Tag: Podcast

Flannery O’Connor on Imagination, Solitude, and the Oddities of Life

I recently participated in a panel discussion with three other women on the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, which was hosted by the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. In this discussion, I address the reasons why she called herself a “hillbilly Thomist”, the sense in which she believed our culture was “Christ haunted”, and her use of vision as a metaphor for the artist. I’m also excited that I’ll be teaching The Violent Bear it Away for the Collegium Institute faith in fiction series.

Of course, fans of the podcast may remember that I also dedicated the very first episode of Sacred and Profane Love to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor. You can access that conversation here, in case you missed it:

Episode 18: Carrying the Flame

In episode 18 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with my friend, Fr. Gregory Maria Pine, O.P., about the virtue of hope in Cormac McCarthy’s painfully beautiful novel, The Road (which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007). In our conversation, we talk about why hope requires an open future and a sense of uncertainty, and how hope is a state of character that strikes a middle position between presumption and despair.  We also explore the essential connections between hope and love, and how this plays out in the relationship between the man and the boy who must journey down the road together.

I am also excited to announce that you can now follow the podcast on twitter; our twitter handle is: @eudaimoniapod.  Please consider following us on Twitter or Facebook, subscribing to our feed on Soundcloud or iTunes, or generally spreading the word about the podcast among your like-minded friends.  At present we get between 1500-2000 downloads per episode, but we are trying to build our audience.  The more support we get, the more we are able to do to produce quality episodes you want to listen to!

I hope you enjoy the conversation!

 

Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P. serves presently as the Assistant Director for Campus Outreach with the Thomistic Institute in Washington, DC. Born and raised near Philadelphia, PA, he attended the Franciscan University of Steubenville, studying mathematics and humanities. Upon graduating, he entered the Order of Preachers in 2010. He was ordained a priest in 2016 and holds an STL from the Dominican House of Studies.

Jennifer A. Frey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department.  She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies (with Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. 

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Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.

Music credits, “Help me Somebody,” by Brian Eno and David Byrne, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.5.

 

Episode 15 Sacred and Profane Love: Faustian Ambitions

In episode 15 of Sacred and Profane Love, titled, “Faustian Ambitions,” I speak with my colleague and neighbor, Professor Anne Pollok, about Johann  Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous tragedy, Faust.  For the purposes of our conversation, we use the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt and edited by Cyrus Hamlin, which is available here.  Goethe’s drama deals with the infinite striving that lies at the heart of the human condition, and how our quest for the transcendent can go terribly awry.

 

Anne Pollok is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.  She did her Dr. Phil at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, and was a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Stanford University prior to her appointment at UofSC.  Her main areas of research are in early modern, aesthetics, and 20th century philosophy of culture.

 

Jennifer A. Frey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department.  She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies (with Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, ethics, and law, with a particular focus on the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition.  She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. 

 Subscribe

Preview on iTunes

Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is A Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and co-Principal Investigator at Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life.

This podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America.

Music credits, “Help me Somebody,” by Brian Eno and David Byrne, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.5.

 

 

Episode 14: Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos

dystopia
In episode 14 of Sacred and Profane Love, “Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos,” I speak with associate professor of Literature, Jessica Hooten Wilson, about Walker Percy’s dystopian, science fiction novel, Love in the Ruins.  We discuss the darkly comic adventures of Dr. Tom More as he tries to figure out how to live and love in the ruins of a society that seems eerily familiar to our own.  We also discuss Percy’s satirical take on the self-help genre, Lost in the Cosmos.  So bring out the Early Times this weekend, settle down on the porch, and enjoy a conversation about one of our greatest Southern writers.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is associate professor of literature at John Brown University.  She is the author of three books: Giving the Devil his Due: Flannery O’Connor and the Brothers Karamazov, Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence, and A Guide to Walker Percy’s Novels. Currently, she is preparing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished novel,Why Do the Heathen Rage? for publication.

 

Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina.

This podcast is generously supported by the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. 

Music credits, “Help me Somebody,” by Brian Eno and David Byrne, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.5.

Pints with Aquinas Episode

On New Year’s Day, Pints with Aquinas, a podcast that seeks to explain the thought of Thomas Aquinas to non-specialists, featured an episode on happiness; it is a conversation between me and the podcast’s hilariously self-deprecating and generous host, Matt Fradd.  The episode is titled “How to be happy” but its not about that (no one can tell you how to be happy–virtue is not a technique,  and philosophy isn’t self-help).  I’m posting a link to it here; I hope you enjoy our conversation!

