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this act of sacrifice is no

good for society. it is the great evil we commit that we have to transcend. >> jesus, i understand from the conference i attended with you, somehow, it's the understanding that jesus made himself the scapegoat and exploded the myth and theory of scapegoating? >> it broke it open. some of the current problems come from this, john. we used to have this old evil but effective way for culture and this huge disagreement that is moving to riots in the streets. yes, that person is to blame and we are now friends again. it was evil, but it worked. we don't like it anymore. that lesson penetrated but we all got it and we understand

the victim is likely to be innocent and we all understand the way victimhood works. how will we now find culture? the evil one is broken and the other one, full commitment to the christian message hasn't been much adopted and that leaves us with real problems on how we found culture. >> or find culture again. we've had it nominally, but how do we find and restore whatever that innocence or goodness was that we were intended for? >> he ended his life a pessimistic man, gerard. in his last book he has a line that should make us shiver. he says, 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. >> yes. okay. on that note, we will take our first break and be back in two

minutes to talk more about catholic art, catholic artists and our guests. thank you.

hello, and welcome back. we are talking about catholic art and catholic artists. we just had a moment of looking into renee gerard and his contribution to understanding our weaknesses, flaws and sins. we will move to something more positive. can we have slide number one? this is the benedict 16 institute under the auspices of this institute, and initiatives of the archdiocese of san francisco. these gentlemen are in town today and if you read carefully, you can hear their slogan or part of it. it is opening the door of

beauty to god and energizing the catholic culture of the arts and thank you for that slide. you are cooperative with the benedict institute and were brought into town for the purpose of having the conference here. i want to talk to about the culture of catholic arts and energizing people with beauty. you are both creators of beauty, excellent poets, writers, thinkers and scholars. where is catholic art today and where are the catholic artists? where is it going in that world? >> i have a sense that we are at the beginning of a renewal. joseph's comment about shivering and terror is not a bad response to contemporary history. 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's something that lay catholics have to be engaged in and the church has to support if a genuine christian civilization will continue. >> it seems we are on the tail end of the stripping of the altars, that we've done ourselves with different architecture and liturgy. are we moving back away to something that is more beautifying? >> the word is more profound. >> i think this is the right line to take, the line of profundity. here's a quick story. there is a science fiction writer, a lifetime science fiction writer and many other things. i asked him at lunch one day, who was the best science fiction writer these days and he said jean wolf. these sick catholic novels.

the song of the new son and the long son. he said he is connecting to the deepest stuff and i said, why don't you do that? >> i would have to go back to being a catholic. >> of course, we can't do that. there is a revelation that the artistic mind, and the sky really had it, recognizes that if you are going to write the best stuff, you have to reach beyond cleverness and beyond the human, toward the deep stuff of being and what the universe is made of and how we run with the grain of it or fight our way across the grain. that is the opportunity for that art, offered only to the religious. >> you are forcibly required to

become spiritual if you want to become an artist? >> you have to. you have to gain spirit if you don't have it when you start. >> i don't think that is entirely true but if you don't, you want to have the highest level of arch. >> you could engage in the clever and the shallow. to be serious, you have to have a certain depth to you and people open books because they want to be changed and they look at paintings to be changed and they listen to music and every moment because they want that moment to be intensely transformed. you have to know something about reality and its depths to change people in that way. >> it's interesting because a common slam for the catholic church or christianity, is that it is a escape from reality, really, fairytale and assurance of things you couldn't possibly know. how is this a road into the depths of human life? >> when the scientists look at the phenomenon of nature, the sea pattern and order.

you didn't need the modern sciences to discover this. there is a further reveal of order in the world and that is why, going back to the ancient world, that poets were thought to be such a problem. >> it's also why rene girard begins as a literary critic. he is reading and starting to perceive patterns of desire and in human behavior, he said novelists are the best psychologists. >> that is really true. there is that depth available in literature and it leads to the question, is anybody reading that? are students assigned it and are faculty competent to teach it? when you are in a moment of renewal, the answer is yes and no. >> it was remarked that people will always discover in themselves a hunger for this

serious. we can cut it down to everything being about xyz and a political topic and there is no beyond or nothing deep to the human being or primal to existing in this world, being thrown into this world. somewhere, someone, they will pick up dickens or shakespeare and realize there is literature and it reaches to the deep stuff. is fundamentally more satisfying because it's connected to the whole. >> civilization survived as a book in a monastery and it is invisible. it manifests in a church or building or a new work. it is carried on and carried out and carried within individual minds. there is never a cause for despair in this regard because it is always they are

percolating somewhere. we just prefer it to shape our whole life, not just the interior of a monastery. >> somehow, we have to open it up and let it percolate. that is a skill that takes training. thank you for than that and we will be back in a couple of more minutes and we will have one more segment about catholic art and artists.

