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 my intention for the next hour and a half is not to have like sort of an introduction

to like a big complicated medieval theology topic where I talk for an hour and then you ask me questions for 30 minutes, which is how like a number of my other TI talks go.

This is the first run for this. So let me know what you think of it at the end. And I wanted this to be kind of more interactive and also hopefully in occasion to take serious philosophical and theological

ideas and apply them to, you know, how you begin to think about ordering the rest of your life

now and after college. So my hope is that it has kind of some direct application and that, yeah,

we can have time for questions at the very end, but that we has kind of some direct application and that, yeah, we can have time for

questions at the very end, but that we can also have some time for interaction along the way.

And that is very much, that's very much built into the structure.

I was telling Seamus, it's very nice to be here.

I probably came to Williams on like a college tour, my junior year, which was now a very long time ago. And so it's good to be back. I then went to Swarthmore, so I have great affection for small liberal arts colleges. And I haven't been like on an actual small liberal arts college campus in a while. So very, very nice to be here.

So I wanted to start by just setting the context for why I would think about doing something like this.

So the first, or sorry, by something like this, I mean, why sort of think about how to make the decisions that then kind of go on and shape our life?

So there are three kind of images.

The first is this.

Picture a young, high-achieving senior in college who has not only many possibilities before her at the end of her time in college, but also comes to

them with many of the awards that her college can bestow upon her. She has made the dean's list.

She has had a thesis win a prize in her department.

She's collected her five data cap a key.

...