Beatrice Institute Podcast

Liberalism is often taken to be essentially about the promotion of radical individual autonomy, but might this understanding of liberalism be only one kind of liberalism? And, if so, why does that matter? 

In this episode, Weston and Fred discuss the meaning of "off-liberalism," an understanding of liberalism that highlights how disparate historical, cultural, and philosophical sources contribute to what is often labeled as "libera...

Does it take a trained expert to read books in our own language? The heart of English departments around the world is the love of amateurs, yet that heart seems to be gradually shrinking, replaced more and more with cold technical literary analysis. Kathryn Mogk Wagner identifies this as the reason English Departments themselves are shrinking too. 

Literary analysis is shutting out truth and reading for ed...

You are marveling at a beautiful sunset, standing in awe before an Italian masterpiece, or gazing lovingly into the face of your beloved. These moments of beauty, however brief, impact our hearts, minds, and souls in a profound way. What exactly is occurring in these moments?

John-Paul Heil offers insight through a reading and discussion of his essay “Ekstasis and the Chicken Truck,” in which he offers ins...

What has become of the trades within our country? Where did the blue-collar workers go and what is the reason behind their disappearance? Is there anything we can do to rebuild and re-vitalize this crucial section of today’s society? A co-founder of the College of St. Joseph, the Worker, Jacob Imam helps to answer our questions.

Join Grant and Jacob as they discuss the root of America’s trade epidemic and ...

As a bioethicist and Catholic deacon-in-training, Dr. Michael Deem has spent years in the medical trenches as well as in theological and philosophical research. Michael Deem joins Grant in this episode to answer questions such as, “Do bioethicists actually change minds?” “Does healthcare flourish under a provider-of-services model?” and “Are bioethical principles self-evident?” Their discussion covers territory from co...

How can we help locally, but in a way that works economically? This is the challenge that thwarts many solidaristic startups. Luckily, Sara Horowitz has picked up the gauntlet. Sara Horowitz has been both the chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the founder of the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company and talks eloquently on mutualism.

Join Grant and Sara’s discu...

How is mathematics a liberal art? How can being good at math translate into virtue? 

Dr. Francis Su, the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, is well aware of mathematics’ place in human flourishing. In this episode, he and Grant converse over these questions. They also discuss the reverence evoked by math and the transcendence found in it, the effectiveness of mathematical a...

Modernity strives to break with the past, especially genealogy. However, is it possible for a society to break a genealogical thread?

In this episode, we explore the meaning and value of genealogy, a way of thinking that will shape the rest of this series. We ask how different forms of genealogical thinking can reconnect us to the past without limiting our future to the past. We see ho...

We often think of modernity as a time period in history. But people have been claiming to be modern since at least c. 550 AD, when the Roman writer Cassiodorus used the term modernus to mark off everything that had happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back much further, to the third century BC in ancient China, when a series of emperors claimed modernity to consolidate their rule. Puet...

For the past three years, Ryan has been working with an interdisciplinary group of scholars to produce a narrative podcast about Genealogies of Modernity. Today’s episode is a sneak preview of the first episode of that series, which will be released in its own feed starting the first week of November. In the thread of the Beatrice Institute podcast, Ryan has focused on interviewing scholars who are interested in the co...

This episode is brought to us by SpirituallyIncorrect:

We all love a good story. We watch movies, listen to friends talk about their last vacation, or listen to podcasts (this one included) just to hear an entertaining and provocative tale. But one story trumps them all: the story of how we have arrived at our modern world.

With technology evolving every year, drugs lessening the effects of illness, and possibilities undreamt of ju...

Anthony Bradley is a professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Human Flourishing at the King’s College in New York City. He gives a personalist analysis of the criminal justice system (touching on everything from architecture to food) and the Black Lives Matter movement. In this rerun episode, Anthony and Ryan discuss the relationship between Afro-pessimism, hope, ...

If happiness is to be had, it must be studied. Tal Ben-Shahar acted on this belief when he created the Master’s of Arts in Happiness Studies in partnership with Centenary University, through which students of eighty-five nationalities learn how to achieve well-being and how to impact others’ flourishing.

In this episode, Tal joins Grant to discuss the study of happiness in an academic setting. They ask: Ho...

Can faith leaders, steeped in tradition, contribute anything to the conversation of ever-new artificial intelligence? What if the questions they are asking are the same? When David Brenner realized the metaphysical overlap between the spiritual questions and the questions of AI ethicists, he decided to institute AI and Faith, which engages the fundamental values of the world’s major religions in modern ethical technolo...

If chickens can’t act as chickens and humans can’t act as humans, Western civilization is not making progress. So observes Mary Harrington, contributing editor for Unherd and most recently, author of Feminism Against Progress. While society champions the defying of limits, our natures - as humans, as men, as women - always reemerge.

In this episode, Mary and Grant discuss the apocalypse, gender, and eros, ...

Although the intersection of faith and artificial intelligence is a modern topic, it can be seen as a new version of an old question famously posed by Tertullian: what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Today’s podcast guest, Derek Schuurman—computer scientist, author, and professor at Calvin University—rephrases that question for those living in the age of AI: what does Silicon Valley have to do with Jerusalem?

Where has a manifest God gone? In his recent book, The Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, Joseph Minich explores this question. A teaching fellow at the Davenant Institute, Joseph helps provide resources for retrieving an intellectual heritage to build up the contemporary Church.

Join Joseph and Ryan in their discussion as they ask these questions of modernity: Why has the e...

What is the person, and why does it matter in psychiatric care? Brent Robbins, professor of psychology at Point Park University and director of the Psy.D. Clinical Psychology Program, has decided to put this question at the forefront of his research and teaching.

Grant and Brent ...

As technology develops at an ever more rapid pace, it can seem that ethics struggles to keep up with it. While science and technology advance by building on discoveries of the past, virtue and moral knowledge must be cultivated afresh in every individual and each generation. 

This is where Brian Green comes in. As director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, his areas of research ...