The Catholic Culture Podcast

It has become fashionable in traditionalist circles to blame all problems in modern theology on the so-called nouvelle th éologie , including a range of thinkers such as Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Hans Küng and Josef Ratzinger. But this is based on a number of misconceptions: about the nature of the nouvelle th éologie itself, and about the views held by some of these the...

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Modern education treats the child as a blank slate, a malleable object to be formed according to the will of whoever has power over educational policy. Classical Christian education treats the child as a person made in the image of God, a mystery to be held in awe, and tends to the flowering of his already-given nature by leading him to wisdom and virtue. Andrew Kern, founder of the CiRCE Institut...

St. John Henry Newman was involved in several art forms throughout his life. In literature, he was perhaps the greatest English prose writer of his time, and a highly skilled poet. In music, he was an accomplished amateur violinist, taught music to the boys at his school in Littlemore, and oversaw liturgical music as the head of an Oratorian community. In architecture, he commissioned a number of...

A look back through the Catholic Culture Podcast archive. This episode contains highlights from: Ep. 11 - Music and Morals - Basil Cole, O.P. https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-11-music-and-morals-fr-basil-cole-op/ Ep. 14 - Priest & Actor - George Drance, S.J. https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-14-priest-actor-george-drance-sj/ Ep. 15 - Online Education with the Tol...

Stabat Mater , a medieval hymn that was long used as the sequence for the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is now commonly sung between each Station of the Cross. This prayer, in which we ask Our Lady to help us experience the same sorrow and love with which she participated in her Son's Passion, has been set to music by many great composers. This episode explores the most fa...

Timothy and David Gordon join the show to discuss their new book Rules for Retrogrades: Forty Tactics to Defeat the Radical Left. It's a reverse-Alinskyan playbook for conservatives and Christians who are sick of being outmaneuvered at every turn by the forces seeking the destruction of the Christian faith and the natural foundations of the social order. The Gordon brothers want us to stop falling...

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This episode features two young Catholic publishers who are doing cutting-edge work to preserve and carry forward the Catholic literary legacy, building on the accomplishments of the great Catholic writers of the 20th century in particular. The first guest is Joshua Hren, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Wiseblood Books. Wiseblood's focus is on cultivating and publishing new works that maintain a hi...

A look back through the Catholic Culture Podcast archive. This episode contains highlights from: Ep. 1 - A Working Actor's Working Faith - Tony Mockus, Sr. https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-1-working-actors-working-faith/ Ep. 2 - The Largest Civil Disobedience Movement in American History - Bill Cotter, Phil Lawler https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-2-largest-civil...

In 1581, a young Englishman named Henry Walpole attended the execution of the Jesuit Edmund Campion. As Campion was hung, drawn and quartered, Walpole stood close enough to be spattered with his holy blood. Though Campion's fame in England was already great, Walpole would amplify it further with a splendid, lengthy poem, which became enormously popular among English Catholics—so popular that the m...

Thomas recently had the privilege of playing piano on the latest album by Catholic composer Mark Christopher Brandt. The Butterfly consists of a suite for string quartet and piano, plus two solo piano pieces. The suite, which uses the butterfly's transformation as an allegory of conversion, was described by the Catholic poet Dana Gioia as "fresh, inventive and alive". In this episode you will hear...

After growing up immersed in feminism and a dissident parish that left her deeply unhappy, Melody Lyons found truth and healing in the fullness of Christ's teaching on man and woman. Yet after decades of no longer considering herself a feminist, she started describing herself as a "Catholic feminist" in order to find common ground with secular women. Melody has recently realized that this strategy...

This is a tribute to Christopher Tolkien, who passed away on Jan. 16, 2020. Without Christopher's decades of dedicated scholarship, most notably his editing and publication of The Silmarillion, our knowledge of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world and very real genius would be considerably disadvantaged. Tolkien scholar John Garth, author of the acclaimed biography Tolkien and the Great War , joins...

Modernity elevated pure, abstract reasoning as the only way to know about reality. Reason having disenchanted everything else, modernity then became disenchanted with reason. The ascendancy of reason over superstitious myths was viewed by the postmodernists as just another myth to be exposed. The postmodernists were right to see that the dictates of reason were not wholly separate from our lives,...

It's Podcast Week here at CatholicCulture.org, as we want to make more people aware of our audio offerings, particularly the two new podcasts we launched last October: Catholic Culture Audiobooks and Way of the Fathers with Mike Aquilina. Both of these shows have broken new ground in Catholic podcasting, which has so far largely stayed in the realm of talk shows rather than scripted programming. A...

It is in the nature of Being to reveal itself to us, and in the natural realm this is done preeminently through beauty. Aquinas mentions radiance, clarity and proportion as beauty's three criteria. Proportion is arguably the most important in showing forth Being, as beauty reveals the plenitude of relations among all things: the relation of the parts of a thing, of the parts to the whole which sur...

We've all heard the complaints about Catholic dating. Catholics have trouble with the concept of "casual dating" because they (rightly) see dating as oriented toward marriage but (wrongly) put all that weight on a single date. Some are perpetually "discerning" without ever really going anywhere. Women feel like if they don't find a spouse during their four years at a Catholic college, they've miss...

The devastation rationalism has wrought on modernity has yet to be calculated, because it is the air we breathe, often regardless of our professed beliefs. To take politics as an example: the modern left, disenchanted with the Enlightenment narrative of reason's supremacy, has, rather than restoring reason to its proper subordinate place in our vision of reality, instead become skeptical of all cl...

Princeton University recently hosted and funded a very Catholic event as part of its annual Being Human Festival. It was a several-hour program dedicated to representations of St. Cecilia in poetry, painting and music, exploring how a conversation between these art forms can stir us to wonder and the contemplation of the Divine. The day's events included singing the Salve Regina and a dinner in ho...

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 forefathers didn't limit caroling to Christmas: they wrote carols for every season of the year covering the entire story of our R...

Terrence Malick's stunning new film , A Hidden Life , is about Blessed Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian farmer who was martyred for refusing to swear loyalty to Hitler. James Majewski joins Thomas to discuss the film. He reads excerpts from Bl. Franz's letters and prison writings, to see how well Malick's portrayal lives up to the real-life saint. The letters of Franz and his wife Franziska their d...

James Matthew Wilson's new cycle of poems, The River of the Immaculate Conception , is a reflection on the history of the Catholic faith in the Americas, from Juan Diego to Elizabeth Ann Seton. Its title is the name given to the Mississippi River by the missionary Fr. Marquette. James reads four of the seven poems, explains their relation to the recent Mass of the Americas which inspired them, and...

Modernity has attempted to do away with authority. It does this not most commonly by advocating anarchy. Rather, it justifies its own established powers in terms of a fictive self-rule, and purports to replace the arbitrary dictates of power--and much of what makes us human--with scientific rationality. But authority is necessary to human life, and not just as a medicine for weakness and evil. It...

Having honed his skills translating Dante, Tasso and Lucretius, well-known Catholic cultural commentator Anthony Esolen has now published his first book of original poetry. The book-length poem The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord is centered around twelve dramatic monologues set during and shortly after the time of Christ, complemented and illuminated by dozens of lyric poems and hymns. Links Buy...