welcome back. our guests are james matthew wilson and joseph bottum. we are talking about civilization and it is percolating beneath and invisible, sometimes. a book in a monastery. civilization has exploded onto the world wide web and that seems to be where people are living. can you explain her institute as a think tank for cyber ethics? >> the computer college asked me to start up a think tank to do cyber ethics and apply humanities to the computer revolution and we are now 40 years in to the personal computer revolution. it has brought sociological changes and perceiving changes

and altered every profession. i don't think we are getting enough actual philosophical analysis of what that means. in particular, you know, we keep seeing ethical problems emerging as a result of our connectivity and emerging as a result of our being reduced to numbers and data. we are emerging from the fact that inner-city kids now spend an average of 14 to 16 hours a day staring at a screen, television, computer or cell phone. these have created problems of addiction and problems of lack of contact with reality. we want to use this new institute to explore what it would mean to say something at the most serious level like, the virtual is not the real. >> it seems to me that your

concern about touching the permanent and not being in the ephemeral all the time, the internet seems to be nothing but ephemeral. how do we pierce through that? >> in books or in the tactile things that have faded and in a variety of ways. the virtual tries to substitute itself for the real, like the shadows in the cave of plato. i'm not anti-technology, i am a fan but you can only be a true fan of technological opportunities brought to us if you have a clear sense of what the cost of them are. these didn't come without a cost in one of them -- in one of the reasons i'm interested in the work of james, is because one of the costs is an additional fading of the permanent things of reality and

a moment at which we could least afford it because they were already pretty tattered. >> james, you mentioned a poem in your latest book? >> this is from a permanent thing, a poem called a poem for olivia grace, my oldest and first daughter. she was in my office when i was a newborn and my office was also her bedroom and the crib was pushed up against the desk. i was asking myself, what do i want for this little girl? what i want is a life that is lasting, not for a long life span, not only, but a permanent worth and value. of course, contemporary technology gives us the thrill of the ephemeral and i wanted to draw her out of that self enclosure and into something permanent. i wrote this poem, a prayer for olivia grace. >> there is little room left in this house for poetry or in

this world for any lasting language for the managers and sales reps in the office who've ticketed their holidays are childless and looking to five days of sunshine and liquor. they care for neither old books or a young daughter. somehow, near me, sleeps an infant daughter who grows, still, to the cradle sounds of poetry with eyelids dropped in the promise of sleeps liquor. she knows nothing of language. nor, did i when i was childless, preoccupied with filling an office of fatherhood. now, crowded in my office, a crib and chest of drawers for my daughter remind me that this empty room was childless, except for sheets of poetry when child was a word and my child language and i would write and read at night with liquor. no, she is born and we have little time for lake with my desk crammed in a corner of the office and papers lost beneath the brighter language of cardboard colored alphabets for my daughter. i'm sure i wrote a different

kind of poetry when all my hours were filled, though i was childless. the tv news shows that because they are childless, exercise shows and liquor and cigarettes, modern poets are self absorbed. they are only daughter an ipod or ephemeral technical language. i pray my daughter speak another language and that in the richest sense to be childless, your every act of lasting daughter more beautiful than board clerks of their liquor. they find room for it at the office, crowding small corridors with poetry. my daughter's teething, her gums rubbed with liquor, calls from my office. i go. may i have more of this child and less poetry. >> your transition into father and what that opens up. that is a beautiful poem and you won't buy her, her own cell phone when she is five years old? >> she keeps asking.

[ laughter ] >> having children connects us in the generations and children connect us to the deep stuff of the universe and where we realize that civilization is not just a game. we realize that what we have in this life is not something that we can just laugh off. >> that is right. irony has its limits and autonomy, as well. we have one minute left and i thank you for being here for the institute and may i bring up slide two for the last moment? these gentlemen, james matthew wilson with the website by that name, please go to it and you can find out everything you want to know and joseph bottum, a website with his name and it's full of interesting stuff and links to these well published and well worth reading gentlemen. thank you for being with us. >> thank you for having us. thank you, kpix, for another edition of mosaic and we will see you next time.

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