4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
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Prof. Christopher Mooney's lecture confronts the philosophical objection that heaven would be unbearably boring due to its infinite duration, arguing instead that Christian eternity is fulfilled in the beatific vision of God, which offers infinite and undiminished joy.
This lecture was given on April 23rd, 2025, at Texas A&M University.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Christopher Mooney is an assistant professor of theology at the Augustine Institute Graduate School in St. Louis, Missouri, where he teaches on Catholic theology, scriptural interpretation, and the Church Fathers. His teaching and research specialize in Augustine, the Fathers, and historical theology, and he is the author of Augustine's Theology of Justification by Faith (2026). A native of Connecticut, he studied at Georgetown and Yale Divinity School before receiving his PhD from the University of Notre Dame. He also serves as a theological representative for the USCCB's Catholic-Reformed dialogue. He lives next door to the Augustine Institute's campus with his wife and four children.
Keywords: Augustine of Hippo, Beatific Vision, Bernard Williams, Eternal Life, Freud, Heaven, Immortality, Odyssey, Philosophy of Religion, Richard Dawkins
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0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
0:21.7 | Thomisticinstitute.org. Building off of a line from the prophet Isaiah, the Apostle Paul writes |
0:29.5 | in 1st Corinthians, what no eye has seen nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagine, God has |
0:37.0 | prepared for those who love him. |
0:39.5 | Though in context, Paul is alluding to the work that God has recently accomplished in Christ, |
0:45.0 | which Paul sees as beyond what human beings could anticipate or comprehend, apart from the |
0:49.5 | Holy Spirit, Christians have frequently applied this to the unimaginable joys God has prepared for the saints |
0:55.9 | in heaven. The book of Revelation also recounts at length the image of the heavenly city, |
1:01.2 | in which he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there |
1:06.6 | be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. |
1:11.8 | The prospect of peace, perfect happiness, and an end-all sorrow and suffering has often been |
1:18.3 | criticized by skeptics of Christianity as what quintessentially makes Christianity the opiate of the |
1:25.2 | masses. For Karl Marx, the hope for an afterlife is both the |
1:29.8 | structure of religion in the present and the original impulse that caused it to come into being. |
1:35.6 | That is, human beings for Marx invented heaven, and this is both originally and at present |
1:41.6 | why there's religion. Sigmund Freud, in his future of an illusion, |
1:46.1 | counts the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life, |
1:49.5 | in other words, an afterlife, |
1:51.1 | as one of many illusions and fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, |
1:55.3 | and most urgent wishes of mankind. |
1:57.8 | It's from this wish, this psychical wish, |
2:00.3 | like the wish to be protected by a benevolentical wish, like the wish to be protected by a |
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