Fr. Gregory Pine

But the basic idea is like, you're gonna have to invest a little bit at the outset.

to engage with the Catholic intellectual tradition or the Christian intellectual tradition more broadly, but you find that it furnishes you with a grammar so as to speak coherently, and then your own experience of life becomes more, I guess, transparent to these cool conceptual resources.

I'm speaking overly complexly, but the idea is this.

It's like a lot of us are eclectic in our thinking.

We're like, this cool person said that, and this holy person said this, and this other guy, whatever, who cares?

But the idea is that it all hangs together.

Like it all comes forth from God and returns back to God, and that we can kind of tap into God's providential plans in their unfolding, not in that we become ubermention as a result, but in the sense that we can actually know, and we can actually love.

So like when you and I enter a church, for instance, we're not like, hey, here's the thing.

People said that our Lord is present in the Eucharist, but like can't really rule out the other alternatives because we haven't seen him appear in a Eucharistic meeting.

Who knows about anything?

So I'll genuflect to the front of the church, to the left of the church, to the right of the church.

I'll genuflect to the entrance itself.

You know, it's like to cover my bases.

It's like, no, no, we just genuflect because we believe that we can have certainty, confidence that the Lord is who he says he is.

And on the basis of that conviction, St.

Thomas is able to say like, okay,

Here are steps, here are principles, here are arguments.

This is the way that you engage.

And I think a lot of like, part of the reason for which they find it so powerful is a lot of folks are out there just saying like, these people are dumb.

So I'm going to say the opposite thing that they say.