The End of Science? Cancel Culture and the Sciences In today’s show Chris reads from an essay by Colin Wright the Managing Editor of Quillette, the online journal and podcast. He describes his own experience as a liberal scientist with cancel culture. The experience has alarmed him and he despairs for the future of the …
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Movies and Shows in a Nihilist Key: How Nihilistic Trends Have Impacted the Movie and Television Industry Tom introduces the topic by engaging Thomas Hibb’s book: Shows about Nothing. Chris and Glenn join in with many insights and rich analysis.Resources:Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld
A Tale of Two Revolutions In this episode, Glenn contrasts the secular, Enlightenment-inspired French Revolution with the spiritual revolution that transformed England at roughly the same time. The French Enlightenment was an anti-Christian project that provided a radical critique of society and theorized about how to fix it. Once the French internalized Enlightenment ideas, the …
Why Should Christians Care about Self-Driving Cars? In today’s show Chris introduces the Pugcast crew to Matthew B. Crawford and his book, Why We Drive. Crawford is known for his writing on moral agency and how the manual arts help to develop it. Self-driving cars have the potential for undermining competence and promoting greater dependency …
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On Weeds and Fairy Tales Glenn starts off the discussion with “On Weeds and Fairy Tales,” an article in Touchstone by Vigen Guroian. Guroian argues that reason and imagination work together to help us make sense of the world, but only imagination lets us get beyond facts into the realm of meaning and helping us …
From Impiety to Totalitarianism In today’s show Chris reads portions of Leon R. Kass’s, The Beginning of Wisdom. The book contains Kass’s reflections on the book of Genesis. Kass is Jewish, and a conservative scholar teaching at the University of Chicago. His reflections on the impiety of Noah’s son Ham, and how Ham’s descendant Nimrod, …
How the Current Cultural Trend Came to Absolutize the Present in Opposition to the Past This week Tom follows up his topic last week on Presentism. He introduces the topic of ‘historicism’ and looks at its role in setting the conditions for the current trend of turning against the past in the name of the …
The New Iconoclasm: Presentism and Its Trendy Enemies In this episode Tom introduces the topic of the intellectual fashion of making ‘present’ experience that which has utmost significance. He further shows how this idea has been wedded to the notion that the past has little significance other than being an outmoded relic of evil and …
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Culture to Language or Language to Culture? Glenn starts off by talking about Tolkien and philology, the study of language to understand culture, and looks at its role in creating Middle Earth. He then notes that this idea has largely been reversed in the modern world, where we belief language shapes thought and culture. This …
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Friendship According to: Aristotle, Aquinas, C. S. Lewis, and the Bible In today’s episode Chris raises the subject of friendship for consideration. What is it? How many forms of friendship are there? What’s the relationship of friendship to citizenship? Can we have too many friends? What’s a bigger threat to friendship, good fortune or bad? …
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