This episode welcomes Chris Bellitto of Kean University to the podcast. We talk about his first career as a journalist, as well as how that background helped him as a scholar, teacher, and public commentator on church events. We also discuss working with students in the classroom in a way that both provokes reflection while sustaining civil conversation. Lastly, we talk about his newest book, Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue, which came out last month with Georgetown University Press.
Dr. Christopher Bellitto is Professor of History at Kean University. He earned his BA in Journalism and Politics from New York University and his MA and his Ph.D. in Medieval History from Fordham University. His research focuses especially on Catholic Church history, and he is the author of numerous books, including Ageless Wisdom: Lifetime Lessons from the Bible (Paulist Press, 2016), 101 Questions and Answers on Popes and the Papacy (Paulist Press, 2008), and The General Councils: A History of the Twenty-One Church Councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (Paulist Press, 2002). His most recent book is Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue (Georgetown University Press, 2023).
You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.
Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.
Transcript of Episode #49 - Chris Bellitto
Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft in vocation of theology.
I'm your host, Stephen Okey.
In today's episode, I talk with Chris Bellitto, a church historian at Kean University. We talk about his first career as a journalist, as well as how that background helped him as a scholar, teacher and public commentator on church events.
We also discuss working with students in the classroom in a way that provokes reflection while also sustaining civil conversation. Lastly, we talk about his newest book, Humility: The Secret History of a Lost Virtue, which came out last month with Georgetown University Press.
For those of you who like my technical updates about the podcast, you are in luck. This is the first episode of the podcast to be released through Substack. I moved the show over from our previous hosting service and have joined it to the Okeydoxy newsletter that I write. So if you go to stephenokey.substack.com, you can see all my newsletters, including the ongoing Celluloid Christ series, as well as all new and past episodes of the Daily Theology Podcast. While there you could become a free subscriber to get email updates when there are new episodes, or you can even become a paid subscriber, if you want to support the show and get early access to episodes.
You can still support the show on Ko-Fi.com/dailytheopod, if you're looking for one-time donation opportunities, rather than a recurring subscription.
And once again, thank you for listening.
[Music Transition]
Stephen Okey: So today for the Daily Theology Podcast, I'm talking to Chris Bellitto of Kean University. Chris, thanks so much for being here.
Chris Bellitto: Thanks for having me.
Stephen Okey: Typically when I talk to theologians, I ask them, you know, how did you get into theology? You are not a theologian, as you like to remind me. You're a church historian. So how did you get into church history?
Chris Bellitto: Right. So, like justice and mercy, church history and theology should kiss more often than they do. And I did not start out, as looking to be a college professor, I had kind of 2 things that were competing with each other when I was in college, I, I'm a muggle. I tell my students, I did not have a history degree undergrad. I studied journalism, political politics at NYU.
The politics was kind of philosophy and I had a religion minor. And I had these 2 strands. When I was a kid, I wanted to be Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. And, but I also wanted to be my mother. My mother was a grammar school teacher.
Right. So I'm the, I'm the last of three boys. So when I went to kindergarten, my mother went back to grad school to get a master's degree in education, which is what she always wanted to do. And so she and I would do our homework together, as I called it, in the kitchen where I learned to cook as well, growing up grandma in the house and, but when she, the week before.
She taught at the local parochial school and the week before classes started, when she would go in and set up her classroom, I would go with her and I just fell in love with the smell and the excitement of all of that.
But coming out of college, I did the journalism thing because Newsweek had given me an internship and, that became a job and, you know, see how far that goes. And then they, I got riffed from Newsweek, but they
said that they would keep me in another division. And I thought, no, no, let me try the high school. So I taught high school, my high school, the Welcome Back Kotter period of my life.
Um, for a couple of years, I was also discerning a Jesuit vocation. I decided I needed to go into the novitiate, to understand that. And I was in the novitiate, this was the fall of 1990 in Syracuse, and realized that my vocation was not to be a Jesuit though, I ended up getting a doctorate under a Jesuit.
I see the world through Jesuit eyes. It's still, still my spirituality, you know, they plant that chip in your brain and you can't take it out.
Stephen Okey: I had 14 years of Jesuit schools.
Chris Bellitto: So, you know, right. You have there, they moved the satellite and you have to mention them.
And I really fell in love with, with, with teaching and I, I wouldn't give up my journalism degree for anything because it taught me to be precise, it taught me to write under deadline, all of those great things. I mean, my first job at Newsweek was being a fact checker. It doesn't even exist anymore. Facts don't exist anymore. So I guess that's, that's okay.
And, one of the attractions, of course, of being with the Jesuits was, was, you You know, looking at an academic career. So that, you know, of those two things, journalism and an academic career, the academic career won out. And I specifically wanted to study history. And I wanted to study a period where I didn't have to exclude things.
