What We Owe to God and Country: Romans 13 | Prof. Erik Dempsey

The Thomistic Institute

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

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🗓️ 26 February 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 7th, 2023, at University of North Texas. For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events About the Speaker: Erik Dempsey (PhD, Boston College) is the Assistant Director of UT's Thomas Jefferson for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He completed his doctorate at Boston College in June 2007. He is interested in understanding human virtue, and the proper place of politics in a well-lived human life, the different ways in which human virtue is understood in different political situations, and the ways in which human virtue may transcend any political situation. His dissertation looks at Aristotle's treatment of prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Aristotle's suggestion that virtue should be understood as an end in itself. He is currently at work turning his dissertation into a book by adding chapters which consider Thomas Aquinas' interpretation of Aristotle in terms of natural law, and Marsilius of Padua's critique of Thomas. He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY and graduated from Hastings High School. As an undergraduate, he attended St. John's College in Annapolis, MD where he began to study the Great Books seriously. From June 2000 until August 2001, he worked for DynCorp in Chantilly, VA, doing mathematical modeling and providing other support for the GETS program. From September 2007 - May 2008, he taught in the Herbst Program for the Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events,
0:21.6	visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:28.6	I'm here today to talk about the question
0:31.6	of what Christians owe to God and country,
0:34.6	to God and their nation,
0:36.6	leaning heavily, but not exclusively, on Romans 13,
0:42.4	passage from Paul's, the beginning, really, the first seven lines, which are all in your handout.
0:49.1	My plan in my talk is, there will be three basic parts.
0:57.6	First, I'm going to speak about the issue of Christianity and patriotism or Christianity in politics in general terms. Second, I'm going to talk a little
1:06.8	bit about the way in which it comes to light in scripture, and especially in the transition
1:12.4	from the Old to the New Testament. And finally, I'm going to try to give something like a picture of what
1:22.4	I understand the relationship of those things to be based on passages from the New Testament, but above all,
1:29.9	Romans 13 with a little help from Thomas Aquinas and his commentary on that.
1:37.0	Before getting into the meat of my talk, let me say that a lot of what I will be saying and claiming is not much more than a
1:49.7	restatement of what I've understood or tried to understand from an address given by Joseph Ratzinger,
1:59.4	the first, that's the man who later became Pope Benedict the 16th, first in 1962,
2:07.4	and then published as a book in 1970 under the title, The Unity of Nations.
2:14.6	I'm not going to claim to have understood everything in this remarkable little book.
2:19.6	I commend it to everyone here.
	...

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