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 mysticinstitute.org.

If you wish to listen to a lecture well, one of the things you need to try to do

is to separate out what is being lectured on from the personal quirks of the lecturer.

It would be unjust and unhelpful to attribute to St. Thomas the peculiarities

of Thomists. I'm going to either deprive you or spare you, depending on your perspective,

of the burden of discovering some of my peculiarities and quirks, by telling you two of them

outright. One is that I seldom resist the urge to divide a talk into question

words. Another is that I like to count the divisions, subdivisions, and sub-sub-divisions.

I mention these quirks in particular because, although St. Thomas also has them, the particular

way that they come out in his treatment of acedia,

is different from the particular way that I will be using them in this talk.

This is to say, I'll be posing different questions than St. Thomas does.

Some of these questions will be aimed at acedia, which Thomas does,

and others will be aimed at Thomas's account of acedia, which Thomas does, and others will be aimed at Thomas's account of

acedia, which Thomas obviously doesn't. My hope is that the difference between my manner of

questioning and St. Thomas's will be helpful for making clear to us modern-minded people,

what scholastic-minded Thomas means.

But, in case it isn't, please direct your complaints at me rather than at St. Thomas in the complaint period following the talk.

Before jumping into the questions we'll be asking in our assessment of Aquinas' account

...