released 9/18/2026
In this extended conversation from 2013, D. C. Schindler discusses what it would mean to restore reason to its fullness from its current impoverished conception in the West. In The Catholicity of Reason (Eerdmans, 2013), he calls for a restoration of the wholeness of reason. Reason, he claims, cannot only include things that we can readily understand. It must include everything. Reason, unlike the maxim of the Enlightenment, is never alone. Instead, it is always ecstatic; it is always a relation. To know, Schindler argues, involves a personal, embodied, and contemplative engagement that far exceeds processing information. Our minds are not simply enfleshed computers. Human knowledge and consciousness form through a complex process involving reason, revelation, and relationship. Schindler explores the beautiful and often tense interplay between anticipation and surprise, fittingness and inevitability, freedom and receptivity, passion and discipline, the material and the spiritual.
A portion of this interview was originally published on Volume 120 of the Journal. An Archive Feature of that conversation is available here.
40 minutes
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