So I think in any period we study, we need to study economics and art history and all of those other things. It's, it's kind of easiest to do that for me in the medieval period, because there's no way you can pull all that stuff out. And I went to Fordham for graduate school and Fordham's program kind of forced you to do that. I was, I didn't have to be forced, I embraced that. But you had to have a home department for me, history, but you also had to take courses in theology, philosophy, and art history. They have a big medieval studies program.
So I am a church historian who does ecclesiology. So, you know, I could, I guess I could teach a course in ecclesiology. But, but I think that unfortunately, you know, John O'Malley, I think is someone who really married church history and ecclesiology very nicely, but I, I, that's something that I would like to see, for instance, the College Theology Society, or conferences do better.
Stephen Okey: I remember when I was looking at going into grad school from undergrad, they had a meeting with a lot of the faculty at Georgetown in theology and religious studies with all, like a lot of us who were thinking of different directions.
And one of the professors, and I don't remember, I don't remember his name now, because he wasn't someone I'd had in class, but he did anthropology of religion. And he said that, you know, especially when you're doing a field that has overlaps with other disciplines, the thing you need to think about is not, the main thing you want to do it's what is the secondary thing you want to do and for him, it was, did he want to do more sort of standard anthropological reading or more religion reading, you know, as his secondary thing, and it was the religion side.
And so that was like, you want to read Augustine more than he wanted to read, I'm not sure who his comparison was, but that made a lot of sense to me, in terms of like interdisciplinary interests.
Chris Bellitto: Even when I teach now, I tell my students, so I have a four course sequence that takes me two years.
I'm in a history department. So I teach Greek Civ in the fall, Roman Civ in the spring, Medieval I, Medieval II. But all of the courses are called civilization. And I tell my students the first day, that's the most important word in this course. It's not Greek history, because history to them is names, dates, places.
Stephen Okey: Yeah they get, they get caught up on, do I have to know these dates? So you have, interest in these sort of, essentially, like, sort of the generalist skills. Like, you want to cover all the various fields, as they pertain to these larger civilizational questions.
And you're working with predominantly undergraduate students, right? Are they taking your course because they have to? Are they taking your courses because they're excited by the topic? I remember when I was an undergrad and I was briefly thinking about studying classics, there was definitely a sense of like, why on earth would you do that?
What's the reaction of your students to, to this as a discipline and as a subject?
Chris Bellitto: Well, I think there's two things. One is... We don't have a strong religion, philosophy program where I am and and students are interested in history of religion and I'm very clear with my students.
I tell them I'm a believer. I go to church most Sundays. I'm of the, more progressive side of my church and I don't care what they believe. And I'm very clear about that in my crusades course. I say, you know, I, I don't care if you don't believe in Mohammed's night journey. But we're going to read Mohammed's Night Journey because we can't understand what makes the Holy Lands holy to Muslims without reading Mohammed's Night Journey in the same way that you may not believe in many gods.
But how do you understand Roman Civ without believing in many gods? And what I find is that when I'm doing Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, or I'm doing learned ignorance in the Middle Ages, you know, students... we have a working class body of students. It takes them five or six years to graduate.
They have these big questions, but there's no place on campus for them to kind of explore it, right? So I'm not their minister in any way. I'm not their counselor, but I do say here are how other cultures address the big questions. So that's one part of it. The other thing is when you're teaching the courses that I teach, so I'm the pre modern guy, I teach ancient medieval reformation, a history of the papacy course as well.
At the 3, 000 and 4, 000 level, any kid taking that course is already, you know, these are our people, right? These are, we're fellow geeks, we found each other, right? Someone who's 20 years old taking this course is a Harry Potter kid. Already they're already readers. They're self selecting, right? So there's a Harry Potter kid and an Assassin's Creed kid and a Lord of the Rings kid and a Narnia kid.
You know, this is all that kind of, you know, gestalt. So people come in, I think jazzed.
Stephen Okey: That's good to hear. I, my experience of undergrads is there, there is a real excitement when they actually get to classes that are not job directed, I guess, but there's also that little bit of You know, this isn't going to help me get a job, so why am I here? And there's some amount of winning them over that I always feel like I have to do. And I'm, I'm very sympathetic. We also, like a lot of our students are, they're working class, they're working their way through college. They're first in their families to go to college, so I'm, I'm sensitive to the, you know, the economic pressures of it, but I also.
Chris Bellitto: I'm sorry. And, and, and you see the excitement when these, I mean, I give you an example from the other day, right? I was talking about how Greeks tell time and telling them the difference between Chronos and Kairos, right?
And that's exactly the example I gave, you know, Chronos for my kids, Chronos is, keeping an eye on your watch. So, you know, when to go to your second job. Right. And Kairos, you know, is when your kids are born when you fall in love and realize what lust is and what love is and they immediately grab on to that, you know, and they'll start talking about a moment that they didn't know was a Kairos moment, you know, and now they begin to understand the relationship between the gods and humans and things like that.
