Hello, welcome to the Editor's Desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.

I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things Magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.

Well, I'm delighted today to have Father Thomas Joseph White with me on the podcast, and he is the

author of The Future of Catholic Theology from the August, September 2025 issue.

Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Rusty. Great to be here.

Thanks for taking an interest in the article.

The piece is titled The Future of Catholic Theology,

which you actually begin with the present.

What is the situation in the 21st century West

that it really evoked from you the desire to think about

like where we need to go from here?

Theological amnesia.

So, I mean, the presence is theological amnesia. The past was resourcement, let's say creative tension between the scholastic enterprise and a new found interest in patristic and historical sources. That itself being in some tension with another mid-20th century trend, which was biblical exegesis.

By the way, the guys emphasizing biblical literacy and biblical historical critical scholarship

weren't always interested at all in the patristic resource small.

And then you also had a kind of existentialist motif that was in mid-20th century Catholic philosophy

as well as theology, kind of engagement with Heidegger and existentialism and phenomenology

and Marxism and atheism and the question of meaninglessness in modern human existence

or the threat or challenge of that.

So you had this polyphony or you might say proliferation, sometimes polyphenous,

...