My spouse’s Christian family very excited to know I studied some medieval Christian philosophy. Less excited to find out that it involves intricate arguments about the whether ideal rationality involves the ability to choose randomly.
(If yer curious, it’s because there’s a massive puzzle for medieval philosophers about how a perfectly rational God could choose a time to create the universe in, because if there is no universe yet, all times are equally good and there is no best time.)
Also they do not seem particularly excited about the technical debates about the definition of “give”, required to figure out whether, if God gave us free will, if he also thereby gave us the ability to do evil.
OMG I just remembered the medieval argument from Maimonides that the definition of “good” and “evil” flipped between the Old Testament and the New, and that the best explanation of this is that God and the Devil must have flipped roles. Definitely great Xmas convo!
The funny part about this is, I learned all this medieval Christian philosophy thinking it was totally useless, out of pure curiosity. I did not expect that it would be crazy useful for teaching intro phil classes in deeply Mormon Utah.
Teaching in LA, it was my hip hop obsessions and ethnic food knowledge that gave me cred. In Utah, it turned out that knowing weirdly enormous amounts about medieval theology gave me cred.
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