In the Nick of Time

6 August 2026  2 Peter 1:16-19

Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord

“You will do well to pay attention to this, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”

(2 Peter 1:19) 

J. Budziszewski (he goes by Jay) got his job teaching at UT Austin by arguing that free will does not exist, and if free will doesn’t exist, then good and evil make no sense, and if they don’t make sense, then God doesn’t make sense. In fact, the philosophy of Law and Government that he was proposing to teach to Longhorn students didn’t make any sense either.

That might seem like a foolhardy strategy for a lecture auditioning for a spot on the faculty, but he got the job. That was in 1981. He teaches there still.

A big part of evangelization is faithfully telling the stories, over and over again, that people finally remember, often in the nick of time.

But J. Budziszewski had to take it all back. He says he got to the point where he was like a guy opening the access panel of his mind, and yanking out all the components that said “God” on them. Problem was, they all did. He kept yanking anyway, for a while congratulating himself that he had spotted the emptiness at the heart of the universe, and his nincompoop colleagues had not. But he also realized that his life was becoming a horror, and he was a good enough philosopheer to know that the only way to get a bad thing is to take a good thing and spoil it:

There is an asymmetry here. This is like with light. You can block the light to get darkness; but you can’t block the darkness to get light. You can take a good thing, and spoil it, and get bad; you can’t take a bad thing, spoil it, and get good. I knew that if there existed a horrible, there had to be a wonderful, of which the horrible was the absence. (Escape from Nihilism, UC Davis Faith and Reason Lecture Series, 2000)

J. Budziszewski finally recognized the Savior that he had abandoned, and as it turned out, it was just in the nick of time:

Astonishingly, although I had abandoned Him, He had never abandoned me. I now believe He was just in time. There is a point of no return, and I was almost there. I said I had been pulling out one component after another, and I had nearly got, shall we say, to the motherboard. (The Revenge of Conscience, p. xvi)

He later described the time immediately after his conversion as one of having been in a dark place, and the shutters were torn off one by one, great shafts of light illuminating dark spaces. Of course, he had to repudiate the lecture and the dissertation that had gotten him his job, and he thought his career might be over. But it wasn’t. Prof. J. Budziszewski is still at UT Austin after 45 years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2004.

The Transfiguration happened about six to eight weeks before the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. Jesus told Peter, James and John to tell no one about it until after He had been raised, which they immediately obeyed because they had no idea what to say. After the Resurrection they all recalled the vision of Jesus’ glory on the mountain, and said a collective, “Oh, yeah. I get that now.” The Resurrection made sense, in large degree, because they remembered the Transfiguration.

J. Budziszewski became a Christian, in part, because he realized he remembered something, something that finally pulled his scattered life together. A big part of evangelization is faithfully telling the stories, over and over again, that people finally remember, often in the nick of time.