An Interview with Philosopher Tom Morris, Part 2
By David Baggett
An Interview with Philosopher Tom Morris, Part 2
by David Baggett
Tom Morris served for fifteen years as a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of more than 30 books and a sought-after speaker. He holds two masters degrees as well as a joint Ph.D. in both philosophy and religious studies from Yale University, as well as other, honorary doctorates in recognition of his public work in practical philosophy. Tom is now Chairman of the Morris Institute for Human Values in Wilmington, NC.
David Baggett: You describe yourself as shy. I’m sure that would come as quite a surprise to anyone who has seen you give a public lecture. How would you explain the discrepancy?
Tom Morris: When someone moves in next door to me, it may take me six weeks or six months to get the courage up to go say hello. And yet, I’ll talk freely to anyone sitting next to me on an airplane. I’m a walking paradox (one in philosophy, one in religious studies). Part of me would be happy sitting alone in my room reading and writing most of the day, and just taking breaks to talk to my wife, pat the dogs, and throw a ball to a cat to chase or disdain, depending on his or her mood. And then another part of me wants to be with those 5,000 people in Las Vegas, or those 10,000 in Orlando, or the 20 top executives in Silicon Valley. When this started happening, I began to realize more deeply that I really liked being around people who enjoyed and appreciated the ideas I was bringing them. And I had to get over the shyness to do the job. Of course, as a professor, I already learned a lot about how to do that. Like many performers, actors, singers, comics, and jugglers, I learned, for the sake of my audience and my effectiveness, to overcome any tendencies that would keep me from having a sort of exuberant effectiveness. People seem to respond uniquely to positive energy. And it’s always a joy.
But the two parts of me serve a purpose. The shy side encourages the scholarship and thought required to create new frameworks of ideas. The sociable showman side helps me get those ideas out into the world. I speak only on ideas that I’ve needed myself and that have changed my life for the better. Ultimately, great presentations happen where personal need and fulfillment meet the love of others amid the joy of service.
Baggett: Explain your vision of public philosophy. Is this a tradition that, after the likes of Emerson and perhaps James, has been neglected?
Morris: Public philosophy is in a sense just a version of public health. What would we think if all the physicians just stayed in their labs, discovering things, and talking about them among each other, but never brought those discoveries out into the world, or—worse yet—just worked on things that they happened to be interested in, whether those ideas would ever have any practical implications or not? We need basic research in science, all the sciences, without regard for payoff or practicality, but we also need applied science that aims at positive impact. I think of theoretical philosophy as immensely important, and I’ve loved doing it, but it’s not the only sort of philosophy that deserves attention. The practical side of philosophy has been neglected for a very long time in our culture. And I think we’ve all suffered as a result. I came to realize that I was being put into a position to do something about that.
But I had few role models in our time. What Emerson and James accomplished in their day gave me a sense that it can be done, and to great effect. And of course, there were other philosophers who had reached out to a broader audience, like Mortimer Adler, who was actually more of a historian than a philosopher, and Bertrand Russell, who maybe shouldn’t have reached out at all, but he could crack a good joke now and then. Sartre and Camus had made their splash, as it was, with a broader public, but a lot more was needed, and in a different direction, adumbrating a different sort of worldview. Pascal had inspired me, as had Kierkegaard. But rather than jokingly jabbing Jesuits or hilariously harpooning Hegel, I decided to focus on another set of issues. Give me another 200 years to work in practical philosophy, and I think I’ll get it right. But even now, it’s the most satisfaction I’ve ever felt in any intellectual pursuit, although figuring out the incarnation and tracing the implications of perfect being theology were pretty much fun, too.
Baggett: Tell us about your eight-part novel series—how it happened, what it’s about. Is this something you planned to do, or did it catch you by surprise?
Morris: This is definitely the wildest, most unexpected and gratifying story of my life. In February 2011, I woke up, had toast, jam, and coffee for breakfast, and, before I could get out of my chair to go work on a book about how to deal with change, one of the greatest changes and adventures of my life suddenly began. I started to see, as if in my mind’s eye, a vivid movie. It was something like the most amazing daydream of my life.
In an instant, I was watching and listening to an old man and a young boy who were sitting under a palm tree in the desert and talking about life. Their conversation was really great, so I ran up the stairs to my study and began to type as fast as I could, to catch up and keep up. I then put a short essay on The Huffington Post with the first rough version of that initial conversation. People reacted quickly and with great enthusiasm. “What is this?” “Is this the beginning of a book?” I honestly didn’t know what it was.
