 Hey, thank you all for coming. We're going to go ahead and get started. I know we're starting a little late, so I'll try to speak more quickly so we can still cover all the same territory. What I want to do this afternoon is put some of last night's reflections into a larger context. So rather than talking about specific hot button issues in the public square, taking a step back and just thinking about how should we as Catholics approach the question of faith and reason, especially when it comes to these political debates. So I want to start this by summarizing to my mind what the church has been doing for 2,000 years. Because the 2,000 year story of the Catholic Church's cultural engagement is a story of challenges that are answered. Say that again. Oh, they can't hear me. Can you turn up the volume? Okay, is this better? Okay, great, and I'll try to get closer to the mic. So what I was saying is that the 2,000 year history of the church is a history of challenges that the church answers, rises to the occasion to answer the challenges. For the early church, there were debates about who God is and who is God. And in response, the church developed wonderfully rich reflections on Trinitarian theology. Developed rich reflections on Christology. In a sense, you could say that we have the early heresies to thank for these accomplishments. Arius' errors gave us Athanasius' refinements on Christology. Nestorius' blunders gave us Cyril's insights. Now, in truth, it's the Holy Spirit that we have to thank for all of these things. It's the Holy Spirit that is constantly leading the church to have deeper and deeper insights into the truth and therefore to be better and better equipped to respond to the errors of the age. And every age has particular errors. So if you fast forward 1,000 years from the early church to the church of the reformation and the counter-reformation, you saw renewed debates about salvation. Debates that picked up where Augustine and Pelagius had left off. And so whatever side of the reformation, counter-reformation debates you fall on. And in this audience, I can imagine we all fall on a similar side of those debates. The church as a whole was left with deeper reflections about justification and sanctification, about ecclesiology and about soteriology. That the heresies of the reformation gave rise to deeper insights into the truth that came about through the counter-reformation. Now, debates about God, about salvation, about the church, they never disappear. But today's most pressing debates, today's most pressing heresies aren't primarily about the nature of God or the nature of the church. What they really center on is the nature of man. The tribulations that marked the 20th century and now have continued into the 21st century, whether it's totalitarianism, genocide, abortion, sexual ideology, these have all sprung, as I mentioned last night, from faulty humanism. And I don't intend to equate all of those challenges. Communism, genocide, abortion, sexual ideology, they aren't all the same thing, but they all have a common root. And it's getting the nature of man wrong. So to oversimplify just a little bit, if you wanted you could classify different eras of the church. And so you could say that the early church saw challenges to the truths about God, the reformation era church saw challenges to truths about the church herself. And today's church is confronted with challenges to truths about man, about the being who is made in the image and likeness of God, who the church is tasked with protecting. Now I don't claim any unique ownership to this insight. As I mentioned last night, this largely is an insight from John Paul II. Before he was Pope, when he was Bishop of Krakow, Carol Votiva, he had argued that the problem of the 20th century was that one of faulty humanism. And so shortly after the Second World War, he writes to one of his friends describing what his main intellectual project was. And if you recall, John Paul was a professor of philosophy. He was an academic when he became Bishop of Krakow. The communists kind of dismissed him because they figured, what do we have to worry about with an intellectual as Bishop, right? He's not gonna be effective. He's not a fighter. He's a head in the clouds philosopher. This is what John Paul wrote to his friend. I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is more in the metaphysical order than in the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideology, we must oppose rather than sterile polemics, a kind of recapitulation of the inviolable mystery of the person. John Paul diagnosed his culture's ills in terms of the mid 20th century revolutions. And if he was with us today, he would have extended that analysis as he did as pope to the culture of death from abortion to the increasing spread of a physician assisted suicide to the redefinition of marriage and now the redefinition of even sex to mean gender identity. All of these challenges that today's church face are heresies about the human person. And so how do we respond to these? And I think one of the first conclusions there is that we have to take thought seriously. That one of the things that is now distinguishing the Catholic church from many other institutions in the world is the emphasis that the church places on both faith and reason. Now the ancient Greeks initiated the practice of disciplined thinking that has been, that has come to be called philosophy, the love of wisdom. Ancient Greeks, people like Plato, Aristotle, they could reason from the intelligibility that they saw in the world to deeper truths. What they witnessed was manifest intelligibility in the world around them and they thought through disciplined reflection, disciplined thinking, they could discover certain truths. The Greeks worked from the ground up. Now the church, the Catholic church, they take this same approach from the Greeks but they add on to it an additional perspective from Jerusalem, right? So the church wants to blend together both Athens and Jerusalem. And so Catholics following the Jewish people have an additional reason to embrace reason. It has been revealed to us that creation is rational. Here's how Joseph Ratzinger put it in a lecture that he delivered at the Sorbonne. He writes, or he spoke. The question is whether reason, rationality stands at the beginning of all things and is grounded in the basis of all things or not. The question is whether reality originated on the basis of chance and thus from what is irrational. That is whether reason, being a chance byproduct of irrationality and floating in an ocean of irrationality is ultimately just as meaningless. Or whether the principle that represents the fundamental conviction of Christian faith and of its philosophy remains true. In Principio Eret Verbum, at the beginning of all things stands the creative power of reason. Now as then, Christian faith represents the choice in favor of the priority of reason and of rationality. Now that's a remarkable claim that Ratzinger makes. He says that our faith commits us to the priority of reason and rationality. Our faith commits us to take thought seriously, to expect and therefore to seek answers, to seek reasons, to seek truths. And so as a cultural matter, the revelation of God in Genesis fundamentally reshaped the world, freeing it from superstition, determinism and pagan religiosity. So prior to his lecture at the Serbonne, Ratzinger delivered a series of homilies on the doctrine of creation. These were then published in a slim but really a profound book titled In the Beginning where Cardinal Ratzinger is reflecting on the book of Genesis and on other texts that reflect on the doctrine of creation as to what are the theological and philosophical truths that can be learned from these texts. And here's what he says commenting on a passage from Genesis. He says, in the face of any fear of these demonic forces, we are told that God alone who is the eternal reason that is eternal love created