Paradise and Utopia

Father John welcomes listeners back to the podcast with the opening to its third part, the age of utopia. He also summarizes some of the main points of his recently released book The Age of Division, which tells the history of Christendom covered in the second part of the podcast.

Fr. John Strickland talks about the newly released book The Age of Paradise. The book is available at store.ancientfaith.com.

Returning after a long absence from the podcast, Fr. John in this episode introduces a new reflection on the crisis of western Christendom prior to the Reformation by discussing the penitential context of Martin Luther's famous Ninety-Five Theses.

Fr. John delineates the various ways in which Constantine contributed to the Christianization of the Roman state.

Fr. John describes the desanctification of the world that began to occur in the time leading up to the Great Schism.

In this final episode of Part 2 of the podcast, Fr. John discusses the catastrophic wars that broke out in western Christendom during the Reformation age. These wars, along with other forces unleashed by developments in the Reformation and earlier, would ultimately result in the loss of Christianity's legitimacy, leading to the rise of a modern, secularized form of Christendom centered upon the experience of utopia.

In this episode Father John explores the way in which the loss of sacramental experience among Calvinists led to the rise of a political ideology that would unintentionally lay the foundation for utopia.

In this episode Fr. John discusses Reformed attitudes toward worship, and the ways in which western Christendom's liturgical and sacramental foundations were eroded when they were put into practice.

In this episode Fr. John discusses ways in which Reformed cosmology represented a shift from the heavenly immanence of paradisiacal Christendom toward the heavenly transcendence of utopian Christendom.

Fr. John looks at a couple of consequences of St. Augustine's anthropology in the West.