Sacred and Profane Love

In this episode, I speak with Michial Farmer about the philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel--more specifically, we discuss his play, Thirst, and one of his essays, "The Mystery of the Family."  We talk about how Marcel's plays give him the materials for his later philosophy, and how Marcel differs from other existentialist philosophers, like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Kierkegaard.

In this episode, I speak with the writer Nick Ripatrazone about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the authors featured in his latest book, Wild Belief.  We discuss the spiritual dimensions of wilderness and how the contemplation of the natural world can have transcendent dimensions.

Sometimes, you just need to do something fun, and this episode reflects one of those times.  I was in DC this summer for a week teaching, so I popped into the Hillsdale College recording studio (where I've been before to chat Walker Percy) to talk with one of my favorite children's lit authors, Matthew Mehan.  We discuss children's lit generally and also discuss his own books (which I highly recommend!): The Handsome Little Cygnet and Mr. Mehan's Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals.

In this episode, I speak with podcast regular (see episode 14 on Walker Percy), Professor Jessica Hooten Wilson, about Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. We discuss one of the greatest literary figures of all time, Ignatius J. Reilly, “slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas all rolled into one” and his “great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures.” We discuss why a recent New Yorker hit piece on Ignatius is just plain embarrassing for its author, insofar as it displays an all too familiar inability to read books. But it is not difficult to be more intellectually sophisticated than the New Yorker these days, and we invite you to read this Pulitzer Prize novel as the work of comic art it truly is. I hope you enjoy laughter, because there is quite a bit in this episode!

In this episode, I am joined by Professor Thomas Pfau (Duke University) to discuss the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.  We talk about his realism--i.e., his conviction that the task of poetry is to convey the truth by getting us to pay careful attention to reality.  We discuss his philosophical and theological influences--Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Weil--and how these show up in his poems.  For Milosz, poetry is the habit of accurate vision--we can only capture the real by looking.  Therefore poetry is not self-expression, but testimony or witness. Milosz, we agree, is a religious poet in that he seeks to affirm the world, to celebrate and marvel at the mystery of existence, even as he is keenly aware that the world is fallen and full of suffering and, in the end, not really our proper home.

In this episode, literary critic Morten Høi Jensen and I discuss the Danish novelist and poet, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and his beautiful novel, Niels Lyhne.  Niels is a man searching for love and for God, but who finds that God does not answer his prayers and concludes that the universe is without a creator and cannot offer us any consolation.  Originally titled The Atheist, Jacobsen's novel is an honest exploration of atheism and its paradoxical nature as parasitic upon the faith it rejects and a new faith in its own right.

OK, friends, we are finally in Paradise, with our faithful guides Beatrice, St. Bernard, and of course, Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser. It turns out that perfect happiness is resting, delighting, and dwelling in the good. How does Dante manage to write 33 more cantos about rest? You should listen to find out, of course!

2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death in Ravenna. This is the second of three episodes exploring Dante’s The Divine Comedy, with Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser (Theology, Honors College, Azusa Pacific University). In this episode, we discuss Dante’s vision of Purgatory, a place where sin is healed and the soul purified, so that a person can become truly free to enjoy the good. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

In this episode, I am joined by one of the founding editors of The Point, Jon Baskin, to discuss the prospects of philosophical literary criticism and how we can apply such criticism to the fiction of David Foster Wallace.  Baskin elaborates his ideas in a book I highly recommend, Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace.  Jon and I discuss Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, Stanley Cavell, Robert Pippin, and of course, David Foster Wallace.  I hope you enjoy our conversation.

2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death in Ravenna.  This is the first of three episodes exploring Dante's The Divine Comedy, with Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser (Theology, Honors College, Azusa Pacific University).    In this episode, we discuss Dante's vision of Hell as a place where the truth of one's desires are finally revealed to oneself. In Dante's Hell, people get what they really want and deserve; since what they want is a distortion of what is truly good, the realization of their desire doesn't make them happy or fulfilled, but perpetually miserable. In this initial conversation, we discuss who Dante was, the structure of his poem on the whole, and how Christians and secularists alike can approach and benefit from reading Dante's famous poem.