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The Thomistic Institute

Weaponizing Saints & Miracles: The Church as Stairway to Heaven | Prof. Carlos Eire

The Thomistic Institute

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2022

⏱️ 74 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given on June 15, 2022 at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. as part of The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship: "The City of God in Modernity: Culture and Ecclesiology." The slides for this lecture can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/b7ubtddp For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Carlos Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of the supernatural, and the history of death. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, he taught at St. John’s University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for two years. He is the author of War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (1995); A Very Brief History of Eternity (2010); Reformations: The Early Modern World (2016); and The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila: A Biography (2019). And he is co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). He has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in the memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction in the United States and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. His second memoir, Learning to Die in Miami (2010), explores the exile experience. A past president of the Society for Reformation Research, he is currently researching attitudes toward miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His recent book Reformations won the R.R.Hawkins Prize for Best Book of the Year from the American Publishers Association, as well as the award for Best Book in the Humanities. It was also awarded the Jaroslav Pelikan Prize by Yale University Press. All of his books are banned in Cuba, where he has been proclaimed an enemy of the state – a distinction he regards as the highest of all honors.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.

0:03.0

For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.

0:11.0

Today, we're going into an area that is not normally associated with ecclesiology,

0:21.6

but I think it is central to ecclesiology,

0:25.6

central to the definition of the Catholic Church,

0:31.6

not just in this period, but throughout its entire history.

0:36.6

And it is the way in which the church as not just an

0:45.2

institution, but as the community of saints headed by Christ himself is a point of contact with the supernatural.

1:00.0

And let's face it, that is the basic assumption of most religions, is that there are two realms, the natural and the supernatural.

1:10.0

Right? And we live in the natural and the supernatural.

1:11.1

And we live in the natural world.

1:12.8

But from the very beginning, the Catholic Church has insisted that it does have, through

1:23.9

Jesus and the authority given to the apostles and their successors,

1:31.3

the ability to tap the supernatural.

1:35.3

So in this period, 16th, 17th century, and into the 18th and down to the present,

1:43.3

this has remained one of the more salient and definitive

1:50.2

traits of the Catholic Church, and actually of its ecclesiology.

1:57.4

As someone said to me a few months ago about their own religious upbringing, I said, well, you know, as someone said to me a few months ago about their own religious upbringing,

2:03.6

I said, well, you know, I grew up in my family, yeah, we went to church every Sunday

2:08.6

because that's a good place to meet nice people.

2:13.6

And that is why we went to church.

2:16.6

Well, that might be true in some churches.

...

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