I'm not going to read a paper. I actually have a book that's done on aesthetics.

And I was trying to think about the best way to come at this, and I decided since I'm supposed to talk for about 35 or 40 minutes, and then open it up to questions, that I wouldn't do a big kind of historical thing on nihilism,

talking about Nietzsche, although I'm happy to talk about Nietzsche in the question period.

I want to come at this in a way that I think works for,

and I'm going to show some clips at the end, works for this particular topic,

and it'll be much more focused than that very grandiose

title that you were invited to come hear about tonight. I want to talk a little bit about

the papal encyclical Laudato C and what Francis has to say about the crisis of modernity.

That'll be the first section briefly.

The second section, which will also be fairly brief,

will be about the sources of the modern crisis.

And the third section is going to be about my claim

that what the encyclical is calling for,

and what I would certainly call for as a response to this crisis and its sources, is a

twofold recovery. One is a recovery of the classical Catholic account of creation,

and the second would be a recovery of an understanding

of a sort of classical understanding of the artist as providing a kind of sacramental vision

of nature.

And that's where I will turn at the end to a couple short clips from the film Tree of Life,

as an example of the kind of thing that I think we need.

So in the Pope's encyclical, Laudato C, which is known mainly for its reflection on ecology,

its concerns about climate change, and its very concrete recommendations about how we might begin to respond to that environmental

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