Plights of the Postmodern Era w/ Bobby Angel | Fr. Gregory Pine & Fr. Joseph-Anthony Kress
April 14, 2025
This transcription was generated using AI technology. Please note that there may be errors or inconsistencies.
Fr. Gregory
This is Father Gregory.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
This is Father Joseph Anthony Kress.
Fr. Gregory
And welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining, wherever you listen to your podcasts. For this episode of Godsplaining, we are delighted to join Bobby. Nope. We are delighted to have joining us – Man- Active and passive verbs they’re confusing and also source and terminus of agency. Nevertheless,
Fr. Gregory
We are delighted to be joined by Slash to host Bobby Angel. Thanks for joining.
Bobby Angel
Thanks for having me.
Fr. Gregory
So many of our listeners, viewers will know you from various postulates to which you have contributed over the course of the last , you know 15-20 years. But for those who don’t know you. Would you say a word of introduction?
Bobby Angel
My name is Bobby Angel. I’m an author. Doing ministry. Ever since I got out of youth ministry where I had my conversion. I grew up Catholic, but a dynamic youth ministry program hammered at home that God is real and I need to give my life to him, whatever that looks like. And so have just kind of been on the journey of life, running to God, running away from God.
I was a firefighter briefly. I worked for the city of Tampa, and then I was born and raised in Florida. I then was wrestling with the priest in question, so I was in diocesan formation for about three years before I really felt the call to marriage and re met the woman who is now my wife, Jackie, who lives in California.
So like any rational man, I drove across the country for a woman, did a novena to Saint Joseph, ended up at an all boys school that I loved all boys Catholic high school for about ten years doing campus ministry and teaching theology. And now we live in Texas and are full time traveling and speaking, doing our YouTube stuff for the Sunshine Press and writing books when our five children allow us the time and space to do so.
Fr. Gregory
How old is your oldest and how old is your youngest?
Bobby Angel
Our oldest is ten and our youngest is a little over a year and a half. Nice. So little people, little problems.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Makes sense.
Fr. Gregory
Do you like your kids?
Bobby Angel
I do. Parenting. I love my children. Parenting is exhausting. Like, if they could all just be regulated, we would have so much fun. Yeah.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
No, that’s a great distinction.
Fr. Gregory
Like them?
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Yeah, that’s a great distinction. Yeah, I love it. Parenting. Horrible. You know, it’s like, okay, I can see.
Bobby Angel
Running all day.
Fr. Gregory
I see. Okay, hold on. Clarification. I asked if you liked your kids. You answered that you loved your kids. Which is.
Bobby Angel
Okay.
Fr. Gregory
To say. Do you like. Ah, you’re like, are your kids like, do you like hanging out with them? Like my kids are cool.
Bobby Angel
Yes. Yes. Our kids are, all our kids have very distinct personalities and I don’t take it easy on them in Mario Kart or SmashBros. Good, good. And they are good like they have trained. And we’ll talk smack and they. They boo me if I win. So, yeah, I like them.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
They’re your children’s, which is like your blood is running through their veins.
Bobby Angel
Oh, yes, that’s right.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Oh, yeah, I love that.
Fr. Gregory
Apropos of apropos of video games, you wrote a book about gaming and the heroic life. You also wrote a book about, it seems, discernment, pray, decide, and don’t worry, variation on a saint. Padre Pio theme. Nice work there. I see you. But then you’ve written another book, a book most recently published through Sofi Institute Press. What is this book and what does it purport to teach this book?
Bobby Angel
The Postmodern Predicament. Look at that cover. I love this cover. That is a beautiful cover. It’s a.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
It’s a good design shining a good design.
Bobby Angel
Utterly confused by our modern art with this is what Sofia Institute Press, and this is written in a way that I hope non philosophers and people that don’t have time for philosophy can easily digest the story of philosophy. How we got here into this postmodern mess. Like what is it and what do we do about it? That’s what I purport to attempt to do.
