I asked medieval historian Rachel Fulton Brown if we ought to still think of our nation (or any Western nation) as “a Christian country” in the twenty-first century. My reasoning was that I thought our Judeo-Christian inheritance is the foundation—if partially forgotten—of the democratic principles of our republic. The resulting discussion was lively, fruitful, and surprising. Professor Fulton Brown teaches Medieval European History at the University of Chicago, specializing on Religious, Cultur...
Jan 06, 2023•55 min
Joseph Nagel and Heather Skinner are principal and vice-principal of the School of the Madeleine in Berkeley, California; Mrs. Skinner was also once Joseph’s teacher and mine (your host, Chris Odyniec) and has been at the school for 45 years. Over this time, the school population and broader community has changed significantly. Mrs. Skinner and Mr. Nagel reflect on their experience teaching and working at a beloved and successful Catholic school in a progressive town like Berkeley, California; t...
Jan 05, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Matthew J Hart and Daniel J Hill's book Does God Intend that Sin Occur? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) argues, from a detailed consideration of the Christian Scriptures, that God intends that sin occur. It swims against the tide of current thinking in philosophy of religion, arguing for an unfashionable conclusion. The book begins by considering the history of views on the question, paying particular attention to the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition. The heart of the book is a detailed examination ...
Jan 05, 2023•43 min•Ep. 224
Robert Fastiggi discusses Catholic doctrine about the Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary, the Mother of God. He also reflects on his participation in ecumenical dialogues on these subjects and explains that many of these principles are shared by our Orthodox and our Protestant brothers and sisters—something many people don’t realize—and presents arguments from Scripture as well. Finally, Professor Fastiggi talks about some of the most famous Marian Apparition...
Jan 04, 2023•55 min•Season 1Ep. 7
Chris Padgett explains Catholic doctrine about the Virgin Mary and how both Sacred Tradition and Scripture inform the Magisterium. He talks about his Baptist upbringing, his own journey to the Church, and how he then became a theologian and one of the most influential Catholic speakers—and musicians—in the United States today. He explains Catholic Mariology and how we radically venerate and love Mary ( dulia or hyperdulia ) but adore ( latria ) only God. Padgett also talks about how this convers...
Jan 03, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 6
Anthropological theory can radically transform our understanding of human experience and offer theologians an introduction to the interdisciplinary nature between anthropology and Christianity. Both sociocultural anthropology and theology have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of human experience and the place of humanity in the world. But can these two disciplines, despite the radical differences that separate them, work together to transform their thinking on these topics? In...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 205
Lauren Nelson discusses St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Way, the communion of saints, which is really quite close. She also talks about her ministries and classes and what St. Thérèse has taught he about life and being a mother. Lauren Nelson's classes are here . The Coffee & Catholics podcast is here . The Gathering Manna Facebook community is here . St. Thérèse of Lisieux's The Story of a Soul is available here . An audio recording is here . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
Jan 02, 2023•41 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Author Heather King discusses her journey from the alcoholic abyss to redemption and new life (which she described in her book, Parched , 2006), St. Thérèse of Lisieux and the Little Way (whom she wrote about in her book, Shirt of Flame , 20011), the Communion of Saints, literature, women in the Church. In this conversation, we talk over the “Little Ways” that we may look for in our lives to follow the Way of Jesus—as women, men, parents, clerics, lay-people, writers, teachers, workers, and ever...
Jan 01, 2023•58 min•Ep. 4
Professor Matthew Thomas returns to explain how we can place the Gospels in time and context using both internal clues (literary evidence) and the external ones (anthropological evidence). These are the first steps on a path of the many centuries of transmission toward the Bible we have today; Matthew Thomas tells why they are so important and where they have led us. The papyrus (P66) of the Gospel of John in the Bodmer Library, Switzerland, can be found here . Learn more about your ad choices. ...
