Atheism to Catholicism: A Professor’s Journey Out of Nihilism | Prof. J. Budziszewski

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Oregon on 21 November 2019.

J. Budziszewski (Ph.D. Yale, 1981) is a professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His main area of research is the natural moral law, and he is most well known for his work on moral self deception, “the revenge of conscience” what happens when we tell ourselves that we don't know what we really do know. However, he has written about all sorts of things such as moral character, family and sexuality, religion and public life, toleration and liberty, and the unraveling of our common culture. The most recent of his thirteen books are Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law and Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Virtue Ethics, both from Cambridge University Press, as well as "On the Meaning of Sex," from Intercollegiate Studies Institute. His book for students, "How to Stay Christian in College" has sold several hundred thousand copies. He also maintains a personal website and blog, "The Underground Thomist." Married for more than 45 years, Dr. Budziszewski has several children and a clutch of grandchildren. Presently he is completing a book on the meaning of happiness.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You know, in the early 1800s, an artist named William Hogarth made a series of paintings called
0:06.0	A Rake's Progress. A rake, of course, is a dissolute person, somebody who lives irresponsibly.
0:15.0	And you can also use them to collect leaves. Painting by painting, the rake inHolgarts series, is shown coming into an inheritance
0:23.8	in one-pick painting, and then he's, wastes all his money on gambling and prostitutes,
0:30.1	and then he goes into debt and all the phony friends that he won with his money, desert him,
0:36.2	and then he's put into debtor's
0:37.8	prison, and then because of syphilis, he ends up in the madhouse, and finally he dies.
0:43.7	Well, my journey to Catholic faith has also been a kind of rake's progress.
0:48.3	I don't mean I went down and down and down and down and finally hit Catholicism.
0:52.3	The word progress, you know, can mean either progression upward or progression downward.
0:56.8	And my progress was both.
0:58.9	In the downward phase, I didn't waste my financial inheritance on gambling and prostitutes,
1:05.2	but I did waste the inheritance of my mind and of my faith on follies and idiosies and self-deceptions.
1:14.9	But in the upward phase, by the grace of God I recovered, I sometimes say God reeled me back
1:20.7	in because I really can't take any credit for this, and I eventually found my way into the Catholic
1:25.4	Church, although that was some decades later.
1:28.1	The people here at the Thomistic Institute have asked me to come and tell you about it.
1:32.8	So that's what I'm going to do.
1:35.0	I can't tell you everything in the first place.
1:37.8	Some things are only for one's confessor.
1:39.9	And in the second place, there isn't enough time.
1:42.7	I'm going to tell you a lot about how I returned to my abandoned Christian faith.
	...

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