Welcome to the Tomistic 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 Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

So what we're going to discuss, what we're going to think together through is the question

of meaning, or negatively stated, the problem of meanlessness.

Now it's with this problem that the question becomes most

acute usually in our lives. Often we just coast along through life until we meet the problem

of meaninglessness. Now this problem often presents itself in various forms that we're familiar with.

When we suffer, when we suffer something like depression

or a lesser evil malaise,

or when we suffer something like anxiety

or a lesser evil on weed. When we meet physical suffering,

also we experience this problem when we're found in the chaos and confusion of life.

The contemporary world is in many respects overwhelming,

and the overwhelming character of it in some sense

causes us to freeze before it. We can't adjudicate between all of the meanings that are

bearing down upon us. Then also we live in a culture that is to a large degree fragmented.

It's moving through a transitory phase.

Irish culture and Western culture as a whole

is moving through a great transition.

And with any large transition,

...