Andrew Klavan Show - Does Catholicism Make Life Too Difficult?
Aired: 2026-04-08
Duration: 31:38


=== The Shock of Holiness (10:19) ===

[00:00:00]  So there's a certain kind of exercise of reason which, if you're a believer, you think that God wants us to develop.
[00:00:06]  And it's not the formal rationality of a mathematical system or a logical system.
[00:00:12]  It involves the imagination.
[00:00:29]  Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Pekulick.
[00:00:33]  He is a philosopher and an author.
[00:00:35]  He teaches at the Catholic University of America.
[00:00:37]  He's an Aristotle scholar.
[00:00:39]  His most recent books include The Shock of Holiness, which we're going to talk about, a wonderful collection of essays.
[00:00:45]  And I mentioned earlier on my show the Memoirs of St. Peter, his absolutely wonderful translation of the Gospel according to St. Mark.
[00:00:56]  He is, as I said, a philosopher, so we're going to ask him a lot of difficult questions.
[00:01:00]  Michael, it's good to see you.
[00:01:02]  Thank you for coming on.
[00:01:03]  Same here.
[00:01:03]  What a delight.
[00:01:04]  Thank you.
[00:01:05]  The thing is, if you get the questions wrong, it's $1,000 per question.
[00:01:09]  We didn't tell you that before you came on.
[00:01:13]  That's cheaper than my sticks on the golf course, so no problem.
[00:01:17]  So here is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you.
[00:01:20]  I want to talk about the shock of holiness.
[00:01:22]  But one of the reasons I want to talk to you is a lot of people, especially in the conservative side, have been talking about.
[00:01:30]  What seems to be a boom in Catholic conversions or people coming back to the Catholic churches.
[00:01:36]  We had an article in the Daily Wire by a Catholic saying that there were some disturbing things about this, with some people using.
[00:01:45]  Ryan Gurdusky wrote a piece called The Catholic Convert Boom is Real, but a troubling pattern is emerging.
[00:01:53]  Some new Catholic voices are using the faith for something else entirely.
[00:01:56]  So, what I want to ask you basically is what you think of this?
[00:01:59]  Do you think it is real?
[00:02:01]  Because there was an article in Amazon saying, oh, they're misinterpreting the numbers.
[00:02:05]  And why do you think it's happening?
[00:02:07]  Why specifically Catholicism?
[00:02:09]  Well, I think in Israel, people are reporting it, but the numbers are not that great.
[00:02:13]  We're not talking about millions of people returning or coming to the Catholic Church, but thousands or maybe tens of thousands.
[00:02:20]  And what's happening in the United States is really swamped by what we see in Africa, for example.
[00:02:26]  But I think it's because of civilization, really, because people understand that there is something.
[00:02:34]  Called civilization, and that if you're looking for its kind of lifeblood, it's Christianity, but Christianity on its own can kind of just go in bad directions and kind of peter away.
[00:02:49]  So, what is the kind of enduring institutional presence of Christianity in the West?
[00:02:55]  And that's the Catholic Church.
[00:02:56]  And this is also something that's transcendental, it reaches beyond this world.
[00:03:02]  And we live for what's beyond the world.
[00:03:07]  This is where people think they can find it.
[00:03:10]  I agree with them because I became a Catholic myself.
[00:03:13]  Do you see at all what Gdesky was talking about in this article, that there's some danger to it as well?
[00:03:19]  I mean, I certainly was taken aback by that woman whose name I've blacked out, but her name is Prison Pollard.
[00:03:28]  I can't remember what it was.
[00:03:29]  The woman who started ranting.
[00:03:31]  Right.
[00:03:31]  Yeah.
[00:03:31]  I mean, the social media and the internet kind of draws people out to be.
[00:03:36]  Public personalities probably way before they should be speaking on certain things.
[00:03:42]  And St. Paul went away for 14 years and he learned the faith and meditated and mortified himself before he took any kind of public role.
[00:03:52]  So I think that's what's going on here.
