YouSaid · the spoken record

Ross Douthat

lines on the record: 98
first: 2018-01-17
most recent: 2018-01-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“In musical terms, I'm a bit of a Philistine. Well, this is, again, you're going to get me on narrative every time. I like a lot of folk country kind of music. I don't I don't know that I would make any special theological claims for it generally, but that's sort of my musical tastes run to, I don't even know how to say this without being embarrassing, but like Natalie Merchant, that kind of thing. And I haven't thought through the theological dimension, except I do like some of the storytelling in country music.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Favorite periods in modern literature. And even the writers in that era who are not practicing Catholics seem to me to be influenced in different ways. But Hemingway and Fitzgerald in different ways, for instance, Hemingway's writing in a Catholic cultural context in a lot of his stories. And Fitzgerald is, of course, a lapsed Catholic of a certain kind. So I think Catholicism hangs in an interesting way over that whole first half of the 20th century period of literature. And I think that's the best recent period of literature. So I'll claim some chauvinistic pride.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's been a while since, but I want to, yeah, but it's been a while since I really dug into that debate, but I'd like to. And I think that actually does, in a weird way, tip things in certain ways when you're talking about the scale of things. But no, I mean, the period that produced WA and Green and a lot of those writers is in certain ways one of my”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's well represented, and I think that the decline in sort of Catholicism's importance in literature since that wah green golden age has happened in parallel with the decline of literature's cultural importance in certain ways. Some of it depends on whether you claim Shakespeare for the Catholics or not, which is a lively.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overrated. There's a little too much sentimentality in the Catholicism and the sort of honor trilogy is a little more cold-eyed and therefore slightly better.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's more personal and psychological. I mean, it is the characters on the wire are fascinating, but they are, when you meet them, you sort of know who they are. It is Dickensian in that sense, the sort of endless jokes about the Dickensian element on the wire are right. And Dickens is a great novelist, and the wire is a great show, but there is a depth to much of the sopranos that I think is not equaled by the wire and hasn't quite been equaled in any show since. But only very, I mean, you know, people love the wire, so it can only be very slightly underrated. I mean, people love the Sopranos.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very slightly underrated I think that the sort of proliferation of sopranos, imitators, and there are a lot of people who wanted to like the wire more than the sopranos because the wire was sort of sociological and political in a way the sopranos wasn't. And so there was a certain number of people who should have known better who convinced themselves that the wire was a better show than the sopranos, which it is not.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theme of the book is this idea that this sort of cuddly fur baby in your room is an apex predator who has taken over the world through its relationship to human beings. And I think that was my view all along. So really we've ended up on, we've sort of smoothed out our fundamental disagreement by the process of having her learn more about cats than anyone could ever possibly imagine knowing.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Singular standoffishness and so on. And I think in certain ways writing the book about cats brought her around to something closer to my view. So she started the book shortly after we started having children. And one of the interesting things that she sort of realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a sort of displaced child reaction that cats have these faces that look like infants' faces and have the eyes and the sort of wide faces and they meow in this way that approximates an infant cry and they essentially hijack the maternal instinct. So she had sort of maternal feelings towards cats, but in the process of having actual children and writing the book, I think she came to a appreciation of them more as the sort of fascinating apex predators that have, that's sort of the theme of the book, which you should all read. It's much more interesting than late 20th century Catholic theology, but it's the”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sort of, you know, if there's a Girardian element in watership down, I mean, there's a lot further to go with this, but I've probably gone far enough.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the Aeneid, he has quotes before every chapter, but where it's you know, the city falls and you have to go found a new city and there's sort of religious visions along the way that relate to the legitimacy of the founding. And there's a tension between, sorry, I'm rambling, but you got me going. There's this tension between Hazel and Bigwig, who are the two sort of leaders of the city that's being founded. And Bigwig is, he was a member of the Ausla, which is the sort of rabbit martial order. And everyone assumes when they sort of meet this group of rabbits that he is the leader. But in fact, the leader is Hazel, who is this rabbit who is neither the visionary nor the military leader, but just sort of, he's the politician, and he's good at it. And the success of the war in is based on ultimately the subordination of Bigwig and the marshal and the religious to sort of the politician. The next time you have Peter Thiel here for one of these conversations, you can really press him.