the world and that it rests in his hands. Only with this in mind can we appreciate the dramatic confrontation implicit in this biblical text in which all of these confused myths were rejected and the world was given its origin in God's reason and in God's word. This could be shown almost word for word in the present text of passage from Genesis. As for example, when the sun and the moon are referred to as lamps, that God has hung in the sky for the measurement of time. To the people of that age, it must have seemed a terrible sacrilege to designate the great God's sun and moon as lamps for measuring time. Here we see the audacity and the temperateness of the faith that in confronting the pagan myths made the light of truth appear by showing that the world was not a demonic contest but that it arose from God's reason and it reposes on God's word. Hence, this creation account may be seen as the decisive enlightenment of history and as a breakthrough out of the fears that had oppressed humankind. It placed the world in the context of reason and recognized the world's reasonableness and freedom. But it may also be seen as the true enlightenment from the fact that it put human reason firmly on the primordial basis of God's reason in order to establish it in truth and in love without which an enlightenment would be exorbitant and ultimately foolish. And so as Ratzinger sees it, the decisive enlightenment didn't happen in the 1700s with a bunch of enlightenment philosophers like Locke and Kant and Rousseau. The decisive enlightenment took place several thousand years ago with God's self-disclosure to humanity that at the very beginning stands eternal reason. At the very beginning stands God's creative reason and that our own reason participates in God's reason. That the world isn't random chance. The world isn't simply a evolutionary but with no intelligibility and result. That from the beginning stands creative reason and we can decipher God's reasons. We can decipher them through what has been revealed to us and we can decipher them through our own intellects. God's created an intelligent creature who can recognize the intelligibilities that he has placed in his creation. And so belief in creation by a God who is both Kiritas and Logos allows Catholic thought to be open to every discipline that can discover truth. The Catholic has nothing to fear from science or philosophy or reason of any sort. In fact, Catholics like all people need reason in order to fully know the truth. So as John Paul II put it at the very beginning of his masterful and cyclical fetus at Ratio, faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. And God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth in a word to know himself so that by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves. So what John Paul is pointing out, we need both wings, faith and reason to know the truth about God and to know the truth about man. And so right now what we need as Catholics is to use every discipline at our disposal to defend the truth about man. In previous visits to this campus, I've delivered lectures about marriage, about the redefinition of marriage, about religious liberty after the redefinition of marriage, about gender ideology similar to what I shared with you last night. And so I won't repeat any of those arguments right here and right now, but let me just say that on all of those contested issues of human nature, we need all hands on deck. In addition to John Paul's theology of the body, we need a philosophy of the body and a psychology of the body and a sociology of the body. We need philosophers and theologians, psychiatrists and psychologists, biologists and sociologists, all of these disciplines revealing the truth about the human person, the truth about human nature. And we need artists and saints because our ultimate defense of the truth won't merely be an intellectual exercise, but it'll be an embodied beautiful witness. And so in a world increasingly hostile to people of faith, people of faith need to take reason all the more seriously so that we can speak in terms and in tones that our neighbors can understand. To help our neighbors see that there's no contradiction between reason rigorously applied, science properly conducted and the revealed truths that the church teaches. And so to bad science, we need to respond with good science. To bad legal reasoning, we need to respond with better legal reasoning. To misguided philosophy, we need to respond with true philosophy. And then we need to build on this reason with revelation because grace perfects nature. But to a bad scientific argument, our initial response can't simply be a good theological argument. We've missed a step. To a bad scientific argument, we need to respond with good science and then build on that good science with grace, with revelation. To show that there's no contradiction between faith and reason. To show that what Jesus has done is elevated human nature. He hasn't denied or distorted human nature. But even as we defend this lofty vocation of reason, being rational isn't enough because rationality itself points to the reality of truths that go beyond reason. Truths that transcend reason. Truths that can only be known through revelation. Truths that have to be accepted by faith. And so the challenge here for the culture is to embrace reason without embracing rationalism. And so many of our neighbors have thought that in order to be rational, they have to embrace rationalism and only be rational, which actually distorts rationality. Now, very few people noticed that this was one of the things that Benedict was actually criticizing in his Regensburg Address. The way that the media reacted to the Regensburg Address, and this is now a decade ago that Benedict delivered the Regensburg Address. They reacted as if this was simply an anti-Islamic lecture that he had given. But the main target of Benedict's criticisms were other Europeans. Europeans who had reduced the scope of rationality. Rationalists who had castrated reasons true scope. And what he urged was that European thought, Western thought, including in European thought Americans, to recover the tradition of philosophical theology, to reject the volunteerism that detached God from the rational order, and to see God as the logos, to see God as the rational word. And so our understanding of God should be as informed as much by reason as it is by faith, as much by philosophy as theology. And so the challenge here is to embrace faith without embracing Fedeism. The idea that faith alone or only faith, or faith to the exclusion of other disciplines is how we know truth. So you need to embrace reason without rationalism, faith without Fedeism. And it's not just that we need both faith and reason, it's that we need the right type of reason. And so in criticizing modern thinkers who had reduced reasons proper scope, Benedict at Regensburg was continuing John Paul's analysis from Fetus et Ratio, that modern rationality has been artificially constricted. And so ironically, or perhaps better, providentially, we're left in a cultural moment in which the Catholic church has greater confidence in reason than many Enlightenment philosophers and many university academic philosophers, right? It's the church that is the defender of reason's true vocation, a lofty vocation. Whereas many moderns have reduced reason merely to empiricism, scientism, pragmatism, and then ultimately a form of technocracy. The church says we have an enlarged understanding of reason. And so while the scientific method has proved helpful at discovering many scientific realities, this isn't the entirety of rationality. While the scientific approach can discover truths about empirical physical realities, it can provide little help in discussions about justice or love or beauty, whether these be in earthly domains or transcendent domains, only by broadening the conception of rationality beyond the empirically verifiable can man arrive at the truths