So there's a certain kind of exercise of reason which if you're a believer you think that God wants us to develop.

And it's not the formal rationality of a mathematical system or logical system.

It involves the imagination. Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with Michael Pekulloch.

He is a philosopher and an author he teaches at the Catholic University of America.

He's an Aristotle scholar. His most recent books include The Shock of Holiness, which we're going to talk about, a wonderful collection of essays.

And I mentioned earlier on my show, the memoirs of St. Peter, his absolutely wonderful translation of the gospel, according to St. Mark, he is, as I said, a philosopher

so going to ask him a lot of difficult questions. Michael, it's good to see you. Thank you for coming

on. Same here. What a delight. Thank you. The thing is, if you get the questions wrong, it's a thousand

dollars per question. We didn't tell you that before you came on.

That's, that's, that's cheaper than my sticks on the golf course, so no problem. So, so here,

here is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to. I want to talk about the shock of holiness.

But, but one of the reason I want to talk to is a lot of people, especially in the conservative side,

have been talking about what seems to be a boom in Catholic conversions or people coming

back to the Catholic churches. We had an article in the Daily Wire by a Catholic, saying that

there were some disturbing things about this with some people

were using Ryan Gurdowski wrote a piece called the Catholic convert boom is real

but a troubling pattern is emerging some new Catholic voices are using the faith

for something else entirely so what I want to ask you basically is what what you

think of this do you think that is real uh because

there was there was an article in amazon saying no they're misinterpreting the numbers and

and why do you think it's happening why specifically catholicism well i think it is really people

are reporting it but the numbers are not that great we're not talking about millions of people

...