[00:03:54]  You have kind of newbies who want to do good and they're kind of drawn out, but they should probably just go away in prayer and contemplation for a few years.
[00:04:03]  And if you had to guess, would you think that this mini boom in America is going to continue or do you think it's just a a temporary phenomenon.
[00:04:13]  I don't know.
[00:04:14]  I think it's the Holy Spirit.
[00:04:15]  That's how I would see it.
[00:04:17]  But whether it can be kind of carried on, I think, has a lot to do with education.
[00:04:21]  I see everything as really that's the nexus.
[00:04:24]  So these converts are going to want to have a lot of children.
[00:04:28]  I'm going to have a lot of children.
[00:04:30]  And will they carry on the faith for more than one generation?
[00:04:34]  That's a question of can they provide a religious education to their children?
[00:04:39]  Yeah.
[00:04:40]  I noticed on the back of the Shock of Holiness, you said you had 15 children.
[00:04:45]  Did I not tell you when we got together?
[00:04:47]  Yeah, I was married once, and my late wife and I had seven, and then Catherine and I had eight.
[00:04:52]  That is amazing.
[00:04:53]  You've done your part.
[00:04:54]  I think you can rest.
[00:04:56]  It's kind of crazy.
[00:04:57]  I still can't even imagine all the diapers that I've purchased and changed.
[00:05:03]  So, talk a little bit about when and why you became Catholic specifically.
[00:05:07]  Well, I was an atheist at Harvard College when I was an undergraduate, and I had a near death experience.
[00:05:13]  I was rescued from drowning by an A miraculous way.
[00:05:17]  And everybody who hears the story thinks it was an angel that rescued me.
[00:05:21]  So then I thought I needed to kind of figure out the purpose of my life.
[00:05:25]  And at that time, I met my late wife, Ruth, and she had her own experience.
[00:05:30]  And we started investigating together.
[00:05:33]  Our intuition was, is Christianity true?
[00:05:35]  That was our question.
[00:05:36]  And a lot of people back then said, well, why are you investing in Christianity?
[00:05:39]  Why not Buddhism?
[00:05:41]  Why not Hinduism?
[00:05:42]  Why not Islam?
[00:05:43]  And I think it is this question of civilization.
[00:05:46]  You know, widely read persons who knew the great literature and architecture and music of the West, and we understood that Christianity was this animated at all.
[00:05:55]  So, this is the question for us is this actually true?
[00:06:00]  So, and so we started praying together, reading the Bible together, and then reading a lot in the history of the church.
[00:06:08]  And Newman says to be acquainted with history is to cease being a Protestant.
[00:06:13]  So, maybe, Drew, you need to read just a little bit more history.
[00:06:19]  I'm steeped in history.
[00:06:23]  You're pretty well asleep, though.
[00:06:27]  I have to ask why did people think it was an angel who saved you?
[00:06:29]  What happened?
[00:06:31]  Okay, well, it's a really, really great story.
[00:06:35]  We were fishing on the bay side of one of these barrier islands in the south shore of Long Island, and we didn't catch anything.
[00:06:42]  So we brought our boat to the barrier island and ran across the barrier island and then into the Atlantic Ocean.
[00:06:49]  And where we had landed with our boat was far away from any roads or structures or anything, basically uninhabited.
[00:06:57]  And we both got caught in a riptide.
[00:07:00]  My friend made it back to the shore.
[00:07:02]  He was an evangelical Protestant.
[00:07:03]  He's on his knees praying, God, don't let Michael die because he's going to go to hell if he dies.
[00:07:09]  And I'm 300, 400 yards out, really far out.
[00:07:13]  And I panicked, I lost all of my strength.
[00:07:17]  I was about to go under and die, and I was convinced I was going to die.
[00:07:20]  And two or three men, I think there's three, showed up in black Speedo bathing suits, really well built.
[00:07:27]  And my friend points to me out there, and one of them goes out and brings me back in.
[00:07:33]  He swam right across against the rib tide.
