Life is pretty intense for Paul these days. We present this interview with Megan Levis from the 2019 Society of Catholic Scientists archives, every bit as relevant now as it was then. It was originally presented as two episodes. Megan Levis is a fifth-year graduate student in bioengineering at the University of Notre Dame. The topic of her talk at the annual conference of the Society of Catholic Scientists was “Created in the Image and Likeness of Man.” She described the University’s bioengineer...
Mar 08, 2021•53 min•Ep. 190
This episode had to be rushed in due to Paul's travel schedule. He got to visit a location peculiarly dear to his heart, Lander, Wyoming, and give a talk at Wyoming Catholic College . It's just Paul's cut of the raw audio, bonus-episode style, since we had to record it Sunday afternoon. Paul and Bill discuss the visit and the substance of his field exercise, including how the ideas of our friend Nicolaus Steno and the 18th century James Hutton play out in a live outdoor setting: Derby Dome in th...
Feb 22, 2021•26 min•Ep. 189
A rerun of Episode 6. Do not blame Morgan for the sound quality of this episode! All complaints should be directed to Paul at the email link at https://www.thatssosecondmillennium.net . Bill and I hope to be back in action soon.
Feb 08, 2021•37 min•Ep. 188
Paul and Bill talk here about a mix of psychology and societal dilemmas in light of Catholic values. Twelve-step programs have experience with an interpersonal phenomenon often called “taking someone else’s inventory,” Paul points out. This entails one individual assessing another through a facile psychological analysis of supposed characteristics underlying comments made or behavior shown; it can be prone toward unfortunate intimations of contempt, based on emotional reaction. This has gotten w...
Jan 27, 2021•35 min•Ep. 187
Aida Ramos, Ph.D., is an associate professor of economics at the University of Dallas. She returns to TSSM, in this episode recorded early in the week of January 4, 2021, to discuss Catholic perspectives on United States policy efforts to stimulate the economy. During the discussion, Bill recalled a class he took at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs that outlined a rigorous process of federal budget management. It included multiple annual authorization and appropriations b...
Jan 11, 2021•43 min•Ep. 186
In this last episode of 2020, Bill and I discuss how attention, focus, and distraction are shaping us and being engineered in our media-saturated culture. We can't pay attention to everything, and in this environment, it seems that censorship is becoming a politically acceptable option for tech companies, as the Trump election corruption allegations became forbidden topics on many platforms. Co-hosts Paul and Bill agreed that the film—and Broadway play—called “Network” shows foresight in its ref...
Dec 28, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 185
Our guest, economics professor Dr. Aida Ramos, returned for further conversation after Episode 114. She pointed to wisdom in papal encyclicals from the past that we still need to tap into today—for the sake of just and reasonable arrangements in society and the economy. The granddaddy of these encyclicals is Rerum Novarum , from Pope Leo XIII in 1891. Forty years later, Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Ann o. Words are important, we noted in our discussion. The root for the word subsidiarity, wh...
Dec 14, 2020•40 min•Ep. 184
Paul and Bill spoke with Aida Ramos, Ph.D. , an associate professor of economics at the University of Dallas. Prof. Ramos’ research and teaching at that private Catholic university include topics in economic development and Catholic Social Thought and their implications for public policy. She is the author of a book ( Shifting Capital: Mercantilism and the Economics of the Act of Union of 1707 ) in the “Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought” series. The Vatican’s first direct foray...
Nov 23, 2020•31 min•Ep. 183
Your TSSM coverage of the 2020 US election with the unique perspective Bill and Paul provide. Be sure to let us know your ideas for the presidential hopeful cage match reality show that we clearly need to augment or replace the primary election system here in the 21st century... hit us up with your proposed names and formats using the links to the right. As always, God bless America (all of it, not just the US...).
Nov 09, 2020•57 min•Ep. 182
Paul and Bill focused on the 2020 elections as a point of tragically little focus in discourse or reasoning—but a good starting point for wide-ranging conversation about humanity’s desperate search for balance, hope, and sustainability in our hearts and minds. The desire for a higher wisdom—a happy medium, a golden mean—has always been complicated by our focus on ourselves and our temptation to believe that we know best, the co-hosts pointed out. Bill pointed out that “fake news” was said to hav...
