Is the Message a good translation of the Bible? Is it even a translation? This is one of the questions I get asked all the time, and with good reason: people like the vividness of a more plainspoken translation, but they worry about the accuracy of bringing the Bible so far down to earth. How can we tell the difference between a faithful but idiomatic translation, and one that goes off the reservation? How do translators think about these things, and how should we? It's such a profound issue tha...
Feb 02, 2024•38 min
Today I'm tackling (no pun intended) a very important philosophical question of our age: why does anyone care what Taylor Swift thinks? No, seriously--that's a real question. It's basically the one that Plato deals with in his Ion. Trying to answer it can lead us to some pretty fascinating insights about the nature of celebrity and even reality itself. Who would have thought the Biden Administration's efforts at courting celebrity would take us into 9th-century Thessalonikē and the Eastern Churc...
Jan 30, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 172
"This sickness is not unto death, but..." what? On this episode of Words, Words, Words, I answer a listener question about how to understand what Jesus says about Lazarus' illness shortly before healing him. It's a juicy question that leads into all sorts of issues about ambiguity (good and bad) and how to understand the Bible. Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://a...
Jan 26, 2024•25 min
People are fighting online (shocking, I know) about whether therapy is a godsend, a scam, or something in between. Without delving too deep into the Twitter weeds, we can actually extract a pretty important insight from this debate: whatever the merits or drawback of any particular therapeutic practice, our understanding of spiritual matters--our actual psychology or "study of the soul"--is badly in need of a reboot. As part of my ongoing investigation into the relationship between the inner and...
Jan 23, 2024•59 min•Ep. 171
In this new occasional series, I want to try and help you guys answer some of the questions you often ask about translation--how it works, what challenges it presents, and how to pick a good edition of a work originally written in a foreign language you don't speak. Each time I'll pick a small sentence from a famous work--this time it's the first line of Homer's Iliad --and talk through some of the questions that it raises. Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): htt...
Jan 19, 2024•40 min
Election 2024 is in motion, and no question it's an important one--but will it be the decisive cataclysm that everyone will surely make it out to be? Somehow it almost feels as if we hope it will: as if we're longing for some definitive event to deliver a verdict on where all this turbulence is headed. But deeper currents are moving beneath far beneath the surface of politics, and there is, if you can believe it, something more real than the presidential race. Subscribe to my new joint Substack ...
Jan 16, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 170
When did we stop looking to great men gone by as role models? My guest today, Alex Petkas, is a recovering academic who founded the Ancient Life Coach podcast in order to make a more immediate connection between past and present. He's recovering Plutarch--once antiquity's most cherished moralist--as a guide for today. We discuss the transformation of scholarship from instruction to dissection, and how ancient pagans can help modern seekers get a hold of themselves. Listen to Alex's Podcast, Anci...
Jan 12, 2024•49 min
Claudine "Fake and" Gay is out at Harvard, and there's something about this scandal that reveals what makes academic corruption so painful and infuriating: it's the humiliation of having to believe a lie. As it happens, this is a news story that can illustrate—with a little help from William Shakespeare—the core issue in matters of sin, art, and our present national dysfunction. Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com Check out ou...
Jan 09, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 169
Over on Substack , I've been gradually creating an audiobook reading of Milton's epic poem of mankind's fall, Paradise Lost . It's one of the greatest works of English literature, well…ever. So this Friday, I thought I'd do something a little different: this is a free sample of the audiobook so you can get a feel for the poem and see whether you'd like to sign up to hear the rest. So here's Paradise Lost Book 3, read aloud by yours truly. Sign up to hear the rest: https://rejoiceevermore.substac...
Jan 05, 2024•34 min
Everything is completely insane, so, in other words, it's business as usual. Everyone seems to feel certain that we're in for a year of madness, and it's hard to disagree. But it's also hard to remember that human life is always madness, playing out against the backdrop of the stars. That's what the calendar itself represents. So on this first episode of the year, I'll talk a bit about the history of leap years and the wisdom I want to seek with you in 2024. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient La...
