Sacred and Profane Love

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. 

In Episode 3 of the podcast Sacred & Profane Love, philosopher Jennifer A. Frey has a conversation with fellow philosopher Nancy Snow, about why she thinks we should be reading the poetry of Walt Whitman in our current political moment.  We discuss Whitman’s, “Song of Myself” and “Democratic Vistas,” and how each of these works touches on the theme of hope as a democratic civic virtue.  We also explore Whitman’s conviction that poetry can help build hope and help to shape the national character more generally.

In Episode 2 of the podcast Sacred & Profane Love, philosopher Jennifer A. Frey has a conversation with fellow philosopher, David McPherson (Creighton University), about transfiguring love as explored by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his influential novel, The Brother’s Karamazov.  The episode covers Dostoyevksy’s treatment of the classic problem of evil—i.e., the problem of reconciling God’s love and wisdom with the evil and suffering that are part of his creation—and in particular, his idea that active and self-transcending love for others is the only proper response to human suffering, because the only true path to achieving the kind of deep happiness that is the goal of every human heart.

In Episode 1 of the podcast Sacred & Profane Love, philosopher Jennifer A. Frey has a conversation with the Thomist theologian, Father Thomas Joseph White, O.P., about Aquinas on grace and charity, and how Thomistic concepts of grace and charity operate in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. The episode covers themes of grace, redemption, the comic unveiling of the human person to itself, and the violence of Divine Love as a necessary antidote to human folly and brokenness.