necessary for our full flourishing, for our full flourishing as human beings. This was the key that was ignored in Benedict's Regensburg lecture. And so let me quote you another passage from Benedict at Regensburg where he criticizes the reduction of human reason merely to empiricism and positivism. He says, quote, if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced. For the specifically human questions about our origin and our destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics then have no place within the purview of reason as defined by science so understood and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides on the basis of his experiences what he considers tenable in matters of religion and subjective conscience becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason, which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. So what Benedict was pointing out is that when we see the extremism either extreme religious fundamentalism or extreme secularist fundamentalism, they both spring from a common root in reducing reason merely to the empirically verifiable rather than the historic conception of reason being a lover of wisdom, a reason being explored with the deepest human questions about origins and destiny, about what's true, what's good, what's beautiful. Only if we can think about these things, talk about these things, can we arrive at the truth about these things. So for John Paul, faith and reason were like two wings. For Benedict, Athens and Jerusalem were akin to a double helix. That's the image that Tracy Rowland, an Australian theologian who's written a wonderful book on Ratzinger's thought, that's the image she uses to describe Benedict's genealogy of the West. It's like a DNA double helix of faith and reason of Athens and Jerusalem. And she explains that for Benedict, the corruption of thought was one in which the helonic component of the culture was severed from the Christian and in which the Christian component was fundamentally undermined by the mutation of the doctrine of creation. When faith in creation is lost, Christian faith is transformed into gnosis. And when faith in reason is lost, wisdom is reduced to the empirically verifiable which cannot sustain a moral framework. That's the condition that we find ourselves in today. Faith has been detached from reason, reason has been reduced to the empirically verifiable. And that's why when you're in the public square you see endless disagreement with no common ground, with no common starting points, with no common framework for even thinking about the things that we disagree about. So many of the Enlightenment's political efforts were directed at securing man's liberty and yet the 20th century resulted in more human bondage than any other time period. The gamble was on supposing that a dictatorship of relativism, to use Ratzinger's phrase, would provide a more secure foundation for human liberty than the splendor of truth, to use John Paul's phrase. But only if man is capable of knowing truth, including moral and spiritual truths, can he be capable of freely directing himself towards ends that are worthwhile, away from evil ends and towards good ends. If man is ultimately the measure of all things, of right and wrong, of good and evil, rather than discerning natural truths about right and wrong, good and evil, then it ends up eliminating any firm foundation for law or freedom, when man becomes the measure of all things. Freedom untethered from truth in the political realm truly does lead to a dictatorship, either the despot who gains power through force or the majority that imposes its will without justifying reason. For reasons unable to arrive at the truth, what can a political community appeal to when organizing its common life? Those who ground democracy on relativism or subjectivism undercut the very foundation that support democratic institutions in the first place. A proper concern for the authentic good of each and every member of the human family. Once you undercut reason's ability to know the authentic good on each and every member of the human community, what do we as a political community have left in the process of discernment? So the capacity to know right and wrong, good and evil is one of those keys for recovering a sound understanding of freedom. But the liberty on offer in most post-Christian societies is not the liberty of either the ancient Greeks or of the church. That liberty was understood as freedom from sin. The type of freedom that the ancient Greeks wanted, the types of freedom that the early Christians wanted was a freedom from sin, and therefore a freedom for self-perfection, self-mastery. Today we face two competing conceptions of freedom with Cervas Pinkers, a Belgian born, a Thomistic, a Dominican thinker has described as either a freedom of indifference or a freedom for excellence. And so the modern conception of freedom, the freedom of indifference, all that matters is that I choose it. It doesn't matter what I choose, so long as I'm the one making the choice. But the traditional conception of freedom flowed out of a different conception of human nature. If freedom is grounded in man's rational and free nature, then freedom is about how do we flourish as the type of creatures that we are? So you could think of this when it comes to your children learning a musical instrument. If you sit at the piano and you simply hit whatever keys you quote want to hit, you just bang at the piano. In one sense you could say that you're free, but really in another sense you're simply being enslaved to your ignorance and inability to play the piano. You don't really have meaningful freedom at the keyboard. So this is how Pinkers puts it. Of course anyone is free to bang out notes haphazardly on the piano as the fancy strikes him, but this is a rudimentary savage sort of freedom. It cloaks an incapacity to play even the simplest pieces accurately and well. On the other hand, the person who really possesses the art of playing the piano has acquired a new freedom. He can play whatever he chooses and also compose new pieces. His musical freedom could be described as the gradually acquired ability to execute works of his choice with perfection. It is based on natural dispositions and a talent developed and stabilized by means of regular progressive exercises. It's a habitus, a habit. Aristotle and Thomas' prudent or good man in the moral sphere is like the good piano player in the artistic sphere and is therefore the truly free man. So what Pinkers is getting at, what the Catholic tradition is getting at, is that to actually be free we have to habituate ourselves to virtue. We have to order certain desires, certain inclinations, and ultimately actions towards what's truly good for us. And then we can acquire the freedom that the well-trained concert piano player has, to be able to sit down at the keyboard and play beautiful music. In the same way to be able to live in reality in a way to flourish, to be comfortable living in reality, we have to develop certain virtues. Avoid certain temptations, certain actions that aren't actually good for us. John Paul gave a homily at Mount Sinai, describing how to think about the moral law. And so he said, quote, the 10 commandments are not an arbitrary imposition of a tyrannical lord. They were written in stone, but before that they were written on the human heart as the universal moral law, valid in every time and place. Today, as always, the 10 words of the law provide the only true basis for the lives of individuals, societies, and nations. Today, as always, they are the only future of the human family. They save man from the destructive force of egoism, hatred, and falsehood. They point out all the false gods that draw him into slavery, the love of self to the exclusion of God, the greed for power and pleasure that overturns the order of justice and degrades human dignity. If we turn from these false idols and follow the God who sets his people free and remains