Fr. Gregory Pine

I think, I mean, not unrelatedly, to use a torturous formulation at the beginning of a paragraph.

Not unrelatedly, she said in haste.

So I think part of the reason for which I think it's good to navigate around crass speech or naughty language as you describe it, is that it tends to lower the tone of a conversation.

And when you consciously or deliberately lower the tone of a conversation, I think you open the door to further verbal vices or to further sins of speech.

So when you say like, hey, this is a place in which we say this word, that word, the other word, it seems to suggest this is a place in which we detract, calumniate, and otherwise gossip.

Because it's like, hey, you can let your hair down.

Hey, you can be at your leisure and say whatever occurs to you in the moment.

And so I think that it goes back to the idea that

speech is for communion, that we're meant to build each other up, not in like patronizing or condescending ways, like patting each other on the proverbial head, but in the sense that I think there's a lot of excellence that lies hidden in each of us that requires the community in a certain sense to recognize and then to elicit.

I think it's like the office of a friend to kind of coax the good out of his friend.

Not in that like, again, it's not in that like he knows better, but I think that there are ways in which our friends pull things out of us.

And I think that our speech should reflect that, it should facilitate that.

And so, you know, like men tend to be competitive and comparative.

They tend to be, they tend not to give compliments too terribly often.

But I think that's a problem.

You know, it's like, I live in a house with 45 Dominican friars and I listened to a rotation of 30 to 35 priests preach each month.

I try to tell them like, when I think it's good, like, hey, that was a great homily.

Thanks for that insight.

That was beautiful.

Because it's like, listen,