Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, Transparency: the Material History of an Idea (Yale University Press, 2023) is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Dr. Daniel Jütte a...
Dec 01, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 358
The Power of Protocol: Diplomatics and the Dynamics of Papal Government, c. 400 – c.1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) by Dr. David d’Avray asks: How did the papacy govern European religious life without a proper bureaucracy and the normal resources of a state? From late Antiquity, papal responses were in demand. The 'apostolic see' took over from Roman emperors the discourse and demeanour of a religious ruler of the Latin world. Over the centuries, it acquired governmental authority analog...
Nov 30, 2023•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 57
Was there international law in the Middle Ages? Using treaties as its main source, International Law in Europe, 700-1200 (Manchester University Press, 2022) by Dr. Jenny Benham examines the extent to which such a system of rules was known and followed in the period 700 to 1200. It considers how consistently international legal rules were obeyed, whether there was a reliance on justification of action and whether the system had the capacity to resolve disputed questions of fact and law. The book ...
Nov 24, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 55
Jay Richards PhD, OP discusses the new book to which he contributed a chapter, God’s Grandeur: The Catholic Case for Intelligent Design (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), edited by Ann Gauger. We take on the insufficient explanations of Darwinian orthodoxy which insists that our world—from the vast cosmos to the also vast (in its complexity) genetic code in our cells. At the end of this episode (at 55 minutes), we hear an update from Father Piotr Żelazko in Israel as we enter the second month of th...
Nov 23, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 74
In our talk about his book, More than Things: A Personalist Ethics for a Throwaway Culture (InterVarsity Press, 2023), and in addition to quoting Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, Paul Louis Metzger also quotes Indiana Jones. When seeking the Grail, he chooses the clay cup from among the gilded chalices, “that’s the cup of a carpenter,” is the metaphor of the inherent value of human beings, ends unto themselves, priceless and unrepeatable. So I ask him (Dr. Metzger, not Dr. Jones) how we keep ...
Nov 09, 2023•59 min•Ep. 73
Father Piotr Zelazko is Vicar for the St. James Vicariate in Jerusalem and has been priest in Israel for fifteen years (he is a native of Poland and studied in Rome). He describes the Catholic Church in Israel today and also the broader Christian community. He discusses some of the challenges and many joys of the ecumenical work he does with Jews, Muslims, and the many other Christian denominations in the Holy Land. And he tells a lot of stories of pastoral work in Jerusalem and in the desert at...
Oct 26, 2023•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 72
To a lively cast of international players that shaped Manchuria during the early twentieth century, At the Frontier of God's Empire: A Missionary Odyssey in Modern China (Oxford UP, 2023) adds the remarkable story of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876-1948). A French Catholic missionary, Caubrière arrived in Manchuria on the eve of the Boxer Uprising in 1899 and was murdered on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China in 1948. Living with ordinary Chinese people for half a century, Caubr...
Oct 22, 2023•57 min•Ep. 24
Jane Sloan Peters remembers World Youth Day in Toronto back in 2002 when she was a teenager. She also talks about being a young mother and a teacher; she is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx. We also discuss her articles in America Magazine, her teaching philosophy, and the faith journey she has been on since her teenage conversion to the present day. Professor Peters’s faculty webpage at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx. J...
Oct 19, 2023•58 min•Ep. 71
On the night of March 18, 1655, two Spanish friars broke into a church to steal the bones of the founder of their religious institution, the Order of the Most Holy Trinity. This book investigates this little-known incident of relic theft and the lengthy legal case that followed, together with the larger questions that surround the remains of saints in seventeenth-century Catholic Europe. Drawing on a wealth of manuscript and print sources from the era, A. Katie Harris uses the case of St. John o...
Oct 16, 2023•48 min•Ep. 52
Gina A. Zurlo's book Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023) is the first textbook to focus on women’s experiences in the founding, spread, and continuation of the Christian faith. Integrating historical, theological, and social scientific approaches to World Christianity, this innovative volume centers women’s perspectives to illustrate their key role in Christianity becoming a world religion, including how they sustain the faith in the pre...
Oct 16, 2023•58 min•Ep. 23
England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages: Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073 (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Benjamin Savill provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought bac...
Oct 06, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 52
In Living under the Evil Pope (Brill, 2019), Martina Mampieri presents the Hebrew Chronicle of Pope Paul IV, written in the second half of the sixteenth century by the Italian Jewish moneylender Benjamin Neḥemiah ben Elnathan (alias Guglielmo di Diodato) from Civitanova Marche. The text remained in manuscript for about four centuries until the Galician scholar Isaiah Sonne (1887-1960) published a Hebrew annotated edition of the chronicle in the 1930s. This remarkable source offers an account of ...
Sep 30, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 444
Between 167 and 160 BC, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers led a revolt against the Greek tyrant who desecrated the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Miraculously victorious, the Jews rededicated the Temple in a festival of lights that became the first Hannukah. A bloody tale of oppression, war, and ancient diplomacy, these books (Maccabees 1 and 2) are a bridge between the Old and New Testaments and are the first places that the Jewish Bible speaks of life after death, intercessory prayer, and purgator...
Sep 28, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 70
Sister Mary Josefa of the Eucharist is a Benedictine nun in Missouri; she and the sisters of her community recently wrote a charming children’s book, Brides of Christ (Sophia Institute Press, 2023), which invites the reader into the rhythms of their contemplative life through the course of the day and cycle of the year. She talks about this life with me and also the discernment that drew her into it. We also discuss the late Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster who founded their community who drew the at...
