The Catholic Culture Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

This is the first in a series of episodes (accompanied by articles) surveying the most important encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII. His third encyclical, Aeterni Patris (1879), on the restoration of Christian philosophy, famously called for a revival of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Links

Thomas’s article on Aeterni Patris, “Leo XIII and the restoration of Christian philosophy” https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/leo-xiii-on-restoration-christian-philosophy/

Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_04081879_aeterni-patris.html

The Great Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII: Volume Two – The Spiritual Letters https://clunymedia.com/products/the-great-encyclicals-of-pope-leo-xiii-volume-two-the-spiritual-letters

Russell Hittinger, On the Dignity of Society: Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law https://www.cuapress.org/9780813238234/on-the-dignity-of-society/

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St. Hildegard of Bingen, 12th-century abbess, mystic, polymath, and Doctor of the Church, is best known to non-Catholics for something else – her music. We have more pieces of music by Hildegard than by any other medieval composer whose name we know. Her chants are beautiful, otherworldly, virtuosic and ahead of their time. Some of them were written for her morality play, the Ordo virtutum, which is also the first of its kind. Musicologist Margot Fassler joins the podcast to discuss what makes St. Hildegard’s music so special.

This episode is a crossover with Way of the Fathers, where Dr. Jim Papandrea has done two episodes introducing St. Hildegard’s life and writings. Make sure to listen to those for more context about St. Hildegard.

Links

Way of the Fathers episodes on St. Hildegard’s life and works:

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/512-st-hildegard-bingen-multimedia-visionary/

https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/513-st-hildegard-bingen-teutonic-prophetess/

St. Hildegard’s letter to the Prelates of Mainz https://digfir-published.macmillanusa.com/mckay11eepages/mckay11eepages_ch9_4.html

Margot Fassler, Cosmos, Liturgy, and the Arts in the Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias https://www.pennpress.org/9781512823073/cosmos-liturgy-and-the-arts-in-the-twelfth-century/

All music used with permission from Benjamin Bagby & Sequentia, who have recorded her complete works. The specific pieces in this episode can be found on the albums Ordo Virtutum, Symphoniae, and Voice of the Blood. https://www.sequentia.org/projects/hildegard.html

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St. Anicius Manlius Severius Boethius's book The Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote in prison while awaiting martyrdom around the year 524, is one of the single most influential works for medieval philosophy and theology. But Boethius also owed much to the pagan philosophy that came before him.  Thomas Ward has just written a commentary on Boethius's dialogue for Word on Fire, entitled After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher.

Topics discussed include:

• Boethius's debt to Stoic ethics and how he critiques the Stoic view of happiness
• The influence of neo-Platonist philosophy on Boethius
• Questions about the account of deification given by Lady Philosophy - is it more Platonist than Christian?
• Boethius's brilliant arguments about how God's way of knowing differs from ours

Links

Thomas Ward, After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/after-stoicism?srsltid=AfmBOopBRfuMW6DMx_iUEH9u2gjSswySJAZ__JrdTznAIpZ3Ptj9mDMJ

Way of the Fathers episode on Boethius https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/st-boethius-church-father-and-medieval-scholar/

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This is a crossover episode in which Thomas joins forces with Scott Hambrick and Karl Schudt from the Online Great Books Podcast,  to discuss the classic essay Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain.

Maritain argues for an objective view of both art and the artist, bringing an orderly, scholastic, Thomistic approach to understanding aesthetics. Mirus says, "Maritain gets art better than any other philosopher who came before him in the Western Tradition."

For Maritain, art is “a virtue of the practical intellect that aims at making." The virtue or habitus of art, Maritain writes, is not simply an “interior growth of spontaneous life”, but has an intellectual character and involves cultivation and practice.

The trio also talks about how fine arts and practical arts have been cloven off. How can we hold them both in esteem without denigrating the other?

Scott says, "If we really know what art is then we will be more connected to honest work— that will be a refuge from this intellectual confusion, this metaphysical disgustingness, around us."

Links

Buy Art and Scholasticism https://clunymedia.com/products/art-and-scholasticism

Read Art and Scholasticism for free online (inferior translation) https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art.htm

Learn more about Online Great Books https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-27-always-wanted-to-study-great-books-heres-how-youll-actually-follow-through-scott-hambrick/

Join Online Great Books with 25% off your first three months via this link https://hj424.isrefer.com/go/ogbmemberships/tmirus/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia, recently issued “A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology”. The document takes a strong unequivocal stance against transgender ideology, down to practical specifics like telling the faithful we must not use transgender names and pronouns. Beyond that, it excels in showing how the Church’s whole anthropology and theology are at stake in the transgender issue.

Today’s guest, Fr. Stephen Schultz, was one of the Bishop’s advisers in drafting the document. Fr. Schultz is the director of the EnCourage apostolate in the Diocese of Arlington, and chaplain at St. Paul VI Catholic High School.

