Catholic Culture with Tolkien – Prof. Patrick Callahan
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Prof. Patrick Callahan explores the living tradition of Catholic culture, using Tolkien’s life and imagination to demonstrate how the Mass, community, and cultivation of virtue form a unified Christian identity resilient amidst modern challenges.
This lecture was given on January 18th, 2024, at University of Washington.
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About the Speakers:
Prof. Patrick Callahan is director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture as well as Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. There he directs and teaches in a Great Books Catholic program for students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and other regional colleges. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classics. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife and 5 children.
Keywords: Catholic Culture, Community Tradition, Cultural Standardization, Evelyn Waugh, Incarnational Liturgy, Intellectual Virtue, Justice And Temperance, Letters Of Tolkien, Mustard Seed Metaphor, Sacramental Imagination
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks to donors like you, Aquinas 101 is setting the world aflame with the truth, |
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| 0:22.9 | description below to give today. Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to |
| 0:32.6 | promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public |
| 0:37.3 | square. |
| 0:38.0 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute |
| 0:42.6 | chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
| 0:47.4 | to mystic institute.org. Before I launch too much into details, I want to give a brief exposition to the main points of this talk. |
| 0:56.0 | You can kind of think of this as a map, as it were, so that if I digress from the text too much, because I'm a professor and I tend to digress. |
| 1:04.0 | In fact, I know one of my classes, they wrote a whole group chat for the class and it was called I digress. |
| 1:10.0 | So if I digress from the text, no laughs. |
| 1:13.6 | I really lost you with the Oregon thing, didn't I? |
| 1:16.6 | Okay. |
| 1:17.6 | So if I digress from the text or you lose the train of this argument, |
| 1:21.6 | you can follow the breadcrumbs back to where we left off the trail, |
| 1:25.6 | or you might even be able to find a shortcut and cut me off onto where this is all going. |
| 1:30.3 | So let's begin with the first part of the title is talk, Catholic culture. |
| 1:35.3 | What is Catholic culture? John Sr., who is a professor at the University of Kansas, |
| 1:41.3 | in his famous death of Christian culture in 1979 to find it very simply as |
| 1:48.0 | the Mass. From its institution at the Last Supper to the 1230 p.m. daily at the campus center |
... |
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