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of folk hero and his relationship. There is actually sort of the rudiments of a rabbit theology in Watership Down. What kind of theology think about God, right? How would rabbits think about their proper relationship to God? What kind of myths would they develop to explain their position in the world as opposed to every other creature? It's all quite brilliant. It's a great novel and in fact I reread it last year and it was still quite great. And then there's even right. And then there's even sort of a mystical element. The book begins with a rabbit as rabbit fiver who is sort of a runt who has visions and the whole founding is sort of based on various prophecies and visions that he has throughout the beginnings of this rabbit's warren that these rabbits go out and found. So he has a vision of apocalypse. So there's an Aeneid element, right, clearly where it's probably he uses, quote,”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exist as a kind of breeding farm, and you have a warren that's run as a fascist dictatorship, essentially, and then you have sort of this attempt to form a political community that is somewhere in between the two, getting back to this sort of Hegelian synthesis and so on. And you have sort of these very primal narrative where the problem is, of course, that they don't have any females. And so there's sort of this competition for reproductive power that's carried out between these different Warrens where the rabbits from the Good Warren have to literally not kidnap because the does come willingly, but sort of steal women from the fascist dictatorship, which maintains a ruthless control over reproduction. So there's just a lot of fascinating stuff there, and then it's all interspersed with storytelling. There's this sort of rabbit folktales. It's a narrative against Adam narrative again that Richard Adams came up with that are just brilliant about Ell Arreira, the great rabbit, you know,”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was maybe an overstatement. But I think watershed down, we live in an age of intense attention paid to children's books and young adults' books by people who are adults, and there's a lot of, I think, reasonable controversy over whether that's a good thing necessarily. But I've been sort of always disappointed that there hasn't been a kind of sustained watershed down revival because it's such a great book. And it's a book about a founding, right? It's a book about it's connected in a sense to the kind of things that the Straussians are always arguing about and so on. What does the founding mean and so on? But you have a group of rabbits who go forth and encounter different models of political order, different ways of relating to humankind, this sort of shadow over rabbit kind at any point. You have a warren that has essentially surrendered itself to humanity.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And power over that piece. But that's always contingent and temporary. And yes, Christianity is at its root a more radical religion.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think conservatism is particularist sort of by definition, yes. And I think that every form of conservatism is going to be different depending on the cultural context. I think conservatism in America at its best is trying to preserve a kind of American exceptionalism that doesn't sort of have applications really when you're thinking about what a German conservatism would be or a Russian conservatism and so on. And in that sense, Christianity can only be conservative in sort of provisional and context-bound ways, right? Like in a culture that was universally Christian and is in the process of ceasing to be so, then Christianity, then the phrase conservative Christian makes a lot of sense in the sense that you're trying to, you have a universal faith that has sort of taken over a particular piece of the world and you're trying to sort of preserve its influence.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so on. And so full revival in the church, I think, would need a kind of priestly center to it in a way and not just to focus on apostolates and evangelization within the world. Like Catholicism has been caught up in the idea that this is the age of the laity for the last 50 or 60 years. I think the age of the laity has kind of been a disaster for the church in certain ways.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It asks lay people to take vows of various kinds. Celibate lay people are part of the Opus Day structure. And I think that there is essentially there's just a sort of a straightforward need for a more old-fashioned model of just sort of priests and nuns. Like the church needs more priests and nuns. Catholicism can't function without priests and nuns, which doesn't take anything away from what Opus Day is doing. And of course, they have many vocations and many priests. To the extent that it doesn't get the due maybe that it deserves in my writings, that's probably maybe the root of it. Again, you're teasing out things I haven't even begun to think about before. There's no particular reason why, yeah. I mean, the church, the sacramental life of the church depends on a strong priesthood, depends on men becoming priests. It depends on religious orders.