Augustine College was pleased to have Dr. R.R. Reno deliver our 17th annual Weston Lecture.
Since 2011, Dr. Reno has served as the editor of First Things, ‘America’s most influential journal of religion in public life’. He received his PhD in theology from Yale University and taught theology and ethics at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska for twenty years. He has published in many academic journals, and his opinion essays have appeared in Commentary, the Washington Post, and other popular outlets.
In his talk, Against Critical Thinking, Dr. Reno discusses the way in which today’s academic culture places great emphasis on critical questioning and doubt, but fails to train in how to pursue and assent to truth. Reno argues that the life of the mind is based on our capacity to know and affirm truth, and for that we need a pedagogy of piety – an approach to instruction ordered towards the affirmation of that truth.
Dr. Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature in the Department of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His lecture revisited Richard John Neuhaus’s famous thesis that the moral arena in our time has been vacated of serious social content by a refusal to deal with the most basic ethical questions: human nature, the human good, moral evil, the virtuous life. The result is not moral perversion so much as moral nakedness, the unclothing of our species as we revert to animality.
Dr. Wood’s familiarity with both literature and theology will move us through Walker Percy’s hilarious and N.T.Wright’s more sombre account of our resulting predicament: “a bizarre privatism in which the left and the right become unacknowledged twins.” Further attention to Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton – two advocates of education as training in the virtues – promise to make for an engaging evening. The instruction of virtue in the context of education “may well be a long twilight struggle,” says Dr. Wood, “but it is the only one worth waging” in the hearts of the young.
Dr. Wood received his doctorate from the University of Chicago and has taught on the faculty of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His books include Contending for the Faith: The Church’s Engagement with Culture (2003), The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (2004), Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (2004), Literature and Theology (2008), and Preaching and Professing: Sermons by a Teacher Seeking to Proclaim the Gospel (2009).
