The Catastrophe of the Self: Walker Percy on Sin and Transcendence | Jennifer Frey

The Thomistic Institute

Thomism, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Catholic, Philosophy, Catholicism

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on December 5th, 2018 at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C.

This is the final lecture in a three-part series titled "Tales That Tell: Moral Devastation and Original Sin in Literature," co-sponsored by the Catholic Information Center and the Thomistic Institute.

For more information on other upcoming events, visit our website: thomisticinstitute.org

About the speaker:

Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina) received her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana in 2000, and her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012. In 2013 she was Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago prior to taking up her current appointment as Assistant Professor in the Philosophy department at the University of South Carolina. Jennifer's research interests lie at the intersection of virtue ethics and action theory. She has publications in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, The Journal of Analytic Philosophy, and in several edited volumes. She is the recipient of several grants, including a 2.1 million dollar project awarded by the John Templeton Foundation, titled "Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in Life." She is currently at work on three separate book projects.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you so much. Thanks to the Tomasdic Institute and the Catholic Information Center for having me.
0:07.0	I'm really delighted to be here. Can everybody hear me? Fine. Okay.
0:12.0	The title of my talk is the catastrophe of the self-Walker Percy on sin and self-knowledge.
0:20.0	And I'm not going to presuppose any knowledge of Walker Percy on sin and self-knowledge, and I'm not going to presuppose any knowledge of Walker Percy.
0:23.6	If one knows anything about Walker Percy, and I think one is just as likely to know nothing about him,
0:31.6	it's that he was a 20th century Southern Catholic writer who lived in Louisiana. This is true enough,
0:39.9	but it's also misleading. He was born a Southerner, to be sure, but he didn't become Catholic,
0:46.5	or really religious at all, until his early 30s after he suffered an existential crisis
0:53.5	born of illness. Just around the time, he quit his medical
0:57.4	practice and moved to New Orleans in order to marry the woman he loved. So his identity as Catholic
1:04.6	and his identity as writer were to a certain extent co-evil. They are not meaningfully connected to his being a
1:12.9	southerner, but are meaningfully connected to his being identified with New Orleans,
1:18.9	the only truly Catholic city in the South, where, according to his own testimony, the Catholics
1:25.8	tend to be more Catholic than the Pope, and Protestants
1:29.3	are most conscious of being not Catholic, and indeed in that way, like the Protestants
1:35.3	of old. Walker Percy's first and foundational identity is as a Southern gentleman, a member
1:42.8	of the Southern Wasp Aristocracy.
1:45.0	Percy was born in May, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama.
1:50.0	His father, an Episcopalian, educated at Princeton and Harvard, practiced law in Birmingham.
1:57.0	And his mother, Maddie Sue, came from one of the wealthiest Presbyterian families in Georgia.
2:04.2	Their marriage was publicly announced as uniting two of the most prominent old families in the
2:10.7	South. Walker Percy was so indelibly southern. He even went to summer camp where Bear Bryant was his counselor.
	...

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