always with him, then we shall emerge like Moses, shining with glory, a blaze with the light of God. To keep the commandments is to be faithful to God, but it also is to be faithful to ourselves, to our true nature and our deepest aspirations. So what John Paul is getting at there is he's combating the vision that sees the 10 commandments or the moral law as an arbitrary imposition from a killjoy God who wants to get in the way of us having fun, who wants to get in the way of us flourishing. And he's saying, no, these are actually the moral laws that make us true, not simply to God, but also true to ourselves, to our deepest nature. These are the moral laws that actually allow us to flourish given the type of creature we are. And so later on in that homily, he says, quote, the 10 commandments are the law of freedom, not the freedom to follow our blind passions, but the freedom to love, to choose what is good in every situation. So let me apply that to a couple contested issues right now to show how I think this should play out in the public square. Because I think one of the great benefits that we have from the pontificates of both John Paul and Benedict is a framework for thinking about how to think. A framework for thinking about how to think, particularly in the public square, how faith and reason can go together, how we can respond to neighbors who say, well, look, I don't share your Catholic faith. Why should you impose your beliefs on me? And I'm sure you've all experienced those sorts of conversations. And the simplest response is that we're not imposing anything that is distinctively and uniquely and privately ours. Every truth claim is a public truth claim as applicable to ourselves as to our neighbors because it's not something that we created. It's not something that we as the arbitrary strongman, the dictatorship of relativism being, well, this is what I believe and I'm imposing it on you. It's that we can actually appeal to truths that are as true for us as for our neighbor because they're not uniquely our truth, but they're grounded in the truth, the creative truth, the creative reason that stands at the beginning of all things. So let me go through a couple contested questions and then I'm gonna open this up for questions and answers so we can have more of a conversation. I think the pro-life movement has been remarkably successful at reasoning in ways that people who don't share our faith commitments can understand. And so when you go to the march for life, you'll see banners with different diocese marching, but you'll also see Lutherans for life, you'll see Anglicans for life. So people who share our fundamental Christian convictions but not all of our Catholic convictions, you'll also see groups like atheists for life. You'll see gays and lesbians for life. You'll see a variety of groups who don't agree with us on more or less any other moral or philosophical issue agreeing with us that the unborn child is a human being with a right to life. Now they might not agree with us on why that unborn child has a right to life. They won't go to our deepest reasons, but they can at least come to some of the initial reasons. So pro-lifers have been very good at using embryology and developmental biology to show that the unborn child isn't a unicorn, isn't a giraffe, isn't a potato. The unborn child is a human being in the womb. And you don't need any faith to believe that. All you need is science well done. Ultrasound images reveal this. So many people, their first picture in their baby book now is the ultrasound image of them when they were 20 weeks old. 20 weeks post conception, 20 weeks pre-birth. Depending on how you wanna think about this, our birth days aren't really the beginning of our lives. We've already been alive for nine months on average prior to our birthday. And science confirms this, right? This is actually one of those empirical realities that even the narrow understanding of science can reveal. And then you can build on this with basic philosophy. Do you believe in human equality or not? If you claim to believe in human equality, why is the unborn human being not equal to the post-born human being? Why are human beings with disabilities not equal to human beings who are fully physically able to switch examples to the assisted suicide context or the euthanasia context? Do you believe in human dignity or not? Do you believe in human rights or not? And do human rights apply to all human beings or only a subset of human beings? And if it's a subset of human beings, how do we determine which human beings have human rights? We have a pretty bad historical legacy of denying human rights to certain populations, either because they have the wrong skin color or because they practice the wrong religious beliefs, the 20th century in the case of the Holocaust, human beings denied human rights because of their faith, 18th century in the case of the United States slavery based on skin color, right? And so challenge, what is it about the unborn human being that denies them human rights? Is it because of their age? Is it because of their size? Is it because of their stage of development? What reason could you give for saying you have a right to life, but they don't? And so the pro-life movement has been very good at engaging in these sorts of debates. Now the deepest reason for why any of us should believe in human dignity, human equality and human rights is because each and every one of us is made in the image and likeness of God. But there's a natural reality, all three of those things, human dignity, human equality and human rights, those are natural realities that we can know through philosophy, that we can defend with good philosophical arguments, even if we haven't yet gone all the way to bedrock. We haven't gone to our deepest reasons, which are now fully participating in God's creative activity. And so we can reason with people as far as they're willing to go. Some people might only be willing to go with us on the basic embryology and the basic philosophy of human rights. Other people's will go deeper, they will share the theological reasons. This is how I think the pro-life movement has been very successful at persuading younger people when you see young people that march for life saying I am the pro-life generation. They're more pro-life than their parents' generation because they see there's no conflict between faith and reason. I think it would have been a mistake had the pro-life movement said, we're pro-life because the church says so. We're pro-life because the Bible says so. Even though both of those things are true, both of those things are true. The church does say that the unborn child has a right to life. The Bible does reveal that every human being is made in the image and likeness of God, whether they're in utero or out of utero, right? Those would both be true things, true statements. But the reason why it's resonated with young people is that they've had a direct experience that there's no conflict between what the church teaches and what the best of science and philosophy reveals. That as John Paul said, faith and reason go together like two wings. Now some of the harder questions are things like the marriage debate. The way that the secular media wanted to set up the marriage debate was that it's merely outdated faith and bigotry on one side of the debate and then on the other side of the debate it was enlightenment, reason, philosophy, and science. So that if you were in favor of what they called marriage equality, that was because you took science and reason seriously and if you were against marriage equality, that's because you were a religious bigot who was stuck in backwards superstitions. You all lived through at the past decade so you know what I'm describing. And of course that's an entirely false description. Everyone, as far as I can tell, was in favor of marriage equality. Meaning we all wanted all marriages to be treated in the same way. We wanted all marriages to be