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Sacred and Profane Love

Latest episodes

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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 38min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 23: Lost in Thought with Zena Hitz

In Episode 23, I speak with Zena Hitz about her new book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.  We discuss how love of learning saved us and how we can reclaim it for ourselves in our busy and distracted world. I hope you enjoy our conversation!
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 42min

Episode 22: Huxley on Love and Longing in the Dystopia

In episode 22, I am joined by the philosopher David McPherson, of Creighton University, to discuss Huxley’s famous sci-fi dystopia, “Brave New World.”  We discuss how technological progress can accelerate processes of dehumanization and how the loss of piety transforms how we experience love and desire.  Along the way, we bring in help from Nietzsche, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cora Diamond, Michael Sandel, and of course, Leon Kass. As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 19min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 21: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Episode 21 is a discussion about Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Phil and I discuss narrative identity and self-knowledge, the perils we encounter in our search for truth, and the nature of the absurd.  As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 10min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 20: Scruton’s Wagner: Sex, Death, and the Sacred

With the recent passing of the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, I decided to devote episode 20 to his provocative and comprehensive analysis of Wagner’s famous opera, which he lays out in his book, Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2003).  In this episode, I speak with philosopher Fiona Ellis (University of Roehampton), about the self-transcendent and potentially redemptive and religious character of erotic love.   I hope you enjoy our conversation.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h 13min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 19: Love and Lust in Lolita

After a long winter’s nap–i.e., the end of the semester madness followed by holidays with my family–I am back to releasing new episodes of Sacred and Profane Love.  I am starting the Spring semester with a discussion of Nabokov’s celebrated but controversial novel, Lolita.  In episode 19, titled “Love and Lust in Lolita,” I speak with Becca Rothfeld, award winning essayist, literary critic, and PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University, about the tensions we readers are forced to navigate between the awesome beauty of Nabokov’s prose and the ugly perversion that is the central focus of our attention in the novel.  As readers, it is natural to wonder how we can appreciate the beauty of the novel’s prose and the cleverness of its structure, given its dark subject matter.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 55min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 18: Carrying the Flame

In episode 18 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with my friend, Fr. Gregory Maria Pine, O.P., about the virtue of hope in Cormac McCarthy’s painfully beautiful novel, The Road (which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007). In our conversation, we talk about why hope requires an open future and a sense of uncertainty, and how hope is a state of character that strikes a middle position between presumption and despair.  We also explore the essential connections between hope and love, and how this plays out in the relationship between the man and the boy who must journey down the road together.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 54min

Episode 17: The Death of a Whisky Priest

In episode 17 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with Dr. Angela Knoble about Graham Greene’s masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.  Set in Mexico during a period of brutal religious persecution, Greene’s novel explores questions of what true power and glory consist in, and what sort of love and life can make one a witness to it.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 56min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 16: King Lear’s Vision

In episode 16, “King Lear’s Vision,” I speak with Professor and poet Troy Jollimore about the connections between love and perception.  In his recent book, Love’s Vision, Jollimore, drawing on Plato and Iris Murdoch, argues that true love consists in grasping the objective value of the beloved rather than the projection of it.  This vision involves the bestowal of patient, loving, and imaginative attention on the objectively valuable qualities the beloved truly possesses. We explore this theme of love’s vision (or lack thereof) in Shakespeare’s darkest and wildest tragedy, King Lear.  Reading Lear, we conclude, can help to open our eyes to the fact that we need to get out of our own way—i.e., to put aside our deep insecurities and vices—in order to see and love people for who they really are.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 1h

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 15 : Faustian Ambitions

In episode 15 of Sacred and Profane Love, titled, “Faustian Ambitions,” I speak with my colleague and neighbor, Professor Anne Pollok, about Johann  Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous tragedy, Faust.  For the purposes of our conversation, we use the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt and edited by Cyrus Hamlin, which is available here.  Goethe’s drama deals with the infinite striving that lies at the heart of the human condition, and how our quest for the transcendent can go terribly awry.
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Jan 11, 2021 • 55min

Sacred and Profane Love Episode 14: Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos

In episode 14 of Sacred and Profane Love, “Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos,” I speak with associate professor of Literature, Jessica Hooten Wilson, about Walker Percy’s dystopian, science fiction novel, Love in the Ruins.  We discuss the darkly comic adventures of Dr. Tom More as he tries to figure out how to live and love in the ruins of a society that seems eerily familiar to our own.  We also discuss Percy’s satirical take on the self-help genre, Lost in the Cosmos.  So bring out the Early Times this weekend, settle down on the porch, and enjoy a conversation about one of our greatest Southern writers.

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