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it doesn't, it seems to me that in part that there is a sort of set apart, not set apartness exactly, but there's an element of, well, I think a big part of the crisis in Catholicism in the last six or 70 years can simply be distilled to a collapse in the sense of the importance of religious life, of consecrated life, of the priesthood religious orders, sisters and brothers and so on. It's as easy for me to say because I did not become a priest and so on. It's always easier once you haven't become a priest to say, oh, well, you need more people to become priests. But to the extent that that's true, Opus Day seems like it's very well tailored in certain ways to sort of secular society as it exists right now. But I think the ultimate revival of the church is likely to come from a slight”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I'm pro Opus Day overall. I think that, I guess that it seems to me sometimes that Opus Day is a particular apostolate, right? And the particular idea of Opus Day is that you are, you know, it's not primarily supposed to be a priestly order, even though there are, of course, priests of Opus Day, that the central idea, and with apologies to Opus Day members, if I'm getting this at all wrong, but the central idea is that it's a ministry, it's an apostolate for lay people who are at work in the business world, the journalism world, the corporate world, the communications world, and so on. And as such, I think it has an admirable and important vocation in the life of the world and the life of the church.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess that for there to be a sort of Judeo-Christian Islamic synthesis, then it does await some further revelation that would make more sense of the Islamic story to me.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case, I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity make, and again this comes back to sort of the storytelling issue maybe, but I think there's sort of a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story. I don't think I have a certain answer. I can tell you things, as I just, I suppose, started to, that I admire within the Muslim world, but I can't tell you sort of definitively, and this is, I guess, why I am a Christian and not a Muslim, I can't tell you what I think, how I think that story would fit together. If God's revelation to Muhammad were sort of as definitive a revelation as the revelations of Christianity and Judaism, I can't make that story work. So the story then has to be sort of big.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that Western civilization is decadent and that decadence has virtues among them the absence of the kind of massive bloody civil wars currently roiling the Middle East. But at the same time there is a sense in which, yeah, I mean there's parts of Islam that are sort of closer to asking the most important questions about existence than a lot of people are in the West. And, you know, asking important questions carries major risks and incites levels of extremism that we've sort of tamped down and put away. That desire for the extreme and the absolute and the truth about things that animates some of the best and some of the worst parts of Islam, I think that's better for human beings to have that desire than not.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catholic debates. He went to the Vond ⁇ in France for the anniversary of the Vond ⁇ and sort of and gave a speech there, sort of hailing the resistance of Catholics to the revolutionary regime in France in the 18th century, which is kind of this extraordinary moment, not anything you would have imagined 150 or 200 years ago, and a kind of moment that lets you briefly imagine that kind of that there could be a Catholicism that sort of revived certain European elements in the process of becoming more African. That's a very, from a Catholic perspective, optimistic view, and the likelihood is that things will be more chaotic and messier and so on. But yeah, I mean, but ultimately my first loyalty is or tries to be to the church rather than to European culture. So I would certainly take an African Catholicism over, again, the museum that we have in Europe today.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both. I mean, I would think that, you know, the future of an African Catholicism, of a sort of Africanized Catholicism, is better than many, many futures that I can imagine. But I would still be sorrowful if sort of particularly European distinctives that within the church are lost in that transformation. I mean, I think if I were playing the optimist, I would say that there is a sort of Euro-African future for the church where African forces, African migration, African ideas, African leaders sort of help renew and enrich and sort of return European Catholics to their faith. And you can find sort of small, strange examples of this, right? Like Robert Sarah, who is this Guinean cardinal who's sort of seen as kind of a partial antagonist to Pope Francis in certain intricate.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's sort of my columnist's pundit's answer. But I don't know exactly how to connect it to this deeper question of what kind of future of Europe given the available options should a Catholic desire. Because to some extent, if you're asking me, would I rather Europe be atheistic and sort of effectively anti-Catholic for the next thousand years, or rather have it be Muslim, perhaps I'd rather have it be Muslim, right? I mean, from a Catholic”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sits at like one remove from that debate. My reaction to Merkel's move was very much as sort of a political analyst who thinks to myself, you know, stability is better than chaos, as flawed as the liberal order is in various ways. I wanted to hold up. Therefore, I don't want leaders to make these big dramatic moves that I think could have obviously destabilizing impact. So I've been skeptical for a long time of the sort of extreme Mark Stein or beyond Mark Stein analysis that Europe is inevitably going to go Muslim and so on. But having Merkel make a decision like she did sort of pushes me slightly in a Stynian direction probably. It makes me think, you know, Europe's elites are not sort of reckoning with how big demographic transformations can change societies, divide societies, create space for all kinds of extremisms to flourish.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be placed to someone, I think. And it's further complicated by the fact that sort of overshadowing that particular tension is the reality that a large share of the potential long-term migration to Europe could be from Catholic and evangelical portions of Africa, which is sort of, you know, it sort of adds a further layer of dilemma. And so my reaction to Merkel's move.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways hostile and becoming increasingly hostile to traditional religious faith. And at the same time, you have this sort of alternative of Islam whose potential power and potential ability to reshape Europe is sort of ambiguous. It's not at all clear to me how powerful or how substantial that influence would be. And so the Catholic is sort of given, at least in at the moment, this sort of strange choice. Would you rather have this museum of your faith be preserved in its existing form in a sort of post-Catholic maybe still residually Catholic situation? Or would you have it be changed dramatically by the entrance into Europe of the faith that Catholicism contended with for world mastery for hundreds and thousands of years? That's a strange”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some substantial tension, I think. I think the situation in Europe is a very challenging one for anyone to think through, but particularly for a Catholic, because you have this sort of, it's the ancestral homeland of my faith. And, you know, we're talking about stories. The story of Catholicism is a European story for much of its history, much of the great dramas, the great debates, and so on take place in that continent. And when I sort of think of figures that I identify with, when I think of sort of the writers and artists and so on that I relate to, they are primarily European just because of that synchronicity, because the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith historically. But now we're in an era when that's not really true. Europe is sort of a museum of Catholicism in this weird way, you know, with some exceptions, but particularly in Western Europe, it's a museum. And the culture of Europe is in certain ways.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the characters is imagining that this life is like the epic of heaven, that we're living in the Iliad or the Odyssey of heaven. This is the story that will be told in the streets. And I think that's a very powerful and resonant and interesting way thinking about our lives, but thinking about sort of the Christian view of history that we're living inside a very interesting story that people will be talking about in heaven for a long time.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Western theology over the last 50 years, but Christians in the West, in the United States, sort of well educated, would-be intellectual Christians, tend to be heavily influenced by storytellers, heavily influenced by Lewis, heavily influenced by JR Tolkien, heavily influenced even by Dorothy Sayers and her detective stories, heavily influenced by Chesterton's father Brown stories. I think it's probably fair to say that Chesterton's father Brown stories had as much influence on my worldview as his more sort of polemical and argumentative writings. And again, I think therein lies some important insight that I haven't thought through, but I think you're correctly gesturing at about sort of a particular way of thinking about God and theology that isn't unique to Christianity, but that is strongly suggested by just the structure of the revelation that we have. Marilyn Robinson has a line, I think, in Gilead about, you know,”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, sometimes I say this to my children when I'm sort of clumsily trying to indoctrinate them in my faith. I say, you know, you were living inside a story. And God is the storyteller. And again, this is not a thought original to me at all, but God is the storyteller, and you are an actor within that story. And the difference is that in this story, Christians would say God himself enters the story. He becomes a character in the play, which is a very difficult thing for playwright to normally do. But that that story, the fact that God is a storyteller, tells us something reasonable about how best to approach him and that it is not just okay but completely plausible to approach him through narrative, through poetry, through art, through stories, and so on. And there is a sense, I think this idea I'm stealing from Alan Jacobs, who wrote a biography of C.S. Lewis, but I think there's a real sense in which, and maybe this speaks to the failure of.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll venture a theory again about something that I haven't thought about before you raised it 30 seconds ago. So please take this with a grain of salt. But I think that you could make the argument that narrativity is the way”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understands this foundation, that they're sort of operating in a landscape of critique and commentary and so on that assumes a kind of 1880s or 1940s Catholic education in their readers. And so the sort of collapse, which they hastened in certain ways of that Thomistic consensus means that in certain ways their works don't make that much sense, that they're sort of driving forward, but there's a missing synthesis that you need to sort of understand what they're driving at sometimes. But again, that's a more theologically learned take than my own, which sometimes matches yours.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the sort of heart of the connection between Catholicism as a religion and the startling striking world of the New Testament lies more in liturgical life, the lives of the saints, the sort of everyday stuff of the Catholic Church rather than the abstract arguments. Also say that the post-60s Catholic theologians are also maybe a little more dense in certain ways. I mean, there's a good piece by rusty Reno is the editor of First Things that he wrote a little while ago about sort of arguing that a lot of those Catholic theologians, the ones that you read, it sounds like, are working as sort of critics of a sort of existing Thomistic, sort of Thomas Aquinas rooted foundation in Catholic theology that they felt had gotten very stale and very boring. And they were right, I think, in certain ways. But the problem is they're also writing on the assumption that their reader sort of understands.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It should come in the experience of looking at the Eucharist, looking at what goes on in Catholic churches every day around the world, and connecting that to the startling and shocking and scandalous things that Jesus says about his body and blood in the New Testament, connecting it to the form of the Last Supper, connecting it to that story. And the theological commentary on all of this can be fascinating and theological controversies can be very interesting, but that I mean to me, the sort of the really”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it all right to say that I have a similar reaction to many of them, or will that? I mean, that's a dangerous thing to say because in my position as a sort of hack journalist who writes about Catholic controversies, I'm often getting criticized for by professional theologians for lacking adequate theological training and so forth. So if I admit that I find many theologians dense and boring, that will be used against me when my book comes out in a few months. But I guess it's too late. So having said that, no, I think that the heart of Catholicism is found in the link between the New Testament and the form and structure in ordinary life of the church. And what theologians are doing is very important, but it is far from the most interesting and essential part of the Catholic project. So to the extent that there's sort of an aha moment for someone sort of thinking intellectually about the connection between the New Testament and the Catholic Church.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. No, and you're absolutely right. There is a kind of in order to get to the orthodoxy of Nicaea and Chalcedon, there's a sense in which there's a kind of Hegelian fulfillment. The issue there, though, is just that the Orthodox Christian believes that at a certain point the revelation is actually final. That God essentially doesn't play tricks on you. And this is sort of, I think, an important idea, that too much Hegelianism leads you to the point where you're saying, well, what God is saying in one era just doesn't hold true in another. And that gets you to a point where it's a kind of dishonesty, I think, necessarily imputed to God in that scenario. That he sort of withholding, giving you a revelation, but he's constantly withholding for the future. And I think the God that I would prefer to believe in does give, when he says he's giving final answers, he actually means it.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given form in the 1930s and 1940s. And so the Orthodox Christian says, no, any seeming tension between the Old Testament and the New, any seeming contradiction is actually suggesting that we need to look for a kind of synthesis between them and for a kind of a sense in which there is not contradiction but fulfillment in some way, which”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's wrong because it takes the form, well, I mean, it's wrong for any number of reasons. But in the context of the conversation we're having, it's wrong because it tries to basically take one of the things that Christianity is trying to hold in synthesis and run with it to the exclusion of everything else. And to sort of essentially to sort of solve problems by sort of cutting things away. So the Marcionite thesis is basically, well, if you read the New Testament, Jesus offers you a portrait of God that seems different from the portrait of God offered in Deuteronomy. Therefore, these things are in contradiction. Therefore, if you believe that Jesus' portrait of God is correct, then the Deuteronomic portrait of God must be false. Therefore, the God of the Old Testament must be a wicked demiurge, etc., etc. And the next thing you know, you're ascribing to, again, a kind of what is the Aryan Christianity of the Nazis, if not the Marcionite heresy.