Watch discussion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Sf83zKx3XeI

Links

“A Catechesis on the Human Person and Gender Ideology” https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=12554

EnCourage https://couragerc.org/encourage/

David Crawford and Michael Hanby, “The Abolition of Man and Woman” https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-abolition-of-man-and-woman-11593017500

Acedia episode mentioned https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-18-acedia-forgotten-capital-sin-rj-snell/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Writer Matthew Mehan returns to the show to discuss his new children's book co-authored with painter John Folley, The Handsome Little Cygnet. This lovely tale about a family of swans in Central Park is a much simpler book than their previous outing, but introduces children to the idea of accepting one's God-given nature. That is no small matter in a world which tantalizes the young with offers of a more exciting new identity just around the corner. But we need to know what we are in order to properly shape who we will become.

Watch discussion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/oxAQpGxduCw

Links

The Handsome Little Cygnet https://tanbooks.com/kids/elementary-school/the-handsome-little-cygnet/

Previous episode with Mehan: Teaching Children Self-Knowledge through the Liberal Arts https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/episode-43-teaching-children-self-knowledge-through-liberal-arts-matthew-mehan/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

In this outtake from episode 113, Thomas asks writer and editor Joshua Hren whether the turn to realism in modern fiction, a historical anomaly, is also a problem from a religious and philosophical point of view.

Episode 113, Can a Novelist "Create" a Saint? https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/113-can-novelist-create-saint-joshua-hren/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

In his new book How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic, fiction writer and editor Joshua Hren lays out an approach to Catholic literature that spans all the way from St. John Henry Newman called “a record of man in rebellion” to the other end of the continuum, which is a representation of the Beatific Vision. Topics discussed include:

• How important is beauty to fiction? Will beauty save the world?
• The importance of particularity; Carmelite vs. Ignatian views of imagination
• Newman and Augustine on the uses, limitations, and dangers of indulging sentiments about fictional characters
• Can the action of grace be dramatized? Can the life of holiness be fictionalized?
• The depiction of repentance, conversion and the lasting effects of sin in authors like Balzac and O’Connor

Joshua Hren is the founder and editor of Wiseblood Books as well as, with James Matthew Wilson, founder of a new creative writing MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, which is also discussed in the episode.

Watch discussion on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ump3CRZ6GRY

Links

How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic https://tanbooks.com/liberal-arts/literature-and-theology/how-to-read-and-write-like-a-catholic/

MFA program https://www.stthom.edu/Academics/School-of-Arts-and-Sciences/Division-of-Liberal-Studies/Graduate/Master-of-Fine-Arts-in-Creative-Writing/

Wiseblood Books https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/

Listen to Newman’s sermon “The Danger of Accomplishments” at Catholic Culture Audiobooks https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/st-john-henry-newman-danger-accomplishments/

Read “The Danger of Accomplishments” https://www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon30.html

Previous interview with Joshua Hren, “The Flannery-Haunted World” https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ep-70-reviving-catholic-literary-tradition-joshua-hren-john-emmet-clarke/

Follow this link to join the Online Great Books VIP waiting list and get 25% off your first 3 months: https://hj424.isrefer.com/go/ogbmemberships/tmirus/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Thomas Mirus apologizes for and retracts some things he said in Episode 106 of the Catholic Culture Podcast, a discussion of the morality of COVID vaccines.

"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?"

So wonders Dr. Tom More, a descendant of the great English martyr, in the first sentence of Walker Percy's third novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at Time near the End of the World.

Written in 1971, this prophetic work presents a world startlingly like our own. Today's guest, literary scholar Jessica Hooten Wilson, joins the show to give a general introduction to Percy and discuss aspects of what is for many his most beloved novel, Love in the Ruins, which she describes as a "panoramic satire" indicating that modernity's “lost sense of self makes it impossible to live the good life”.

Topics include:

• How Percy's Southernity informed his fiction
• His keen and ruthless observation of race relations
• His recurring commentary on the modern disjunction between mind and body, what protagonist Tom More calls oscillation between the angelic and the bestial
• His use of apocalyptic themes
• His treatment of love between men and women
• The lasting significance of his work

Links

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins https://www.amazon.com/Love-Ruins-Walker-Percy/dp/0312243111

Jessica Hooten Wilson https://jessicahootenwilson.com/

JHW, Reading Walker Percy’s Novels https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Walker-Percys-Novels-Jessica/dp/0807168777

JHW, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence https://www.amazon.com/Dostoevsky-Influence-Literature-Religion-Postsecular/dp/0814213499

Follow this link to join the Online Great Books VIP waiting list and get 25% off your first 3 months: https://hj424.isrefer.com/go/ogbmemberships/tmirus/

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio