The Catholic Culture Podcast

Poet, translator and cultural critic Anthony Esolen joins the podcast to discuss his book, In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John . 'In this extended meditation, Anthony Esolen looks, phrase by phrase, at the majestic Prologue to the Gospel of John, which with good reason he calls "the most influential paragraph in the history of man." He unfolds its theologica...

Joshua Hren returns to discuss his debut novel,  Infinite Regress. "In the years since his graduation from St. Marquis University, Blake Yourrick has fled his family and Milwaukee, rotating from job to dead-end job—working the Bakken oilfields in Dakota and even signing on as the night caretaker of a rural abbey graveyard. Deep in student debt and estranged from his misanthropic, alcoholic father,...

Historian Árpád von Klimó joins the podcast to give an introduction to József Cardinal Mindszenty (1892-1975), prince primate of Hungary. Mindszenty was not only the face of Hungarian resistance to fascism and communism, but ultimately a symbol Catholic resistance to communism worldwide. From 1948 to 1956 he was in a communist prison, from 1956 to 1971 he was isolated from the world as a refuge in...

D. C. Schindler's book  The Politics of the Real: The Church between Liberalism and Integralism is one of the richest entries in the ongoing Catholic debate over liberalism, political authority, the common good, and the relation between Church and State. Schindler offers subtle, convincing arguments as to why liberalism is "the political form of evil", specifically consisting of a rejection of the...

In a wide-ranging and erudite interview, poet and translator Ryan Wilson joins the podcast to discuss how the poet makes use of the classical virtue of xenia or hospitality, what poets can learn from the work of translation, the "romantic turn" (inner vision) and the "classical turn" (communication/craft) in poetry, the great Latin poet Horace, and more. Ryan performs, in his dynamic style, classi...

"The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity." - Glenn Gould One of the greatest classical pianists of the 20th century, Glenn Gould, shocked...

This episode contains clips of highlights from episodes 51 and 53-55 of the Catholic Culture Podcast. Links (in order of clips) The Hundredfold - Anthony Esolen https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-55-hundredfold-anthony-esolen/ Bringing Melody Back to Pop Music - The Duskwhales https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-51-bringing-melody-back-to-pop-music-duskwhales/ God Ma...

One of the best contemporary natural law philosophers, J. Budszizewski, joins the show to discuss his new book, How (and How Not) to Be Happy , spiritual warfare in the classroom, and his journey from "macho nihilism" to faith. Topics include: Why virtue alone won't make you happy Why the Greeks said "Call no man happy until he is dead" A critique of the Stoic revival How belief in the afterlife a...

In Holy Week of 1962, Bishop Karol Wojtyla gave a retreat to a group of Polish artists. The text of that retreat has now been published in English, along with commentary, by the Theology of the Body Institute, in a book titled  God Is Beauty: A Retreat on the Gospel and Art . Christopher West, president of the TOB Institute, joins Thomas Mirus to discuss the retreat and how it fits together with S...

Thomas Mirus reads his article "Fatima Today: In Defense of Private Revelation". The first part of this article is a reminder of the essential importance of Fatima in our time. The second, and longer, part corrects a misunderstanding of private revelation  held by many—namely that whatever falls into this category can make no claim on our mind or conscience, and that it is a matter of indifference...

Katy Carl, author of the excellent new novel As Earth Without Water and editor-in-chief of the Catholic arts journal Dappled Things , joins the show to discuss the novel and the state of the Catholic literary scene. The publisher's description of  As Earth Without Water: When Dylan Fielding, celebrated contemporary visual artist, becomes Br. Thomas Augustine, novice at Our Lady of the Pines monast...

Today's guest is Chase Faucheux, translator of a recent biography of Pope St. Gregory the Great. Topics include: The very low point in Rome's history in which Gregory came of age His being all things to all men in the city of Rome, as both a spiritual and temporal leader His longing for the monastic life even after he became Pope His remarkable forthrightness about his own shortcomings His diploma...

This is a significantly truncated version of the original episode. Listen to the full episode here: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/126-how-charlie-parker-changed-my-life/ Thomas Mirus goes solo in this episode to talk about how his relationship to music was completely transformed in his late teens, by exposure to the music of alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Before he had used music to...

Art historian Elizabeth Lev joins the show to discuss her new book,  The Silent Knight: A History of St. Joseph as Depicted in Art . The book offers not only a history of sixteen centuries of art featuring St. Joseph, but also an account of the development of devotion to St. Joseph over the past two thousand years -from the old man sitting overlooked in the corner of early Nativity scenes to the g...

For two decades, Maggie Gallagher was a leading voice writing about the importance of permanent, monogamous marriage to society. At first, that included pointing out the problems with divorce, feminism and single parenthood. Then as same-sex marriage became the predominant issue, Gallagher became the public face of the movement against it. A few years after the Supreme Court made gay marriage lega...

Carl Hostetter, editor of a new volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's unpublished notes,  The Nature of Middle-earth , joins the show. Carl discusses: His collaboration with Christopher Tolkien leading to this new volume What other Tolkien writings we might expect to see published Why it may be good that Tolkien never finished the Silmarillion in his lifetime Tolkien's Thomistic reflections on elvish hylomor...

T.C. Merrill's debut novel, Minor Indignities , is an evocative portrayal of the vanity of undergraduate life at an Ivy League university. Its protagonist, a freshman consumed with what others think of him intellectually, socially and sexually, only makes a fool of himself the more he strains to impress. The novel ultimately becomes a richness of embarrassments whose final catastrophe illustrates...

Originally published as episode 59 on December 21, 2019, this popular episode is being rerun in a slightly improved version. This is a love letter to the great English Christmas carols, from "There Is No Rose" to "The Boar's Head". Did you know that not just any Christmas song is a carol? The true carol, in all its earthy splendor, is a distinctive product of the Catholic middle ages. Yet our fore...

Mary Lou Williams: one of the outstanding jazz pianists of all time, composer, Catholic convert, visionary, performer of works of mercy. Because Williams's career lasted and her style adapted through many changes in jazz from the swing era to the early 1970s, and because she mentored two of jazz's most influential figures (Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk), this episode is an opportunity not only to...

This episode contains clips of highlights from episodes 45 and 47-49 of the Catholic Culture Podcast. Episode 45—Libertarianism vs. Natural Law on Private Property https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-45-libertarianism-vs-natural-law-on-private-property/ Episode 47—Our Lady's Habit: Wearing and Loving the Brown Scapular—Fr. Justin Cinnante, O.Carm. https://www.catholicculture.org/com...

Unlikely as it may sound, Catholic fiction has a certain amount of mainstream appeal in Japanese literature. Sono Ayako, one of Japan's most famous novelists, wrote a novel about St. Maximilian Kolbe called Miracles , which has just been translated into English. Miracles is a semiautobiographical account of the author's personal investigation into the miracles approved by the Vatican for Kolbe's c...

Etienne Gilson's Metamorphoses of the City of God traces the quest of philosophers for a universal human society, as it gradually degraded from the heavenly city of which Augustine wrote to modern-day secular humanist globalism. It began with well-intentioned medieval thinkers who were overconfident in the capability of natural reason to unite the whole world in the Catholic faith - but this led g...

Mark Christopher Brandt returns to the show to discuss his latest album, Joy , which is based on the structure of the Rosary. It features the family choir of Mark and his three daughters, accompanied by Mark on piano. Mark began composing this music in the mid-1990s, not knowing who would sing it, when only his first daughter had been born. On the eve of the new millenium, he decided to take a hia...

This is a crossover episode in which Thomas joins forces with Scott Hambrick and Karl Schudt from the Online Great Books Podcast,  to discuss the classic essay Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. This episode covers beauty as a transcendental and its role in the fine arts, and intuition as the way we experience artistic beauty. The beauty of a work does not depend on the emotional effects i...

This is a crossover episode in which Thomas joins forces with Scott Hambrick and Karl Schudt from the Online Great Books Podcast,  to discuss the classic essay Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. Maritain argues for an objective view of both art and the artist, bringing an orderly, scholastic, Thomistic approach to understanding aesthetics. Mirus says, "Maritain gets art better than any oth...