Acedia I: How Our Sorrows Determine the State of Our Souls | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

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4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This talk was given on December 3, 2022, at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., as part of the intellectual retreat entitled, "Avoiding Acedia." For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Thomas Hibbs is currently President of the University of Dallas, his alma mater. With degrees from the University of Dallas and the University of Notre Dame, Hibbs taught at Boston College (BC) for 13 years, where he was full professor and department chair in philosophy. At BC, he also served on the Steering Committee for BC's Initiative for the Future of the Church and on the Sub-Committee on Catholic Sexual Teaching. For 16 years, Hibbs was Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. Hibbs has written scholarly books on Aquinas, including Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles, and a book on popular culture entitled Shows About Nothing. Hibbs has recently published scholarly articles on MacIntyre and Aquinas (Review of Politics), on Anselm (Anselm Studies), and on Pascal (International Philosophical Quarterly). He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, New Atlantis, The Dallas Morning News, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, for which his latest piece is a study of the ethical implications of the films of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Thomistic Institute podcast. Every talk on this podcast was originally delivered at an in-person event for university students, perhaps for one of our Tamistic Institute chapters on a university campus or at a Tamistic Institute retreat or conference. These lectures and events are happening around the country and around the globe all the
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0:36.1	and don't forget to like and share these recordings
0:38.8	with your friends because it matters what you think.
0:51.6	I want to say some things first about the culture and especially perhaps about social media.
1:00.3	And then I want to say some things about it in the course of doing that.
1:03.8	And then afterward, I want to say some things about what Aquinas has to teach us about sorrow.
1:11.4	I've found in reading Thomas on sorrow, I mean, he's always brilliant, but sometimes
1:18.8	you're just really blown away by the brilliance and especially by the way in which his
1:24.8	insights are directly applicable to lots of things in our lives and in our
1:31.3	culture. In the mid-19th century, the great French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville visited
1:38.8	America, this great book, Democracy in America, which you haven't read. I highly recommend
1:43.4	that you read it.
1:44.7	It's still probably the best book about America that's ever been written.
1:50.9	And sadly, it was written by a Frenchman.
1:54.2	But at one point, he talks about, and he actually has a lot to say about the vice of Achedi. He doesn't call it that.
2:02.8	He talks about the strange melancholy of Americans in the midst of their abundance.
2:11.9	Strange melancholy. This restlessness. He says at one point that Americans are sure that right around the
2:24.5	next corner is the happiness that they long for. They get around that corner and it isn't there.
2:33.2	Instead of learning from that particular defeat, some universal
2:38.4	truth, they think, oh, it's around the next corner. And we keep doing this until at last,
	...

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