Sacred and Profane Love

In this episode, I speak with Michial Farmer about the philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel--more specifically, we discuss his play, Thirst, and one of his essays, "The Mystery of the Family."  We talk about how Marcel's plays give him the materials for his later philosophy, and how Marcel differs from other existentialist philosophers, like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Kierkegaard.

In this episode, I speak with the writer Nick Ripatrazone about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the authors featured in his latest book, Wild Belief .  We discuss the spiritual dimensions of wilderness and how the contemplation of the natural world can have transcendent dimensions.

Sometimes, you just need to do something fun, and this episode reflects one of those times.  I was in DC this summer for a week teaching, so I popped into the Hillsdale College recording studio (where I've been before to chat Walker Percy) to talk with one of my favorite children's lit authors, Matthew Mehan.  We discuss children's lit generally and also discuss his own books (which I highly recom...

In this episode, I speak with podcast regular (see episode 14 on Walker Percy ), Professor Jessica Hooten Wilson, about Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces . We discuss one of the greatest literary figures of all time, Ignatius J. Reilly, "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas all rolled into one" and...

In this episode, I am joined by Professor Thomas Pfau (Duke University) to discuss the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.  We talk about his realism--i.e., his conviction that the task of poetry is to convey the truth by getting us to pay careful attention to reality.  We discuss his philosophical and theological influences--Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Weil--and how these show up in his poems.  For Milos...

In this episode, literary critic Morten Høi Jensen and I discuss the Danish novelist and poet, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and his beautiful novel, Niels Lyhne.  Niels is a man searching for love and for God, but who finds that God does not answer his prayers and concludes that the universe is without a creator and cannot offer us any consolation.  Originally titled The Atheist, Jacobsen's novel is an ho...

OK, friends, we are finally in Paradise, with our faithful guides Beatrice, St. Bernard, and of course, Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser. It turns out that perfect happiness is resting, delighting, and dwelling in the good. How does Dante manage to write 33 more cantos about rest? You should listen to find out, of course!

2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death in Ravenna. This is the second of three episodes exploring Dante's  The Divine Comedy , with Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser (Theology, Honors College, Azusa Pacific University). In this episode, we discuss Dante's vision of Purgatory, a place where sin is healed and the soul purified, so that a person can become truly free to enjoy the g...

In this episode, I am joined by one of the founding editors of The Point, Jon Baskin, to discuss the prospects of philosophical literary criticism and how we can apply such criticism to the fiction of David Foster Wallace.  Baskin elaborates his ideas in a book I highly recommend, Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace.  Jon and I discuss Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch,...

2021 marks the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri's death in Ravenna.  This is the first of three episodes exploring Dante's The Divine Comedy , with Professor Matthew Rothaus Moser (Theology, Honors College, Azusa Pacific University).    In this episode, we discuss Dante's vision of Hell as a place where the truth of one's desires are finally revealed to oneself. In Dante's Hell, people get wha...

In this episode, I am joined by author and theologian Tara Isabella Burton. Tara and I explore the distinctive erotic pleasure one can experience in the act of creating a character out of another human being. This sort of seduction involves coming to possess someone else so as to transform them into a character in your own drama. This is a theme in the two works we discuss, Soren Kierkegaard's The...

In this episode, I speak with my colleague, Agnes Mueller, who is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, about why Thomas Mann's novella,  Death in Venice , is a must-read during our ongoing pandemic. We talk about Modernism, Plato, and Nietzsche. We see the novella as exploring sickness, death, and eros, and we find similarities and continuities betw...

In this episode, I have a wide ranging conversation with Agnes Callard. We discuss our experience teaching the Great Books Core at the University of Chicago, as well as why philosophers should read and teach great literature, how to teach Homer in a philosophy class, and how humans gain wisdom through mistakes and suffering. We also talk about arguments, piety, and wisdom in Antigone .

In this episode, I speak with Karen Swallow Prior , who is professor of English literature, Christianity, and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. We discuss how reading great books can be an education in virtue, and we apply these ideas to a reading of Joseph Conrad's influential and controversial novella, Heart of Darkness .

In this episode, I talk with philosopher Jamie Smith (Calvin College) about St. Augustine and Christopher Beha's latest novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts . Our conversation covers the surprising connections between St. Augustine and the existentialists–most especially Albert Camus–and how St. Augustine can help us understand the gap between what we long for and the finite world that we are...

In episode 25, I speak with Ian Marcus Corbin (Harvard) about solitude. We discuss Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke alongside Thomas Merton's essay, "Rain and the Rhinoceros."

In this episode, I am once again joined by philosopher and poet Troy Jollimore, to talk about the absurd, evil, suffering, theodicy, God, death, metaphysical rebellion, and of course, virtue.  As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

In Episode 23, I speak with Zena Hitz about her new book,  Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life .  We discuss how love of learning saved us and how we can reclaim it for ourselves in our busy and distracted world. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In episode 22, I am joined by the philosopher David McPherson, of Creighton University, to discuss Huxley's famous sci-fi dystopia, "Brave New World."  We discuss how technological progress can accelerate processes of dehumanization and how the loss of piety transforms how we experience love and desire.  Along the way, we bring in help from Nietzsche, Alasdair MacIntyre, Cora Diamond, Michael Sand...

Episode 21 is a discussion about Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim . Phil and I discuss narrative identity and self-knowledge, the perils we encounter in our search for truth, and the nature of the absurd.  As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

With the recent passing of the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton , I decided to devote episode 20 to his provocative and comprehensive analysis of Wagner's famous opera, which he lays out in his book, Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2003).  In this episode, I speak with philosopher Fiona Ellis (University of Roehampton), about the self-t...

After a long winter's nap–i.e., the end of the semester madness followed by holidays with my family–I am back to releasing new episodes of Sacred and Profane Love.  I am starting the Spring semester with a discussion of Nabokov's celebrated but controversial novel, Lolita .  In episode 19, titled "Love and Lust in Lolita," I speak with Becca Rothfeld , award winning essayist, literary critic, and...

In episode 18 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with my friend, Fr. Gregory Maria Pine, O.P., about the virtue of hope in Cormac McCarthy's painfully beautiful novel,  The Road ( which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007). In our conversation, we talk about why hope requires an open future and a sense of uncertainty, and how hope is a state of character that strikes a middle positi...

In episode 17 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with Dr. Angela Knoble about Graham Greene's masterpiece,  The Power and the Glory .  Set in Mexico during a period of brutal religious persecution, Greene's novel explores questions of what true power and glory consist in, and what sort of love and life can make one a witness to it.

In episode 16, "King Lear's Vision," I speak with Professor and poet Troy Jollimore about the connections between love and perception.  In his recent book, Love's Vision , Jollimore, drawing on Plato and Iris Murdoch, argues that true love consists in grasping the objective value of the beloved rather than the projection of it.  This vision involves the bestowal of patient, loving, and imaginative...