Sep 14, 2023•49 min•Ep. 69
Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature's Limits: The Roman Inquisition and the Boundaries of Science (U Chicago Press, 2022) engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper b...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 49
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities....
Sep 12, 2023•33 min•Ep. 109
J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork The Lord of the Rings delighted so many of us as children, yet it and its vast body of accompanying work, such as the Silmarillion, contain a rich depth not well understood by most adults. Tolkien's work reflects his academic interests in the history of language and the Medieval world, as well as his Catholic faith. What purpose and religious message does his writing contain? Does his work carry a political meaning? Here to discuss is Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, As...
Sep 12, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 84
On the second Saturday of each month, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Varanasi, Shiva's own city, thousands of shudra and Dalit devotees worship Yesu (Jesus) at a Catholic ashram. In an open-air pavilion more than three thousand women and men alternately sit, stand, and sing; they offer testimonials of healing, and receive the blessings of encounter from an unlikely deity. Facing this ocean of humanity is a 12-foot billboard Christ, arms outstretched, urging in Hindi: "Come to me all you...
Sep 07, 2023•54 min•Ep. 282
For Augustine, the world is replete with meaning; it represents not merely a collection of facts to be catalogued but a repository of truths to be discovered and discerned, a view which contrasts with the one we have inherited as a result of the thought of figures such as Descartes, Newton, and Kant. What difference would it make to see the world as created? In On Creation, Science, Disenchantment and the Contours of Being and Knowing (Bloomsbury, 2019), Matthew W. Knotts explores this question ...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 248
Today I talked to Kathleen Osberger about her book I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975 (Oribis Books, 2023). In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police. This was after the CIA assisted coup that overthrew democratically elect...
Sep 05, 2023•18 min•Ep. 356
Love and Despair: How Catholic Activism Shaped Politics and the Counterculture in Modern Mexico (U California Press, 2023) explores the multiple and mostly unknown ways progressive and conservative Catholic actors, such as priests, lay activists, journalists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, responded to the significant social and cultural shifts that formed competing notions of modernity in Cold War Mexico. Jaime M. Pensado demonstrates how the Catholic Church as a heterogeneous institution--with...
Sep 01, 2023•57 min•Ep. 195
Kevin Vallier is a philosophy professor and author of All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2023), a new book about Catholic Integralism, a mostly online intellectual movement that thinks the church should take over the state, something that made sense fifteen hundred years ago after the collapse of the Roman Empire, but not so much day in our pluralistic, democratic age. Professor Vallier’s goal is to help us all talk together with patience a...
Aug 31, 2023•59 min•Ep. 68
Father Chris Pietraszko has been thinking about sin and redemption for the last year and a half as he has been writing a series of articles that will become a book. Relying on the Gospel, Catholic Doctrine, Thomas Aquinas, and his experience in the confessional, Father Chris explains the mechanism of sin, how it works in our lives, and how it is to be defeated. He reflects on his experience as a confessor and explains the relationship between the deadly and venial sins. Articles by Father Chris ...
Aug 24, 2023•59 min•Ep. 67
American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism―not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship―is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice: Disability, Ministr...
Aug 22, 2023•40 min•Ep. 27
Praying to Portraits: Audience, Identity, and Inquisition in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn State University Press, 2023), art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true” effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of liv...
Aug 21, 2023•50 min•Ep. 47
Sandie Holguín speaks with Jennifer L. Holland about her book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (University of California Press, 2020). In addition to her book, Dr. Holland has recently published an article in Feminist Studies, “‘Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust’: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement.” Dr. Holland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma and Book Review Editor for the Journal of Women’s History. In Tiny You, H...
Aug 16, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 128
Jonathon Fessenden, theologian and editor of Missio Dei, invited me to talk about The Fourth Wise Man, the 1985 film based on the 1895 Henry van Dyke novella, The Other Wise Man. It was a tale I had known as a children’s story, but it was a delight to learn more about it, to watch this movie (a few times), and to share this discussion with Jonathon. Martin Sheen plays Artaban, a Persian astrologer, a magus (one of the magi), who is following the star to the birth of Christ. But he arrives too la...
Aug 03, 2023•53 min•Ep. 65
The poor have always been with us, even in a rich country and a prosperous time. I ask Ben Metcalf, former Secretary of Housing and Community Development in California, about the challenges and successes of the government in providing shelter for its people. Our conversation recalls the question from Matthew 25:37-38, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?’ I was pleased to see that m...
Jul 27, 2023•54 min•Ep. 64
With its expanding legal system and its burgeoning throngs of lawyers, legates, and documents, the papacy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has often been credited with spearheading a governmental revolution that molded the high medieval church into an increasingly disciplined, uniform, and machine-like institution. Reimagining Christendom: Writing Iceland's Bishops Into the Roman Church, 1200-1350 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023) offers a fresh appraisal of these developments from a surpri...
Jul 25, 2023•51 min•Ep. 45
In this important historical account of the role that religion played in defining the political life of a modern national society, Paul A. Hanebrink shows how Hungarian nationalists redefined Hungary--a liberal society in the nineteenth century--as a narrowly "Christian" nation in the aftermath of World War I. Drawing on impressive archival research, Hanebrink uncovers how political and religious leaders demanded that "Christian values" influence public life while insisting that religion should ...
Jul 21, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 192
