Gather round, me hearties, and attend the tale of Pierre-Simon Laplace--a demon-haunted man. This is a story I've been itching to tell for a while, about the birth of quantum physics and the revenge of the Atomic Swerve. It stretches all the way back to Marcus Aurelius and all the way forward to the AI revolution, with some incredible tea to spill along the way (including a cameo from Napoleon). Buckle up, kids: this is a fun one. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://an...
Apr 09, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 183
In his new book, Pagan America , Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson argues that America is not only becoming, but functionally already is , a pagan society. We talk about what that means, why it's happened, and what can be done about it. It's a fascinating discussion touching on a lot of themes that have really been mainstays of the show this year. Also take a listen to my introduction for a wild tesetimonial to liturgical providence (and to find out what happened with my car). Read J...
Apr 05, 2024•34 min
You've probably seen that meme of the IQ bell curve, where the guy with the lowest IQ and the guy with the highest IQ both agree, while the guy in the middle copes and seethes. Well, this week I am here to tell you that it really do be like that. Chris Marlowe and my Uber driver are in agreement that the soul is real, while Dr. Faustus and professional midwit Yuval Harari want to tell you humans can be hacked. The choice is yours! Literally. Stay tuned until the end for a new weekly segment, "I ...
Apr 02, 2024•1 hr 5 min
On this Good Friday, we're doin' it live: translating Aquinas, that is. I talk through some extremely sticky medieval philosophy of language, but it's all worth it because at the end it turns out that existence is bananas and humanity really is made in God's image, which, come on, is good payoff for 30 minutes. A blessed Easter weekend to you; hope you spend it doing and thinking about the stuff that well and truly matters. Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World : https://a...
Mar 29, 2024•32 min
The universe just keeps getting weirder and weirder, man. New data from the James Webb Space Telescope might actually be the most important news story that no one's talking about. It invites us to consider whether we're going to freak out, like the Commies, or rejoice in the glory of God, like civilized people. It's possible Christopher Marlowe can help us tell the difference. But probably we'll just keep yelling at each other online! Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World ...
Mar 26, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 181
Lying awake one night, I pulled out my Japanese grammar dictionary, as you do. And I suddenly realized some of the stuff in there--i.e., in Japanese, a language the Ancient Greeks had never heard of--could have been taken right out of Plato's Cratylus. What the heck is that about? And what does it have to do with the name of God? Answers to these and other questions, taken straight from my groggy 2am brain, on today's installment of Words, Words, Words. Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, ...
Mar 22, 2024•36 min
Will the real Merlin please stand up? Every major new development in scientific knowledge comes with a period of upheaval in what it means to do magic--or in what counts as magic, and what counts as science. This week, in providential synchronicity with a listener question, I wanted to talk about two twentieth-century depictions of Merlin in the age of industrial technology. Was he friend, foe, or fraud? Mark Twain and C.S. Lewis will help us decide. Also somebody, please, tell me what I'm suppo...
Mar 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 180
Are the kids alright? Before you leap to respond "absolutely not," listen to content creator Isabel Brown argue that in fact there really is honest-to-goodness hope among members of--wait for it--Gen Z. As an ancient Millennial myself, I think this is great news. Isabel lays out the case for why Gen Z might actually be trending conservative culturally in her new book, The End of the Alphabet . Bored with the wokescolds and searching for meaning, the newest generation to come of age may have more...
Mar 15, 2024•38 min
These days we tell a tidy little story: once there was magic, now there's reason. But there's another, older story that might be closer to the truth: once there was fake magic, now there's real magic. In fact, not only is that the story that many luminaries of the scientific revolution told--it's also a story that extends back before the scientific revolution, to the days of Merlin and King Arthur in the Medieval chronicles of English history. Scientists, meet Merlin: you guys have a lot in comm...
Mar 12, 2024•59 min•Ep. 179
Oh, we're really in it now. On today's translation segment, I take a question that will lead us into the heart of magic, language, and human nature: what's in a name? Specifically, what's in God's name? Throughout the Bible, not just God but God's name is invoked as a stand-in for God himself. Figuring out why will take us through Greek philosophy, Medieval theology, Jewish wisdom literature, and magical thinking of the most intense kind. Let's dive in. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Languag...
