Another Life with Joy Marie Clarkson

Benjamin Crosby on how hymn singing can help revive a culture of communal music.Read the article.

Phil Christman finds community and catharsis in the YouTube comments to Joy Division and other post punk and new wave music.Read the article.

Peter Mommsen on how singing and making (not just listening to) music shapes the soul.Read the article.

Mary Townsend on how the excellence of Dolly Parton helps her students understand Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics.Read the article.

In this excerpt from his novel Brisbane, Eugene Vodolazkin’s character Gleb Yanovsky quits music school because “we’re all going to die.”Read the article.

When our amateur choir sings Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, the music’s power overwhelms our mistakes.

Peter and Susannah talk with friend of the pod Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought, about the state of the liberal arts, how those not in academia can continue their humanist education, and the Catherine Project, her new organization dedicated to helping people do this.What is the value of the “great books?” Why these books and not others? How do we read closely, and why is it important to do that in community? Zena, Peter and Susannah address all of these questions.Then Peter and Susannah tackle listener questions, facing #Imaginegate head-on. Other listener questions include the question of bad music: can music make you worse? Also, the importance of silence.

Peter and Susannah talk with Joey Keegin and Phil Christman about their pieces on Christian hardcore and ’80s, ’90s post-punk respectively. The blend of nostalgia and genuine appreciation makes for a powerful and enthusiastic back and forth between the two guests, with Pete chiming in and Susannah remaining respectfully silent.They discuss what makes derivative Christian music bad, and how some Christian hardcore escaped the fate of imitative mediocrity. They also discuss the way that YouTube comments provide a strange Covid-era community of nostalgia for the children of the ’80s and ’90s.Then, Pete and Susannah talk with Plough’s own Joy Clarkson about her newly-published title Aggressively Happy, a how-to guide to finding joy. Unlike many such guides which focus on one’s internal state, this book encourages readers to find joy in the actual goodness of the world: it is an anti-stoic text.Most controversially, Joy makes the case that Pride and Prejudice’s sycophantic vicar, Mr. Collins, is unfairly maligned and is a model of appropriate ambition, resilience, and contentment. 

Peter and Susannah have a long, polyphonic conversation with Rowan Williams about his new collection of plays, Shakeshafte and Other Plays; about a Christianity that can accommodate the whole of the world; about the poet David Jones, the artist Eric Gill, and the destructiveness of aesthetic fundamentalism.Then they turn to a discussion of the war, and of the role of art in a time of war. The archbishop closes in a prayer for peace and justice.Peter and Susannah then speak with their colleague Maureen Swinger about her piece “Doing Bach Badly,” about the history of the Saint Matthew Passion and of its role in the liturgical life of the Bruderhof. They reflect on the way that singing can put you in a position to experience grace, and Maureen recalls a very specific experience of singing as conversion from her teenage years.

Peter and Susannah speak with Esther Maria Magnis about her recent Plough release With or Without Me, a memoir of her father’s death from cancer and her own loss and gain of Christian faith. How can a shattered faith be rebuilt after tragedy?Then, they have a wide-ranging conversation with Sperello di Serego Alighieri, Dante’s descendant, about his book on his ancestor’s cosmology, The Sun and the Other Stars of Dante Alighieri: A Cosmographic Journey through the Divina Commedia.They also discuss the various dramas of Dr. Alighieri’s Dantean year, the 700th anniversary of his ancestor’s death, including a playful relitigation of his ancestor’s banishment trial.Then, they go full galaxy brain: How did Dante’s ideas look forward to contemporary post-Einsteinian concepts about the shape of the universe?