[00:07:35]  That's not what you're supposed to do.
[00:07:36]  You're supposed to go parallel to the shore and let the tide bring you back in.
[00:07:40]  He dropped me in three feet of water and then stood over me, arms akimbo, with contempt and didn't say a word.
[00:07:48]  And I had to beg him to drag me onto dry land.
[00:07:50]  Now, human beings don't act that way, I think.
[00:07:53]  And then, without saying a word, the group of them just walked away.
[00:07:56]  Wow.
[00:07:57]  And my friend's father, well, you're a fisherman, so this is near Center Marches across the bay in Center Marches.
[00:08:03]  He, He said he had fished there for 20 years.
[00:08:06]  He'd never seen anybody on that shore.
[00:08:08]  So, that there'd be people on the shore just the moment when I was drowning, able to swim out and rescue somebody who had evident life saving skills and great strength and swim against a riptide.
[00:08:23]  And then there's no pleasant chit chat.
[00:08:25]  They just kind of walked away and didn't seem to care to be friendly with us.
[00:08:31]  It all kind of points in one direction.
[00:08:32]  Yeah.
[00:08:33]  Yeah.
[00:08:34]  I don't make that claim.
[00:08:35]  I just say, well, that's a good explanation.
[00:08:37]  But it I mean, just the fact that I was saved is a miracle.
[00:08:40]  Never mind angels.
[00:08:41]  Yeah, and the fact that there were three of them, I think, is kind of telling.
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=== Reason and the Human Soul (15:36) ===

[00:10:19]  I just make it look this incredibly easy.
[00:10:23]  So you've written so many books.
[00:10:25]  And as I say, I thought that the Memoirs of St. Peter, which is the translation of the Gospel according to Mark, is wonderful.
[00:10:32]  You also translated John and Matthew, I guess.
[00:10:35]  And you're now translating Luke.
[00:10:37]  So you'll have the whole thing.
[00:10:39]  And you know my angle on Luke.
[00:10:41]  It's the birth of Christian Romanticism.
[00:10:43]  So your focus really helped me.
[00:10:45]  Really?
[00:10:46]  Oh, that's nice to hear.
[00:10:47]  Oh, gee, okay.
[00:10:49]  I look forward to reading it.
[00:10:50]  I just loved reading the Mark.
[00:10:53]  So, The Shock of Holiness is a collection of very short, straightforward essays written for a Catholic newspaper.
[00:11:01]  And I have to say, I mean, you're a philosopher, you've studied Aristotle, I'm sure you're quite capable of writing complex, incomprehensible sentences.
[00:11:08]  But this is written so clearly and simply that it reminded me of one of my writing heroes, Thomas Sowell, who just has this unbelievable ability to deliver.
[00:11:20]  Crisp depth without ever, you know.
[00:11:23]  I mean, if he wanted to, he could use words of one syllable, but, you know, he's just so clear.
[00:11:28]  And the first part of this, now I haven't read the whole thing, but I've been reading in it.
[00:11:33]  The first part of this has a title that is right, just goes right to my heart, called The Romance of Daily Life.
[00:11:40]  And this is, if I had to pick one thing that Christianity in general, and basically because I am an Anglican Catholic, I know that doesn't count with you, but it's still the same kind of theology.
[00:11:52]  You're pretty close.
[00:11:54]  You're both sinners.
[00:11:55]  But I think that theology, the one thing, if I had to pick one thing that it gives you as an instantaneous gift of incredible beauty and joy, it is the romance of daily life.
[00:12:06]  It is seeing things.
[00:12:08]  And just like me, you begin talking about motherhood and mothers in church.
[00:12:14]  Can you explain that title, The Romance of Early Life?
[00:12:18]  I hope that's not too vague a question, but I hope you can explain what that means.
[00:12:23]  Wow, that's the most fundamental question.
[00:12:26]  You know, I'm a philosopher who's trained in analytic philosophy and basically trained to remove all emotions out of thought and underwent that training for 15 years.
