Sacred and Profane Love

This week, we revisit Episode 43 with Brad Carson on Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind!

Throwback to the big five-oh: Episode 50 with Zena Hitz and Chad Wellmon!

This very exciting episode on liberal education with Professor Roosevelt Montás makes a come back this week!

Throwback to our first episode recorded with a live audience: Dr. Cornel West on James Baldwin!

Let's go back to the beginning, where it all began: Episode 1 on Flannery O'Connor with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. !!

Please join us for the most popular of our re-runs thus far. It's the return of Episode 55 with Professor Christopher Snyder on Tolkien and Virtue Ethics!

We invite you to explore one of our previously aired episodes: a conversation with Dana Gioia.

We come back to Episode 48, where I speak with Thomas Hibbs about Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, in our second re-run for the summer!

In our first re-run for the summer, we revisit our most popular episode from Season 4, Episode 51!

In this episode, I explain our recent hiatus. As I'm transitioning to my new role as inaugural dean of the Honors College at University of Tulsa, we'll be re-running our most popular episodes throughout the summer.

In this episode, Russell Hittinger and I finish our conversation on St. Augustine’s Confessions and discuss the last three books.

In this episode, I continue my conversation with Russell Hittinger about one of the great masterworks of the Western literary tradition: St. Augustine's Confessions. In our discussion on books VI-IX, we track St. Augustine's conversion to Christianity and his mother's death.

In this episode, I speak with professor Russell Hittinger about one of the great masterworks of the Western literary tradition: St. Augustine's Confessions. We discuss the structure of the book as a whole, its intended audience, the reasons Augustine wrote it, and its first five books, detailing Augustine's birth, boyhood, and young adulthood.  This is part one in a three part series on this book.

In this episode, I speak with professor, novelist, and critic, Randy Boyagoda, about why people of faith should read contemporary novels, the role of literature generally in the spiritual, moral, and intellectual life, and the themes of his two latest novels, Original Prin and Dante's Indiana.

In this episode, I speak to Anthony Domestico about the poetry of TS Eliot.  We discuss Eliot the man, the critic, and the poet.  We contrast the Wasteland and The Four Quartets, and discuss the reasons we prefer the latter to the former.

In this episode, I speak with fellow philosopher (and substack writer) Justin E. H. Smith about the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe.  This is our final episode of 2022!  As always, I hope you enjoy our conversation.

In this episode, I am joined by Sam Filby, a graduate student in philosophy at Northwestern University. We discuss JM Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth Costello, which is a fictionalized account of a writer who gives a series of lectures on the ethics of eating animals. We simply try to figure out what is /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422182

In this episode, I am joined by the poet and critic Dana Gioia to discuss Charles Baudelaire's famous book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal, or The Flowers of Evil.  We tackle some big questions in this episode, such as whether and how evil can be beautiful, the nature of Catholic art and poetry, original sin, and the poet as a damned figure.

In this episode, I am joined by Christopher Snyder, professor of history and director of British Studies at Mississippi State University, to discuss J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction and virtue ethics.  We discuss Tolkien's background , training, academic work /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422188

In this episode, I team up again with Karen Swallow Prior, this time to discuss what many people call "the great American novel" Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.  We talk about sin, guilt, and repression, and how Hawthorne's story is more complicated and interesting than most people make it out to be.

In this episode, I speak with the poet, critic, and biographer Paul Mariani, professor emeritus at Boston College. We discuss his new book, All that Will be New and his biography of Robert Lowell, /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422197

In this episode, I speak with my friends, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP and Fr. Jonah Teller, OP about the relationship between art, truth, and beauty, sacred and profane music, how music might be integral to religious life, and whether the banjo is beautiful.  Long time listeners will remember Thomas J /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422203

In this episode, I speak to my husband (and fellow philosopher) Chris Frey about Walter M. Miller’s sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz.  We both agree that this is a novel about sin, and more specifically, how sin is connected to the myriad ways that our desire for knowledge becomes perverted and disordered.  Along the way, we also talk about memory, Promethean fear, impiety, hope, the Immaculate Conception, and of course, monks.  I think this episode pairs very well with episode 14, /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422206

On April 26, 2022, The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America hosted a launch event to reveal the new design and website of Sacred and Profane Love. I am pleased to share the audio of that event as episode 50, but you can also watch a video of it here.

In this episode, I speak with the writer, editor, and critic, Christopher Beha, about the Danish bildungsroman by Henrik Pontoppidan, Lucky Per. We focus on Per’s struggle to escape from those aspects of his life that are not chosen—family, religion, place—his quest to understand himself, to love other people, and to live a life that is truly happy and free.  Along the way, we discuss reviews of the novel by James Wood and Morten Hoi Jensen, and we give our own diagnosis of why Per fails to be /episode/index/show/82c764c6-f601-43d3-9c94-2352b57afff3/id/28422212