The movie then continued to play, most days, on and off, for almost four years. The result is, so far, eight completed books that my literary agents wouldn’t even look at, telling me that the great fiction editors don’t know me, and I should stick to my knitting. The truth was that they were the ones unknown to fiction editors and maybe didn’t want to go to the trouble. So, I created my own official publishing imprint, as a part of my Institute for Human Values, and brought out the books myself, with the help of a team of professionals and friends I was able to assemble. And now great thinkers from around the country are asking me to publish their book, and we’re doing it! There’s a big need for wisdom literature publication in our time, in the big area between university press publishing and the major New York firms who cater to mass audiences with only profit in mind. So my novels, and a couple of my nonfiction books are now in print due to this new venture, as are the works of others.
As to the novels: A former student of mine who is now a famous thriller novelist saw the first two books when they were freshly written, and said right away, “This is The Alchemist Meets Harry Potter Meets Indiana Jones!” That made me smile. The series has also been said to be like Lawrence of Arabia in the mode of Aristotle. So we can just hope. It’s my own little Narnia, or Lord of the Rings, a deeply but subtly Christian story of action, adventure, and ideas. One of my favorite people, and a very good philosopher, told me not long ago that the stories convey “a palpable sense of goodness” and that they had restored in him a sense of wonderment about life that had waned through the years.
Watching this inner movie and writing it all down has been the pinnacle of my experience as a philosopher. The things I've seen and heard and learned by viewing this mysterious movie go beyond anything I've ever read or discovered in more normal, ordinary ways.
Three weeks after the movie began to play, and well before I realized that I was in the process of writing a book and, of course, long before I knew it would be the first of many books, I woke up one day and had an almost equally unusual mental vision, where I saw something, again, almost like in a dream. It was clearly the front cover of a book called The Oasis Within. Noticing a banner across the top of the front cover in this surprising morning vision, I realized right away that it said, “Over Three Million Copies In Print.” So, I responded to that by thinking, “Ok, then. I'll write this book.” And the big adventure began.
The series is set in Egypt in 1934 and 1935, a place and time about which I knew almost nothing when all this started. But after 2 or 4 or 6 hours of writing, I’d google stuff that I saw—a certain kind of snake, a specific men’s wristwatch, a car of a particular make, and was amazed to discover, time after time, that these things were in fact in Egypt in the years of the story. I heard characters call out each others’ names—Arabic names I didn’t know—and those I checked out turned out not only to be legitimate names, but also most often perfect for the characters. It’s fiction, but all the research that novelists typically do before their writing, I didn’t have to do at all. I just wrote what I saw and heard. I never made up a plot point, or a conscious decision about what should happen. I watched. I listened. I wrote.
In the end, it’s a series about life, death, meaning, friendship, the secrets behind everyday events, and the extraordinary power of a well-focused mind. It’s about love and commitment and redemption. It’s about hope and good and evil and folly and wisdom. It’s about what moves people to chart their way in one direction rather than another. It’s about inner peace, inner power, and the role of this world in a much bigger scheme of things. It’s about dreams and difficulties, and triumph and ultimate reality. How could that not be fun to write?
You can see all the books on the novels page of my website, www.TomVMorris.com. We’re not at the 3 million copies yet, since I’m doing these books without a traditional marketing and sales department, or the sorts of national book tours I’ve done in the past. But through word of mouth, they’re gaining an audience of people who write me amazing letters! The youngest fan so far was 8 and the oldest, literally 88. So many older people say, “I wish these books had existed when I was younger! I could have avoided so much confusion in my life!”
Baggett: What would you say is the integrating theme—or themes—of your entire career, spanning your time in academia, your work as a public philosopher, as an essayist and novelist, and your future goals?
Morris: My overall theme is helping people think through the most important ideas there are, with conceptual precision and concrete imagination. I want to bring people the wisdom that will spark inspiration, guidance, personal growth, and even protection in a world of counterfeit insight.
My future goals are to keep doing it, and discover more new things that I can share with excitement and great satisfaction.
— David Baggett is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently The Moral Argument: A History, with Jerry Walls. Starting in the fall of 2020 he and his wife will be teaching at Houston Baptist University.
*This interview originally appeared at moralapologetics.com.