Oct 28, 2020•44 min•Ep. 181
Brad Stalcup joins Paul and Bill in this episode to talk about his recent entry into the world of Catholic education. He began teaching religion to high school freshmen and sophomores in this fall semester of 2020—a time that Paul describes as a “baptism of fire” because of Covid-19 and today’s unusual circumstances overall. The vast majority of the approximately 120 students in Brad’s various classes is learning in-person, but there are several who are “live-streamers,” participating in the cou...
Oct 12, 2020•29 min•Ep. 180
In this episode, Paul and Bill are back together for a conversation that catches up on past episodes which pondered big problems in science, government, the economy, personal well-being, and more. The pondering focused on solutions as matters of step-by-step processes, but as our conversation starts, we’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by the enormity of the problems, their quantity and complexity. Society relies more and more on government, which has proven it does not perform long-term planning ve...
Sep 29, 2020•50 min•Ep. 179
A solo episode from Paul. These are the notes I used... the audio is balanced differently. Insight by Bernard Lonergan and 20/20 hindsight. What else (besides the coronavirus and similar epidemics) are we not preparing for? Can we? We can't know all the unknowns, and it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to quantify the risks even for the things we can anticipate. Yet quantification is reasonable and laudable because individual lives do matter... the 1,000,001st victim of a tragedy ju...
Sep 14, 2020•33 min•Ep. 178
or Paving Paradise and the Parking Lots Bill and Paul discuss attitudes toward masks, and then consider why the science wasn't more settled on the subject long before Covid-19. We discuss the obsession of modern society with all things novel and consider how this plays out in science, politics, and our individual lives and families. 1. A discussion of masks as defenses against the pandemic led Paul and Bill to ponder how scientific knowledge about the functionality of these masks for the common ...
Aug 25, 2020•28 min•Ep. 177
This is part 2 of our interview with Richard Garrett, author of The Kids Are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem? Find an overview of his distinguished career in this story about Dick’s zeal for researching and promoting education reform. (The story was written for Purdue’s College of Engineering by Bill last year.) Dick’s book traces his growing concerns about problems in public elementary education. Those concerns led to extensive research from a business executive’s perspective, applying syst...
Aug 10, 2020•28 min•Ep. 176
...or as Paul wanted to put it, "Lies, D--d lies, and p-values." This episode contains a conversation between Paul and Bill in which you’ll learn new things about their experience in particular fields—geology and journalism, respectively—and where their zeal to harvest and connect information bumps up against troublesome uncertainty. You’re accustomed to hearing us as podcast co-hosts, sharing our opinions and our interviews with experts to explore insights at the intersection of science, everyd...
Jul 27, 2020•42 min•Ep. 175
Paul and Bill welcomed Dick Garrett to our podcast. Find an overview of his distinguished career in this story about Dick’s zeal for researching and promoting education reform. (The story was written for Purdue’s College of Engineering by Bill last year.) Dick’s book, The Kids Are Smart Enough, So What’s the Problem? , traces his growing concerns about problems in public elementary education. Those concerns led to extensive research from a business executive’s perspective, applying systems analy...
Jul 13, 2020•25 min•Ep. 174
At the time of this taping, Paul was in the middle of the Metis “bootcamp” program learning the capabilities, tools, and insights of data science . This conversation ranged widely in the realm of data analysis and management, examining its relevance to Paul’s field of geology but also exploring the world’s immersion in what Bill would call a data ecology: It seems every datum is connected, or connectable, to every other datum That word is the original singular form of the plural word “data.” The...
Jun 22, 2020•33 min•Ep. 171
Bill interviewed a leading Catholic voice in public affairs, especially in bioethics and the culture of life: Richard Doerflinger . His latest column for Catholic News Service examines the implications of the “Science Wins” maxim publicized by Pfizer Inc. in a recent TV commercial. You can see the commercial here. Doerflinger mentioned libertarian bioethicist John Harris in connection with the developments and moral controversies surrounding research on embryonic stem cells some years ago. Once ...
Jun 08, 2020•35 min•Ep. 170
Paul and Bill discussed autism—a subject that arose in Paul’s discussion with Pat Flynn in his own podcast. John Ratey , popular psychologist, talks about how our sensory apparatus affects how we function in everyday life. Paul’s comments on the subject of autism connect candidly with recollections from his early life. Hilaire Belloc , a legendary British author of the early 20th century who wrote on many topics, famously was a friend and Catholic “fellow traveler” with G.K. Chesterton . “Never ...
