New Polity

We are happy to announce the next issue of New Polity Magazine, dedicated specifically to Artificial Intelligence! Featuring essays by Matthew Crawford, Slavoj Žižek, D. C. Schindler, Michael Hanby, Andrew Willard Jones, and many more. Subscribe by October 1st to receive this issue! https://newpolity.com/magazine. Alex Denley and Marc Barnes discuss the Christian response to AI, how to safeguard h...

In this podcast, Alex Denley and Professor Rocco Buttiglione discuss the problem of globalization, mass migration, and populism. Post-war globalization brought a great increase in international trade, cooperation, technical and educational development, and cultural sharing. However, with open trade came the loss of manufacturing and industry in the West, and the emptying of the working class. Alon...

Liberalism is on the defensive. Political discussion is shifting from “what’s wrong with liberalism” to “what’s true about politics”—to the question of what exactly must displace liberalism. In The Politics of the Real, D. C. Schindler takes us to the definitive metaphysical roots of liberal politics: the modern reversal of the priority of act over potency; the modern privileging of empty possibil...

The development and use of AI chatbots has grown massively. With hundreds of millions of users, OpenAI, XAI, Claude AI, and others have become a normal part of many people's day. Some Christians have an uneasy attitude toward the use of AI Chatbots, while others are supportive and have developed their own. In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss the moral question: whether Christians...

Professor Rocco Buttiglione and Dr. Andrew Willard Jones discuss the rise of nationalism and populism both in Europe and America. What is the proper Catholic understanding of the peoples and nations? How should we navigate a global economic order within modern nation-states? They discuss how the Church has responded to this situation, and how the theology of the peoples can provide an answer.

D. C. Schindler argues that the loss of authority is the greatest of all human crises. When Nietzsche speaks of the death of God, which will lead to calamities, Schindler sees the great loss of authority. Liberalism's dismantling of any authority in favor of the sovereign individual has lead to the collapse of social order and the pursuit of a genuinely common good. In this podcast with Andrew Wil...

We live in a disillusioned political age, one where old liberal arguments no longer have hold. Conservatism has moved into a right-wing politics which no longer sees the value of Christianity. Lost in an ostensibly equal mass, individuals have experienced a loss of identity. New developments in technology, and especially AI, present an existential threat to human agency. In our time (2025) and pla...

In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Reuben Slife discuss the latest New Polity magazine, Issue 6.1, and specifically the translation of Alberto Methol Ferré's striking essay "The Church, People Among the Peoples." Is the Church a visible people, or a people among the peoples? How does the Church overcome oppositions, universal-particular?

In this podcast, Reuben Slife interviews Rocco Buttiglione about his life and work. Buttiglione was promised by Luigi Guissani, the founder of Communion and Liberation, that a Christian life will never be boring; taking this wager, he discusses his studies with Augusto Del Noce, his early encounters in Poland with Karol Wojtyła, his appointment to the European Union and time as Italian Minister of...

In honor of the new Pope Leo XIV, and in celebration of the 134th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Alex Denley and Andrew Willard Jones discuss the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII and the birth of modern Catholic Social Teaching.

In honor of the passing of the Pope, Marc Barnes and Reuben Slife discuss the life of Francis and the theology which he embodied: the theology of peoples. They also discuss Rocco Buttiglione's new book Modernity's Alternative and how Latin America formed the Pope's pastoral life and mission.

At the 2024 New Polity conference, Matthew B. Crawford gave the keynote address in which he contrasted the view of man inherent in technocratic rationalism with that of a Christian view. Drawing from the work of Joseph Ratzinger and Michael Oakeshott, Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be syntheti...

In this podcast, Reuben Slife and Marc Barnes discuss the new book from New Polity Press: Modernity's Alternative by Rocco Buttiglione. In the 20th century, a movement of priests and laypeople sought to find a way past the clash of ideologies that wracked Latin America. They found a solution in Latin America itself, which was born out of the conflict between Europeans and natives when, with the ap...

What is the difference between a people and a nation? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Ernest Renan's influential lecture "What is a nation?". Renan argues that a nation is not formed by common descent, language, religion, or geography. Rather, a nation is a spiritual principle that requires sacrifice, and a forgetting of the past. Marc and Alex discuss Renan's definition of a...

In this special episode of Political Saints, Marc Barnes and Nicolas McAfee discuss the heroic political life of St. Thomas More. Thomas More was the Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 until 1531. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted of treason and was executed. Pope Pius XI canonized Thomas More as a martyr in 1935. Dr. Nicolas McAfee is the Postdoctoral Teaching...

For the last five years, the Political Right has been debating over a program for regime change in America: should populism be used to construct a new elite class? Should a new administration retire all government employees? Can the bureaucratic state be maintained but filled with new conservative staff? In this podcast, Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Willard Jones discuss subsidiarity as the solution...

What is the meaning of national identity? Does strong national identity necessarily create a hostile relation with other nations? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Joseph Ratzinger's short book "The Unity of Nations." Through a discussion of the political theology of Origen and St. Augustine, Ratzinger shows how the early Christians viewed their relation to the nations, and Chri...

Registration is open for New Polity Conference 2025! https://newpolity.com/events/2025 In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's book "The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood." What is distinct about the brotherhood of Christians? Are there different ethical modes of acting to the brother and the non-brother? How does this impact our understanding of peoples and...

Are we headed to a grand and glorious technological future, bright with gizmos and gadgets and flying cars? In this talk, Andrew Willard Jones expects the opposite: "The Future is Always Worse Than You Think It Will Be." As he explains, there are two paths with the development on new technologies: one which leads to an extension of the humane world into greater areas, and another, the technocratic...

In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley review the latest New Polity Magazine, Issue 5.3, which includes articles on sex discrimination in the workplace, the demise of the hippocratic oath, the state of the pro-life movement, and more. Registration for New Polity 2025 conference is now open! Don't miss out on our early bird price: https://newpolity.com/events/2025

The fifth annual New Polity conference takes “the people” as its theme and object of wonder. Motivated by the apparent victory of populism in the United States’ 2024 election, and inspired by the Holy Roman Pontiff’s love for Latin America’s “theology of the people,” this meeting of theologians, philosophers (and, let’s face it, preachers) is devoted to thinking deeply about "the people." All of t...

The Church sees the world as God’s good and harmonious Creation, a primordial peace. In his acclaimed book Before Church and State, Andrew Willard Jones revealed that society in the High Middle Ages was a striving toward liberation by grace, which led to subsidiarity. In The Church Against the State, he argues that this uniquely Christian political form is still with us, present in our love, our c...

All the energy and vitality today is on the political right; the old conservative reactionary stance has been replaced with active, rival voices aimed at constructing a new regime. One such voice is Bronze Age Pervert and his followers. Through their series "The Politics of Paganism," Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones have explored the Nietzschean proposal, arguing that it is doomed to failure. The...

Why do we not feel free? As modern liberalism continues to isolate and divide, our common experience is a lack of freedom, of being constrained and enslaved. But, how can true freedom be restored? In this episode of the Politics of Paganism, Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones discuss the New Law and how grace restores true freedom.

St. Thomas Aquinas presents salvation history in three stages: The Age of Nature, the Age of Law, and the Age of Grace. The pagans are stuck within the age of nature; fallen humanity inevitably declines into idolatry and slavery. But, God has a plan for saving man. From the time of Moses until Christ, God's chosen people are in the Age of Law which points forward to the coming of Christ. In this p...