Dec 31, 2022•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Jonathan Fessenden and I talk about two movies, Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016) and Jerry London’s The Scarlet and the Black (1983) and what they say about how to confront evil in terrible times—seventeenth-century Tokugawa Japan in one film, and 1943 Nazi-occupied Rome in the other—how to face our shortcomings and lean on God even when He is hard to find. We also talk about Jonathan’s article about continuous prayer and his life and journey. Jonathan Fessenden is a Catholic writer, composer, a...
Dec 30, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 37
Makoto Fujimura , world-famous contemporary painter with global cultural influence, talks about his art, his thinking and writing about Shūsaku Endō's novel Silence (1966), and his work on Martin Scorsese's film Silence (2016). I ask him about Scorsese’s long collaborative friendship with Akira Kurosawa and his participation in Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). Mako also describes his work with his wife, Haejin Shim Fujimura, for Embers International and Kintsugi Academy, protecting and serving women an...
Dec 29, 2022•59 min•Season 1Ep. 14
For two years Sr Nathalie Becquart has been in charge of the Church’s Synod on Synodality, coordinating the responses of millions of Catholics from 112 out of 114 Episcopal Conferences and from all the 15 Oriental Catholic Churches. She and I talk about the spirit of this Synod, its progress and direction, and the recently published Working Document for the Continental Stage (DCS), Enlarge the Space of Your Tent . Sr Nathalie Becquart was appointed by Pope Francis to be Undersecretary of the Syn...
Dec 28, 2022•48 min•Ep. 36
Matthew Thomas , theologian and biblical scholar, explains how the Bible got to be the Bible, how confident we can be in its historicity, and on what authority we can trust such judgments. We talk about the languages of the Scripture and their transmission over time, and how we see the emergence of the documents that would later become the Bible already in first-century Christian communities. Professor Thomas teaches Biblical languages and the history of the Bible, Patristics, and Early Christia...
Dec 27, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 2
David Basile explains Thomas Aquinas's cosmological proofs for God. David is department chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana; he is also an old friend of mine so he was a natural choice to be the first guest of this new podcast. He talked about his own journey from atheism to Buddhism and finally to the Catholic Church. (He spent a decade as a Buddhist monk, where he first encountered Catholic contemplative mystics.) I asked David to explain how we know there ...
Dec 26, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Dr. Karma Ben-Johanan presents a revealing account of contemporary tensions between Jews and Christians, playing out beneath the surface of conciliatory interfaith dialogue. A new chapter in Jewish–Christian relations opened in the second half of the twentieth century when the Second Vatican Council exonerated Jews from the accusation of deicide and declared that the Jewish people had never b...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 26
Can the study of religion be justified? Scholarship in religion, especially work in "theory and method," is preoccupied with matters of research procedure and thus inarticulate about the goals that motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. Richard B. Miller identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, and then offers an alternative framework for thinking about the purposes of the discipline. Shadowing these various methodologies, h...
Dec 20, 2022•43 min•Ep. 185
In A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kathleen Sprows Cummings asks what drove U.S. Catholics in their arduous quest for an American saint? A home-grown saint, she argues, would serve as a mediator between Catholicism and American culture. Throughout much of U.S. history, the making of a saint was about the ways in which the members of a minority religious group defined, defended, and celebrated their ide...
Dec 17, 2022•42 min•Ep. 25
Mary Channen Caldwell in her new book Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press 2022) opens up new avenues for investigation by centering the refrain as an area of focus in which to analyze Latin songs through the Middle Ages. Throughout medieval Europe, male and female religious communities attached to churches, abbeys, and schools participated in devotional music making outside of the chanted liturgy. Newly collating over 400 songs from primary sources, this book r...
Dec 07, 2022•31 min•Ep. 174
Teaching in Black and White: The Sisters of St. Joseph in the American South (Catholic University of America Press, 2022) discusses the work of the Sisters of St. Joseph of (the city of) St. Augustine, who came to Florida from France in 1866 to teach newly freed blacks after the Civil War, and remain to this day. It also tells the story of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Georgia, who sprang from the motherhouse in St. Augustine. A significant part of the book is a comparison of the Sisters of St. J...