And that kind of It kind of pops for them. And another example is, is the crusades course, right? Where, you know, basically you can, you could call my crusades, it's called the crusades, but it's really the Crusades: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Right. And nobody ever talks about the Jews and the crusades, right?
It's like, why, you know, I had, I have had students say, why are we talking about Judaism and the crusades? And so I kind of explained that and, and my. And my story, and I think in my field that this is true, is that, and this would be different than, than people who are listening to the Daily Podcast here, right?
Because, because you're theologians, I find a lot of historians are afraid to talk about religion and religion, whether you're a believer or not, religion is one of the most powerful. forces in history, forget church history, and it is one of the most powerful voices for good, and one of the most powerful voices for evil.
And after 9/11, which of course changed the way all of us teach the crusades, whether we like it or not, I was at a conference and there was kind of a round table, so maybe it's 2006, 7, 8, and people were talking about teaching the crusades, and We were presenting our approaches and one woman came up to me and she said to me, you seem to talk a lot about religion in the crusades course.
And I thought, well, yeah, and she said to me, Oh, I, I try to talk about religion as little as possible. It's far too dangerous. And, and, and I thought to myself, I didn't say this, but I thought to myself, well, you're teaching something, but it's not the crusades. How do you possibly do that? So I think students are, are, are interested in talking about religion.
And I, you know, I, in that course, in the crusades course, I ripped the bandaid off, you know, we go to these anti Islamic websites that went up after, after 9/11, and we go to anti-Semitic sites and, after the Christchurch shooting, I happened to be in New Zealand, on a Fulbright gig, a few months in Christchurch, a few months after the shooting, the shooting was April 20, uh, 19, and the shooter in his manifesto, you know, was, was as many of these white supremacists do, is referencing Urban the Second and referencing, you know, the crusades.
And so you, you start to give public lectures, like, why do the middle ages matter? And you realize they really do matter. And most of what people are talking about is not history, but is, you know, myth history. Uh, you know, Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have a new book out called Myth America, where they talk about these, why these myths, which are debunked matter.
Stephen Okey: I teach a course on war ethics, it's like, you know, we do just war, but we also do holy war, we do pacifism and I, I we look at them in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. And so they, so they, they have to read Urban the Second, and they have to read Bernard of Clairvaux.
And it's always striking for them. I had this, this great moment with a student, as a result of that, where, you know, he, he had this very strong, I mean, this is only a year or two ago, but the same kind of post 9/11 sense of, like, for him, he could not understand Islam as anything other than essentially, you know, jihadist, Islamic terrorism. And so he couldn't, he couldn't reconcile the idea that, like, most Muslims are not, this is not the way that they think. And even, like, theologically, don't share the same commitments. But he's, he's a very devout Catholic. And I, and we had done pacifism in that course, we had done... Holy war in that course, we were in the midst of focusing more specifically on, on Islam itself. And I asked him, can you as a Catholic accept that Urban the Second and Dorothy Day are both Catholics? He was like, yes. And I just sort of waited. And he's like, okay. Like it, it clicked for him, you know, in a way that, wouldn't have before.
And so there, like, yeah, I'm still a little bit just gobsmacked of the person you talk to who just doesn't do religion in the course of the Crusades. But I, I mean, I can understand the sense that it's fraught, but I, on some level, especially in the humanities, almost anything that's interesting is at least a little bit fraught.
Chris Bellitto: I mean, isn't it our job to, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable?
Stephen Okey: Yeah.
Chris Bellitto: You know, in, in, you know, in a classroom. I mean, is this, is, this is why Socrates is such an annoying man. I mean, he walks around and he asks, he exposes the fact that people don't believe what they say that they believe.
I mean, he would piss me off too, who wants to be revealed in that way? But isn't that is, you know, the most important thing we can do is teach students how to ask questions.
Stephen Okey: Yeah if it's not provocative on some level, it, it encourages a certain sort of complacency that is easier in some respects, but, it's much less useful and honestly, it's just a lot less fun.
Chris Bellitto: Yeah. And, and the problem is that we're in a higher ed climate where if you can't count it, it doesn't count. You know, I mean, the most important thing that we do in the classroom cannot be held in your hands.
The most important thing is, you know, compassion when someone's grandmother died, or, you know, telling people to take the day off or, you know, saying that the rules apply except when they don't, you pull the kid aside and say, listen, this was due at two o'clock, hand it in tomorrow and keep your mouth shut. You can't measure that.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. It's interesting too, in my experience that a lot of the, the narrative that we tell about what we want to happen with students is, you know, some version of we want them to grow and be better citizens, better people, et cetera, but that's not really a measurable thing.