treated equally. What we disagreed about is what sort of a relationship is marital? And there was no neutrality on that question. It's not like you get to say, well look I'm in favor of marriage equality and that's the end of the discussion. You said, all right, well I'm in favor of marriage equality too. What sort of consenting adult relationship is a marital relationship and why? And that was the question that the other side of the debate never really was forced to answer. I co-authored a book with a friend of mine from college and a professor of ours titled What is Marriage? Because we thought that was the central question of the debate. And then we laid out two competing philosophical positions on marriage. It's not as if the other side didn't have a position. They had a position. Marriage is simply the consenting union of any two adults. But they couldn't explain why it should be limited to two people, why it should be a permanent relationship, why it should be exclusive relationship or why the government should care. If marriage was simply about consenting adult romance, why is the state in the marriage business? The alternative understanding of marriage was marriage was about a comprehensive union where a man and a woman unite in the type of act that can create new life and then unite new life both a mother and a father. This explains why it's a union of two and only two people because it's only one man and one woman who can unite in that comprehensive way. It explains why marriage is a permanent relationship. It can explain why marriage should be an exclusive relationship and that the type of union that is being formed is a comprehensive union united spouses at all levels of their humanity. These are two philosophical approaches to marriage. Jesus takes the natural institution of marriage which is there for all human beings and he elevates it to a sacramental relationship for baptized Christians. So marriage is both a natural institution and a sacramental institution. It's both natural and supernatural. But that doesn't destroy the nature of marriage. It takes the nature of marriage and it elevates it. It ennobles it. But people all throughout human history all across the globe have been and will continue to be married whether they share our faith or not. Marriage was created when human beings were created. When God created us male and female, when he created us in his image and likeness, he also created the institution of marriage for all people because marriage benefits all people. He also then elevated marriage as an institution of an instrument of grace, a sacrament for baptized Christians. But that doesn't destroy the nature of marriage. And so in the public square when we engaged in this discussion, we should have been just as emphasizing the philosophy of the body as we did theology of the body. In the way that pro-lifers pointed to embryology and developmental biology, we could have been pointing to sociology and some of the facts about how mothers and fathers both benefit children. Men and women aren't interchangeable. Mothers and fathers aren't substitutes for each other. Men and women are different. Mothers and fathers bring contrasting, competing and complementary gifts to the marriage, parenting enterprise. Last night you heard me speak about some of the challenges with gender dysphoria and gender identity questions. If you were paying close attention, you'll notice I never quoted the Bible. I never mentioned God. Because I don't think as a starting point, that's where we're gonna make headway with neighbors who don't agree with us. What you saw a lot of was a lot of science, a lot of medicine, philosophy, appeals to long-term studies on what the outcomes are and appeal to an understanding of human nature as an embodied creature, male and female. All things that are accessible regardless of what your faith is. You could have listened to last night's lecture being Jewish or Christian or Muslim, Buddhist or no faith at all and we all would have had common territory that would have been equally accessible given our human rationality. This is where I think we're gonna have to develop our ability to speak in those sorts of terms and tones in an increasingly secular culture. Appeals to the book of Genesis, appeals to Matthew's gospel, they aren't gonna be persuasive to people who don't already share your beliefs. So a starting point is to look at what is the nature of the phenomenon. The next step is to look at the super nature and I wanna be clear that I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't take that next step. It's important that the church develop both a philosophy and a theology of sex and of gender and of gender identity that we understand these things both from a natural and a supernatural perspective. It requires us to be able to kind of speak two languages in the public square to be able to speak both the faith and the reason language. All right, and so let me close and then we'll go to some questions with what to my mind is the biggest challenge facing the church in the United States is will the church retain her freedom to operate according to the truth on these questions? Some of these religious liberty challenges to my mind are the most threatening challenges because it really strikes at the very heart of whether or not the church, and when I say the church, I don't just mean the bishops or the clergy or kind of the institutional church, I mean the people of God. Whether or not the people of God will be able to continue living in accordance with the truth. Running their charities in accordance with the truth, running their businesses in accordance with the truth, running schools in accordance with the truth, running hospitals in accordance with the truth. Whether this be the truth about the dignity and the sanctity of every human life, so challenges from abortion, challenges from assisted suicide, whether this be the truth about human sexuality where sex is something that's ennobling and elevating only inside of marriage and where marriage is understood as the union of husband and wife. The truth about the human person has created male and female where our bodies aren't just costumes that we happen to wear but where our bodies are our actual selves where we're each an incarnate bodily being where that should be respected and honored, not toyed with as if it's merely an outfit. Will we be able to live in accordance with those truths whether it comes, let's say, this university? Will it lose its accreditation? Will it lose its nonprofit tax status if it doesn't compromise on those teachings? It doesn't offer a gay married student housing. It doesn't cover sex reassignment programs in its student's health care plan. It doesn't pay for abortion. Will those be the types of consequences that before colleges, universities, elementary schools, high schools that seek to continue to operate simply to pass on the truth to the next generation? I will the government say unless you do it our way you can't do it at all. Will Catholic hospitals be told that unless you perform sterilization procedures, unless you perform abortion procedures, unless you offer assisted suicide procedures, unless you offer sex reassignment procedures, you can't remain in place helping the needy. Many Catholic hospitals have a special focus on meeting populations that go without adequate health care. Many Catholic hospitals are dedicated to serving those most and need. Will they be allowed to continue doing it in accordance with Catholic convictions about human dignity and human equality and human nature or will they be told unless you do it the way that the secular government wants you to do it, you can't do it at all? Will bakers, florists, photographers, and anyone who intersects with the marriage industry, the marriage business, for that matter counselors, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists who intersect with people struggling with gender dysphoria, will they be free to continue