Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at

Thomistic Institute.org. The title is a little misleading because for a toomist, of course,

death is really, can, death through sin can really be a way station on the way to glory.

So, you know, when I say

the vulnerable Christian in distress, I don't mean definitively. I want to begin with a text that you

are, I'm sure, all familiar with from the seventh chapter of the letter to the Romans,

where Paul writes, So I find it to be a law that when I

want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,

but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, and making me captive to the law of sin,

which dwells in my members.

Wretched man that I am,

who will deliver me from this body of death?

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So then I of myself serve the law of God with my mind,

but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

The text, of course, raises what I would say is the perennial question that men and women have asked

for millennia, not strictly Christians, but who am I, and who am I becoming?

What am I doing with my life? How do I understand what I am? And of course, the cor corollary is why am I so flawed and so unable to manage my life?

It's out of control.

I can't, you know, I make decisions and I can't keep to them.

I make resolutions, and they fall by the wayside.

The perennial question, which is not exclusive to Christians, is really what I'm trying to address today in the couple of presentations that I make.

...