The Theology Pugcast

On today’s show Tom brings into discussion themes from Robert Geraci’s book: Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. The conversation focuses on ways in which the Western Christian Apocalyptic emphasis gets changed and rethought by several key figures in the Robotics and AI research fields and promoted as a new form of salvation and immortality....

That’s the provocative title of a series of articles that the guys discuss today. Belief in nature spirits was universal around the world, including among the church fathers and Christian theologians, until the 17th century, when Enlightenment rationalism consigned them to the realm of superstition. Even today, though, there are people who talk about encountering them. So what are we to make of th...

Join us for a mini-episode of the Pugcast in which Chris talks to Joe Rigney about the talks he will be delivering in September at the Welcome to Negative World Conference, September 9-10 in Battle Ground, Washington! To learn more about the conference: www.negworldconference.com To learn more about Bethlehem College and Seminary: https://bcsmn.edu/

On today’s show Chris guides a conversation on the nature of justice and its relationship to the given order of nature. For many intellectuals “justice” is an ideal that is imposed on society. Innate differences between people should be either compensated for, denied, or surgically removed. But is this really just? Perhaps the differences we see between individuals, or the sexes, are actually give...

Join us for a mini-episode of the Pugcast in which Chris talks to Aaron Renn about the talks he will be delivering in September at the Welcome to Negative World Conference, September 9-10 in Battle Ground, Washington! To learn more, follow this link: www.negworldconference.com

The trials and triumphs of Christian life as pilgrims in the world but not of the world. Tom introduces the topic by way of David Elliot’s article: Passing through the Sirens, the Trials of the Christian Wayfarer in the World. The conversation discusses the various biblical senses of ‘world’ and engages the biblical call to live a life resisting and renouncing the fallen world and its lingering im...

Listen in for a quick question and answer session following yesterday's episode: The Most Reluctant Convert.

This week, the Pug has a special guest, Max McLean, the founder of the Fellowship for the Performing Arts. Max has brought to the stage “The Screwtape Letters,” “The Great Divorce,” and “The Most Reluctant Convert,” the story of C.S. Lewis’s conversion; most recently staring in a film adaptation of the last of these. For the first half hour of the show the pugsters spoke with Max about his work an...

We wouldn’t have Christianity without miracles, and one miracle in particular—the resurrection and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth. Odd then, isn’t it, that not so long ago, there were some people who said that we could? C. S. Lewis knew that was nonsense, and he set out in his great book, “Miracles,” to set down a case for miracles in general, and specifically, the miracles that gave us Christiani...

In this episode, the Pugsters look at the idea of courtesy and manners through the lens of medieval courtesy books. These were instructions to children on how to behave derived from chivalry and from instructions to novices in monasteries. Their goal was to inculcate virtue in children before they had a chance to develop vices. The guys discuss how manners reflect how we think about other people a...

In today’s show Tom introduces the topic: how contemporary secular and nihilistic thinking owes its form to material deviations from the classical Christian understanding of God and final things. Once set in play, such altered understandings about God and final things led to the wide host of competing secular and nihilistic views about the end game of our actions and lives. Glenn and Chris bring i...

Is writing objective history impossible? Many today believe so. To these folks everything is "text,” meaning something we can interpret however we please, the implication being facts must be interpreted, and since we're the only interpreters "history" is nothing more than one person, or group's tendentious interpretation of things. (You have your interpretation and I have mine, in other words, and...

Listen in for a quick question and answer session following yesterday's episode on Romanticism.

In this semi-live episode, the Pugsters return to Romanticism, a topic we’ve touched on in a number of other Pugcasts. After a quick explanation of Romanticism as a response to cultural stress, the guys discuss some of the pathologies that have entered Western society as a result of the Romantic movement, including Expressive Individualism. But it turns out that not everything about Romanticism wa...

On today’s show the guys unpack aspects of contemporary culture and its move away from ontological truth. Language, once it’s detached from referencing the real, becomes a field of competing power plays and conflict. How are Christians to enact truthfulness, avoid falsehood in their discernment of truth, and speak the truth as it become increasingly costly to do so? The Pugsters consider such ques...

Today the Pugsters are joined by Dr. Luke Sheahan, President of The Academy of Philosophy and Letters, and Editor of The University Bookman. Among other things, Luke is an authority on the intellectual history of conservatism in the United States. The conversation includes a discussion of some of the more important luminaries in American Conservatism, the nature of "freedom of association" and why...

In this episode, Moira Greyland Peat and Rachel Fulton Brown return for the first time together as Pugcast guests to explore the importance of story and imaginative fiction as a vehicle for communicating truth in ways that can transcend nonfiction. Along the way, Moira, Rachel, and the Pugsters talk about what makes stories fail, the impact of substituting ideology for truth in pop culture, the re...

Today the Pugsters are happy to welcome Jason Baxter on the show! Jason is the author of a new book on C. S. Lewis entitled: The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind. Have you ever wondered why no one seems to come close to C. S. Lewis when it comes to apologetics and fiction (except J. R. R. Tolkien, of course). Jason Baxter knows why--C. S. Lewis had a medieval mind...

Ever feel like an upgraded body would be good to have? You're not alone, and there are people who are ready to help--for a price. How about an extra 10 years of life, wouldn't that be nice? Why stop there? Why not an extra 20, or 100, or 10,000? Believe it or not, there are people who think that mortality is an engineering problem. Now here's another wrinkle, there are theologians that agree. What...

Today the Pugcast is joined by Mark Bauerlein, professor emeritus of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things. Mark made waves back in 2008 with his book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone under 30). He was accused of being a luddite, and an alarmist in those halcyon days of Web 2.0. Unfortunate...

This is the time of year when we get a lot of memes about how Easter is a warmed-over pagan holiday. Everything from the name “Easter” to the use of eggs and rabbits is a claimed to be connected to a pagan fertility goddess. Our resident historian Glenn takes great delight in debunking these kinds of myths, and in this episode he and the guys talk about the historical and linguistic facts about Ea...

Tom introduces one of the driving assumptions that is underwriting the flux and chaos of current social trends: the assumption that truth is relative, perspectival, unable to be attained apart from our individual or group filters. The guys join in with many historical and contemporary insights into some key figures and ideas which have played into the rise and dominance of contemporary relativism...

Many Christians today reject altogether the idea of Christian mysticism, but it has a long history in the church going back to the first centuries. The early church recognized three different types of mysticism: scriptural, which involved looking for symbolic or allegorical meanings in Scripture; liturgical, focused usually on the Eucharist; and contemplative. The guys discuss each of these, argui...

Well, which is it, a duck or a rabbit? Today the Pugsters examine the notorious duck/rabbit problem. You probably have seen the drawing, look at it one way, and you see a duck, look at it another way and you see a rabbit. Often the drawing is used to illustrate the ambiguity of signs, and the inevitably subjective character of interpretation. But are we doing justice to the signs, or the world we...

Tom unpacks themes from David Blount's essay on Hobbits, Tolkien and Nietzsche in relation to the differing way power and is understood and related to. Blount compares the Hobbits rejection of becoming Überhobbits in contrast to Nietzsche's dark vision of embracing the will to power. The guys engage in a variety of matters related to power, the will to power, the ring of power, and the counter vis...