The things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live. Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars; the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education; and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live, and move, and have our being.
If we all weren't so cynical, we might expect professional ethicists—or say a professor of ethics or morality at a university—to also be a really morally virtuous and good person. And by extension, you might also expect a theologian to be a person of deeper faith. And that's because intellectual reflection about matters of justice, right and wrong, God and human flourishing all cut to the core of what it means to be human, and the things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, just might change the way you live.
Today, in our series on the Future of Theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution—the good, the bad, and the ugly of that exercise; the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars; the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education; and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live, and move, and have our being.
About Eric Gregory
Eric Gregory is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles in a variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Augustinian Studies. His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Former Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton, he also serves on the the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics and sits with the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values.
Show Notes
Production Notes
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
Eric Gregory: The question of the good life has been an animating concern of the intellectual life of philosophers, of theologians of, I, I think all academic enterprise. And I think there is a kind of healthy way in which unifying or directing the task of theology with respect to a particular vision of that good life that will be fleshed out in different ways by different theologies is one way to find a place for the discourse of theology in conversation with other visions of the good life and to, I think also revivify theology, which sometimes has a reputation of being sort of arid, dry, technical, dogmatic.
Theology is a way of life. It's not just a set of propositions. And I think students find attractive this kind of overarching wisdom that theology seeks to offer and not just to kind of talk about virtue, but to give them a sense of how one tradition has thought about cultivating virtue and has a vision of the meaning and purpose of life.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa, with the Yale Center For Faith and Culture. If we weren't all so cynical, we might expect professional ethicists or say, a professor of ethics or morality at a university to also be a really morally virtuous and good person.
And by extension, you might also expect a theologian to be a person of deeper faith. And that's because intellectual reflection about matters of justice, right and wrong, God, and human flourishing--they all cut to the core of what it means to be human. And the things you discuss in an ethics or theology course, if you took those ideas seriously, or if you taught them, they just might change the way you live.
Today, in our series on the future of theology, Matt Croasmun hosts Eric Gregory, professor of religion at Princeton University, an author of Politics in The Order of Love: an Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Eric reflects on what it's like to teach theology in a secular institution: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the complications of making professors of humanities, ethics, and religion into moral or spiritual exemplars.
He discusses the centrality of the good life in the purpose of higher education and the importance of discerning and articulating the multifarious visions of the good life that are presumed by the institutional cultures in which we live and move and have our being. Thanks for listening today.
Matt Croasmun: Eric, If I may, so great to have you here.
Eric Gregory: Great to be here.
Matt Croasmun: When you meet someone on a, on an airplane or in some kind of context like that, or at a party, and they ask you, what do you do for a living? How--what do you, what do you tell them? How do you answer that?
Eric Gregory: Yeah, I guess I answer in different ways, depending on the setting. My own area in the study of religion is religious ethics. So I will sometimes say I'm an ethicist, or I'll say I'm a professor of religion. And in my experience that actually--sometimes this is not good if I have a stack of papers to grade--but solicits a lot of conversation.
Matt Croasmun: Mm-hmm
Eric Gregory: So rather than religion and ethics and politics being something that you're not supposed to talk about, I think, uh, a lot of people wanna talk about it a lot. So --
Matt Croasmun: Sometimes when they have an expert!
Eric Gregory: Well, and they talk a lot about maybe their background or, um, sometimes they're, um, not sure what religion means, but, you know on the whole, I think it does invite good conversation.
I recently was giving a talk in Toronto and I flew into the airport and the security guard was asking me questions about what I did. And I told I'm a professor of religion and he kept asking questions and I needed to get to my, uh, host. So I thought I would end this by saying, well, I work on the reception of Augustine in modern philosophy and he said, "Augustine, isn't he responsible for all the evil of war in the past, uh, thousand years?"
Matt Croasmun: Oh my God.
Eric Gregory: I thought, wow. Uh, the security guards in Canada are very theologically literate. Um, but uh, we ended up having a good conversation.
Matt Croasmun: Wow. Wow, that that is not the kind of story I hear a lot. That's fantastic. That's really great. So, you know, we talk a fair bit about what's, what the trouble is with theology, what are some of the struggles, the difficulties, and we'll get there, but let's start with the, on the positive side.