[00:12:38]  So, what I write in this book is the result of I would say I probably needed 15 children to humanize me, frankly.
[00:12:47]  It's a lot of work, but still.
[00:12:49]  This guy needs another one.
[00:12:51]  He still has a hard heart, right?
[00:12:55]  But, um, That's a really good question.
[00:12:59]  So it has elements of obviously gift.
[00:13:04]  Sacrifice is really important for the notion of romance.
[00:13:09]  There's romance, which has the character of order, and there needs to be kind of a hierarchy, I think, for there to be romance.
[00:13:19]  And honor is extremely important.
[00:13:21]  And as you mentioned, beauty, a notion of quest, and some kind of notion of service.
[00:13:29]  So this is kind of off the top of my head because I've been exploring this for the Gospel of Luke, but you know how it is.
[00:13:35]  That project's been out of my mind for a few weeks.
[00:13:37]  Yeah.
[00:13:38]  But I think it's possible to do a kind of analysis of what this kind of Christian romanticism has been.
[00:13:46]  And I think it all traces back to the notion of sacrifice.
[00:13:49]  There's that great letter that Tolkien wrote to his son, and he recommends the Blessed Sacrament as kind of the origin of romanticism.
[00:13:59]  So I think that that's a really deep insight.
[00:14:01]  And I need to think about that some more because I don't think I fully understand it.
[00:14:06]  But I don't understand sacrifice either.
[00:14:08]  Do you understand like that?
[00:14:09]  In all cultures, people have taken living things and killed them as sacrifices.
[00:14:14]  You know, it's so interesting that you asked me that last Sunday, Palm Sunday in church, I had a sudden, powerful vision, emotional vision of the fact that I was listening, they were reading the Passion story, that I was listening to the story of a human sacrifice.
[00:14:33]  Yes, exactly.
[00:14:35]  The horror of it was overwhelming.
[00:14:38]  Right.
[00:14:39]  Yeah.
[00:14:40]  In one of the few cultures that had entirely Foresworn human sacrifice and was at odds with Moloch and Moloch worship because it was a religion of human sacrifice.
[00:14:51]  So, within the Jewish culture, this is so alien.
[00:14:56]  And yet, you're right, that's what happened.
[00:14:58]  You know, so this brings me to a question, and this is absolutely true.
[00:15:02]  If you weren't you and you weren't a philosopher, I wouldn't ask this question because I've had a lot of Catholic thinkers on, and I'm always afraid of putting them on the spot like this, but I have a feeling you'll be able to handle it.
[00:15:12]  But I have the most to lose, so you're really putting me on the spot.
[00:15:15]  Well, that's why.
[00:15:16]  That's why.
[00:15:17]  It's an absolute trapdoor of it.
[00:15:18]  But, you know, people look at.
[00:15:22]  Maybe Catholics more than others, but I think in Christian life altogether.
[00:15:26]  And they basically say, Why are you making life so complicated?
[00:15:31]  Why are you making it so hard on yourself?
[00:15:34]  It's just sex.
[00:15:36]  It's just pleasure.
[00:15:37]  It's just this.
[00:15:37]  It's just that.
[00:15:38]  And I'm not talking about drug addicts and promiscuous people who destroy their lives.
[00:15:42]  I'm just talking about people who sort of live an easygoing life without really taking any of this higher meaning into account because it is more difficult to live with this higher meaning.
[00:15:53]  And there are times when I. Ask myself questions like this, which was in one of the books that I wrote, where I, you know, you'll talk about people come on and say, well, you know, marriage is like the relationship between Christ and the church.
[00:16:08]  And you'll think, well, it is, but it's also about taking out the garbage.
[00:16:11]  And, you know, like, I don't think when you're having sex, you're thinking, like, oh, yeah, this is just like Christ and the church.
[00:16:19]  That there's something so real about physical life that it has a power that.
[00:16:25]  That when people make this argument, I think the argument has strength.
[00:16:28]  And I'm wondering, does that ever occur to you?
