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hello, and on behalf of the archdiocese of san francisco, welcome to mosaic. we have the pleasure of speaking to two catholic singers, artists, knowledgeable and entertaining individuals. they are scholars, teachers and catholics. deeply formed in their phalluses him and profoundly acquainted with the true incidentals of beauty that meet and mingle and for one another. when our souls are touched and mines in line. seekers of truth, tellers of truth and they may be practitioners of goodness as well. you will meet them and we will find out why they are here in town and we will talk about a range of things in the range of catholic arts, learning and

culture. please join us to meet some catholic artists and talk about the catholic arts.

welcome back to mosaic. our guests today are to intellectuals visiting us from out of town, one from the frozen wastes of south dakota and one

from the frozen wastes of philadelphia. james, you are a professor at philadelphia university. and jody, you are a professor at dakota state university. and you are also a poet, one of the nation's most widely published essayists and your current work is directing a think tank for the study of cyber ethics. we will talk about that. you are both in town for a conference we had on work and relation to catholic art and artists. i will hold up this book and hope we can get a close-up. renee was a literary critic turned theologian, turned

psychologist and was at stanford for many years and written incredibly revolutionary books about human nature, human desires and psychology. you are both students of renee, so what has he and his work to do with the work of catholic artists like yourself? >> first of all, girard was one of the great models that an intellect should be. he thought of everything and drew everything together and left as little out as possible for any modern thinker to do despite the complexity of our times. >> he seemed to have wandered into the second half of the 20th century from these 19th-century thinkers that could sink grand, big thoughts. and all you heard of scapegoating in victimhood all comes from work that girard

did in the '60s into '70s. he was a breakthrough thinker and he said it all came from a single insight he had in 1959 and he just chipped away at it until what emerged was catholicism. >> he became a renewed catholic through his studies, is that correct? >> he had a mystical moment in the '50s and it was only in what came back to the church as a young man. it was only later in life that he express the theological content of what started out as literary criticism and became an argument when he had entered through cultural anthropology and blossom into this huge theory that essentially we catch desire like a disease. we learn about

what we want and what to compete for by watching what other people want and what other people want to compete for. and girard in this context, becomes a kind of interesting model for us to think about what it is to be a catholic intellectual and artists. what is it to be wholly invested with your mind and in a faith that reaches from the most immediate emotional behaviors all the way up to the highest claims of metaphysics. >> and i think that his work or investigation focused on somehow the original violence that found our civilization, is that right? >> yes. one of his great insights was that religious violence goes deep down into human civilization. the slaughter of an innocent person

actually serves historically a social function. in answer to the question, what difference does it make that christ came into the world, there are many answers to that question. but girard is particularly brilliant answer is that the difference is the self-sacrifice on the cross taught us a number of things including this feeling of getting over this active desire, and it is no good for social society it is rather the great evil we commit that we have to transcend. >> jesus, i understand from the conference i attended with you that somehow girard's understanding, that jesus who made himself the scapegoat exploded the whole method and theory of scapegoating. >> absolutely. broke it open.

some of our current problems come from this. we used to have this old evil but effective way of confounding culture. we have this huge disagreement, it moves to a riot in the street and we pick somebody and both sides agreed that person is to blame. after the scapegoat, we are all friends again. it was evil but it worked. the trouble is that christ exposed how it worked and we don't like it anymore. it took 1000 years or more for that lesson to penetrate but we all got it and we all understand that the victim is likely to be innocent. we all understand the way victimhood works. so how now will we find culture? the evil one is broken and the full message of the christian message has not been much adopted and that leaves us real problems on how we found culture. >> i mean to say we've had a christian culture but how do we find or restore that innocence

or goodness was that we were intended for. >> girard ended his life as a very pessimistic man. >> in his last book he has a line that should make us shiver. it's called battling to the end and he says, i have become more and more convinced that history has a meaning and the meaning is terrifying. >> on that note i think we will take our first break and we will be back in two minutes to talk more about catholic art artists and our guests. thank you.

hello, and welcome back. we're talking about catholic art and artists and we just had a moment of looking into rene

girard and his contribution of his understanding of our weaknesses, flaws, errors and sins. we will move on to something a little more positive. can we have slide number one please and this is the benedick 16 institute. it is under the office of this institute which is the archdiocese of san francisco that these gentlemen are in town today and the rene girard conference was established. the benedict institute is opening the door of beauty to god and energizing the catholic culture of the arts. thank you for that slide. gentlemen, you are cooperative with the benedict institute and were brought into town for the purpose of having the conference. i want to talk to you about the culture of catholic arts and energizing people in the doorway to beauty. you are both excellent riders,

thinkers and scholars. so where is catholic art today and how is it going? >> i have a sense of of we are in the beginning of a renewal. joseph's comment about shivering and terror is not a bad response to contemporary history but i think it is safe to say that in the last six years many writers and artists within the church are starting to realize that beauty is not cosmetic. beauty and the arts play a vital role in humanizing and spiritualizing the soul. it is something that you have to be engaged in and the church has to support if it genuinely christian civilization is to continue. >> it does seem we are on the tail end of the stripping of the altars where we've got different architecture and liturgy. our removing back away from that to something that is

more, how to weigh it, you said beautified? >> i think the word is more profound. i think this is the right line to take. there is a science fiction author, best-selling and not best-selling, and many other things, and i asked him, i said, who is the best science fiction writer these days? and he said jean wolf, who writes these thick catholic novels . and i said, why? and he said, because he is connecting to the deepest stuff. i said why didn't you do that and he said because i would have to go back to being a catholic. i thought, well of course, we can't do that. there was a revelation they are that