Quotable
In his highly acclaimed book Ethics After Babel, ethicist Jeffrey Stout, who does not write from the standpoint of religious faith, disapproves of what he sees as a “complete breakdown” of interaction between secular and religious ethics. Clearly this fissure has been caused by several factors, including an unwillingness among secular philosophers to dialogue with religious ethicists. But this is not the lone story. Just as troubling for Stout is the failure of religious ethicists to develop the implications of their beliefs in contradistinction to their secular counterparts and to state them with sufficient clarity and cogency. Stout writes,
To gain a hearing in our culture, theology has often assumed a voice not its own and found itself merely repeating the bromides of secular intellectuals in transparently figurative speech. . . . Meanwhile, secular intellectuals have largely stopped paying attention. They don’t need to be told, by theologians, that Genesis is mythical, that nobody knows much about the historical Jesus, that it’s morally imperative to side with the oppressed, or that birth control is morally permissible. The explanation for the eclipse of religious ethics in recent secular moral philosophy may therefore be . . . that academic theologians have increasingly given the impression of saying nothing atheists don’t already know.
While Stout’s critique of theology and religious ethics is not aimed solely—or even primarily—at evangelicals, his observation, spoken as an outsider to the faith, should give us pause and is eminently worth pondering.
Most Christians—evangelicals included—have not been taught to understand faith and life in terms of worldview, that is, in terms of an overarching framework for interpreting all of reality. Most believers would be unable to articulate what they believe in terms of a unified world- and life-view perspective. One symptom of this state of affairs is that most evangelical colleges and seminaries speak liberally of integrating faith and knowledge while offering few courses to show precisely how integration proceeds; correlatively, the same institutions typically devote numerous courses to Christian doctrine but a limited number to Christian ethics (or, at least, to demonstrating the indivisible link between doctrine and ethics).
Why is this? Part of the reason, it would seem, is the pietistic strain that is such an integral part of American evangelical history. This inward focus of a faith that is chiefly devotional and inspirational in character has unwittingly and not infrequently contributed to the neglect of the Christian mind. Because evangelicals pride themselves in their emphasis on direct experience with God through Christ, they tend to think and act as if cultivating the life of the mind, studying Christian doctrine, subordinating our beliefs and traditions to the consensus of history, and learning from the early church fathers are unnecessary at best or a waste of time at worst.
— J. Daryl Charles, The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism: Recovering the Church’s Moral Vision (Fontes Press, 2020), 101, 102.
Book Highlight
In his book The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism: Recovering the Church’s Moral Vision, evangelical ethicist J. Daryl Charles explores why contemporary American evangelicals “are, by and large, absent from the great ethical debates of the day.” The truth is, he laments, is that “we simply cannot speak of an approach to ethics that is distinctly Protestant evangelical. Why is that?” To help address this problem, Charles equips evangelicals to think biblically and theologically about ethics and provides guidance for engaging with those around us who hold non-Christian ethical perspectives.
“This is a remarkably astute work of Christian social ethics and cultural criticism. It combines the best of cultural analysis with the best of philosophical and theological scholarship. I found its arguments well stated, well documented and convincing. . . . The public square no longer lacks an evangelical Christian vision for the future. This is a book to be read and studied by every Christian in a leadership role, whether in the church or the larger society.”
—James W. Sire, former editor of InterVarsity Press and author of more than twenty books, including The Universe Next Door.
Contents
The Cultural Moment and the Cultural Mandate
Ethics and the Evangelical Legacy
The Necessity of Ethical Formation
Retooling the Evangelical Mindset: Ethics and Worldview
Retooling the Evangelical Mindset: Ethics and the Permanent
Biblical Resources for Ethics: The Pauline Model
Biblical Resources for Ethics: The Petrine Model
Biblical Resources for Ethics: The Disciple’s Model
Toward a Biblical Ethic: Principles in Polarity
Thinking with the Church
J. Daryl Charles, PhD, serves as the Acton Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is author of eighteen books, including Natural Law and Religious Freedom (Routledge), America and the Just War Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press), and Wisdom’s Work: Essays on Ethics, Vocation, and Culture (Acton Institute Press), as well as editor of Abraham Kuyper, Common Grace, volumes 2 and 3 (Lexham Press).
Find The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism: Recovering the Church’s Moral Vision at Amazon and Fontes Press.
* This is a sponsored post.
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