The Good Life as the Ordinary Life? A Conversation with Ephraim Radner

What would you write to your adult children about the good life? Would it strike the modern notes of making the most of yourself and your abilities, seizing every opportunity, making a difference in the world? Or would it focus on the beauty and goodness of our created and providentially given limits, personally and relationally?

This is the question that prompted Ephraim Radner’s most recent book, Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty. In today’s Greystone Conversation, Greystone President, Dr. Mark A. Garcia, sits down with Professor Radner to explore the ironically revolutionary idea that the ordinary, quotidian, limited life we have been graciously given in God’s providence is the world we are called to and which invites our self-offering. In a time when political and social fervor is at fever-pitch, and it’s easy to believe that we are called to make a difference in the world at large, especially through political means, this is a call back to something the Church has always cherished in one way or another: both creation and providence are good, and our limits, the limits of our bodily lives maximally defined, are goods too. Radner’s book takes its point of departure in a letter he wrote to his adult children, an updated version of which closes the book, and along the way he prods and provokes in the direction of greater modesty in what he calls “betterment” politics. But the frame of the book, and its heart, we suggest, is this message about the beauty of our ordinary lives and contexts, and it is this that we considered together in today’s episode.