In this anecdotal introduction to Reflection 21, Father John relates a remarkable but short-lived revolution in fourteenth-century Rome that served as a sign of what the age of utopia would bring. Listeners who enjoy the music of Richard Wagner will recognize the ill-fated revolutionary's name and understand why the turbulent nineteenth-century composer was attracted to him! And speaking of music, if you are wondering about the new closing sequence, it is a chorus from Mozart's utopian opera The...
Sep 24, 2021
In the nineteenth century, some Christians in America developed radically new visions of God's relationship to man and the cosmos. This "utopian Christianity" produced Unitarianism, Mormonism, and a string of millenarian sects. Father John Strickland concludes the episode with one of the most daring and disturbing examples of American utopianism, the community of Oneida in upstate New York.
Sep 23, 2021
In this episode Fr. John Strickland discusses various ways in which Christendom's leadership rejected the reformational Christianity that had provoked the wars of Western religion and replaced it with science, philosophy, pietistic Christianity, and a new religion known as deism.
Aug 15, 2021
In this reflection, Fr. John Strickland relates how Christianity ceased to motivate and regulate statecraft in Christendom following the Wars of Western Religion. He discusses the cases of France, England, and New England. He concludes with an account of westernization in Eastern Christendom under Peter the Great of Russia.
Aug 15, 2021
In this reflection, Father John Strickland turns from secular humanism to reformational Christianity to see how Christendom's paradisiacal culture was subverted by both the Protestant "Counter-Reformation" and the Roman Catholic "Neo-Reformation." Ironically, Protestant fathers like Luther and Calvin did much to perpetuate the anthropological pessimism and cosmological contempt of their rivals like the earlier Pope Innocent III, opening the door even wider to the wholesale secularization of the ...
Aug 11, 2021
This is part 2 to last week's special video episode, on the revolution of art during the Italian Renaissance.
Jul 10, 2021
In this special video episode (the first of two parts), Father John discusses the background to the revolution in art during the Italian Renaissance. Though it produced some of the most stunning and innovative works ever, secular humanism represented a radical departure from the heavenly orientation of traditional Christian art.
Jul 09, 2021
In this, the first episode of the Paradise and Utopia video edition, Father John provides a video lecture from his office in Puget Sound, showing, with the use of powerful, full-color icons such as those of Andrei Rublev, how hesychasm inspired some of the greatest art in the history of eastern Christendom.
Jun 08, 2021
Fr. John discusses the ways in which the Church tries to create a sanctified topography in Christendom.
Feb 17, 2021
Fr. John discusses the spiritual transformation of time by Christianity.
Feb 16, 2021
Father John welcomes listeners back to the podcast with the opening to its third part, the age of utopia. He also summarizes some of the main points of his recently released book The Age of Division, which tells the history of Christendom covered in the second part of the podcast.
Jan 13, 2021
Fr. John Strickland talks about the newly released book The Age of Paradise. The book is available at store.ancientfaith.com.
Dec 31, 2019
Returning after a long absence from the podcast, Fr. John in this episode introduces a new reflection on the crisis of western Christendom prior to the Reformation by discussing the penitential context of Martin Luther's famous Ninety-Five Theses.
Oct 17, 2019
Fr. John delineates the various ways in which Constantine contributed to the Christianization of the Roman state.
Dec 24, 2018
Fr. John describes the desanctification of the world that began to occur in the time leading up to the Great Schism.
Dec 16, 2017
In this final episode of Part 2 of the podcast, Fr. John discusses the catastrophic wars that broke out in western Christendom during the Reformation age. These wars, along with other forces unleashed by developments in the Reformation and earlier, would ultimately result in the loss of Christianity's legitimacy, leading to the rise of a modern, secularized form of Christendom centered upon the experience of utopia.
Dec 16, 2017
In this episode Father John explores the way in which the loss of sacramental experience among Calvinists led to the rise of a political ideology that would unintentionally lay the foundation for utopia.
Dec 16, 2017
In this episode Fr. John discusses Reformed attitudes toward worship, and the ways in which western Christendom's liturgical and sacramental foundations were eroded when they were put into practice.
Dec 16, 2017
In this episode Fr. John discusses ways in which Reformed cosmology represented a shift from the heavenly immanence of paradisiacal Christendom toward the heavenly transcendence of utopian Christendom.
Dec 16, 2017
Fr. John looks at a couple of consequences of St. Augustine's anthropology in the West.
Dec 14, 2017
Fr. John continues to discuss St. Augustine by looking first at his notorious doctrine of original sin and its impact on the conception of man in the West.
Dec 12, 2017
Fr. John addresses the foundations in the West of a growing pessimism about man's condition, paying particular attention to Augustine.
Dec 10, 2017
Fr. John contends that to understand the coming of the Renaissance and its humanism, one really needs to understand how in the West the doctrines about man became increasingly pessimistic.
Dec 07, 2017
Fr. John discusses the dignity of man according to the Greek Fathers
Dec 06, 2017
In the first episode of part two of his four-part podcast "Paradise and Utopia," Fr. John Strickland, a professor of history at Saint Katherine Orthodox College, describes how Pope Nicholas I paved the way for the rapid development of the papal theory of empire.
Dec 05, 2017
In this episode Father John discusses a few tendencies in Calvinism that would serve to undermine the place of paradise in Reformation Christendom, especially the doctrine of "total depravity" and the spiritual anxiety that accompanied it.
Oct 03, 2017
In this episode Fr. John explores the life of Protestant father John Calvin and the reformer's contribution to the Reformation project.
Oct 03, 2017
In this episode Father John describes some of the most noteworthy effects of the Protestant Reformation on Western Christendom, emphasizing the decline of a sacramental basis for civilization and the rise of a primarily moral one.
Jul 05, 2017
In this anecdotal introduction to the final reflection of Part 2 of the podcast, Father John relates the extraordinary story of a Reformation-era town that declared itself the kingdom of Christ on earth, a "New Jerusalem." Expressing a profound absence of God in the world, however, the story of Reformation Muenster was in fact a sign of the fall of a Christendom centered upon the experience of paradise.
Jul 02, 2017
In this episode Father John concludes his reflection on the critical state of western Christendom on the eve of modern times, exploring how the Reformation tried to resolve the issue of anthropological pessimism but ironically served to intensify it.
Dec 15, 2016