performing their services in accordance with the truth? Why do I mention all these religious liberty challenges? Because I don't think it'll be a successful argument if we simply say the Bible says so. That if our neighbors think that what we are doing is bigoted, if they think what we are doing is evil, what we are doing is discrimination, then they're gonna say it doesn't matter if you're doing it for religious reasons, you don't have a right to be a bigot, you don't have a right to discriminate, you don't have a right to be morally evil with respect to all the issues I just mentioned. So I think one of the things that we're gonna have to do simply in order to protect our religious liberty is to be able to persuade at least a significant portion of our neighbors that even if they think we're wrong, it doesn't mean we're bigoted, it doesn't mean we're evil, it doesn't mean we're discriminating, that there are some things that you can just have a good faith disagreement about. And I think the pro-life community has been more successful on this than we've been on some of the other issues. My average classmate from Princeton would say something like, I disagree with Ryan about abortion, but I don't think he's evil. I don't think the reason that he's pro-life is because he's anti-woman or because he's anti-sex or because whatever the anti-argument would be. Yeah, I think he's wrong, I'm not personally pro-life, but I don't think it makes him evil or a bigot because he is pro-life. And therefore I'm not willing to force Ryan to violate his beliefs about the sanctity of human life. You notice that on abortion, religious liberty protections have, for the most part, been respected and protected for the past 40-some years. It was only with the HHS mandate that we had our first major national violation of religious liberty with respect to the sanctity of life. The Hobby Lobby case, the Little Sisters of the Poor case, that was one of the first major federal cases that said, look, we're no longer gonna respect the conscientious beliefs of pro-lifers. You, the nuns, are gonna be forced to pay for this. You, the evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, University of Notre Dame, are gonna be forced to provide this. The reason why, for the most part, and I think that just shows you how radical things have gotten more recently, was that for the most part we could say, it's a good faith disagreement. We don't think people who are pro-life are the equivalent of the KKK or the equivalent of racists. But look at the rhetoric surrounding something like Masterpiece Cake Shop, the baker who went up to the Supreme Court last year. Look at the rhetoric surrounding doctors who don't think transitioning is a good idea. They're immediately compared to racists. Well, if you're not in favor of gay marriage, you're just like the bigots who weren't in favor of interracial marriage. If you're not in favor of someone changing their gender identity, changing their sex, you're just like racists who were against interracial dating. It doesn't make any logical sense. People were not just like racists and bigots, but it's the rhetoric that's being used. And so I think our challenge here is gonna be how do we appeal to the middle? I don't think we're ever gonna persuade the extremists. But I think most people in the middle, if they heard a rational presentation about gender dysphoria, a rational presentation about human sexuality, they would at least be receptive to it. They might not at the end of the day fully agree with us, but they would at least say, yeah, that's a reasonable position. I might think you're wrong, but I don't think you're Hitler. And sadly, that's actually an argument we have to make. It just shows you how bad our culture is, that that's actually a situation in which we find ourselves trying to appeal to people to at least see the intelligibility, the rationality that undergirds our beliefs, even if they don't fully agree with it. All right, so with that I'm gonna stop. We should have plenty of time for questions. I'm looking, I don't think we have mics. So just ask your, we do have mics. All right, so I'll call on you. They'll bring you a microphone. There's a question right here in the front. They're gonna, yes, yeah, yeah. Yes, so great question. And I think I'll repeat the question briefly and then I'll answer it. The question was, look, so many of these words have been redefined in Orwellian fashion so that if you have any disagreement about immigration, you're now a racist. And if you have any disagreement about gay marriage, you're now like a homophobe. And then we aren't using words to describe real evils, like abortion as the killing of an unborn child. We're saying it's reproductive health or we're saying it's a choice. And so we're kind of concealing real evils through the manipulation of language. And then we're describing reasonable disagreements as if they are themselves evils. And I think the answer to this is one, we should not censor our own language. So you should not refer to abortion as reproductive health care, because it's not. If you're having an abortion, reproduction has already taken place, right? If you're having an abortion, it's because you were reproductively healthy and you conceived a child. And so we shouldn't describe the killing of a child as health care, killing is never caring. And that's also gonna be true at the end of life. So they're now redefining physician-assisted suicide as physician-assisted death. Well, physician-assisted dying is hospice care. We've been doing that for centuries. Physicians have been helping patients die and natural death with dignity. That's what palliative care is about. That's what hospice care is about. It's what the little sisters of the poor do when they're not suing the federal government. I mean, what they run are homes to help people in the dying process die a natural death with dignity. That's assistance in dying. What physician-assisted suicide is, it's killing, right? It's a physician prescribing lethal medication so that a patient can kill a him or herself. And so step one is we should not use the Orwellian language. We should actually describe realities accurately, because when you describe realities accurately, you can see them for what they are accurately. Second, I think the only way we can respond when people want to describe everything as bigotry is by being willing to call out real bigotry ourselves. And that gives us the credibility to say that this other thing isn't bigotry. So there is anti-gay bigotry in our culture. We should be the first ones willing to call it out when it happens. And that gives us greater credibility to say, but the church's teaching itself isn't anti-gay bigotry. Anti-gay bigotry is wrong. When people are being mocked and belittled on social media or in high schools, we should be right there saying that's wrong. Respect the human dignity of this person made in the image and likeness of God, regardless of their sexual attractions, even their sexual actions. We should respect them for who they are made in the image and likeness of God. But that doesn't mean that we have to redefine what marriage is. That doesn't mean that we have to say that it's morally acceptable to have sex outside of marriage where marriage is understood correctly as a union of husband and wife. I think that one reason why we've been ill-equipped for those conversations is that many of our most outspoken spokespeople on these issues are unwilling to call a spade a spade. And so I think you have to be willing to object to the really objectionable stuff to distinguish true beliefs from those morally repulsive beliefs. Yes, let's go with that back corner there. They're bringing you a mic. Yeah, thank you. Can you hear me now? OK. What sources or watchdog groups do you suggest that we follow to remain aware of proposed legislation or medical mandates so that our freedoms aren't taken away? Great question. So the first, especially for this audience, is