What Can Film Teach Us About Religion? C.S. Lewis Goes to the Movies | Prof. Thomas Hibbs
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2019
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This lecture was presented April 9th, 2019 at George Mason University and was sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Mason Catholic Patriots. For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: thomisticinstitute.org/events-1
About the Speaker:
Thomas Hibbs is currently Distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. He is the author of books including Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good and Shows About Nothing, one of two books of his about film. He has nearly completed a book on Pascal, tentatively entitled Divine Irony and is at work on a book on Nihilism, Beauty, and God, an application of Jacques Maritain’s aesthetic theory to the arts of poetry and painting in the 20th century. He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in publications including Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I started working on film after I had, |
| 0:07.0 | got a tenure at Boston College, which is where I was before I came to Baylor in philosophy. |
| 0:12.0 | And I finished a sabbatical, I had written a book on Aquinas |
| 0:17.0 | that I was set out to write at the end of my tenure period. I thought I had a summer |
| 0:22.2 | with nothing to do for the first time since, maybe since like my junior year in college. |
| 0:28.1 | And so I, you get in a mode when you're trying to get tenure where you're writing constantly. |
| 0:35.6 | At least if you were scared as I was that you might not get tenure, you just write constantly. |
| 0:40.3 | And so I thought, I got some ideas about television and film, and that became eventually this book, Shows About Nothing, |
| 0:49.3 | which about film and TV, the title, some of you, some of you will be dated by this but that |
| 0:54.9 | was from a silent episode shows about a show about nothing one of the reasons I got |
| 1:00.6 | interested in writing about film and this will lead into the talk tonight is that when I |
| 1:07.6 | was in the philosophy of the Boston College, we had, I think we had something |
| 1:11.6 | about 300 majors, which was a lot of philosophy majors. |
| 1:14.6 | I think for that side of university, we had been most of any place in the country. |
| 1:17.6 | And these were bright students, and many of them had philosophy as a second major, so |
| 1:23.6 | they were majoring in finance or pre-med or whatever. |
| 1:25.6 | And they, we had a good department, a lot of good teachers, Peter Crapes, |
| 1:29.2 | great Catholic writer who was in the apartment, |
| 1:32.6 | and I was happy to be his colleague. |
| 1:35.0 | But I found that the students, despite being right |
| 1:38.6 | and despite actually being interested in philosophy, |
| 1:42.7 | were failing to kind of make connections between what we're reading in class |
... |
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