Why We Need or Don't Need Utopias – Dr. Jan Bentz

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Jan Bentz argues that utopias are dangerous because they promise a perfected society by denying human fallenness, replacing Christian hope and grace with man-made salvation, and turning politics into a counterfeit religion.

This lecture was given on November 1st, 2025, at Thomistic Institute in Limerick.

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About the Speakers:

Dr. Jan C. Bentz was born and raised in Germany and graduated high school in St Louis, Missouri, where he attended as a foreign exchange student. Dr Bentz holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the Roman Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, a Masters in Sacred Art, Architecture, and Liturgy and a Masters in Church, Ecumenism, and Religious Studies. His dissertation was published in German on Gustav Siewerth (1903-1963) and his work on Thomas Aquinas and G.W.F. Hegel. His fields of expertise include Metaphysics, History of Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, Thomism, and Philosophy of Art. Dr Bentz lectures at Blackfriars’ Studium on History of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of History. He taught Philosophy of Art (Aesthetics) for The Catholic University of America, Rome Campus, History of Medieval Philosophy at Christendom College, Rome Campus, and Apologetics for IES Study Abroad also in Rome. His journalistic career included the production of weekly TV coverage in German and English for EWTN Global; interviews and commentary for Catholic News Agency, Inside the Vatican; and for The Catholic Herald in English and Jüdische Rundschau in German. His current format is called Reality Check, a series of video interviews also published on YouTube with the European Conservative.

Keywords: Equality, Eschatology, Grace, Human nature, Joachim of Fiore, Marx, Politics, Religion, Technology, Utopia

Transcript

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1:03.0	Imagine a vast glass city, stretching across the horizon, gleaming under artificial sunlight.
1:09.6	There's no poverty, there's no crime and there's no war.
1:13.6	Everything is clean, everything is efficient and everything is peaceful.
1:17.6	Every human life is accounted for, optimized and content. There are no prisons because people don't have a desire to disobey.
1:25.6	There's no religion because everyone is comfortable to the maximal degree.
1:30.3	There's no memory of suffering because history has been rewritten or deleted entirely.
1:36.3	Even free will that messy and unpredictable freedom has been gently retired.
1:41.3	In its place is conditioning, surveillance, and the soft tyranny of perpetual
1:48.5	pleasure. You are in utopia. Or better, you are in hell. Eutopia is not far from the one
1:56.2	imagined by Aldous Huxley and Brave New World, for instance, but also the dreams from the
	...

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