This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at

tamistic institute.org. I'm speaking on Augustine's Confessions and the religious nature of the

person tonight. It's about an hour-long talk, and so you can just kind of settle in and relax.

How many of you have read Augustine's

confessions? Is there anybody? Just a few people. Well, I'm going to kind of reference it throughout,

obviously, but it doesn't depend on you having prior knowledge. I'll try to describe things

as well as I can if you've not read it before.

We are at the end of an era, I think, in America, but also in the West generally, what

ancient Latin speakers once called a secular, a significant segment of time, which is marked

by certain identifiable features.

The era might be called liberal or it might be called secular, and the

latter is probably more fitting since one of the defining features of this era is that its great

advocates and authorities promulgate the fiction that human beings are secular by nature.

One doesn't need any grand argument to observe, though, that the secular

era and the secular idea of the person is ending. We can simply look around at the contemporary

world we inhabit. Even your lobby of your student union here is full of religious symbolism.

Examples of institutional wokeness, a phrase which trades on the American tradition of Protestant

awakenings, far from non-religious tendency, what our secular liberal order is more reliably

and more increasingly produce

is, as Alex said, not no religion, but very, very bad religion, which disorders human passions,

intellects, and wills. The so-called secular liberal order tends not towards what Aristotle and St. Thomas

would have called the virtue of liberality,

...