And for me, so... I don't know if you have the same situation, but like in every syllabus, we have our, our objective student learning outcomes that are measurable and they have their, you know, columns with the rubrics and things like that. And the two outcomes I always actually want from a course is I want my students to be more virtuous people and I want them to understand what we did in class. And I don't push the first one because I know I'll get pushback, but even the second one I've been told you can't say understand because you can't measure understanding. But that's the whole goal like that's what I really want to get to. And I get that things like identify and assess and blah blah blah are part of that but
Chris Bellitto: I find it's easier to play the game and then do; it's a lot easier post tenure.
Stephen Okey: I mean, I'm post tenure, but I'm still in the early phase of, uh, in the same way that I like to provoke my students, I also sometimes like to provoke my supervisors.
Chris Bellitto: Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, the people in my neighborhood, they sometimes they'll say to me, well, what do you teach?
And I tell them students and then they're like, okay, smart ass. What do you really teach? And then I say skills. Now, I happen to do that through history. I could do that through chemistry. Well, I couldn't do it through chemistry. It can be done through chemistry. For me, the thing that I always say to my students, I always make this very dramatic.
I say, so when you leave this classroom 100 days from now? I don't know if it's 100 days, but it sounds good. I want you to be able to think better. And the evidence of the fact that you think better is that you read better, you speak better, and you write better. That that's what I care about, you know, and civil discourse.
I, I, I, I insist on civil discourse in the classroom and we disagree. I mean, I, I have a just war course as well. We'd have the crusades course, you know, we let it rip, but I'm trying to model for my students that, you know, I have said to my students, I think you're wrong about, about that, but your reasoning is, is really good.
I just don't accept your reasoning. And I think because I don't raise my voice or call them an idiot. I think that's something that we have to model for our students live in a Fox News MSNBC world. We all do right. I mean the inmates are running the asylum. And, you know, I think that there's a; being a moderate, whether as a, as a believer or not a believer or a Democrat or Republican or whoever you are, is now a radical position. You know, when people say Pope Francis is a is a revolutionary. I totally disagree. He's a radical moderate. The fact is that being a moderate is now a radical position. You know, it's a bizarre statement, but it's true.
Stephen Okey: So one of the things I, and I'm curious about you on this, and I feel like I have a sense from what you said where you would stand on this, but one of the things I often do struggle with with students is to what degree to let on my own position on things, because I sometimes feel like there is a real value in me performing as the same kind of intellectual participant with them, like sharing my thoughts, that sort of thing. There's also a part of me that recognizes in terms of power dynamics in the classroom.
I don't want students to just say what they think I want to hear, but on some level also, it might be that if I'm very upfront about what I think they're not wondering what I want to hear, they know, and so then it's a little, you know, there's less of a guessing game with it. But I also, and I, this is one of the things I am committed to it's just, I'm not always sure how it fits into sort of those options is I, I recognize, like, I have to play the unpopular option in a lot of class discussions because otherwise it won't get thought through or won't get engaged.
And so sometimes, like, I have to be, I have to be Dorothy Day because most students are very resistant to any sort of strong pacifism. And other times I have to be Urban the Second, because, some of them maybe think that way, but, you know, the, the, the language in there is, is not great.
And so I have to, I have to perform in a certain sense, or even on, on other ethical issues. Like if we have a class discussion about any of the kind of hot button, moral questions, I have to sort of play the role of certain positions in order to get people to work with them in a way that otherwise they won't because, my experience at least my sense is that students are often resistant to putting themselves at risk, especially early in a course, on things that might matter to them. Does that make sense?
Chris Bellitto: Yeah, it does make sense. I think my experience is I haven't been teaching freshmen in some time. I think that's also a difference.
So that by the time I get them in upper division, they kind of have a sense of... so first semester college freshmen are still in high school, just like first semester high school seniors are still juniors, something I learned when I was teaching high school. So I think in an upper division course, they may have kind of figured out what it is to be a college student.
And they, I think somebody who's a junior or a senior might have a better sense of, oh, I understand what you're doing here. You're playing devil's advocate, right? But I'm always very explicit about that. I'm going to deliberately make a provocative statement here. And then my line is always, now don't go all Facebook, Instagram on me and say, Dr. B said, right? And I have this disclaimer that even if they put it up and say, you know, Dr. B is a racist jerk, you know, when I say something like, like let's do a thought experiment here, right? And I do this early in the course when I talk about what does it mean to think historically. So you've got a 10 year old white kid in Alabama in 1835, whose parents are slave owners. Is that kid racist? Right. And then we get into this whole discussion, you know, and typically it comes down to he's racist, but he doesn't know he's racist. And then I say well, is he then culpable for being racist, you know, and it and it's, you know, and of course, someone someday is going to tweet out that Dr B is a racist or something, but.
And I think that that just comes with the territory, you know, and we, we, we, we, we had that example of the art historian, I think it was last year, you may have seen. The art historian who showed an image in class that depicted Mohammed's face. Right. So some Muslims say depict no creatures because they are all in the image and likeness of Allah. Others say you can depict animals, but not humans. Some say humans, but not Muhammad, right?