Fr. Gregory
Okay, so let’s start then with kind of postmodern condition. Sorry, Father Joseph Anthony. I’m a I’m a brute man and I’m just speaking at some clip. It’s unclear what, but my first question concerns like postmodernism. People hear the word and they have some vague sense as to what it’s, you know, what it suggests or what it constitutes. I heard one author, Leotard is his last name.
Fr. Gregory
So I don’t know if.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
He that’s unfortunate.
Fr. Gregory
Yeah, the dancing singlet. But he says like postmodernism is the end of men narratives in the sense that there’s like no big story to be told or no coherent tale that can hold it all together. Where do you kind of start in the book as to a definition of postmodernism or what is the postmodernism to which you are responding?
Bobby Angel
So on the one hand you can look at it as one of the big four philosophical time periods in Western civilization. So you have the ancient period of Socrates. So celebrates Plato, Aristotle, the medieval time period which usually gets skipped over if you’re in a secular undergrad education. It just kind of is this pejorative. The dark ages, like nothing happens, nothing important happened until 1500 and we got Descartes and the start of modernity and enlightenment.
And then now we’re in this fourth era of the postmodern time period, which is a reaction in a rebellion, in a way, to a lot of the promises of modernity that have fallen flat. And as you said in the book, I pull from Abigail Favale in her work, The Genesis of Gender to define postmodernism as a worldview that sees reality in terms of narratives that are created by human beings rather than an order of objective truths that can be discovered.
So it’s this attitude, skepticism indeed, towards any overarching story, meaning or purpose in our lives. We are all now the arbiters of meaning, whether that is the big purpose of my life, the legends and the histories of our country and the heroes that we’re supposed to uphold are now completely dismantled and including, you know, just the nitty gritty of what does that even mean?
To be male or female is now up for grabs and for my truth to redefine. So postmodernism in this time period that we’re living in is very fluid. It’s all about like we’re not playing by the rules of logic anymore. It really is a rejection of the objective to the overemphasis on the subject itself.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
And as you present that, I mean, that seems terrifying to me in the and the fact that like that seems like a huge weight to place on my individual shoulders on the fact that, like, I have to create a narrative and I have to do the kind of like investigative work of all that’s around me that make finite or make definite decisions on what matters, what direction I’m going in and things like that.
That seems like a very heavy place to live in in that sense. So in your kind of, you know, writing the book or in the research that you’ve done, have you been able to like see that? Like, okay, how, how, how do we kind of break out of this heaviness then? Because that does seem like a heavy weight to say, like we’re going to reject the objective and put the weight on the subjective added.
I get to create the narrative that may seem like a freeing trope to tell somebody. You get to create your own experience, you get to create your own narrative. But it really does seem like it shackles you down and things like that. So is there a way then to in this kind of postmodern experience, to kind of chip away at that? Or do you just have to kind of do your best within that structure and kind of make your stumble way through it?
Bobby Angel
It’s heavy and it’s kind of it hearkens back to that you show you shall be as gods. We can define reality based on our terms, which is kind of a tale as old as time, but what we’ve been trying to achieve. But now we’re just in this really wild west flattened landscape where because of the technology we’re given, it does seem like we can just create reality in the way I see fit.
And that is intoxicating. That is fun at some level. But you said it’s also terrifying and heavy and you wonder why this generation is one of the most anxious we’ve ever seen on record and why there is such a desire for purpose and meaning and being religious creatures. We’re going to seek it out. We’re going to seek out something to bind ourselves to some kind of meaning, purpose, crusade.
So for some people, that’s the environment. Like I find meaning in environmental warfare because there’s kind of the good versus evil thing I’m I’m made for, but I’m not being presented with an overarching narrative of I’m seen and known and loved by a guy, the universe. It’s up to me to just kind of find what’s my passion project.
You mentioned a way out of it, and the first step is just to kind of diagnose the problem. Yeah, where are we and to know, we think like this is how humanity is always thought, but not so. And that’s kind of what I aim to do with the book, too, is look at the medieval, look at the ancient time periods and realize how much wonder there used to be, How much and reverence was there towards the created world, and a sense of I need to subordinate myself to the objective, not the other way around.
And now you can’t go backwards. You can’t time travel, put the genie back in the bottle because some people romanticize the past. If only we live, then if only we lived at a certain time period. But it’s like, Well, we can’t go back, but we can reclaim some ways forward. And that’s what I wanted to do in the book.
There’s a lot of great philosophy books out there, but they don’t always tell you what we do now. It’s just kind of like, Well, here we are. Good luck, everyone. Have fun.
Fr. Gregory
This kind of book that I wrote. So something in specifically about a young listener who is perhaps burdened by the response ability of choosing. So in a certain sense, like our freedom can feel to us on the one hand, like an opportunity for options, but on the other hand, like an oppressive weight. Because what if I mess up my life?
What if I mess up the will of God? And so I need to dedicate myself to discernment or to decision making in a kind of deliberate and intentional fashion, but often enough. And yeah, the dread seriousness with which I undertake the task proves unsupportable and I’m just like buried. So within this setting we’re in, we’re trying to reclaim something of a traditional narrative, a kind of classical narrative, whereby we live in a world given us by God or furnished us by God with a nature He himself has created and with its own. Well, the limited bounds.
How do we focus our exercise of freedom such that we can, you know, like make educated choices as to what falls within the bounds of our prudence and then have a kind of healthy disposition with respect to those things that don’t like. I’m just thinking of the people who are just exhausted or maybe just more simply intimidated at the prospect of exercising their faculty of choice. What about them?
Bobby Angel
What about them? They should go pick up this book for $24.95.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Is. There it is.
Bobby Angel
Wow, that’s fabulous. One of the earlier books that Jackie and I co-wrote with Father Mike Schmitz, with Ascension Presents, everyone’s favorite fast talking priest – The Pray, Decide, Don’t Worry book was really kind of that letter to my like a book for myself when I was in my young twenties where I was all in but still confused and treating God like a magic eight ball, just wanting to know like just got just tell me what you want, why you have to make it so complicated.
Why are you hidden? And making my myself neurotic with the vocation question. Because let’s look at what’s underneath that. If I – a part of me believes that I can go wrong, I might choose poorly, I might God may punish me. Some of it is just sitting with what is my conception of God. So this goes way back even to the garden.
Like, did God really say, is God really trustworthy? Does he really have your back? And and so that can reveal itself in the attitudes I have where I am. If I am experiencing a lot of anxiety, if I am experiencing a lot of just that, that heaviness and that lack of of humor, you know, comedy and joy is not nothing.
It demonstrates at some level God’s got it. So I don’t need to take myself that seriously. Like I can take my my sacramental walk seriously, but not much else. You know, I can laugh because I’m realizing the burden of the whole planet is not on my shoulders, which I think there are to the technology we have gives us that illusion of I can know what’s happening on the other side of the world, therefore I’m responsible for it.
And that’s heavy. It’s like it’s intoxicating because it’s this God like knowledge of being able to Google map everything around the world and see everything and know what’s what people on the other side of the planet are suffering. But was I ever meant to carry that? You know? So I think there’s another factor of just that can paralyze us if we have that analysis paralysis of feeling like I have to know every angle of the problem before I make a move. It’s like, well, you’re never going to make a move. So even giving yourself the freedom to make a mistake like you don’t jump to marry the girl you ask her on a date first. The Dominicans are one of the few orders I checked out when I was considering it, and I realized I couldn’t wear white because I just spill coffee on myself regular basis. But they’re lovely.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Enough that doesn’t exempt you that we have many friars that do that. That’s not a requirement.
Bobby Angel
Oh, okay. I should have in the process. But that sense of you going to come and see you go check it out. Because it’s so easy to idealize the thing till you experience it and be like, maybe this really isn’t the best fit for me. Maybe I’m then somewhere else and I trust that God is going to lead me.
A GPS is one of my favorite analogies to I’ve used for myself and for other people in ministry to approach God like God respects your free will, God delights in your free will. I love when my kids are creative, when they’re just coloring, when there’s building with Legos. I don’t need to micromanage. Just have at it. Like I’ll let you know if you’re about to put your hand on the stove or walk into traffic or, you know, our toddler puts his hands in the toilet, it’s like. Like, I’ll stop you. But otherwise, play, create. You know, you’re safe. And when you can operate that way and know, like the father will correct me if I’m going wildly off course, you know, my freedom is respected. It’s like, you know, And so the whole God works with our crooked lines thing. It’s true because in my own life, I can see the times where I was running away from God and yet God calibrated all of that into the journey.
That still led me to my vocation, still led me to my wife. And even in the tapestry of light and dark, like some of those moments of failure were what I needed to get over my selfreliance, to get over that, you know, just the heaviness of feeling like I have to carry it all. It’s like, No, you can’t.
And if you try, it’s going to crush you. But I’m here, you know, I’m here for you. So it’s to realize again, like, what is my how do I conceive of God? Do I believe he’s really there? If so, do I envision a tyrant or a judge out to get me or a father who unconditionally is with me?
Fr. Joseph Anthony
I mean, this whole concept of being terrified and afraid of making a mistake and this kind of pressure for perfectionism, that everything you have to do has to be perfectly in line with this concept of God’s will and stuff. I saw this so much in campus ministry and our current college age students that are so afraid of making a mistake.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
And that may be an academic mistake because I would ruin their profession or career or maybe a social mistake, you know, posting the wrong thing online or showing up at the wrong party or something because it all gets documented. And there’s just so terrified that if there’s some kind of social mistake or there’s some kind of mistake in their life that they can never get away from it or it can never be redeemed, that’s huge because of this whole kind of concept of both your concept of God and who God is and who you are in that way.
You mentioned something a little earlier with like this postmodern predicament that we’re kind of all swimming in. You know? How is it then that you mentioned, like we kind of then have this natural desire to worship and we want to have some kind of God in our life, But in this postmodern way, where are you seeing that kind of attachment or a deifying of creative things or the deification of maybe goods, but not the ultimate good?
Like, how does that get expressed in this kind of postmodern predicament side?
Bobby Angel
I mean, we’re all looking for that tribe. Like what community do I belong to? And that too. It’s so old. Like it goes back to the golden calf. Like, what is that thing that I put my highest worth in? That is the thing that I am worshiping. And maybe that’s a relationship I will only be happy when I have a girlfriend, when I’m boyfriend and putting my security in that.
For some people it’s entertainment, it’s social media status, it’s career, it’s, you know, just entertainment. So again, I wrote a whole book on gaming. So I love video games. And I that book was also a fruit of my journey as a discipleship. And also like, how do you navigate the video game world? So it was a delight to write.
But I also see like it’s for some people it’s there’s a pitfall of this is the thing I worship. Like this is where I spend the most amount of my time and energy. And so to realize like, yeah, like this is what it’s so easy to fall into and, and to make my identity and like these things that make up parts of our life.
How easy is it to make it like this is the most important thing about me? Like this is my identity, you know? And before we started recording, we were just talking in brief about this concept within postmodernism postModernist thought called deconstruction and how it’s it starts in this kind of approaching a text and to deconstruct the meaning of it.
Like Herman Melville, he wrote something he what he thought he meant with the Moby Dick theme. But I say it’s something different. It’s like it’s no longer about respecting the author’s intent. It’s I’m the one that gives it meaning. And, you know, we can argue about that. There’s a dance perhaps between the author and the reader. But at the same time, the author meant something when he was writing the text.
But now we’ve we’ve applied that all these other things of dismantling truth in the things we’re approaching to the point even where and this was another impetus for writing the book was seeing like some people like this has become their identity because in the ways in which they’ve been hurt, because in the ways they’ve experienced abuse, even within Christianity, you have this like I’m a deconstructionist, like I’m a deconstructing Christian.
And I wrote the book in a very pastoral way because I want to acknowledge, like, it makes sense why we go to these ideas or these thoughts, like the ways in which we’ve been educated, the ways in which we’ve been hurt. It makes sense why we we gravitate towards these things. But the danger too, of and we need to ask questions like we need.
I had a priest, professor say Christ came to take away your sin, not your brain. So there’s a difference in approaching and asking the hard questions of the church of God taking these things seriously. But then if you kind of imbibe like, Oh, it’s hip, it’s the cool thing to be deconstructing, like I wanted to kind of raise a red flag to.
I see it a lot in the Protestant world in some pockets of Catholicism, but this kind of trend of I’m just dismantling the religion itself. And then you arrive at a place of like, well, my Jesus says this, this in this room, okay.
Fr. Gregory
To this point, we’ve described the confluence of various world historical movements. I mean, it’s always fun to deal in large epicable kind of change making terms. So like we made mention of Marxism or it’s kind of economic reductionism where everything’s a matter of push pull up and down. And now you’ve talked about deconstruction ism where you break a thing into its constituent parts and then you yourself are responsible for conceiving of and narrating some story.
Whether coherent or incoherent doesn’t really seem to matter too terribly much to the postmodern. But I yeah, I also think to, you know, just kind of looking at some of the themes which you introduce in the book, this idea of, yeah, like you take on this, what would you call a specter of fragmentation, the sense that like there is no people are very loath to grant the deeply related or interaction oriented nature of human existence, like this idea that you get from the ancients and the medieval is that we are conjugal and social and political animals and that we don’t just tap into human communities as an expression of need or of like momentary poverty.
But we are for communities and the communities themselves are higher like realization or higher good, in fact, more so us than our individual or private Good. So I’m thinking like everybody’s trying to carve out a space for him or herself. Everybody’s trying to be different. Everybody’s trying to be cool in one way, shape or form. And I think we often do that by distinguishing ourselves or differentiate, differentiating ourselves from It’s like those people over there are saying this.
So clearly it’s not that because like, what’s up? It’s clearly yadda yadda. That’s not such okay, that’s totally incoherent. The things that I’ve said are just buried all over the place. Nevertheless, like you don’t just want to tell people like, all right, conform, but you want to you want to help people to find their place in the mystical body with the kind of cognizance that it’s precious, you know, to the Lord and for you.
And that it serves a purpose, even if it’s small, even if it’s modest, even if it’s humble, even if it’s hidden. So how do we gain access to, like, the deeper truths, the richer goods, which are often the types of things which we only ever discover, like in obscurity or in the quiet of prayer?
Bobby Angel
There goes to like the dark room, like you think of old camera photography where you had to develop the film like he had a little film cartridge and you had to go away and in a literal dark room to develop the film. And it took a long time before you ever saw it. And there’s a Protestant preacher, Christine Cain, who uses this analogy.
And a masterful way of explaining this is the formation we all need. You can’t give what you don’t have. You know, are we giving God that time in our lives to be hidden, to be for him to be purged? In a way, for me, that was my seminary years was really these times of hidden this where God did a number on me through my four majors, through my own, had to wrestle with my own stuff, thinking like, God, I don’t know where this is going, like I’m on this trajectory towards priesthood, but I give you year by year and can see now in those years, God prepare me in different ways for my vocation of
marriage, for, you know, daring to be an evangelist was like, you’ve got to work on some stuff in you first. You can’t get well. You don’t have to always be recalibrating in every season of life, like, how is my prayer? Am I staying close to the source in the summit? Because as John Paul the second said, we have to propose.
We don’t impose. It’s a beggar leading other beggars to where the food is. I and when I taught it was very much that way. It’s like I want you to know and love Jesus. Like I’m not here to force a conversion. I’m not here to help my year old self professing atheist, you know, have an encounter in the classroom.
But I am here to like, just propose from a passionate place of why this Jesus is worth hearing out and leading through beauty, leading through the good to get back to the true art and architecture is a topic I cover in the book a bit. When I would show my students pieces of art from the Renaissance, from the High church times, the architecture of medieval Europe, and then you show them architecture of today and art from the last hundred years the surrealism, the dots, the splashes of paint, the banana duct taped to the wall, the urinal in the French museum, like, Oh, this is art now, or the brutalism architecture of the Soviet Union, literally
designed to suck your soul away. It’s like, Well, what happened? Like, well, this is why ideas have consequences. Is the human person worth referencing? Do we have dignity? Can we spend lavishly even if it’s useless? You know, we imbibed such this materialistic like it’s got to be useful. So just four walls, maybe some windows, and who cares? It’s like, oh, does it uplift the person or not?
