Give and Take

My guest is Melissa Glaser. Her new book is Healing a Community: Lessons for Recovery after a Large-Scale Trauma . After the horrific tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, local caregivers, civic leaders, and first responders had the daunting task of navigating emotional and physical trauma as they stitched their community back together. The recovery process takes years,...

My guest is Edith Hall. Her newest book is Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life . In expert yet vibrant modern language, Hall lays out the crux of Aristotle's thinking, mixing affecting autobiographical anecdotes with a deep wealth of classical learning. For Hall, whose own life has been greatly improved by her understanding of Aristotle, this is an intensely personal subject....

My guest is Edward J. Watts. In Mortal Republic, this prize-winning historian offers a new history of the fall of the Roman Republic that explains why Rome exchanged freedom for autocracy. For centuries, even as Rome grew into the Mediterranean's premier military and political power, its governing institutions, parliamentary rules, and political customs successfully fostered negotiation and compro...

My guest is Karen Swallow Prior. Her newest book is Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books . Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue. Great literature increases knowledge of and desire for the good life by showing readers what virtue looks like and where vice leads. It is not just what one reads but how one reads that cultivates virtue. Reading good literat...

My guest is Tal Keinan. His new book God Is in the Crowd is an original and provocative blueprint for Judaism in the twenty-first century. Presented through the lens of Tal Keinan’s unusual personal story, it a sobering analysis of the threat to Jewish continuity. As the Jewish people has become concentrated in just two hubs—America and Israel—it has lost the subtle code of governance that endowed...

My guest is A.J. Jacobs. The idea for his newest book was simple: this New York Times bestselling author decided to thank every single person involved in producing his morning cup of coffee. The resulting journey takes him across the globe, transforms his life, and reveals secrets about how gratitude can make us all happier, more generous, and more connected. Thanks A Thousand: A Gratitude Journey...

My guest is Michael Horton. His newest book Justification , is a comprehensive study of the historic Christian doctrine. The doctrine of justification stands at the center of Christian theological reflection on the meaning of salvation as well as our piety, mission, and life together. In his two-volume work on the doctrine of justification, Michael Horton seeks not simply to repeat noble doctrinal...

My guest is Angela Himsel. Her new book is a memoir entitled A River Could Be a Tree . From the time she was a young girl, Himsel believed that the Bible was the guidebook to being saved, and only strict adherence to the church's tenets could allow her to escape a certain, gruesome death, receive the Holy Spirit, and live forever in the Kingdom of God. With self-preservation in mind, she decided,...

My guest is Luke Norsworthy. His new book is God Over Good . It's hard to say that God is good when God isn't always what we expect good to be. A good father wouldn't make it so difficult to get to know him, would he? And if God is all-powerful, wouldn't he ensure that we never suffered? Either our understanding of God is incorrect, or our definition of good is inadequate. In a world that is messy...

My guest is Chaim Saiman. His newest book is Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law . What does it mean for legal analysis to connect humans to God? Can spiritual teachings remain meaningful and at the same time rigidly codified? Can a modern state be governed by such law? Guiding readers across two millennia of richly illuminating perspectives, this book shows how halakhah is not just “law” but an en...

My guest is Joseph D. Small. How can we reconcile the ideal church described by theology with the broken church that we see in the world? In his newest book Joseph Small argues that the church’s true identity is known somewhere in the tension between the two. Small revisits familiar ecclesiological concepts—including the body of Christ, communion of saints, and people of God— but rather than focus...

My guest is Martin Cohen. Doctors and nutritionists often disagree with each other, while celebrities and scientists keep pitching us new recipes and special diets. No one thought to ask the philosophers—those rational souls devoted to truth, ethics, and reason—what they think. Until now. That's the subject of Martin Cohen's newest book I Think, Therefore I Eat: The World's Greatest Minds Tackle T...

My guest is Andrew Bomback. His new book is Doctor . It begins with a 3-year-old who asks her physician father about his job, and his inability to provide a succinct and accurate answer inspires a critical look at the profession of modern medicine. In sorting through how patients, insurance companies, advertising agencies, filmmakers, and comedians misconstrue a doctor's role, Andrew Bomback, M.D....

My guest is Brian VanDemark. His newest book Road to Disaster draws upon decades of archival research, his own interviews with many of those involved, and a wealth of previously unheard recordings by Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford, who served as Defense Secretaries for Kennedy and Johnson. Yet beyond that, Road to Disaster is also the first history of the war to look at the cataclysmic decisio...

My guest is Amy Julia Becker. Her new book White Picket Fences: Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege welcomes us into her life, from the charm of her privileged southern childhood to her adult experience in the northeast, and the denials she has faced as the mother of a child with special needs. She shows how a life behind a white picket fence can restrict even as it protects, and h...

My guests are Todd McGowan and Ryan Engley. They are the co-hosts of Why Theory , a podcast that brings continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory together to examine cultural phenomenon. Special Guests: Ryan Engley and Todd McGowan.

My guest is Jackson MacKenzie. Jackson MacKenzie has helped millions of people in their struggle to understand the experience of toxic relationships. His first book, Psychopath Free , explained how to identify and survive the immediate situation. In Whole Again he guides readers on what to do next–how to fully heal from abuse in order to find love and acceptance for the self and others. Through hi...

My guest is Simeon Zahl. He is University Lecturer in Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge. He recently wrote a piece in the Scottish Journal of Theology on the "use" of tradition in theology and what it reveals about the subjective life of the theologian . Building on a close analysis of Martin Luther's distinction between the ‘substance’ of a thing and its ‘use’, the article makes a...

My guest is Bradley W. Hart. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided. Bradley W. Hart's Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States exposes the homegrown antagonists who sought to protect and p...

My guest is David Shields. His new book Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention , is perhaps the only genuinely original thing you have read yet about Donald Trump. It can be read in a variety of ways: as a psychological investigation of Trump, as a philosophical meditation on the relationship between language and power, as a satirical compilation of the “collected wit and wisdom of Do...

My guest is Cai Emmons. Her newest book, Weather Woman , is the story of meteorologist Bronwyn Artair who discovers she has the power to change the weather. Feeling out of place in her doctoral program in Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, 30-year-old Bronwyn drops out and takes a job as a TV meteorologist in Southern New Hampshire, much to the dismay of her female mentor, Diane Fenwick. When, after a y...

My guest is Austin Fischer. Too often, our honest questions about faith are met with cold confidence and easy answers. But false certitude doesn't result in strong faith—it results in disillusionment, or worse, in a dogmatic, overweening faith unable to see itself or its object clearly. Even as a pastor, Austin Fischer has experienced the shadows of doubt and disillusionment. In Faith in the Shado...

My guest is David Quammen. In his new book T he Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life , this nonpareil science writer explains how recent discoveries in molecular biology can change our understanding of evolution and life’s history, with powerful implications for human health and even our own human nature. In the mid-1970s, scientists began using DNA sequences to reexamine the history of all...

My guest is Alyshia Gálvez. In her gripping new book, Eating NAFTA: Trade Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico , Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico – sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, m...

For millennia, idleness and laziness have been regarded as vices. We're all expected to work to survive and get ahead, and devoting energy to anything but labor and self-improvement can seem like a luxury or a moral failure. Far from questioning this conventional wisdom, modern philosophers have worked hard to develop new reasons to denigrate idleness. In Idleness , the first book to challenge mod...