In this image, Muhammad has features, you know, eyes, ears, and the professor gave a disclaimer in case there were any students and a student did object. And then there was this, you know, very interesting discussion, it made the New York Times even, on you know, did the professor handle it right? Did the, did the administrators handle it right? You know, I'm not sure I, I can render a verdict on that because I didn't, you know, I didn't get into the weeds on it, but it's a typical example of that.
Omid Safi at Duke, someone I respect greatly, says, Well, isn't the job in the classroom to make some people uncomfortable? You know, and, and the teacher had said, Hey, listen, this is coming up. You may wish to, I don't know what she said, avert your eyes or I'll count to 10 and, you know, close your eyes that was some, some, did something what sounded to me like appropriate without being able to render a verdict on that. I mean, we're in such a world that here I am giving all of these qualifiers. But, I, I do think that sometimes our, our role in class.
I mean, I get a little nervous about it because we have some combat vets and, you know, if I'm showing Greek Civ and I'm showing this thing from 300, you know, there's blood, guts and gore in that. And usually I'll try to pull them aside the week before and say, here's what we're doing; you want to miss the next class, that's cool or whatever. Something like that. You know, and then I leave it. Then it's their decision, right? They're adults and they can make those decisions.
But, you know, it's kind of like the Catholic tradition, right? People want to say that the Catholic tradition is to the right or to the left. And it's, as you say, so nicely, and I will be stealing that, thank you, that both Urban the Second and Dorothy Day are Catholics, right? I mean, this is part of the resistance to Pope Francis, right? Is that he wants this kind of big tent Catholicism and, and, Cardinal Tobin years ago, probably 15, 20 years ago said the problem with American Catholicism is that we have allowed political discourse to infect the church. Right. The exact opposite of Gaudium et Spes.
Stephen Okey: Yeah, I think that's true. I also teach men becoming permanent deacons, as part of my job. And everyone who comes in is very devout in terms of their faith or, you know, clearly deciding to serve the church, generally for no real reward or they don't get paid.
But for some of them, you can tell that their, their political commitments were more formative in some respects than their religious ones. And so it becomes a lens through which religious issues get, get managed. And some of that is because politically, things that are important to the church have been sorted in different camps, depending on the topic.
You can get a read for where someone is on certain issues just by the way they talk about it in the, the religious context.
Chris Bellitto: Yeah, I think it's also very interesting that, that I, unlike many of my colleagues who perhaps are listening, I teach at a public university.
And one of the reasons I'm teaching at a public university is that, I taught at a Catholic seminary, Dunwoodie, St. Joseph's Seminary, from 96 to 2001, where I was fired in the ides of March massacre by Cardinal Egan. Not personally, he just fired all the lay faculty because God forbid we should have PhDs and be qualified, to be replaced by priests without PhDs.
And I think I had a hard time getting a job in some Catholic schools because people thought that I was far more conservative than I am, because of where I was teaching, but they, but the, and so it just is safer. Not that I'm a flamethrower, but I mean, it's just safer to what I do.
You know, the old line, if you want to save your faith, study church history. If you want to lose your faith, work for the church. And so there was, part of that, but it's also, when we're teaching, I think it depends if you're teaching undergraduates or graduates, if you're teaching in a Catholic institution or religious affiliated institution or not, there's a whole different climate.
I mean, the climate among candidates for permanent deacons and for seminarians is don't get cut.
Stephen Okey: Yeah.
Chris Bellitto: Right. So you're just going to tow the party line. And then a lot of them, at least at Dunwoodie, were trying to like out Catholic each other, you know, like at some point, some said, well, we're going to start wearing cassocks to class, you know, and they found some ruling from 1712, you know, and my answer to that is, okay, well, I'm going to start wearing my doctoral robes to class.
Stephen Okey: Nice.
Chris Bellitto: You know, and you know, you want to play games, let's play games. So clientele becomes important as well. You know, who, who is your audience? Why are they there?
Stephen Okey: So a second thing I wanted to ask you about, you're a very active commentator on contemporary church issues in the media, news, podcasts, and whatnot. I'm guessing some of this just comes out of the journalism background, having worked at Newsweek and all of that. But I, I was curious a bit about how you got into that, and then I'm also just sort of curious, how do you see that as part of your professional work, as part of your life as teacher, researcher, church historian?
Chris Bellitto: Yeah, I don't see it as ancillary in, in any way. So when I self identify, I, I self identify as a teacher, not even as professor, and I think it goes back to teaching high school. And I never got a PhD because I wanted to talk to 5 other people. I really, really enjoy, I'm working on one now, writing 25 page journal articles with Latin footnotes.
And you know, I, I like spending five hours writing three sentences with four footnotes. I really, really enjoy that. . No, I mean, I'm not, I I like
Stephen Okey: that. I understand. Yeah, yeah, I know the feelings.