Uh, you actually noted, there's some reasons for hope here, uh, for theology and for theology's relevance in society.
Eric Gregory: Yeah. Well, I share many of the concerns about the future of theology and the current state of theology, but I, I think it's important to recognize that there have been remarkable developments in theology in the not so, uh, distant past. Recently, a lot of, um, dialogue between Protestant and Roman Catholic theology about some very important matters that traditionally have divided those traditions. And I think that could be seen as something that has really, um, been, uh, a positive aspect of contemporary theology. And also dialogue between the Jewish and the Christian traditions on all sorts of matters that have historically been very fraught topics. And more specifically in those dialogues, thinking about the virtues, lots of foment and, and interest around rereading Paul, I think that has been positive.
My own work is often trying to also discover the sometime implicit religiosity or even theology of what are sometimes taken to be secular thinkers. So I, I think there is a kind of interest in theology as both a kind of way of thinking and as a grammar and sorts of questions that theologians have been interested in, I find a kind of analogs, at least in contemporary philosophy and the humanities more generally.
Matt Croasmun: You teach religion in a, in a secular university. What is the role for, especially for Christian theology in that sort of pluralistic secular context?
Eric Gregory: Yeah. Well, this gets maybe also to concerns because for various reasons, Christian theology has often and increasingly so, been absent from the curriculum in secular universities and there's a long story to tell about why that is the case, but even departments of religion are sometimes anxious about Christian theology as part of the curriculum, because they understand themselves over--against a theological enterprise, they are about the academic study of religion. They talk about religion. They're not confessional or trying to shape students in a theological vision, which would be different than say a setting of a seminary or divinity school. On the other hand, my argument is that theology is--theological materials are so central--certainly to the Christian tradition, that it's very difficult to sort of, uh, appreciate and be initiated even as an eaves-dropper into that tradition to discuss it without also dealing with theological and materials.
And a lot of my students, many of whom don't come from a religious background, find the theological materials fascinating, almost exotic. Uh, so there's a generational difference. I think in years past some professors of religion thought they had to sort of beat out any regnant theology that some of the students had. But now with many students coming with, you know, very little by way of a kind of habituation into theological materials, uh, they're encountering it fresh and, uh, sometimes surprised by what they see. And also those texts make demands on the students. And I think for some of them, they find that disarming. And, but part of the virtue of the humanities, I think, is to kind of dislocate us and to kind of allow us to inhabit different worlds than the ones that we have prior to encountering these texts.
So theology: my students are interested in it, they find it fascinating, they sometimes find it very difficult, but I think that's also good. I try to tell them this is no more difficult than some of your other classes you've taken, but there is a kind of tradition that they can enter into that might help them articulate their own commitments, whether they be religious or not, but at least provide a kind of vocabulary and a language and a grammar to help understand this very influential Christian tradition, but also to think about their lives.
Matt Croasmun: Hmm. Well, and that's something we've been talking about these last couple days is kind of, what if we were to orient Christian theology, in which case we might include something like ethics, around articulating a vision of life, a vision of the good life, the life that we're actually hoping, that, to live. Um, does that seem like a reasonable kind of way to orient what theology is and is about to you? Or is that kind of, uh, move it off the mark or the claim, actually somebody else--is that somebody else's job?
Eric Gregory: Yeah, I tend to resist or try to resist the desire to police the boundaries about which academic specialization can speak to this question.
And especially, obviously the question of the good life has been an animating concern of the intellectual life of philosophers, of theologians of, I, I think all academic enterprise. And I think there is a kind of healthy way in which unifying or directing the task of theology with respect to a particular vision of that good life that will be fleshed out in different ways by different theologies is one way to find a place for the discourse of theology, in conversation with other visions of the good life and to, I think also revivify theology, which sometimes has a reputation of being sort of arid, dry, technical, dogmatics. Now I'm a fan of many--what people call arid, dry, technical, scholasticism! But I do think that there is this, certainly in the great classical theological authors like Augustine, a sense of--theology is a way of life. It's not just a set of propositions. And I think students find attractive this kind of overarching wisdom that theology seeks to offer, and not just to kind of talk about virtue, but to give them a sense of how one tradition has thought about cultivating virtue or has a vision of the meaning and purpose of life.