Dec 07, 2022•45 min•Ep. 24
Today I had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Henni Alava, postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, on her fascinating new book published by Bloomsbury as part of the New Directions in Anthropology of Christianity book series: Christianity, Politics and the Afterlives of War in Uganda: There is Confusion (Bloomsbury, 2022). Alava's work sheds critical light on the complex and unstable relationship between Christianity and politics, and peace and war. Drawing on long-running ethnographic field...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 34 min•Ep. 150
Ammon Hennacy was arrested over thirty times for opposing US entry in World War 1. Later, when he refused to pay taxes that support war, he lost his wife and daughters, and then his job. For protesting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was hounded by the IRS and driven to migrant labor in the fields of the West. He had a romance with Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker , who called him a “prophet and a peasant.” He helped the homeless on the Bowery, founded the Joe Hill House of ...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 23
Russell McCutcheon shares his views on the academic study of religion, and the path ahead for religion graduates and the field itself. McCutcheon is a professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama and a contributor to the Religious Studies Project podcast. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...
Nov 28, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 237
In popular thought, Christianity is often figured as being opposed to dance. Conventional scholarship traces this controversy back to the Middle Ages. Historical sources, however, suggest that medieval dance was a complex and ambivalent phenomenon. During the High and Late Middle Ages, Western theologians, liturgists, and mystics not only tolerated dance; they transformed it into a dynamic component of religious thought and practice. In Ringleaders of Redemption: How Medieval Dance Became Sacred...
Nov 25, 2022•42 min•Ep. 218
Aidan Enright holds a PhD in History from Queen’s University Belfast and is an Associate Researcher and Part-Time Lecturer in History at Leeds Beckett University, where he teaches Modern British History and he is also a Teacher of Social Sciences at University of Bradford International College. In this interview, he discusses his first book, Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts, 2022) This book uncovers th...
Nov 24, 2022•29 min•Ep. 31
In our age of biomedicine, society often treats sickness and disability as problems in need of solution. Phenomena of embodied difference, however, have not always been seen in terms of lack and loss. Where Paralytics Walk and the Blind See: Stories of Sickness and Disability at the Juncture of Worlds (Princeton UP, 2022) explores the case of early modern Catholic Canada under French rule and shows it to be a period rich with alternative understandings of infirmity, disease, and death. Counterna...
Nov 17, 2022•55 min•Ep. 22
In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard University Press, 2022), Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the “heathen” has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses—discourses, specifically, of race. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptio...
Nov 11, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 180
The T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology , edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long (T&T Clark: 2020), provides a wide-ranging survey and analysis of the Christian Church. This foundational text explores the scriptural foundations of ecclesiology, historical and confessional aspects of the topic, contemporary and topical themes. Compiled and written by leading scholars in the field, this accessible volume covers a range of key topics in the context of their development and importance...
Nov 08, 2022•28 min•Ep. 212
Anna von der Goltz’s The Other ‘68ers: Student Protest and Christian Democracy in West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021) is a history of 1968 written from a new perspective—that of center-right student activists. Based on oral history as well as new archival sources, The Other ‘68ers examines the ideas, experiences, and repertoires of West German students who identified with the long-governing political movement known as Christian Democracy. Writing these activists back into the history of...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Ep. 143
What can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment”, ...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 27
The extraordinary story of the Popish Plot and how it shaped the political and religious future of Britain In 1678, a handful of perjurers claimed that the Catholics of England planned to assassinate the king. Men like the "Reverend Doctor" Titus Oates and "Captain" William Bedloe parlayed their fantastical tales of Irish ruffians, medical poisoners, and silver bullets into public adulation and government pensions. Their political allies used the fabricated plot as a tool to undermine the minist...
Oct 31, 2022•46 min•Ep. 15