Chris Bellitto: This is total geek out, right. But all of those things serve the purpose of making me informed. And giving me the, the auctoritas in, in the positive sense, not the power sense, of being able to give a 90 second soundbite to CNN.
I mean, I had someone on my campus refer to me, in a very derogatory way, as a song and dance man. Oh, you're on CNN. And my answer is, you know, how many books I have to read to say something for 20 seconds on CNN, you know, and I hope that doesn't come up across as arrogant. It's the exact opposite.
You know, it's really, really, really hard to get to do that. But I think because I came up as a journalist, I kind of know, when a reporter calls, I'll say to them, are you looking for background? Are you looking for, what do you need? Do you need 30 seconds? You need 50 seconds? I remember having a conversation with Nicole Winfield at AP once, and she said, can we, I don't even remember what the document was, but it was some document. It was like 20 years ago. Can we just read this through together? So that you can help me understand. I love that. My goal when I talk to a reporter is not to get my name in the paper. My role when I'm working with a reporter is to help that person understand.
And so I will sometimes say, I'm going to give you the sexy 20 second soundbite, but you have to listen to me for 2 minutes to understand that. And so it's about building relationships, I think. So I see it as part and parcel. And I think, you know, as somebody who studies the middle ages, that's a very medieval notion of what the university is.
The university was no ivory tower. You know, the university in the middle ages was right there writing, you know, what's a quodlibet? Quodlibet is an op ed. You know, what, what's going on? Let's figure out what's going on. Let's talk about it. Let's look at the pros and the cons, whether you're doing that in a scholastic way, or in a rabbinic way.
So I see that as part and parcel of my field, and as part and parcel of my, what I see as my vocation, but when I say that, I don't mean that in a religious way, when I'm at Kean, but in my own spirituality, you know, I, I can do very few things I, I can teach, I can write and I can cook, you know, outside of the classroom.
I actually have very, very poor instincts. You know, when it comes to interpersonal relations, I can't change the oil in my car, so these are the gifts God gave me and I'm going to give those gifts back.
Stephen Okey: What advice would you give for listeners of this podcast, and also the host of this podcast, who might be interested in doing more sort of public facing, kind of work like that in terms of whether it's, you know, writing op eds and writing short pieces, or when, periodically the communications office at the school sends me, you know, a reporter is looking for X, Y, Z, can you comment on it?
What suggestions, what advice would you have for those of us looking to do more of that?
Chris Bellitto: Well, one thing that we might do, for instance, at the College Theology Society, either as a webinar and/or at conferences, which we've done in the past, I've done this, for instance, with Elena Procario Foley, Vincent Miller and people is, is do training sessions.
It's helpful at those training sessions to have journalists. And so typically, when we have conferences that are in or near media centers, I try to do that. I did that with the American Catholic Historical Association with Rachel Zoll of blessed memory, with AP, probably better than 10 years ago.
You get people who have crossed back and forth like David Gibson at Fordham who runs the Fordham Center for Religion and Culture, who can talk about both sides of the issues. You could do workshops on it. You can practice, you know, maybe that's something that we can do, the two organizations with which I'm organized, the American Catholic Historical Association and College Theology Society, or do more programming, but there again you have to think outside the box right so I once, for an organization I won't name, wanted to bring in New York, wanted to bring a journal, big name journalist in and and this person said, yeah, you know, I'm in Manhattan, I'll come in, I'll talk for 45 minutes, I'll go back to my office. And then the organizers of the conference, oh, no, they have to join the society and they have to register for the program.
Well, I'm not going to ask that person to do that. You know, it's just, you know, and my response was that's stupid, and then well, then the person can't be on the program. Okay, well, that's stupid too. And that's short sighted. So we have to kind of. You know, it's kind of like when you and I get frustrated with our own organizations or our own universities, you know, like, you know, the mission statement says equity, and then when you say what this isn't equity, you know, well, that's, you know, that's just the mission statement, you know, so I think we have to get, you know, more creative. So I'd like to see us do more workshops. You know, maybe we can devote one of these podcasts to it and do a webinar.
Read, read, read the people you admire, right? You know, the people who really do this well, the people who just know, you know, call up, have a conversation, have coffee at a conference with Natalia Imperatori-Lee, who's just a master at this. This is why NCR keeps calling her and things like that. There are people who are just good at it.
And if you're not good at it, don't do it. If you're uncomfortable, especially pre tenure, don't do it. Don't feel pressured.
Stephen Okey: No, that's a good point. So one of the reasons why you and I are talking today, I've had you on my list to talk with for a while, actually, but the, the proximate cause, you have a new book out, titled Humility: the Secret History of a Lost Virtue, from Georgetown University Press. And what was the impetus for you to write this book?
Chris Bellitto: So normally when I'm writing a book, I know what the next book is that I want to do. And in the mid 2010s, I was writing a book that became Ageless Wisdom: Lifetime Lessons from the Bible from Paulist because the goal there was, I, being a good Catholic, I had never read the Bible.
