Ryan, Grant, and Gretchen ask each other all their burning questions, probing more deeply into past interviews and breaking new territory. Together they ponder how Jesus might run a tech company, the desire to live forever and its impact on procreation, and what it means to be stewards of reality.

The liberal tradition frames the story of modernity as the gradual victory of freedom against state hegemony. Liberty, the consent of the people to be governed, and individual rights are the mainstay of western society. But are we really more free than before? What if freedom isn’t what we think? Historian and theologian Andrew Willard Jones talks with Grant about the ways that liberalism contradicts the Christian idea of the human person, how liberalism ultimately tends towards tyranny, and what a post-liberal world might look like. What is the role of government if self-gift and peace are seen as the foundation of human society? How ought the Church and state relate to one another? Most importantly, how can we work here and now to build a just post-liberal society in a culture shaped profoundly by individualism?

The modern conception of how time unfolds leaves us trapped in a chronological sequence with no return to the past; but is it true that “you can’t go back”? In the second part of their conversation, Matthew and Ryan discuss how the past can erupt into the present; why cultivating these temporal possibilities must be an ecumenical project; the way images reveal timeless truths that underlie our visible surroundings; and how the ideas of thinkers like Chesterton can converse with, and be informed by, ancient Indigenous mythology.

We often think of the time before the birth of Jesus Christ in terms of the Old Testament. But what about the humans in other parts of the world, long before the history of Israel begins? Art historian Matthew Milliner joins Ryan to discuss how "the Lamb who was slain from the foundation of the world" might have been present in cultures tens of thousands of years ago. The first of two parts.

Although the intersection of faith and artificial intelligence is a modern topic, it can be seen as a new version of an old question famously posed by Tertullian: what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Today’s podcast guest, Derek Schuurman—computer scientist, author, and professor at Calvin University—rephrases that question for those living in the age of AI: what does Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem? In order to answer this question, Derek posits that it is vital to have an ethical imagination that is formed by story, viewing ourselves as participants in the narrative of Creation, the Fall, and Redemption. When our daily actions are suffused and shaped by this narrative, technology—along with the rest of our daily lives—is taken up into that story.  Derek and Gretchen play out what this story-shaped ethics looks like in relation to technological questions. Are computer bugs the result of original sin? What does open source software have to do with Genesis? What’s the difference between predestination and technological determinism, and what do both mean for our freedom? Listen to their conversation as they ponder how we might sanctify technology for the glory of God’s kingdom.

Healthcare workers have been lauded as heroes during the pandemic; but even as nurses and other medical employees have been praised for their service, COVID-19 has exposed many of them to long hours, dangerous working conditions, and lack of resources. Although COVID may have magnified these problems in an unprecedented way, they are hardly new challenges for laborers in the healthcare industry. Is living with these conditions expected of heroes, or are nurses allowed to ask for something better? Does a desire to serve entail vulnerability to exploitation? This coexistence of care and exploitation is a familiar theme for historian Gabriel Winant. In his book The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America, he uses Pittsburgh as an example of the economic shift from industry to services (including healthcare), and the impact that shift has on the working class.As a Marxist, the lens Gabe turns on these issues is different than Grant’s Catholic personalism; but together they tackle the health care industry, the current state of working class jobs, and many other issues.From the political power of nurses tothe meaning of women’s work, they ask what care might look like in a society where it is not work to be marketed or exploited, but an act of freedom that finds value in others.

In this episode, Ryan interviews historian Brad Gregory, Henkels Family College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. In his book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Brad connects the Reformation in surprising and sometimes controversial ways to the making of the modern world, from secularization and the privatization of religion to the battle between faith and science. Brad argues that the naturalism proper to the natural sciences can’t provide a full understanding of human life; as temporal beings who live in a present that has been shaped by events of the past, history is a vital component to meaningfully understanding the world around us. In this packed conversation, he and Ryan discuss how historical knowledge impacts our understanding of such diverse fields as economics, theology, and eschatology. Among the many questions they ask, some pose painful challenges to the modern Christian. What if Christianity in the Western world holds responsibility for such things as the climate crisis and the sin of slavery? If pre-history was characterized not by scarcity, but abundance, what justifies the avarice so characteristic of our times? Can we hope for goodness here on earth, or is the virtue of hope only fulfilled in heaven?

As technology develops at an ever more rapid pace, it can seem that ethics struggles to keep up with it. While science and technology advance by building on discoveries of the past, virtue and moral knowledge must be cultivated afresh in every individual and each generation. This is where Brian Green comes in. As director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, his areas of research are many, ranging from transhumanism and artificial intelligence, to catastrophic risk and the ethics of outer space. This diverse array of interests all pivot on the intersection between technology and humanity. In this episode, Brian and Gretchen dive into many areas of tech ethics that both impact our present lives and promise to shape our future. From immediate ethical dilemmas like self-driving car crashes and responsible tech development, to long-view issues like the establishment of extra-terrestrial colonies and the achievement of artificial general intelligence, they reflect on a large range of themes that can affect human lives for both good and ill. Listen in as they discuss old and forgotten tools for answering ethical questions, the Christian commission to work miracles, which human qualities can’t be programmed into machines, and more. Together they ask, should our predictions about technology and ethics be dire, or hopeful? What choices are we making now that will shape coming generations?

On this episode of the podcast, Grant interviews Ted Castronova, Professor of Media at Indiana University and author Life is a Game: What Game Design Says about the Human Condition.  Mathematical game theory defines a game as anything that has players making strategic choices to achieve an outcome that matters to them. From this, Ted argues that life itself is a game, and as Christians we can view God as a game designer who has given us free will to make choices within His design.  But if life is a game that we are playing, why do so many people find themselves frustrated and bored by it? And why is the allure of virtual worlds—from the hype around the Metaverse, to the vibrant culture around online gaming—so strong? Many futuristic movies and novels (such as The Matrix, Ready Player One, and Snow Crash) portray virtual reality as having a fundamental role in a dystopian world, often as a distraction from a real world that is somehow broken. Is virtual reality attractive because we’ve forgotten how to “play” the game of life? Or can the games of the real and virtual worlds coexist in a balanced way? Which game are we all really playing, and how do we actually win it? What can games—whether tabletop or VR—teach us about living? Listen as Ted and Grant discuss these and other questions about games, reality, and the many places where the two meet. 

In her book The Permeable Self, Barbara Newman—John Evans Professor of Latin, as well as English, Classics, and History at Northwestern University—explores the importance of coinherence in the medieval view of personhood. This is the concept that persons are profoundly interconnected, existing not in isolation but “in” each other. One illustration of this is the trope of exchanging hearts, whether between lovers or between female mystics and Christ.  The concept of our selves having such porous boundaries is perhaps an alien one to the contemporary American mind. But in this episode, Barbara discusses stories of heart transplant patients who—without knowing anything about the donors of their new hearts—began to take on personality traits of the donors. In a society where we often define personhood by its individuality and separateness, what do we make of instances such as these, which seem to bear out a medieval understanding of what it means to be human? Barbara and Ryan discuss this and other aspects relating to how people in the Middle Ages conceived of personhood. They delve into saintly telepathy, the relationship between virginity and fertility, the social life of trees, and the tension between the public, performative persona and a private, interior sense of self. Together they ponder the different ways that people can be seen as existing coherently with each other, both in the present and across the boundaries of time through genealogy.