Charity as a Virtue | Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2020

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on October 24, 2020 as part of "The Bonds of Love" Intellectual Retreat at the University of Texas, Austin.

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About the Speaker:

Fr. Ephrem Reese, O.P., was born in Harrisburg, PA. He received a B.A. from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD in 2010, and was confirmed in the Catholic Church around the same time. He entered the Order of Preachers in the summer of 2013. In the spring of 2020 he was ordained a priest, and received an S.T.L. from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I want to give you a sort of starting block for charity.
0:07.0	So this might be basic to some people, but I don't think we should start without talking
0:15.0	about charity as a virtue. So charity is love. Love is charity. But love can mean a lot of things. So I want to show you what it means when we call love a virtue. So I want to do that in three stages.
0:33.6	First, what is a virtue?
0:38.3	Second, why is charity a virtue?
0:43.3	And third, what kind of virtue is charity?
0:47.3	So your handout is fairly simple.
0:49.3	It just has three sections to organize those three things and then a few texts.
0:55.0	You can use the spaces for notes if you want.
0:58.0	Okay, first, what is a virtue?
1:01.0	The idea of virtue is at the service of the idea of action.
1:08.0	Action is what virtue is about, acts. There are many kinds of beings in the universe.
1:15.6	And we are beings who act. Some beings share a lot in common with us, human beings, but we don't say that they act. Human beings act. We find ourselves dropped into
1:32.3	the blinding light of existence, and we squirm around for a while, and then eventually
1:39.3	we do something about it. We act. We take our bearings, we determine what we want, whether we do
1:48.2	that consciously or not, and we act. But if we want to find out what an act is, the
1:57.8	more we focus on an act, the act itself itself it can become even more opaque what is an act
2:06.6	so we need to find a way to study the act human acts are facts are things that are done
2:15.6	like the division of a cell or like a meteor hitting a distant moon.
2:22.6	A human act is a fact that happens.
2:26.0	These acts are opaque, but once we begin to understand the scientific principles that underlie these facts,
2:37.0	we can approach an understanding of acts themselves. So there are principles that stand behind or beneath.
	...

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