Mar 08, 2024•34 min
Are you a good magician, or a bad magician? This week, I start diving into the weird and complicated world of magic, from Disney to the Book of Acts. There's lots to say here, but let's start with what we want to avoid , namely: stealing people's voices and usurping the throne. In a deep cut from back when Disney wasn't awful, I hereby present: the Ursula-Jafar Theory of Bad Magic. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Pre-order my new ...
Mar 05, 2024•59 min•Ep. 178
YOU ARE ENTIRELY A STAR CHILD! Maybe you've seen the internet meme where someone--or perhaps some program--translates the lyrics of Smash Mouth's "All Star" into Aramaic and then back into ornate, florid English. For '90s kids who grew up screaming those lyrics, this is hilarious. But it's also kind of revealing about our assumptions when it comes to register in translation. Why does the process of going into Aramaic, then back into English, end you up in a higher register than the original? Ans...
Mar 01, 2024•27 min
They’re putting chips! In people’s brains! We have to talk about it. But this is Young Heretics—so let’s not talk about it from a panicked, world-is-ending catastrophe mindset, or from a naïve, tech-will-save us progressive mindset. With one eye on tradition and one eye on the future, I want to embark this week on an attempt to seriously argue that what we’re doing with tech is, and always has been, actual magic—with all the enticements and dangers that come along with that. Pre-order my new boo...
Feb 27, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 177
I'm joined today by Johnny Burtka, whose new Gateway to Statesmanship is a collection of writings on one of our most neglected virtues. Statesmanship is the art of leading in complex and difficult times, especially when all of the options on the table involve painful trade-offs (sound familiar?). Johnny and I discuss the changing conditions of history, the fight over "Christian nationalism," and what it would mean for a modern politician to recover the ancient virtue of prudence. Pick up Johnny'...
Feb 23, 2024•49 min
Since last we spoke, I have literally traveled around the world--and I can say with certainty there's nowhere I'd rather be than here. This week, a few reflections from my trip to Cambodia about what every culture has to grapple with when it comes to depicting God--and what's unique to the Bible. No one has ever seen God. So how can anyone know him? It's a question fundamental to both art and science, and absolutely everyone everywhere has to face it. Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Li...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 176
Why is the Gen Z Bible a joke and not a translation? In this installment of our series on register, I'm doing a close reading (yes, actually) of a passage from the Gen Z Bible. Bear with me, because there's actually a method to my madness, and it speaks to the strengths and weaknesses of another, much more widely used version of the bible--the Message. Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World : https://a.co/d/2QccOfM Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no r...
Feb 16, 2024•31 min
Is it spirit or flesh? Matter or form? Symbol or symbolized? On this episode I want to argue that these questions aren't only religious questions--or rather, they're religious questions that cut right to the heart of reality. They've become newly important as anti-humanists propose to leave our embodied life as human beings behind. Discard the spirit and you get senseless matter; discard the matter and you get heartless calculation. Only with the two combined can we be fully human. Pre-order my ...
Feb 13, 2024•58 min•Ep. 175
I've got a new book coming out! Light of the Mind, Light of the World: How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God will come out on August 13, and it's available now for pre-order. We are confronted today by a dark philosophy that views the world as a machine and humanity as a mistake. But as listeners of Young Heretics know, this philosophy is not only evil: it's also hopelessly out of date. Light of the Mind, Light of the World is a story of how God reveals himself through science...
Feb 09, 2024•5 min
The veneration of icons is one of the longest-lasting and most intense controversies in the history of the church. But it's not just a matter of religious practice: it also happens to touch on even more ancient and profound issues in the nature of perception and reality. So, just exactly what Young Heretics has been all about this year! Thanks to encouragement from you guys, I'm going deeper on the subject of icons, art, and reality (though not much deeper on the whole Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift ...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 174
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
