In episode 13 of Sacred & Profane Love, “Jane Austen on the Virtues of Social Life, I speak with professor Karen Stohr of Georgetown University about how Austen brings into relief the social dimensions of virtue in her novels. We discuss the importance of social roles and environments for the exercise and development of virtue, and how friendship and family life are the best contexts in which virtue can be fostered and strengthened.  I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In Episode 12 of Sacred & Profane Love, “Meaning, Murder, and Divine Madness,” I speak with the eminent moral theologian, Fr Michael Sherwin, O.P., about Donna Tartt’s breakout bestseller, The Secret History.  We discuss how the novel is best situated within both the Southern Gothic and the Southern Catholic Gothic literary genres, and how Donna Tartt, like Flannery O’Connor, understands the task of the novelist as helping us come to see ourselves and our world as it truly is.

In episode 11 of the Sacred and Profane Love Podcast, I speak with Scott Moringiello, assistant professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University, in Chicago, Illinois, about Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead.  Among other things, we discuss the connection between contemplation, love, grace, and the ability to pay attention.

In episode 10 of the Sacred and Profane Love podcast, host Jennifer A. Frey has a  conversation with scholar Paul Mankowski, SJ, about Evelyn Waugh’s popular novel, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. They discuss Charles Ryder’s experiences of love, freedom, grace, and redemption as he becomes erotically drawn into the rarefied world of Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia Flyte.

In Episode 9 of Sacred & Profane Love “Revelations of Love in John Steinbeck,” Philosopher Jennifer A. Frey speaks with Thomist Theologian, Fr Michael Sherwin, OP, about John Steinbeck’s secular understanding of Christian caritas (charity) and how Steinbeck captures the beauty and power of love in the simple act of sharing breakfast with strangers. Their conversation tackles the nature of divine love as understood by Augustine and Aquinas.

In episode 8 of Sacred & Profane Love, Jennifer Frey speaks with Dhananjay Jagannathan about Greek tragedy and the fragility of human loves and happiness, with a special focus on Sophocles’ play, The Women of Trachis.

In Episode 7 of Sacred & Profane Love, Professor Jennifer A. Frey speaks with her colleague in the English department at the University of South Carolina, Professor Holly A. Crocker, about the boasts and pledges of love in Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous Middle English poem, Troilus and Criseyde.  This wide ranging conversation considers how the courtly love tradition, the Christian tradition, and the classical pagan traditions are put to use in Chaucer’s poem to help us understand the all too human failure to live up to our pledges of love, and to what extent this failure depends on good fortune rather than philosophical and practical wisdom.

In Episode 6 of Sacred & Profane Love, Professor Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina) has a conversation with Zena Hitz (St. John’s College) about friendship, the intellectual life, and the virtue of seriousness in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels.  This episode explores how the cultivation of an inner life through contemplation–i.e., seeing, understanding, and savoring things as they are–allows us to enter into a deep and meaningful communion with other human persons.

In Episode 5 of Sacred & Profane Love, Professor Jennifer A. Frey (University of South Carolina) discusses the erotic impulse and experience with Professor of philosophy Talbot Brewer (University of Virginia).  This discussion explores how eros draws us out of ourselves into a kind of ecstatic union with a beloved–a union whose power over us comes from its potential to give birth to something greater and more beautiful than one’s present self.

In Episode 4 of the podcast Sacred & Profane Love, Professor Jennifer A. Frey speaks with philosopher, poet, and literary critic, Troy Jollimore, about how romantic ideologies and illusions can destroy our ability to experience real and meaningful love–the sort of love that is a central part of a happy and meaningful life. We ground our conversation in a wide ranging discussion of Gustave Flaubert’s incredibly influential nineteenth century novel, Madame Bovary.