[00:16:31]  Do you ever sit and think, you know, why all this metaphorical thinking?
[00:16:35]  Why not just live life as it is?
[00:16:36]  Well, I mean, life as it is is very difficult.
[00:16:40]  The tendency of taking things easy is just to lose your health, not to get any work done, to lose yourself.
[00:16:46]  You don't even recognize yourself after a few months of just letting yourself go.
[00:16:51]  I think that's the phrase that we use, right?
[00:16:53]  So it looks like you have to struggle and battle just to kind of keep even.
[00:16:59]  And then, if you want to achieve anything great, and I do think that magnanimity is kind of built into the human heart, that we all want to achieve great things.
[00:17:08]  And maybe we forget that when we become somewhat jaded, a lot of us do.
[00:17:14]  But then you really must strive.
[00:17:17]  That's why we love the Olympics.
[00:17:18]  And we see these Olympians, and they've done this in one domain.
[00:17:21]  But as you say, I think of this man I heard about when I lived in Scotland for two years.
[00:17:29]  He was a milkman.
[00:17:30]  He got up at four every morning.
[00:17:32]  He delivered the milk.
[00:17:33]  He did this consistently, day in, day out, whatever the weather, he delivered the milk and got up at four in the morning.
[00:17:39]  And that's extremely heroic, but he's a milkman.
[00:17:43]  And everybody has to, it seems to me, you have to do something like that if you want to be simply a decent person.
[00:17:48]  And then consider the men who have died in war.
[00:17:52]  I think about this all the time.
[00:17:53]  I began thinking about it when I was 21 and I was still living when.
[00:17:56]  You know, so many men my age had already given up their lives in battle.
[00:18:02]  It seems, I think we're not paying attention to reality if we think that it's actually easy.
[00:18:07]  I think it has difficulties in it.
[00:18:10]  Do you think these particular difficulties, and I mean, I do see what people are saying.
[00:18:16]  For instance, 15 children, and God love you, I think it's great.
[00:18:20]  But I can understand people saying, like, you know, we can't handle that.
[00:18:24]  I can't handle it emotionally.
[00:18:25]  I can't handle it economically.
[00:18:28]  And then If you're a Catholic and you're a believing Catholic, then you're stuck in a kind of a bind because they're telling you you shouldn't use birth control.
[00:18:36]  And a Catholic recently said to me, you know, birth control, all birth control is evil.
[00:18:41]  You know, and then this metaphorical life that you're living makes your physical life very, very difficult.
[00:18:50]  Well, I'm a big believer in freedom.
[00:18:52]  So if somebody wants to kind of take it easy or move to, you know, Florida and just, you know, play golf on a golf course community, I'm not going to criticize such a person.
[00:19:02]  To me, it's, It's something you see as available.
[00:19:06]  And it's like the choice of Achilles.
[00:19:08]  I mean, you could live either a long, dull life or you can live a short, heroic life.
[00:19:14]  It's, you know, which life do you want to pick?
[00:19:18]  And I think we have freedom.
[00:19:20]  And so count me as somebody who's in favor of something that's difficult and heroic.
[00:19:26]  And I think that is romantic.
[00:19:27]  But, you know, just being plain and doing what's easy, I'm not going to criticize somebody who does it because you and I are strong believers in freedom, I think.
[00:19:37]  Yes, very much so.
[00:19:39]  And I think it's in keeping with the instruction not to judge that you sort of worry about yourself.
[00:19:45]  Yeah.
[00:19:46]  I mean, exactly.
[00:19:48]  So you're an Aristotle scholar and you're teaching at a Catholic university.
[00:19:52]  Can I just follow up on what you just said?
[00:19:54]  I don't think the metaphorical things are unreal.
[00:19:56]  I think they're actually more real than what we call.
[00:19:59]  And you agree.
[00:20:00]  Yes, I do agree.
[00:20:02]  So it looks like they're not real, but the more you engage with them, the more you realize those are the truly real things.
[00:20:10]  Every Christian has to become a bit of a A Platonist, I think.