the artistic mind that this guy really, truly had, recognizes that if you are going to write the best stuff you will have to reach beyond cleverness and reach beyond human and toward the deep stuff of being with the universe is made of and how we run with the grain of it or fight our way across the grain. that is the kind of opportunity for that kind of art, offered only to the religious. >> you are forcibly required to become spiritual if you want to become an artist. you have to gain the spirit. >> i don't think that is truly correct, you have to but you won't gain the highest spirituality of the art. >> the thing is that people open books because they want to be changed. they look at paintings because they want to be changed,

they listen to music because they want that moment to be intensely transformed. you have to know something about reality and its depths if you were going to change people in that way. >> it's interesting because the common slam of the catholic church or christianity in general is an escape from reality, sort of a fairytale or the assurance of things you couldn't possibly know. >> when a scientist begins looking at the phenomena of nature he begins to see pattern and order and we did not need the modern scientists to discover this. the art already played the role of further revealing the world. which is why woods were thought to be such a problem in the ancient world. >> it is also why girard begins his theory as a literary critic. he is starting to perceive

patterns of desire in human behavior and he actually says at one point, novelists are some of the best psychologists. >> that is really true. there is that depth available in literature, which leads to the question, is anybody reading that kind of literature? >> when you are in a moment of renewal, the answer is yes and no. >> and people will always discover in themselves a hunger for the serious. we can cut it all down to, everything is about xy or z, there is no beyond and there is nothing deep to the human being or more primal to existing in this world, but somewhere, someone will pick up shakespeare and realize that there is literature that reaches down into the deep stuff and it

is fundamentally more satisfying because it is connected to the whole. >> for centuries civilization survived as a book in a monastery. a civilization is invisible until it manifests itself in a church, building or new work. but it is carried within individual minds, and so there is never actually cause for despair in this regard because it is always there percolating somewhere, we just would prefer it to be shaping our whole life. >> and somehow we have to open up and let it percolate up. that must be a skill that takes training. we will be back in a couple of minutes and have one more segment talking with our guests about catholic art and artists.

welcome back. our guests are james matthew wilson and joseph bottom, well-known artists and wonderful companions and socialists. we were talking about civilization that exists and you mentioned that it is a percolating, invisible at times. the villainization has exploded

onto the world wide web and that is where people seem to be living. can you explain your institute as of think tank for cyber ethics? >> the state college asked me to come over and do cyber ethics and apply humanities to the computer revolution to which we are now 40 years in to the computer revolution. it has brought sociological changes, it has brought perceiving changes to us and altered every profession. i don't think we are getting enough actual philosophical analysis of what that means , we keep seeing ethical problems emerging as a result of our connectivity and being reduced to two numbers and data and emerging from the fact

that inner-city kids are spending an average of 14 to 16 hours a day staring at it screen. these are creating problems of addiction and the problems of lack of contact with reality and i want to kind of use this new institute to explore what it would mean to say something about at the most serious level like, the virtual is not the real. >> it seems to me that you are concerned about touching the permanent but the internet seems to be nothing but ephemeral. how do we pierced through that? >> books. the tactile and, it has faded and in a variety of ways the virtual keeps trying to substitute itself for the real. keep trying to intrude our attention. i'm not

anti-technology, john. i'm a fan but i think you can only be a true fan of the technological opportunities that are brought to us if you have a clear sense of what the cost of them are. they did not come to us without a cost. and one of the costs and one of the reasons i am interested in james's work is that one of the costs is an additional fading of the permanent things of reality at a moment in which we could least afford it because they were already really tattered to read >> james, you mentioned your latest book? >> yes. this is a poem called living grace. grace is my oldest, first daughter. one night i was sitting in my office when she was a newborn and my office was also her bedroom. so

the group was pushed up against the desk and i was just asking myself, what do i want for this little girl? what i want is a life that is lasting, not in the sense of only a long lifespan but one of permanent worth and value. and technology gives us the thrill of the ephemeral. i wanted to draw her out of that mere self enclosure, so i wrote this poem. a prayer for olivia grease. there is little room left in this house for poetry or this world for any lasting language. the managers and sales reps in the offices who ticketed their holidays are childless and looking toward five days of sun and liquor. they care for neither old books and her young daughter. but somehow, near me sleeps and infant daughter who grows still to the greater sense of poetry, eyelets dropped in the promise of sleep liquor, it charms her and yet she knows nothing of language. nor did i

in a way when i was childless feel preoccupied to fill another office, now crowded in office, a chest of drawers, reminds me that this room set childless when child was just a word in my language which i would write and read at night with liquor are now she is born and we have little time for liquor. my desk crammed in a corner of an office and papers lost beneath the language of the alphabet for my daughter. i'm sure i wrote a different kind of poetry and all my hours were filled although i was childless. the tv news shows that because they are childless, modern consumers live a life of modern poetry, bates the office of sonnets, their only daughter an ipod or technical language. i pray that my daughter speak another language. that in the richest sense you not be childless, although they find

for room for it in the office, the crowd the corridors with poetry. my daughter's teething will stop me from my language, call me from my office. i have more of this child unless poetry. >> your transition from non-father into father and all that it opens up. that is a beautiful poem and i take it you will not buy her her own cell phone. >> she keeps asking. >> it is the having children of course that connects us in the generations. it is having children that connects us to the deep stuff of the universe. this is when we realize civilization is not just a game. we realize that the throne as we have in this life is not something we can just laugh off. >> ironing has its limits. we have one minute left. i want to

thank you both for being here in town for the benedick 16 institute. may i bring up slide two please, james matthew wilson has a website by that name. you can find out everything you want to know. joseph bottum, same thing, a website with his name full of interesting stuff and links to these well published and well worth reading gentlemen. thank you very much for being with us. and thank you for another edition of mosaic. we will see you next time.

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