So even in small, hidden ways, like for those of you who are artists and maybe pursuing architecture, the like to bring back beauty because it serves it serves a purpose and it’s a compass in a way to get people to stop in their tracks and like, look up. I’ve you know, I’ve seen some really ugly churches in my life.
And when you step into a beautiful one, you’re just like, yes, this is what I’m talking about. Because it it hits you. It hits the soul in a way that you can’t help but go up.
Fr. Joseph Anthony
Hmm. Mm hmm. As we talk about, like, this entire experience, I think we’ve all had experiences of that. And kind of juxtaposing the experiences of art and of its many forms, especially to previous generations, who were maybe operating under a different milieu. Is there anything good or redeemable in the postmodern experience, like, Oh, this is what we have to live with?
Like, this is the water we’re swimming? And do we get out and say, nope, we’re no longer swimming in this water, We’re pure land. Creatures have to reject it all. Or I mean, is there anything positive about the postmodern experience that we are in right now?
Bobby Angel
I think of like a few things. One negative being that you don’t know what you have till it’s gone. So I do think is this like it’s gone so far? You kind of you see this ache for traditionalism and you see this age for women like wearing prairie dresses and and looking like a little house on the prairie and this like what have like for my parents generation, they’re like, what is going on?
Like, why is everyone want Latin? Why are people dressing like it’s the fifties again? And it’s this like, well, we went so fluid, we went so without direction and meaning. And just like I grew up kind of in the grunge era of the nineties where, you know, we all dressed baggy like little boys. And then Mad Men came, It was like, Oh, I want to dress like a man like.
So sometimes it has to go to a certain point before we realize like, oh, actually we should reclaim some of that. Like maybe we do need beauty in our churches, maybe we do need some kind of direction for what masculine and feminine look like. Now we get in trouble when we go too far. When we create these boxes of to be a man, you have to do this. Be in this profession. To be a woman, you must be this. It’s like there is a beautiful spectrum of the masculine and the feminine and how that’s lived out in every person, in every vocation. So I think one of the the things that we can glean because postmodernity, it’s not even its own thing, it’s like a reaction to modernity.
It’s like a reaction to we forcing everything to be under a microscope. And if it can’t be scientifically tested, it’s just kind of not important. It’s like, well, that is a really impoverished way of living life. If we can’t appreciate music and friendship and the spiritual life, all these things that you cannot necessarily empirically test. So I do think there is an ache and in hunger, in modern man and woman, that is it good that it’s like that can be a helpful starting point in the Augustine kind of ways like this world that is so empirical or testable it doesn’t satisfy you’ve got all these gadgets and yet we’re bored out of our minds what’s going on? Maybe we’re made for another world, even like the focus on narrative. Like I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think the whole postmodern emphasis on storytelling and again, I can go too far when we have lost a footing on the objective that there is an objective truth and beauty and standard of goodness and a God who cares about you, like we can hold that.
And also give space for now, your subjective experience. What have you been through? Tell me about your life, because that matters like it. Jesus used stories and parables because he knew like that hits home in a different way where so even you’ve got the rise of these different modes of therapy, like narrative therapy, like look at your life, like it’s a story and what has happened to you.
Let’s recognize that and honor what you’ve been through. And also, guess what? You have the agency to decide what comes next. You have the capacity to, you know, and we would say as disciples, with God’s grace and with his partnership to figure out what’s going to come next in my life. What what will where do I want to go from here?
So I think there are nuggets of postmodernity that it’s also like, well, here’s the pieces were given. Like I said earlier, we can’t go back. We can’t like just reverse time. There is a Jesus, you know, God has us here, so let’s make the best of it.