the USCCB. The Conference of Catholic Bishops, their policy office is really good on these sorts of issues. I work with them a lot in DC. I work at the Heritage Foundation. And so I don't work for the Bishops Conference. But on religious liberty issues, on questions about marriage, questions about assisted suicide, questions about religious freedom, they've been outstanding. That's not to say they haven't been outstanding on other stuff. It's just that I don't work on those other issues, follow it. But on these sorts of things, I do know for a fact that they're doing good work. I would also point you to the daily signal. That's the news source that we run at the Heritage Foundation. And that covers all sorts of public policy issues. So it may cover some things that you're not particularly interested in. It does foreign policy. It does tax policy. It does all sorts of things. But it also has a deep focus on many of these cultural questions, many of these moral questions, and particularly religious liberty questions. And then the last source that I'll mention is one that I edit that Scott Hahn had mentioned last night. Public discourse. It's a publication of the Witherspoon Institute out of Princeton, New Jersey. And it's just one essay a day that normally focuses on. It's a long essay. It's about 2,000 words. So it's a committee essay. And it's covered a lot about abortion, about assisted suicide, about marriage, about gender identity. Archbishop Hu wrote an essay for us about two weeks ago. And so we have prominent Catholics writing there as well as evangelicals, orthodox Jews, public discourse. In the website, it's www.thepublicdiscourse.com. And then daily signal, if I remember correctly, it's www.dailysignal.com. And then the USCCB's website does a good job of tracking these issues. Yes, let's go right here. I was wondering, Joe Coon from Virginia Beach, I was wondering what your position is if you heard of the Catholic thing in the dialogue that takes place on EWTN with the papal posse they call themselves. I only heard half of that. Can you say it again? You cut out halfway through the question. The Catholic thing is a blog. And EWTN supports it. And just recently, a fellow named Randall Lehmann said that we're approaching civil war with regard to the position. So I haven't seen the Civil War essay, but the Catholic thing is a very good publication. Bob Royal is the editor-in-chief there. It's orthodox. A number of my friends write for it. So I would highly recommend that one as well. First things is another good journal. A Catholic vote is a good website, actually. And they have a very nice, this goes back to the previous question, every morning they send out an email with about somewhere between five to 10 links to important stories of that day. So actually, the more you ask the questions, the more I'm thinking about what are the things that I read. The Catholic vote morning email is very good, because it just gives you a quick summary. What is this other group? There's another email. The Catholic Association has a daily email that comes out. They're more focused on kind of like church news, whereas Catholic votes more interested in political news. So between the two of them, you know what's going on inside of the church and what's going on with the state. And then the Catholic thing itself does a nice job as well. So any and all of those sites. And then EWTN has a nightly news show that's broadcast right from DC. I've been on that show a number of times. And it's a half hour show at 6 p.m. on EWTN's cable show. You can also then get it the next day on their YouTube channel. And that's a very good presentation of what's going on both inside of the church and inside of the government. Yeah, we'll go right here and... I keep making you running back and forth. I apologize. I do weekly praying at abortion clinic. And just talking with people coming in and out, the ones that do stop and talk to us and don't point up to heaven with their middle finger to us. The argument is not rational and it's not scientific. It's emotion. And I see that in the general public now also. They've lost. They've lost rational argument. They've lost scientific. It's about emotion now. And it's about, well, because it's painful for me, or it's mental health, I feel bad, but I can't deal with that. Or it's all about emotion. How do we combat that? That is a great question. And you're entirely right that for large segments of the population, even though part of what being made in the image and likeness of God means is to be a rational and free creature. Everything, what's God's nature? God is a rational free creature. What are human beings made in God's image were rational and free creatures? And yet you see many people seem not to be taking their rational nature or even their freedom, all that particularly serious. So two thoughts on this. One is that the long-term challenge is rebuilding a culture that does take rationality seriously. This is something that the church built. The church created a culture that took reason seriously. The church was the institution that created the university system. We sometimes forget that both the hospital and the university were creations of the church because the church took healthcare and it took intellectual life seriously. And so in the so-called dark ages, middle ages, this is when both of these institutions get off the ground with Catholic sponsorship. And so when you think about something like what does Franciscan University do? It's training people on how to be thoughtful leaders. So that's part of it. The second part is I just think we have to meet emotion with emotion. And so there was only a couple of sentences in the prepared remarks where I said, look, we don't just need the philosophers and the theologians. We also need the artists and the saints. We need to be better storytellers. We need to have Hollywood movies and songs and TV shows that can embody our worldview as attractively as the progressives embody their worldview. And that means that we're gonna have to pray for vocations to Hollywood. It's probably not something that many of you have ever prayed for, right? You'll pray for vocations to the priesthood. You'll pray for like marital vocations. You'll pray for your politicians, right? How often at mass have we prayed for our political leaders, for our military? We should be praying for our cultural leaders. We should be praying that people who share our basic vision of the truth use their artistic talents to embody that vision. We forget that. Think about all of the great poets. Think about all of the great playwrights. So many of them, the great composers. They were all Orthodox Christians, either Catholic or Protestant. Think about Bach, Beethoven, Palestrina, Monteverdi. You think about Shakespeare. Think about Chaucer. Like all sorts of poets, playwrights, novelists. We're coming at this from a Christian perspective, embodying a certain worldview in their art form. And for whatever reason, we don't foster that in the way that we used to. And so this could be something that either financially, if you're a philanthropist, helping to financially support people in this line of work. But you can also support this through prayer. You can support this through university programs and creative writing, university programs, and screenwriting. But I think the biggest challenge is how do you block, how do you get over the block of the people who govern Hollywood? You've seen Hollywood actors, Hollywood producers that once they are outed as conservative Christians, it actually brings their career to a screeching halt. And I don't know how you break that. When Hollywood can boycott the state of Georgia, because they're gonna pass a pro-life law, I don't know how to overcome that. When Netflix can say, well, if you pass this pro-life law, we're gonna boycott your state. There's an economic dimension to this. It's a form of, they're calling it woke capitalism, where big businesses are