Uh, now I think there are ordered disciplines within theology in that not all theology is ethics. Not all theology is dogmatics per se, but I, I do, I can see how thinking about the good life, which Christians might describe as friendship with God--that's how Aquinas talks about it--is a kind of heuristic way into thinking about mode of reviving or addressing a lot of the challenges that theology faces.
Matt Croasmun: If theology is about a way of life, if philosophy is about a way of life, what kinds of implications does that have for the life of the theologian or for the philosopher, for the scholar? Do professors need to be exemplars of what it is that they teach or at least what it is that they advocate--may not advocate everything that they teach.
Eric Gregory: Yeah, I think that's a difficult question. There are many academics that I think inspire students because of the way in which their personal commitments align with the philosophy they espouse. So my colleague Peter Singer, for example, is a utilitarian who's made arguments for example, about how you should lead your life with respect to the global poor.
And I think the kind of compelling nature of some of his arguments has as much to do with his way of life. The danger is, um, set--of setting oneself up as an exemplar, are probably well known. And I think another route into that would be to point to, to show exemplars of this aspirational type of life. Though surely if one is committed to that vision, then one must at least aspire to try to cultivate those virtues.
And the academic life is always demanding a certain kind of what the Greeks called acesis or paideia--of kind of intellectual and moral virtue as, look a lot of these questions are really difficult to know, but also difficult to do.
And I think universities are not just places of the production of information, but are also sites where people seek to ask questions about how they should live. And if universities can't do that, it's very difficult in our current culture, to find spaces of reflection that allow that possibility.
Matt Croasmun: Does that mean then that a philosophy course, an ethics course, a religion course, that needs to be imparting kind of practical wisdom? Do we need to be teaching our students--sometimes there's a drive these days to push education outside of the classroom.
Eric Gregory: Mm-hmm
Matt Croasmun: Kind of take it to the streets, take it into students' lives.
Eric Gregory: Yeah. And certainly I think part of that is a demand that students are asking of the university. And there's a long tradition in the Christian Church, but also shaped by a philosopher like Aristotle, that one comes for example to know what it means to be good by doing good, or there's a kind of practice involved.
Now, I, I still might wanna distinguish between, say the work of, of doing justice and doing charity or the kind of practical skills that come about through working in different settings and the kind of intellectual labor of reflection on those practices.
There's also always, I think a lot of universities that once saw themselves as sites of moral formation became anxious about that because of a kind of moralism or a kind of oppressive vision that was seen as being sort of foisted upon students, especially in a pluralistic setting, like my own, where I teach, but I think universities, I sense, are sort of revisiting this: questions about morality, but also responsibility and is a desire to kind of shape whole persons and to not just view education as a commodity that we are delivering to customers, but to kind of reconsider what a, uh, liberal arts education might look like.
Matt Croasmun: Should we then be thinking that it's not just theology that could be oriented around the good. But the, in a certain sense that would be a, a modern university is such a diverse thing. You couldn't--surely we couldn't have a single kind of center or goal or aim, but could it be a unifying goal and aim of say a humanities curriculum, a liberal arts education?
Eric Gregory: Yeah, I mean, I think willy nilly, despite the deep pluralism and specialization of the modern university, there always already is a certain vision of the good life being communicated in the institutions in which we find ourselves. And I think it's all to the good, if we could be more articulate about those visions and even critical of them, or kind of pointing to the kind of, um, dialogue between them, the rivalry, the conflict.
And I, I think in many ways, my vision of the humanities at least is that is an arena and where we lift up and not necessarily endorse, but point to kind of competing visions of the good. And have an inquiry into the kind of virtues and vices of those, uh, speeches. And it's in some ways a task that's demanded of us by assigning books of great humanistic interest, because this is--these questions are the questions that have been asked by, uh--we always have new questions and new pressing moral issues or new pressing political issues, but I think the great texts of the humanities, when we read them, they ask us to read ourselves and kind of demand us to, to reflect on the vision of life that inspires us, that attracts us or should be the one that we follow
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured religious ethicist Eric Gregory and biblical scholar, Matt Croasmun. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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