Fr. Gregory
Let’s make the best of it. Indeed. And I think that, like as many people come to grips with their own postmodern condition, they they recognize a certain space between the living of their life and the interpreting of their life. And the question is, what do you do with that space? And I think, like, you know, a lot of our contemporaries either eliminate that space and live with the kind of dread earnestness of the Ecojustice warrior, or they increase that space and just kind of give themselves wholly to the alienation which gradually closes.
It’s like talon, like grip over their old soul, or I think they’re like, as Christians, we can learn to navigate that space. And I think that that’s like what we’re doing in part in prayer. Like prayer isn’t an imminent act. It’s a transcendent act insofar as we’re asking God to interpret for us the kind of obscure narrative which is our unfolding life.
But also like, I think that’s where play comes in and I think that’s where humor comes in. I think that’s where whimsy comes in. I think that that’s like, here we are living our lives and they’re a little bit of a dumpster fire, but also you can use that dumpster fire to roast marshmallows, you know, And it’s like, what if we were to roast marshmallows?
I don’t mean to be, like, fundamentally unserious about the Christian project because I think it is fundamentally serious. But I just don’t think that humankind, as T.S. Eliot writes, can bear very much reality. So it’s like we can bear just enough to offer it, offer it to the Lord and say like, hey, make of it what you will.
I don’t cede my rights as the like giving up of my responsibility. But I do recognize that it’s beyond me. You know, I think that like if postmodernism can yield anything in our lives, it reveals to us the wilderness the extent to which it is beyond us.
Bobby Angel
And good natured humor, not in a nihilistic, just tearing everything down sardonic sense, but good humor is so infectious for a reason. I think that’s why Chesterton and C.S. Lewis are perpetually in the water. It’s because they kind of bring life and levity to the situation. One of my favorite books that I would gift my some of my high schoolers was Man Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who was an Austrian psychologist thrown into the concentration camps of World War Two, survived Auschwitz, went back to his practice and wrote Man Search for Meaning among some other books.
He was a very funny man. You would think living through that, he’d be very serious. But I listen to a podcast interview with his grandson. He said he was hysterical. He was. He was like, I’ve seen the worst of humanity. And yet also I know, like throughout his book, he writes, We have the capacity to choose our attitude towards it.
I may not be able to choose my shirt, my circumstances, or what life is thrown at me or the disease I have or what’s happened to my family. But I can choose how I respond to it. And life is beautiful. That movie that was one of John Paul seconds favorite, favorite films. And there you see a very serious situation of World War Two has broken out in Italy.
But this dad decides to I’m going to protect my son’s innocence and turn everything into a joke in a way. And there you see kind of even the comedy of God, like being born a baby in a manger, like the subversiveness of that, like the comedy in that like this is not going the way you think it’s going to go. And it’s serious, but it’s also we can take it lightheartedly, and that’s a beautiful way of evangelizing forward.
Fr. Gregory
Amen. Alleluia. All right. We’ve come to the end of our time. We made mention of the book, the postmodern predicament to be found. It so Fear Institute press. Their website is not sufficient to press dot because that would be too long of a URL. It is. What is it?
Bobby Angel
I think it’s Sofia Institute ecommerce Sofia press dot com. The book’s also on Amazon and it was a delight to write and I hope it blesses anyone that picks it up. It also makes a great coaster for your coffee, if nothing else.
Fr. Gregory
Bingo. Bingo. Yeah. And like, wearing armor is in because Shayne Smith, you know comedian made famous by a recent interview on points with Aquinas is wearing armor in his promotional material to be found at his website. So it’s like it’s part of a kind of world historical movement for the reclaiming of armor for humorous practices. So Folks, you should be part of that movement because all the silly people are so okay.
Fr. Gregory
Thanks so much for taking the time for the interview and many happy returns.
Bobby Angel
Thank you, guys for having me.
Fr. Gregory
All right, squad. This is Godspaining. I don’t know what I’m saying that at the end of the episode, if you don’t realize it by now, well, then things are wild – they’re just absolutely wild. But if you haven’t yet, like and subscribe. Also, you can follow us on social media and you follow links in the description and or show notes to Variety of Options. Support us on Patreon.
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