[00:20:12]  Yeah, I think that's right.
[00:20:14]  And I think the old line about it's not seen is believing, it's believing is seen is actually true.
[00:20:19]  Once you start to live like that, it becomes very real and you get it.
[00:20:23]  Exactly.
[00:20:23]  Yeah.
[00:20:25]  So you're an Aristotle scholar teaching at a Catholic university.
[00:20:29]  You must be at some level a Thomist of some kind.
[00:20:32]  And recently, going back to Aquinas, I was really struck with how much more realistic his psychology is than the psychology of, say, Sigmund Freud.
[00:20:43]  Or other materialist thinkers.
[00:20:48]  Can you distinguish for people the way, how can I put this, the way you see the human soul works that might be different than the way, say, Freud saw the human mind working?
[00:21:02]  Okay, well, I am a Thomist.
[00:21:04]  I'm actually a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
[00:21:07]  Wow, okay.
[00:21:08]  Benedict XVI appointed me to that.
[00:21:11]  So that's a really great honor.
[00:21:12]  I love reading St. Thomas.
[00:21:14]  There's nothing I'd rather do.
[00:21:15]  I love teaching St. Thomas.
[00:21:16]  I love reading St. Thomas.
[00:21:18]  I think his mind is beautiful.
[00:21:20]  I think his insight into human nature is beautiful.
[00:21:24]  What you're saying is a very complicated question.
[00:21:26]  I think I begin by saying that for St. Thomas, the human soul is fundamentally intellectual.
[00:21:34]  So, it's a rational soul.
[00:21:35]  And that means that at the root of it, the root of all of our activity, is reason.
[00:21:41]  And even things that we share in common with animals get informed, they get informed by reason.
[00:21:48]  I mean, just think, for example, sitting at table, we have manners.
[00:21:53]  There's a logic to everything that we do around a table, even though we're just eating food.
[00:21:58]  So, the human soul is at its very root, reason.
[00:22:04]  Is, I think, extremely important insight.
[00:22:07]  So that's going to be against any kind of, say, Freud, who thinks of rationality as kind of almost like a surface crust that's put over the id, which is kind of brute desire and kind of unbounded lawlessness, it seems to me.
[00:22:24]  But so there's an informing and then the potential for informing of everything that we do by a certain kind of reasonability.
[00:22:31]  And that's a very classical insight, right?
[00:22:34]  And then St. Thomas agrees with.
[00:22:37]  With Plato and with Aristotle in the tripartite soul.
[00:22:42]  So he thinks that there's a faculty of engagement and competition and struggling with things that are difficult, which was called thumos in Greek and era in Latin.
[00:22:55]  And then there's a faculty of craving and wanting and attaining things which don't attain, which don't involve difficulty.
[00:23:04]  So we can go back to your earlier question.
[00:23:06]  What do you want to?
[00:23:07]  Live by?
[00:23:08]  What kind of person do you want to be?
[00:23:09]  You want to be reasoned together with spiritedness, or do you want to be reasoned together with desire?
[00:23:15]  And just a critique of the linking together of reason and desire is fundamentally incomplete.
[00:23:22]  This is the argument of the abolition of man of C.S. Lewis.
[00:23:24]  And really, Richard Weaver's ideas have consequences as well.
[00:23:28]  He says that modern societies are just scientific feeding, it's just rationality in the service of desires.
[00:23:35]  So there's something incomplete about That mode of life, you might want to say that it's a misfiring of rationality if we're just using reason to take it easy, going back now to your earlier question, right?
[00:23:49]  Whereas it looks like if you're using reason to do something arduous, then that necessarily places what's called thumos or the spirited aspect of us in the service of reason.
[00:23:59]  So it gets the ordering correct in the soul.
[00:24:03]  But so St. Thomas accepts that.
[00:24:07]  But you know, it's kind of the geniuses in the details because he really is such a great Aristotelian that he lived such a short life.
[00:24:16]  He died when he was 49 years old.
[00:24:18]  He spent most of his time in prayer or walking from one European city to another.