Side note:

Whenever I do a podcast, I always think  about what I wish I had said as opposed to what I actually said.  In this episode,  for instance, Matt asked me why I don’t like Jordan Peterson’s writings.  I wish to say a little bit more in response here than I offered Matt during our conversation.  I didn’t want to derail our episode, but at the same time, I want to be on record about why male interest in Jordan Peterson bothers me.

First and foremost, I don’t follow Jordan Peterson and I have not read his book.  I do not consider this a failure on my part.  I am a finite being with limited resources, and I have to be prudent  about what I decide to read, especially since I read very carefully and in a time consuming way.  Jordan Peterson is famous not because he has brilliant ideas–from what I can gather, his book promotes many pedestrian, time worn platitudes about us, in addition to some fairly shallow readings of great books–but because he is an admitted, radicalized culture warrior.  I am allergic to our toxic culture wars,  as they drag down discourse rather than elevate it.  Culture warriors have practical (typically political) ends and reality gets dragged around to meet these ends on both sides; I have no time for that.  I don’t need to engage yet another voice opposed to finding common ground together.  I want to search for common ground, and if I didn’t believe that was possible I would sooner give up on discourse rather than further destroy it.

But I went further and said I don’t like his work, and that is what needs to be explained.   Jordan Peterson says  some unserious (indeed, laughable) but also dangerous things about women, and frankly, whatever sensible, true  things  he says about our culture is outweighed by his toxic attitudes about women.  For instance, that the feminine is deeply associated with chaos whereas order and reason is masculine, and to treat it any other way would be “transhuman” or denying reality.  For instance:

“You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else. They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Or, if that wasn’t weird enough, here’s something JP tweeted in 2016:

“Women, if you usurp men they will rebel and fail you and you will have to either jail or enslave them.”

Um, OK.

And please note that his “Twelve Rules for Life” is an antidote to chaos–an antidote to the feminine. I think I know enough already about what he is on about, and I’m not interested in what he’s selling.  If you are interested–if this vision of women appeals to you and rings true to your experience–I’m concerned about you.

Having said this, I certainly don’t want to silence Jordan Peterson, even though I think this vision of the feminine is dangerously false.  I will  raise daughters to be proud of their feminine genius insofar as they have cultivated it. But when men ask me point blank, as Matt did, why I don’t like him, as if he’s obviously great, I hope the answer is now clear:  I don’t have time for misogyny masquerading as eternal verities.  Life is too short, and I’d rather be reading wise women like Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Donna Tartt, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Marilynne Robinson, Eleonore Stump, or any of the incredibly amazing contemporary women philosophers and theologians I am so blessed to work with and learn from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Walker Percy Podcast

 

I was in DC yesterday giving a talk on Walker Percy and the Federalist Radio Hour asked me to swing by their recording studio to do an episode with them.  It was fun (Ben was an incredible host) and I’m delighted they invited me on the show.  In the episode, we discuss Percy’s ideas about the self and self-knowledge, the south, being a southern catholic, despair, sin, sex, women, false transcendence, and how to be alive to your own inevitable catastrophe of self.  If you are interested in Percy, you may want to bust out the Early Times, have a listen, and share with all of your friends. You can access the full episode here.

Veritas Forum Podcast

 

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You’ll notice that our blog has a new look. This was not exactly intentional (the blog has fully transitioned over to me, after disappearing for a few days on account of my technical incompetence), and certainly doesn’t dazzle,  but I suspect no one comes here for the look of it anyway. Also, it might change again!

I am off to Switzerland now for a conference in honor of an intellectual hero of mine, and to record another episode of Sacred & Profane Love (this time on Donna Tartt’s absolutely spellbinding novel, The Secret History, with the ever brilliant, Fr. Michael Sherwin, O.P.). I hope to get back to a regular schedule of releasing new episodes after an especially unforgiving October lecture schedule.

In the meantime, I have another podcast episode to share.  I recorded this episode of The Veritas Forum podcast, titled, “Happiness is Not Self-help” last April, just before my Veritas Forum event at Yale University with Dr. Laurie Santos. While at Yale, I was a guest in Laurie’s very famous class on happiness, and we had a public debate about whether virtues are “life hacks” (answer from me: no, they most certainly are not “life hacks”). I’m teaching a graduate level course on happiness right now, and my experience at Yale comes up quite a bit.  At some point I hope to blog about what Laurie and I could (and definitely could not) agree about happiness and the good life.  But for now, this podcast relates some of my basic thoughts and concerns about her approach.