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Civilization, Christian civilization, and so on, even as you sort of grope forward towards programmatic practical solutions and sociological solutions to sort of new problems that emerge.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the Hegelian insight can be true in the development of political forms and sort of responses to problems that social change is create, problems that technological changes create, and you can sort of hold that view while also holding the view that the Hegelian dialectic can't be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths. And, you know, you can sort of take extreme examples and say, well, there isn't a synthesis to be had to violate Godwin's law sort of early in our conversation. There isn't a synthesis to be had with Nazi Germany, right? There are certain ideas about racial hierarchies and so on that are not part of some synthesis that you need to sort of work through and grasp and then be a Catholic, I think, is to believe that there is sort of a larger body of revealed truths that have to remain as”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movement or something like that. And those slogans only get you partway there. But yeah, I do think that that sort of idea of synthesis is somewhat important to the somewhat speculative political writing that I do.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess you could say, but that's mostly true in, no, I guess it's true in a lot of places. I think that there is, for instance, the solution to, and maybe now we're into sort of more Hegelian territory rather than Christian territory, but there's a solution to a lot of problems in some as yet uncertain synthesis. So I write a lot about sort of social conservatism and abortion and feminism and these kind of issues. And I do think that somewhere out there in that zone of argument, there is a synthesis of the best social conservative ideas and the best feminist insights that I personally haven't been able to grasp yet and probably am not necessarily equipped to do so, but also that our society as a whole hasn't grasped, but that that is sort of where the actual truth lies. And you can sort of distill it in certain slogan-ready ways, like saying, well, you know, you need a sort of a more feminist pro-life.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you can't sort of split up grace and works in any kind of meaningful way, I think is sort of, it's connected to larger facts about the nature of human existence, the fact that the sort of tension between determinism and free will that persists in any philosophical system, right? You can get rid of God and stop having these sort of Jansenist Jesuit arguments about predestination and so on, but you're still stuck with the sort of free will determinism debate. That debate doesn't go away. So yeah, I think that there's a sort of point at the intersection of different ideas that is as close to the truth as our limited mind can get. And in Christian thought, we call that point orthodoxy. Now, how that is connected to my political views is a really good question. I mean, I think that a lot of the time in politics, I suppose, I am in certain areas of our politics, I'm looking for that point.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've never been asked that question. I mean, I suppose that I'm drawn to the idea that the truth about human existence lies in what can seem like paradoxical formulations. And this is, of course, a very Catholic in certain ways. Certainly G.K. Chestertonian idea. So I'm just stealing it from other people. But the idea that various heresies of Christianity Calvinism included, with apologies to my Calvinist friends, tend to take one particular element of a view that's supposed to be in synthesis and possibly intention and run with it. And therefore, the sort of the truth about things lies in a place that may seem slightly contradictory. And I think this is sort of borne out in many ways in everyday experience, this kind of both and experience of human existence. The idea that”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes I'm persuaded by a version of it, and sometimes I'm not. I think that there's a very natural story to tell about Western civilization in which particular Christian ideas about the individual, the individual's relationship to God render unto Caesar what does Caesar's and so on, that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy. And in that story, you could argue either that liberal democracy is a kind of happy development out of sort of original Christian ideas and Christian thoughts, or that it is a kind of rebellious stepchild who has sort of taken over the house and banished the parent to the attic. And I guess those are sort of views that I toggle back and forth between, depending on what seems Like the state of Western liberalism at any particular moment.”
2018-01-17 · Conversations with Tyler · Ross Douthat on Narrative and Religion (Live at Mason) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source