using their outsized market influence to impose bad social values on the rest of the country. And I don't think anyone has figured out how to stop that. But it's something we do need to figure out. Oh, yes, thank you. Church leaders in the documentary feared a collapse of, with the collapse of authoritarian communism in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, that there would be a moral and cultural vacuum of values, particularly, and they used the word public square, and that it would lead to something similar to the death of King Louis XVI and the French Revolution coming, and that there would be some kind of Jackman government coming in. But it seems like that threat is perhaps greater in the United States as opposed to these societies who were formerly under a tight authoritarian grip. And secondly, do you think John Paul II's faith and reason campaign has much to do with the collapse of communism as President Reagan's military buildup? Great, great questions. There is a book titled The Pope, The Prime Minister and the President by, oh geez, what is his name? He's the former editor of National Review. I'm blanking on his name right now, but if you look up that title, you can find the book, The Pope, The President and the Prime Minister. And the argument of the book was that it was Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and John Paul II that were jointly responsible for the collapse of communism. Not Fred, but I think it's John O'Sullivan. Fred Barnes was the executive editor of Weekly Standard. And I think it's John O'Sullivan who's booked The Pope, The President and the Prime Minister. And the argument there is that, look, it was both a political campaign, but it was also a moral and cultural campaign. And the person who kind of stands at the heart of that was John Paul, right? So it wasn't primarily a geopolitical campaign that brought down the end of this. It was a moral revolution, a cultural revolution that, you know, within the title, it was The Pope, not The President or The Prime Minister who was responsible, but it was the three of them together who kind of formed a defense of Western civilization. For your first question, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And there are two recent books, both published in the past two years. One is titled The Demon in Democracy, and the other is titled Why Liberalism Failed, which both argue that the biggest threat that we face now isn't from totalitarian governments of the kind of Orwellian, you know, what Orwell was afraid of in Animal Farm in 1984 was, you know, big brother understood as like a totalitarian government. Here it's actually that democracy itself, liberalism itself dissolves the society that makes liberalism and democracy possible in the first place. So that's the demon in democracy. Liberalism has failed, and Nien argues because it has succeeded in dissolving all of the natural institutions, including the church, that stand as counterweights to liberalism. So if liberalism is understood as maximal individual liberty, then anything, including moral truths, religious truths that get in the way of maximal individual liberty are viewed with suspicion. And so it's a very different understanding of human nature. It's very different than what Aristotle or Plato or Augustine or Aquinas would have understood because they would have said, look, there are actually certain things that I ought not to act on. I have certain desires, certain attractions that I shouldn't act on. I don't want maximum individual liberty understood as a freedom of indifference. And so we need to cultivate the better angels of our nature and cultivating those angels require certain laws, civil society institutions, it requires certain non-governmental institutions, and all of those things seem to be getting flattened through pervasive, kind of like radical, expressive individualism. And then they use the authority of the state to punish anyone who thinks differently. So if the baker won't bake you the same-sex wedding cake, the baker's freedom has to be distinguished. So it's a very odd form of liberty where it's my liberty to have the gay wedding. Oh, it trumps your liberty to run your business in accordance with your values. So one is called Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick Deneen, and then the other one is called The Demon in Democracy. Why Liberalism Failed? Why Liberalism Failed? Okay, we're out of time. So we'll do one last question right here in the green shirt. And unless they're gonna, I don't know if we have like a break or not, but we're technically out of time. So you're from D.C., you live and work there. Probably a lot of people are very hostile to these ideas you're expressing to say the least, right? Have you ever personally flipped anybody regarding say transgenderism or gay marriage? And if so, what kind of arguments or strategy did you use to successfully flip these people? Maybe give us a specific and a broader template for us to use in order to promote the ideas that you're looking to promote. Yeah, I mean, great question. So in my case, this is like some of my colleagues, some of my, one of my groomsmen, friends of mine who just hadn't thought about it all that much, to be quite honest. So it wasn't that they were like the hardcore activists in favor of like Pride Month. It was that they were a 20-something or a 30-something and the ambient culture in which they lived just said the right side of history is X, Y, or Z. And so what it required was actually a long-term relationship, a pre-existing long-term relationship in which you could get them to slow down and to think long enough about this to actually see what the problems were. And so what this means is that it's actually really hard to just have a one-off interaction that will change someone's mind. And so normally in like speaking something like this, this is meant to, I assume I'm speaking to a largely sympathetic audience, right? I'm not trying to change your minds, I'm trying to equip you and empower you with a deeper understanding of what you already basically agree with so that you can then have those conversations with your neighbors, with your children, with people who might not have thought about it all that much, but because you're in a long-term relationship, you can then get them to think more about it. And so what does that look like? It's everything that I said last night, right? It's pointing them to, have you looked at the studies? Have you even thought about what it means to feel like a woman? Like is that even an intelligible concept to say that you have an internal sense of womanhood? What does it mean? How would you know if you were feeling like a woman? It's asking those sorts of questions to kind of show the emperor has no clothes. All of the slogans that you've just kind of accepted because that's what the popular culture is telling you, once you put them under the microscope and you actually examine them, you can help people see that they fall away. So that is how I think it plays out. But to go back to one of the earlier questions, that requires someone who's willing to take reason seriously. If the reaction is, oh, but dad, that's not loving. Or dad, you're on the wrong side of history, you can't get very far. If you're, in this case, talking to one of your children who thinks that you're like an outdated dinosaur. But if you can get someone to at least say, all right, I'm gonna think about this. Like I'm willing to devote the time and the energy to thinking about what the truth of the matter is. I think the way that you do it is precisely, some of the things I said last night, some of the things that I've said this afternoon. Okay, so with that, we're out of time. And I'm gonna apologize in advance. I'm gonna run out that door. And I have a four and a half hour drive ahead of me. And I'd like to get home before my son goes to bed because I didn't get to see him yesterday. So normally I would stick around, but thank you.