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 Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.

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

Great. Thanks so much for having me this evening.

It's a great pleasure to be with you here in Oregon.

It's my first time in Oregon,

and first time in Eugene and at the University of Oregon as well.

I'm happy to get out of DC, which yesterday was in the 70s,

and here in Oregon a bit more, I guess they tell me it's like Oregon today.

So it was good.

Isolation, quarantine, separation.

All of those realities have new meaning for those of us who live through COVID times.

And for your generation, for better, for worse, you came of age in that separation and in that social distance, life, let's say.

We learned the hard way what separation from family and friends means, and we learned it

as a real cruel phenomenon. A similar phenomenon of separation can happen with God.

Sin separates. Sin separates us from God and from other human beings. How we fix that separation is the subject of this evening's talk on the Sacrament of Confession. We're going to look at how this sacrament of the Church, the Sacrament of Penance, Restores and strengthens our relationship with God and with his church.

Have you ever been slowed down or paralyzed by recognition of your own moral failure?

Have you ever had that agony of knowing that you've messed up, that you're to blame, and that you don't know

how to get out of the quagmire. You know that you should do better. You should make amends.

You should try to make things right the next time around. But when you've been stuck in sin and stuck by sin, change seems

difficult. Sometimes it seems impossible. So how is the change going to happen when we feel stuck?

...