So I wanted to read the Bible start to finish, but I didn't want to just do it without a lens and so I was as I'm getting older as my, my father passed away in 2014, as my mentors were passing away, I wanted to see whether the conventional wisdom that as you get older, you get wiser was true. And I thought, well, the Bible is a good place to begin.
And so I found that that wasn't true in the Bible. And as I was researching wisdom, humility kept coming up. And I didn't want to confuse the book. So I banked all of that stuff on humility. And then I, and then really, as my country began to fall apart, and as my church began to fall apart, I began to wonder, as all of us are, what is the candle that I can light? What contribution can I make to this? And it just seems to me that within my church and within my country, humility was lacking.
So I had this material, but I didn't want to write a book only on religion, right? So you can read this book. It's kind of like the crusades, right? So you can read this book and not be Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, be a believer or not. Nevertheless, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had a major impact on humility, but so did polytheistic Greco Roman culture in positive, negative ways and Enlightenment and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Dr. Faustus and things like that.
So I wrote this, this kind of biography, up until the very end, I was really grateful. Here's another answer to your question: the NEH actually has a grant called the public scholar grant and it's to support work when you're writing a book for outside academia. I mean, how great is that?
Right? That there's grant money for that. Well, that tells you that the NEH sees a value in this, right? And, you know, we probably all follow John Fea, Kevin Kruse, people like this, you know, I think historians have a role to play in the world in which we're working right now.
And so that all became the impetus to write this book, which was called a biography in the NEH grant and was a biography almost to the end where the editor, Al Bertrand at Georgetown, and Georgetown University Press has a tradition of publishing on virtue and ethics, said nah secret history is kind of sexier.
You know, I thought, okay, well, sell more books. Great. Um, but essentially it is a biography. I begin with fear of the Lord with, with Moses, and I go all the way through chronologically the star of the book, I hope is the chapter on learned ignorance in the middle ages when people really understood.
You know, people say Bernard of Clairvaux was against Abelard because Abelard was so intellectual. It's not true. Bernard of Clairvaux was not anti intellectual, but what he's saying was Abelard has no guardrails, right? And, and, and humility is one of those guardrails, right? You know, this is as much as we could know up to this point, Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th century, you know, he says, our knowledge of God is a polygon and a polygon can get close to a circle, but it is never going to be a circle.
And so you just have to understand that, right? We get as far as we can with the tools that we have. It's kind of like cold case files, right? We didn't have the DNA in 1972, but we have the blood sample from 1972. Underwater archaeology, right? You know, we know where Alexander the Great's tomb is. We just didn't have the technology to find it.
And it probably will be found or at least located, you know, in, in the next 50 years or something like that. And so Al at at Georgetown, who's just a terrific line editor made the book better for which I'm grateful. Sometimes referred to the book, the manuscript that's a 150 page introduction to the epilogue.
And and I also should say that I wrote it. So the published version is like 180 pages. The manuscript is about 240. And another publishing house almost took it, but they said, why didn't you write a 400 page history of humility? And I said, because I want people to read it. Right. I mean, how many times have you read a great 200 page novel that was unfortunately 300 pages long?
Stephen Okey: Yeah.
Chris Bellitto: Right. Um, And so I deliberately,
Stephen Okey: and some great theology books that were,
Chris Bellitto: Yeah, right. You know, and, and so I deliberately, I don't, you know, if I can't convince you with two examples, I'm not going to convince you with 22 examples. Right. So, you know, what I was really writing was sort of like, what are the takeaways?
Right. So, so if I can share those, you know, you know, with you, I think that if you look at the history of it, it's what humility provides is perspective and proportion. Jean Gerson,around 1400, the chancellor at the University of Paris has a delicious line where he says, discretion is the daughter of humility. It's just, it's just a lovely line that I'm still unpacking because I'm doing some work on him now.
And so it gives you a set, you know, the humility says I don't know at all. And if I don't know at all what follows from that, I have to find other people who can fill in my holes, which means I have to be grateful, which means I have to be vulnerable, which means I have to ask for help, which means the world doesn't revolve around me and my cell phone, which means me first means you second.
And what does you second mean for the common good? So I think humility makes you vulnerable and grateful. I think it promotes moderation, to be the radical moderate, you know. When I was doing this and I reached out to certain people, Omid Safi, one of them, but other Muslim scholars, I said, so what's the word in Arabic for humility?
And they're like, yeah, we don't have one. And I said, well, what do you mean? So I said, well, it's so, it's so ingrained in the fundamental submission to the greater power, but it's not the submission. And, you know, I'm little and you're big and please don't beat me up. You know, it's just that sense of what is my relationship?