May 25, 2020•25 min•Ep. 169
Part 2 of a three part conversation between Paul and Bill, where the main themes are skepticism, Catholic education, the mysterious absence of the Spanish Flu from our historical consciousness prior to 2020, and the philosophical conundrums of materialism, transgenderism, and scientism. Paul and Bill continued their conversation about skepticism toward science and religion. They touched on several examples of science failing to show that it “knows everything” or gets everything right. There must...
May 11, 2020•28 min•Ep. 168
In this episode we begin with an unscheduled excursion into the realm of the neurobiology of the two hemispheres of the brain and the psychology of reparenting (with nods to our past conversations with Darcia Narvaez, and about codependency and Twelve Step work). We discussed the questions related to whether psychology based on a right-brain/left-brain dichotomy provides meaningful tools to increase self-understanding. Paul described his experience with opposite-hand-writing for self-discovery. ...
Apr 27, 2020•21 min•Ep. 167
In this episode, Bill presents excerpts from an interview with fellow Secular Franciscan Tim Short, director of formation for the Indiana Region. They discuss, among other things, St. Francis' attitude toward creation and how it relates to the larger picture of the medieval Christian intellectual world and the birth of modern science. Tim Short, OFS, is a member of the Secular Franciscan Order , whose initials in Latin are OFS. This international, canonically approved Roman Catholic order was fo...
Apr 13, 2020•17 min•Ep. 165
In this episode, Bill and Paul discuss the coronavirus, economics and risk, and the L'Aquila earthquake trial . Paul and Bill continued a discussion that began in the previous episode. They allowed the sense of gravitas they felt in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic to push them along a path through many uncertainties—where it’s tempting to rely on one’s GPS guidance system and, if possible, an autonomous (self-driving) vehicle. But should human beings relieve themselves of all responsibilities ...
Mar 30, 2020•34 min•Ep. 163
Bill and Paul discuss the topic on everyone's mind, the coronavirus and social distancing, through the lens of social polarization and isolation that already so characterized American, Western, and modern society in general. One should not assume that “social distancing” breaks connections. Paul and Bill got together to talk about the subject and found that it connects to many other things, at least as an intellectual exercise. But also with many emotional, spiritual and sociological implication...
Mar 23, 2020•33 min•Ep. 162
We welcome Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D., to the microphone. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in developmental cognition, the human brain, and behavior. She has authored or edited numerous books, including Indigenous Sustainable Wisdom: First Nation Know-how for Global Flourishing (2019); Basic needs, wellbeing and morality: Fulfilling human potential (2018); and Developing the virtues: Integrating perspectives (2016). A cornerstone of her research, Neurobio...
Mar 09, 2020•39 min•Season 3Ep. 96
Where can the search for connections between faith and science (that is, between the deeper sense of meaning in life we all crave and the tangible experiences that our five senses tell us are “real”) take us? Our podcast series today receives inspirational guidance from community-builder and up-and-coming recording artist Micki Miller . She helped us explore one universe of answers where no TSSM episode has gone before. That’s the realm of music. Micki Miller, born to pastors in South Bend, Indi...
Feb 24, 2020•15 min•Ep. 161
This week, events have forced another "greatest hits" episode, and so we bring you for your convenience the entire Maureen Condic interview from the June 2019 Society of Catholic Scientists meeting in a one hour and forty-five minute extravaganza. The following are Bill's liner notes from the first run episodes. University of Utah’s information page for Dr. Maureen Condic . She is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy, with an adjunct appointment in Pediatrics. Her research focuses ...
Feb 10, 2020•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 160
Bill and Paul are both losing their minds with stress this week, so we're glad to just get the episode out. It takes in a bit of philosophy and Paul manages to use some illustrative points from the history of geometry and geology if that's your thing. I didn't get her credited in the outro, but Morgan Burkart produced the audio for this episode. Like her style? Let us know in a review and look her up at Ball State University....
Jan 27, 2020•37 min•Ep. 159
Dr. Thomas Ryba is a senior lecturer and adjunct professor teaching philosophy and religious studies at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in Purdue University’s College of Arts. He also holds the title of Notre Dame Theologian-in-Residence for the Aquinas Educational Foundation , offering instruction and guidance on staff at the Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center at Purdue. Ryba kindly adjusted his schedule to meet with Paul and Bill in December 2019 for an interview about themes central...
Jan 13, 2020•33 min•Ep. 158
