things are structured became very painful.
1:34.3	And now I think we're in a moment where we can kind of see it again. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. On behalf of Hillsdale College's Psychology Department,
2:05.6	in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and theology, welcome.
	...

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