[00:24:23]  And how did he attain?
[00:24:24]  And he didn't read a lot of literature either.
[00:24:26]  So how did he attain these deep insights into human nature?
[00:24:29]  It's really extraordinary.
[00:24:30]  Yeah.
[00:24:31]  The thing about reason is, you know, I changed my mind about abortion.
[00:24:36]  When I lost an argument with my oldest friend who's a devout Catholic, and we stayed up till 2 in the morning screaming at each other in the friendliest possible way, but loudly.
[00:24:47]  And I went to bed and I thought, I lost that argument.
[00:24:49]  And it took 20 years for me to admit I lost that argument because he was right.
[00:24:54]  But things make sense.
[00:24:56]  It's true that things make sense.
[00:24:58]  And if you can't argue it and make sense, you probably made a wrong turn somewhere along the line.
[00:25:07]  An important insight that goes against materialism and nihilism.
[00:25:11]  Yes, and the world makes sense.
[00:25:13]  I mean, it makes sense even though there's a lot of mystery in the world and there's a lot of analogy.
[00:25:18]  So there's a certain kind of exercise of reason, which if you're a believer, you think that God wants us to develop.
[00:25:25]  And it's not the formal rationality of a mathematical system or a logical system.
[00:25:31]  It involves the imagination in Coleridge's sense, and there has to be some kind of Looking outward and identifying connections and things which are creative.
[00:25:44]  And so the world is rational, but the character of its rationality is important to grasp.
[00:25:53]  We're talking, I should remind people, to Michael Pekulik.

=== Pride in Decadence (04:52) ===

[00:25:56]  Am I getting this right?
[00:25:57]  Yes.
[00:25:58]  And we're talking about this book, The Shock of Holiness, which, by the way, I mean, if you're afraid of philosophy or anything like that, it is not difficult to understand.
[00:26:05]  It's very straightforward and very deep at the same time.
[00:26:07]  It's really good stuff.
[00:26:10]  One thing I've noticed in myself, as well as other people, is that finding the Holy Spirit can make life look very dark.
[00:26:19]  It's funny.
[00:26:20]  I mean, obviously, it makes beyond life look brighter, but you actually start to see.
[00:26:25]  Yourself, for one thing, and the world as being a lot more messed up than maybe you thought they were to begin with.
[00:26:31]  And I've seen people kind of taken to pieces by it, like they become very, very pessimistic about the world.
[00:26:37]  They always say, Oh, I'm optimistic about the world beyond the world, but I'm very pessimistic about the world.
[00:26:43]  Is that your experience, or is that just something that happens at random?
[00:26:46]  You know, do you feel?
[00:26:47]  I feel pessimistic.
[00:26:48]  It's definitely my experience, but I don't, I think I've grown out of it in the sense that I now expect the world to be.
[00:26:58]  Armageddon, laughing.
[00:26:59]  What is your phrase, laughing through Armageddon?
[00:27:03]  I do expect that.
[00:27:05]  And I'm not surprised by it.
[00:27:08]  And I think that things are really a lot more messed up from the very, all the way down than we accept, than we're disposed to think.
[00:27:17]  And so I don't ever think we're going to get it right or we're going to find the right kind of government that's going to work everything out or form of schooling.
[00:27:26]  I think that the world is.
[00:27:28]  Really, genuinely, and very seriously, and deeply disordered.
[00:27:33]  That's the Catholic understanding of original sin.
[00:27:37]  And there's a lot of ugliness in it.
[00:27:39]  And for the incarnation, very few of us, what is it, St. Paul says, very few of us will die for a just man, but Christ gave his life.
[00:27:52]  We were yet sinners.
[00:27:53]  But he also chose to become incarnate in a very, very ugly way.
[00:27:59]  World.
[00:27:59]  Now, the world of nature is beautiful, but he was.
[00:28:03]  Think of a priest who has to listen to confessions, or say St. John Diani, who's covered in that book, who listened to confessions for eight or 10 hours a day.
