released 7/2/2026
In this November 2015 lecture, David L. Schindler (1943–2022) explores the implications for a civilization that discards the reality that being is grounded in God. American culture is profoundly shaped, he says, by a logic that leads to the abstraction of creature from its Creator and therefore to the loss of its creaturely telos. Schindler argues that a shift from a symbolical to a non-symbolical understanding of being fundamentally changes the nature of human experience in the world. It also implies an “absent God,” a position that is not metaphysically neutral. The way that a culture “images” God thus has profound consequences, which Schindler explores at length.
This lecture is provided courtesy of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. The full title of the lecture is “America & the End of Civilization: God and the Disenchantment of Culture,” and its occasion was the Institute’s 2015 conference on the theme “The Church in the Modern World: Fifty Years Later,” a reflection on the Second Vatican Council’s document Gaudium et spes.
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