Acedia and the Bleaching of Being | Dr. R.J. Snell

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This talk was given on December 2, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies as part of "Avoiding Acedia: An Intellectual Retreat." For more information, please visit thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. Snell is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:05.7	tamistic institute.org. So we're talking about sloth this weekend. If you want to be
0:14.5	pretentious, you can call it sloth. If you don't know whether it's acetya or a kidia or a cedia, I don't care and I don't know either.
0:24.1	It depends how you're going to latinize it.
0:27.1	I'll just go back and forth because I don't know either.
0:30.7	One of the things I want to do tonight is to articulate a little bit or some themes from it from a book that I did a few years ago
0:38.1	on not just how I think that sloth or a chidea is a vice which can beset us, but a little bit
0:45.2	about what it is, certainly not exhaustive. We'll have more sessions to deal with that.
0:49.4	But also in some ways, and I'll admit I'm probably given to some flights of fancy here, of how sloth is not
0:56.7	merely or only a personal vice, which can beset me or you, but I want to suggest that at the
1:02.6	moment it is perhaps a significant cultural vice or a vice of the culture itself. And as members of
1:09.3	that culture, we get caught up into it. And there's a kind of
1:12.4	a collective struggle that we face given cultural norms. That'll be for you to consider and to press
1:17.9	back on and to disagree with and so on. Professor Hibbs tomorrow will be speaking a little bit about
1:23.0	the role of the way our sadnesses can work out. I'll talk a little bit tonight about how in Aquinas
1:28.2	is understanding there's a kind of sadness to Sloth, as well as some reflections on the arts
1:34.1	and how that relates. You'll see more of that tomorrow. And then I'll end tomorrow night with
1:38.0	some suggestions of how to resist Sloth or how to overcome it, or at least in the version as I understand it to be.
1:46.8	I'm going to draw a little bit upon literature tonight because I find that helpful, but I hope you have
1:51.8	lots of questions. I think good retreats like this are full of questions. I hope you grab me
1:56.4	meals and so on, wherever is appropriate to ask and argue and to object, that'd be fine with me.
2:01.5	A few years ago, the theorist William Dershowitz warned that the nation's top colleges
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.