The Christian Imagination I Prof. Raymond Hain

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on May 28th, 2025, at University of Washington.

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About the Speaker:

Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Humanities Program at Providence College in Providence, RI. Educated at Christendom College, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Oxford, he is the founder of the PC Humanities Forum and Humanities Reading Seminars and is responsible for the strategic development of the Humanities Program into a vibrant, world class center of teaching, research, and cultural life dedicated to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. His scholarly interests include the history of ethics (especially St. Thomas Aquinas), applied ethics (especially medical ethics and the ethics of architecture), Alexis de Tocqueville, and philosophy and literature (especially Catholic aesthetics). His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Templeton Foundation, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Charles Koch Foundation. His essays have appeared in various journals and collections including The Thomist, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and The Anthem Companion to Tocqueville. He is the editor of Beyond the Self: Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Culture and is currently working on a monograph titled The Lover and the Prophet: An Essay in Catholic Aesthetics. He joined Providence College in 2011 and lives just across the street with his wife Dominique and their five children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.7	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.3	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:22.5	to mystic institute.org. Thanks to all of you for coming out this evening. Thanks especially to Sam
0:28.9	and the Ti chapter here for the invitation and to the TI more generally, which is doing such
0:34.6	extraordinary work for the church and for our intellectual life here and abroad.
0:40.3	My title is the Catholic imagination. I saw some posters earlier that said the Christian imagination.
0:46.3	If you prefer, you can replace the word Catholic with the word Christian in everything I'm about to say, and I think it will still work for you,
0:55.3	or at least I mean it to. If you'd like to argue with me about it at the end, I would welcome
0:59.9	your questions. Hope Benedict, the 16th once said,
1:04.7	Art and the Saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith. I don't think it's too hard to see why this might be true.
1:12.6	Traditionally, the three deepest experiences of human knowing are mystical, moral, and poetic.
1:18.6	Mystical knowledge remains in the soul tending towards silence, as Jean-Marit Tann,
1:25.6	Winston Fretonist said was. But moral knowledge expresses itself in a life and poetic knowledge in a work.
1:32.3	Things that others can reach out and touch and through them find their way back to the mysterious source of that knowledge.
1:39.3	And then back out again to the created world and its creator.
1:43.3	Goodness and beauty, the gifts of artists and saints.
1:48.0	They offer us in a special way of invitation from God himself.
1:52.0	In 1999, book John Paul II wrote a letter to artists.
1:56.0	May I ask if any of you read a letter to artists?
1:59.0	A couple of you. The rest of you, shame later artist. A couple of you. Good. The rest of you, shame on
	...

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