[00:28:11]  And you and I know human nature.
[00:28:13]  You've explored it in your novels.
[00:28:15]  Think about somebody confessing these dark things and you're listening to it for 10 hours a day.
[00:28:20]  How can you possibly smile at the end of that day, right?
[00:28:25]  But this should be, I think Flanner O'Connor taught me this at the beginning, right?
[00:28:31]  This should be the.
[00:28:32]  Kind of the world in which Christian lives and is used to, the world of ugliness, frankly.
[00:28:38]  And I think the mistake is in saying our art needs to be ugly because I don't think we need to contribute any more ugliness.
[00:28:44]  I mean, we can all agree that it's ugly without expressing that in our art.
[00:28:48]  But that's the reason for this turn in 20th and 21st century art away from Roger Scruton's beauty.
[00:28:56]  Yeah.
[00:28:57]  No, I know.
[00:28:57]  I think a lot of it comes out of the Holocaust and people just saying beauty is nothing and we can't be honest and be beautiful.
[00:29:05]  Absolutely true.
[00:29:06]  You're teaching young people at this university.
[00:29:10]  Are you short term optimistic about the generation up and coming?
[00:29:18]  You know, you and I are going to see things as going downhill.
[00:29:23]  But I think things are going downhill for young people.
[00:29:27]  They're not reading.
[00:29:28]  Yeah.
[00:29:30]  That's the main thing that I see that disturbs me.
[00:29:32]  Yeah.
[00:29:34]  And then they're very poorly educated because you learn so quickly through reading.
[00:29:39]  And you don't, strangely, although you, you know, as Aristotle points out, you get the most information through the eyes, you don't actually learn very much of what you see.
[00:29:50]  And you need to.
[00:29:52]  Learn a lot of things that you never see that are outside your immediate experience and aren't going to show up in a video on TikTok.
[00:29:58]  And this is only through reading, it seems to me.
[00:30:01]  So we have very, very badly educated young people.
[00:30:06]  Even the best educated young people are very badly educated compared with where you and I were going to college.
[00:30:12]  And I don't see a lot of room for improvement.
[00:30:16]  We need families where devices are turned off and people are sitting in their living rooms reading and reading to one another.
[00:30:22]  And I'm confident that that will happen, but it's going to be just a A subset of our society that's doing that.
[00:30:28]  Yeah.
[00:30:29]  You know, I think that one of the phases of decadence is people start to become proud of their decadence.
[00:30:33]  Like, yeah, I don't read, and that makes me better than you.
[00:30:37]  But I always used to think when I would see how many bad novels were published, I always used to think, you know, people have always been mostly illiterate.
[00:30:44]  It's just now that illiterate people can read.

=== Memoirs of St. Peter (00:49) ===

[00:30:48]  Anyway, again, Michael, it's so nice to talk to you.
[00:30:51]  Michael Packaluk, The Shock of Holiness and The Memoirs of St. Peter.
[00:30:56]  Get them both.
[00:30:56]  The Memoirs of St. Peter is just the Gospel of Mark retranslated.
[00:31:01]  But an accurate translation.
[00:31:03]  It's just different.
[00:31:04]  I can't explain it.
[00:31:05]  And The Shock of Holiness, finding the romance of everyday life.
[00:31:08]  It's great to see you.
[00:31:09]  Thank you for coming on.
[00:31:10]  I hope we get to talk again.
[00:31:11]  Thanks so much for having me on your show.
[00:31:13]  Once again, that was Michael Pekulick.
[00:31:16]  And again, The Shock of Holiness and The Memoirs of St. Peter.
[00:31:20]  Both really, really worth reading.
[00:31:22]  Obviously, you can tell very sophisticated thinker and intelligent guy, and a really good writer as well.
[00:31:28]  And if you want more sophistication and more good writing, Come to the Andrew Clavin Show.
[00:31:33]  We don't have it, but we'll talk about it.
[00:31:35]  And I'll be there, and I hope to see you there as well.