The Theology Pugcast

Glenn is still on the road, so Tom and Chris invited their friend Tom Plotkin to talk with them about cinema, or film, or the movies--or whatever you want to call the art form. Tom is a former screen-writer and he worked on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well as other Hollywood productions. Today Tom is a lawyer and a novelist living and working in Hartford, Connecticut.  Join a freewheeling conversation that takes us into Tom's childhood in Manhattan as a child a Jewish atheists to his conversion to Christianity through a remarkable supernatural event in his life. Along the way you'll learn a lot about the rarified world of "art-films"--we know that we did. Enjoy! 

Tom, Glenn, and Chris have the week off this week--but never fear, the Pugcast hasn't let you down! The Pugsters actually have a show that was recorded months ago and had been believed to be lost. But it's been found! The guys can't remember what was about though.  The one thing that they do remember is it was Tom's day for the topic of the day. So, listen in a long with three Pugsters who suffer from memory loss! Enjoy!

Today's show comes to you from deep in the Pugcast bunker. This episode is about the illiberal hostility of liberals directed towards conservatives  in higher education. Glenn is away with family for Christmas, so Tom and Chris invited Racer X to join them. (He's named Racer X because of Chris's nostalgia for Speed Racer--a cartoon he watched as a kid in the early 70s.) Racer X is a conservative and a graduate student currently studying in at an undisclosed secular university. Tom, Chris, and Racer X discuss their experiences as conservatives in academe, and all three agree that things are worse today than when Tom and Chris were in graduate school. BTW, Racer X's voice is distorted for the show. (Yes, things are so bad that we resorted to witness protection techniques to disguise X's identity.)  

Today Glenn rises to defend a holiday that some pagans and certain Christians love to hate: Christmas.  Who could hate Christmas? It is puzzling. There are the folks who claim that there is no justification for December 25th--or January 6th for that matter--so it must have been some sort of appropriation of a pagan holiday. Then there are the folks who just don't think any Christian holidays can be justified, period.  Glenn challenges these conceits and more. You can depend on Tom and Chris to egg him on. 

In today's show Tom, Glenn, and Chris are joined by Aaron Renn, former (but perhaps not), publisher of the newsletter for men with over 5,000 subscribers, The Masculinist.  The guys met in New Haven, Connecticut, right down the street from Yale, at Modern Apizza--one of the top rated pizzarias in America. The conversation was free-flowing and somewhat rambling, but there are a number of gems for you to take away.  Durning the conversation a waitress spills some beer on Chris's laptop, but never fear!--the top was closed and the machine escaped unharmed. (But you'll hear the cry of dismay from the waitress.) Sound is much better than in recent episodes. The Pugsters hope you enjoy the show! 

Today Chris introduces Tom and Glenn to the Shakers--America's favorite utopian sect. If you know anything about them you probably associate them with furniture, oval nesting boxes, and the song Simple Gifts.  At their height during the Second Great Awakening there were 6,000 of them living in nearly 20 communities scattered from Maine to Kentucky. Today they are the darlings of liberalism because they renounced the household-economy, private property, and even marriage.  Naturally, this meant that they also renounced procreation. They believe heaven had come to earth with the second advent of Christ--this time as a woman--in the person of their founder Mother Ann. They believed that God had male and female natures and that the Fall of Adam and Eve in Eden had something to do with sex. Weird stuff, Gnostic too. You can learn more about them in the many museums that now preserve their artifacts. If you want to speak with real Shakers, you better hurry, there are only 2 left and they're elderly. In some ways the themes that characterized Shakerism are still with us, and some of them even seem to be growing more popular among the young in evangelicalism.  The show was recorded at Elicit Brewing, a new brewpub in Manchester, CT that the guys have wanted to try out. They found a quiet corner and everything was going swimmingly until about 3/4 of the way through when someone at the pub decided it would be a good idea to blast the music. The guys are sorry for yet another noisy show--they won't go back there again.     

In today's show Glenn proposes a controversial thesis: Machiavelli's The Prince wasn't promoting amoral political opportunism--in it Machiavelli was actually.... Well, it wouldn't be right to include a spoiler in the show notes, would it? Why not listen and find out what Glenn thinks for yourself? Once again, there is a noisy pub to deal with, but we hope the show will provide enough tasty food for thought that you can look past that. 

In today's show Tom begins an exploration of the ideology of environmentalism and the ways that the monism underlying it is infiltrating churches and theologies that wish to be seen as "relevant". Glenn and Chris push the discussion into the works of Tolkien as a faithful alternative for those who wish to cherish the created order as a gift in contrast to popular environmental ideologies. The show is a bit noisy and a little choppy because it was recorded in the main part of the pub (we were exiled from the backroom by paying customers!), and Chris received a call that he couldn't ignore late in the show.   

In today's show Chris and the guys put "niceness" into the Aristotle Virtue Analyzer to see if it makes the grade. They determined that it depends on the political economy you find yourself in. If it is a consumerist global fantasy-land--well, it's a virtue. But is that a place that human beings really want to live--it means no history, no transcendence, and no depth. It's all here and now and on the surface. But can such an inhuman and false community even last? Perhaps "niceness" still means what it meant in 12th century, "Stupid". https://www.etymonline.com/word/nice Today's show features new music by Chris's oldest son, Caleb!

In today's show Glenn explains how some evangelicals have managed to climb onto the critical theory bandwagon. He begins with a quick overview of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the late 19th and early 20th century, he then shows how this created a void that critical theory has recently filled. Tom and Chris along with Glenn point out the Marxist roots of critical theory, underscoring its materialism and its agonism--i.e. "progress through violence". (That's why there's no reasoning with critical theory--words, even reason itself--are merely other means for getting your way.) Can "progressive evangelicals" find their way out of this morass? The Lord knows and time will tell--but the Pugcasters are not hopeful.