What is my sizeness? I don't want to say smallness, but what is my sizeness relative to Yahweh, or Jehovah, or Allah, or the Father, or the Spirit, or Jesus sizeness? Right. And, and that gives you, I think, a sense of moderation. So these Muslim friends were saying, well, it's, it's related to patience. It's related to submission. It's related to proportion. And so they helped me fill that hole that I didn't have. And a good friend of mine, who is a rabbi as well.
And I think it can fight stubbornness. I think it can fight the notion that, you know, what, what do we do now? We double down, you know, I look at things that people have said in past administrations at my university. I look at past leaders of the United States. I look at past and current leaders of the church and I say to myself, I've learned not to expect honor from people who don't have shame. And I think if you're humble, you have to have shame, in the best sense. Yeah. In the best sense. Right. I mean, this book is not an indictment of pride.
Aristotle doesn't talk about humility. It talks about pride. Right. And, and they're not opposites. Right. So, so in, in the Aristotelian world, a virtue is between two vices, right? So courage is between being stupid and reckless. Right. And being timid. Right. So pride sits between humiliation and hubris. So there is a role for proper pride, right?
Yeah. When, when it becomes the Shakespearean, you know, tragedy, right? You know, this is why Nixon is a Shakespearean character, right? Or Macbeth. When does, when does persistence become stubbornness? Mm-hmm. , right? When does a virtue become a vice? Right? So humility can be humiliation. Or it can go in the other direction of hubris, or it can be right in the middle.
And that, you know, I think promotes moderation and, you know, and that humility can be learned. So learned ignorance is actually the next thing I'm working on a little bit more in kind of the academic writings. I found Gerson has this list of 12 degrees of humility, which he writes around the time that he says discretion is the daughter of humility. And so that's kind of the next thing that I want to work on. I have to say that as I was writing the humility book, it did not become clear to me what the next book is. And, and, and I'll be cool with that. You know, I'm 58. If I spend the next 10 or 15 years helping other people get published, I'd be happy.
I really, I'm an editor as well. And one of, I edit for Brill, and I love being a midwife to help other people, you know, that's a really, really cool thing when you edit other people. And so I, you know, I think that one of the roles of tenured full professors is a duty, not, it's not on the side, it's a duty is to protect junior faculty, but also bring them along.
And I'd like to see learned societies doing more of that as well.
Stephen Okey: Yeah. One of the things when I talk with students, because I'll talk about humility, humility as a virtue, and they're often very struck by this idea of humility as a sort of more genuine self understanding and self awareness. And so, you know, I'll say, if LeBron James says something like I'm one of the best basketball players of all time, I mean, that's true.
That's a demonstrable truth. So that doesn't have to be ego saying that because it's accurate. So there's something in like getting a more authentic sense of self, that is part of that. I wanted to ask you, in terms of like getting to the epilogue, especially for my students and your students, is there anything specific about humility for the college student that you would, that you would say?
Chris Bellitto: I think it fits into so many things that we've been talking about, which is the role to self knowledge, right? So our daughter just went off to college, Grace, to the University of Delaware, and we're really happy that she has been. She has imbued what my wife and I have been pounding into her head, which is you don't go to college to get a job.
You go to a college to figure out who you are. And it sounds like early on, it sounds like she got, you know, and looking at colleges and watching her watch the college. It sounds like she understands that it's so in this world where I understand 1st gen students are are working 2 jobs and taking 6 years to graduate and that they need to get a job to pay off the student loans and all of those other things.
Those 2 things aren't in tension. You can get the skills to do a job, and at the same time, you can learn who you are. The problem is that we put those two things in tension when they can actually be complementary. And so I think humility is an approach. I don't know how to do a balance sheet. If you're studying accounting, right, is the same as saying, well, I don't really understand what justice is in this weird country that I'm living in. Those two things go together. So I think it's that kind of that openness. Right. Humility makes you open to other ideas that are not my own.
Stephen Okey: Well, great. I really appreciate it. Uh,
Chris Bellitto: I'm grateful
Stephen Okey: to talk with you today. I hope the book is a big success and every college brings you to give talks.
Chris Bellitto: That would be nice too. I, I do open, I do open my talks by saying, this is not a lab, that the Jesuits taught me many things and humility was not among them.
Um, and so the, the epigram for the book, which was given to me by a rabbi, dialogue partner, is there's a Yiddish proverb that says, too humble is half proud.
Great line.
Stephen Okey: I love it. All right. Well, thanks so much, Chris. It's great to talk to you.
Chris Bellitto: Thanks, Stephen.
[Music Transition]
Stephen Okey: This episode of the Daily Theology Podcast was produced by Stephen Okey.
The music for the podcast was created by Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea.
The logo was designed by Ellen Stewart.
You can subscribe for free to receive updates about the show at stephenokey.substack.com, and you can become a paid subscriber if you want to support the show financially.
You can also support the show by leaving reviews on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen to your shows. Finally, you can follow us @dailytheopod on Instagram and on the social networking site formerly known as Twitter.
Thanks and see you soon.