Jan 02, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 168
What is a TERF? I'm joined for this week's interview by Louise M. Perry, one of the most insightful and thoughtful observers of the wreckage left behind by the sexual revolution. We discuss the "radical" part of being a "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist," whether social norms can leave space for abnormality, and the limits of "cultural Christianity" as a sustaining civilizational force. Read Louise's book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution : https://a.co/d/0nVZ3nD Listen to Louise's podc...
Dec 29, 2023•48 min
It's (still) Christmas!! On the feast of St. Stephen's Day (AKA Boxing Day), we gather around the cozy fire with our egg nogg and our gifts to talk about...martyrdom? Here's one extra Christmas special on the full twelve days of the holiday and the connections between Christmas morning, the first Christian martyr, and the final festival of Epiphany, when wise men came from the east to seal Jesus as the Messiah, not just for the Jews, but for the whole world. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient La...
Dec 26, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 167
Academia delenda est...et tunc recolenda . "The academy must be destroyed...and then rebuilt." Today's guest, Inez Stepman, is a thoughtful obsesrver of the American education system and an insightful exponent of hard-nosed practical action plans to revive the country's academic health. We discuss the great American tradition of local, homegrown classical education and the role it will play in our uncertain future. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.co...
Dec 22, 2023•47 min
It's that time of the year again: time for some very online doofus to point out that Christmas falls around the same date as the Saturanalia, as if no one figured this out until Reddit was invented. In fact, the date of Christmas is carefully posed against the date of Easter so that the whole liturgical year can emerge out of the "signs and markers" laid down in the heavens from the creation of the world. Chew on that, reddit bros! It's a very Young Heretics Christmas. Check out our sponsor, the...
Dec 19, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 166
How do you do church in the digital age? Is there such a thing as an atheist? To what extent are our crazy times really unprecedented, and to what extent are they nothing the Church hasn't seen before? These are some of the questions I tackle with my friend Paul VanderKlay, a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a close observer of Jordan Peterson's rise to fame and the young men who find meaning in his work, and a rather unwitting YouTube sensation. Subscribe to Paul's YouTube channel: ht...
Dec 15, 2023•40 min
Is Christmas just a rebranded pagan holiday? Or does the rabbit hole go somewhat deeper? After last week's foray into hermeneutics, this week I take a closer look at the history of Christian allegory, and why this particular form of reading became so important to the early church--and why it's still essential for understanding the meaning of Christmas (and everything else). Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Sign up to be in the mail...
Dec 12, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 165
Does science disprove God, or reveal his handiwork? My guest today, Stephen C. Meyer, makes some of the most powerful contemporary arguments that the "God hypothesis" is becoming increasingly necessary to make sense of science and of human life. Stephen has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, and his lucid explanations of his subject have drawn wide attention--as well as resistance from the more hidebound materialists of our age. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Insti...
Dec 08, 2023•52 min
Literally, though, how do we read stuff? It's a question we rarely ask seriously, but it's an ancient one with profound implications for art, faith, and morality. This week I'm presenting an ancient distinction between literal and allegorical reading that helps to get past simplistic modern bickering over merely material truths. Carrying forward our conversation in art, this is a theme that will help guide the show in 2024. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientla...
Dec 05, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 164
Faith Moore is BACK to kick off the Christmas season with a moving meditation on faith, loss, and the meaning of the nativity. We discuss how the characters in her new novel took shape, why Christmas always comes associated with a certain nostalgic melancholy, and what to eat for breakfast on Christmas morning. Plus some embarassing (maybe?) stories about when we were kids. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Pre-order faith's book, C...
Dec 01, 2023•34 min
All your questions answered! This week, as the Thanksgiving daze settles gradually over us all, I dig into the mailbag and pull out three juicy questions I haven't had time to answer yet in the course of the show. Did Plato invent the myth of Atlantis? What kind of love does Jesus ask for from Peter after his betrayal? And what did Paul mean that personal spiritual gifts shall fall away when we see love "face to face"? It's a deep dive into questions linguistic, spiritual, and philosophical. Plu...
Nov 28, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 163
"Civility" is almost a dirty word these days on both the right and the left. But Lexi Hudson has written a book to defend it, arguing that being civil--being a good fellow citizen --doesn't mean being nice or tiptoeing around disagreements. Civility is always under a certain kind of assault, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless. We discuss pictures of civility in Homer, Ovid, and the Old Testament, as well as high and low trust societies and whether our age is a uniquely uncivil one. Check out ou...
Nov 24, 2023•44 min
What's to be thankful for? This Thanksgiving, the answer is: everything. Gratitude is a virtue we didn't cover during our series, but Cicero calls it the mother of all virtues and Aquinas files it cheek by jowl with justice. Spencer traces the etymology and rationale of thanksgiving down to its cosmic roots, opposing it to the philosophy of death that rises to confront us everywhere. Happy Thanksgiving--and again I say, rejoice! Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://anci...
Nov 21, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 162
Does not Wisdom cry out? Michael Martin joins me to discuss how and why God prepares our reading lists. Michael traces an alternate stream of modernity that flows quietly alongside the decadent materialist one. From Jakob Bohme, to Coleridge and the Romantics, to modern farmsteading, we talk about why the political parties switched places and how the everyday world breathes forth supernatural wisdom. Sign up for Michael's podcast, The Druid Stares Back . Read Michael's book, Sophia in Exile . Ch...
Nov 17, 2023•40 min
Do you want to see the world as it is, or as it ought to be? This difficult question is at the heart of the millennia-old debate over morality and art. Pulling back the camera to ask how we got to our current dysfunction, Spencer moves from Homer and Isaiah to Nabokov and Matthew Arnold, looking for answers to the questions that are currently wracking the culture. The digital age has shattered a lot of our old systems, but somewhere in the aftermath there is hope for a new middle ages and a re-e...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 161
What does it mean to be a man in a fallen world and a degraded age? Crime novelist and professional person-I-have-never-heard-of Andrew Klavan joins the show to discuss his brilliant new novel The House of Love and Death . We discuss Klavan The Elder's literary inspirations, thoughts on chivalry, and experience writing a recurring character almost against his will. Plus: why university administrators are so annoying. Read Andrew Klavan's Cameron Winter novels Listen to The Andrew Klavan Show Sig...
Nov 10, 2023•42 min
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." So wrote Oscar Wilde in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , defending himself against charges of corruption in his art. But was he right? His own art, no less than his own sad and morally compromised private life, suggest otherwise. Spencer discusses the history of "art for art's sake" and the impossibility of excepting art from moral judgment, in Wilde's day as well as our own....
Nov 07, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 160
Digital alienation, material politics, and the re-enchantment of the world: this week, reactionary feminist Mary Harrington joins Spencer to discuss the disorenting transformations wrought upon human societies and psyches by the advent of digital technology. The discussion ranges from Mary's realization that woke politics was destroying her life, to the war between the sexes, to the return of something that looks a lot like Medieval conditions--complete with angels and demons haunting the air. G...
Nov 03, 2023•46 min
At the turning of the year, as fall passes into winter, the world hovers for an instant between past and future in the "otherworld," the space between life and death. And that is where we meet the Aes Sidhe, fearsome people of the hollow hills, who roam the earth each year in what has become Halloween. In this holiday special, Spencer dives into the haunted history of the enchanted world. Sign up to be in the mailbag: https://rejoiceevermore.substack.com/ Check out my book, How to Save the West ...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Do you even pray, bro? Teresa Mull is the assistant editor of The Spectator World . Her book, Woke-Proof Your Life, offers practical and concrete suggestions for opponents of the woke revolution to put their money where their mouths are. Spencer talks with Teresa about how families and single people alike can suit their actions to their words, and their words to their actions. Plus: some reflections on the definition of wokeness itself. Check out Teresa's book: https://a.co/d/550uQq2 Find Teresa...
Oct 27, 2023•43 min
Divine love: the most natural, and the least natural, thing in the universe. In this conclusion to his series on virtues, Spencer walks through the history of Christian love from its earliest origins in the church to its extremes in the most exalted realms of human life. We have arrived at last at the virtue that suffuses all others and defines their objective. It's been quite the journey. Sign up to be in the mailbag: https://rejoiceevermore.substack.com/ Check out my book, How to Save the West...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 5 min
