The Catholic Culture Podcast
In-depth discussions of all things Catholic - theology, art, history and more - featuring Thomas Mirus with a variety of notable guests. A production of CatholicCulture.org.
Episodes
Elisabeth Nguyen Thi Thu Hong joins the podcast to tell the inspiring story of her older brother, Venerable Francis-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, the heroic Vietnamese Cardinal who was imprisoned by the Communists for 13 years, 8 of those in solitary confinement. Thuan was descended from a line of Vietnamese martyrs, and his uncle was the devout Catholic President and Prime Minister of Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, who himself was something o...
My other interview with Jane: https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/147-world-is-falling-away-jane-greer/
Get free PDF of New Questions, Old Answers: Catholic Morals and Natural Family Planning https://profide.io/nfp/
Article on the marital debt https://christianrenaissancemovement.com/2023/02/23/thoughts-on-the-marital-debt/
The way Natural Family Planning is commonly taught does not adequately reflect the Church’s perennial teachings on the purpose of marital relations, on sexual asceticism, and the good of cont...
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-...
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 ...
We all know the secular world opposes the very idea of a person with same-sex attraction seeking any kind of therapy or spiritual counsel that might enable them to reach a state of healthy relations with the opposite sex. But what’s odd is that many Catholics seem to have bought into this. Many assume that if someone is not currently attracted to the opposite sex, this is a static, lifelong condition and therefore they must be call...
Fr. John Nepil, priest and mountaineer, joins the podcast to discuss his book To Heights and Unto Depths: Letters from the Colorado Trail. Topics discussed include:
- The modern view of "nature" vs. God's creation
- A morally responsible approach to risk-taking
- The modern origins of hiking as a secular activity
- "Wilderness" vs. "garden" - Catholic attitudes toward the wild places
To Heights and Unto Depths https://ignatius.c...
The standard textbook of theology in medieval universities was the Sentences by Peter Lombard (1095-1160), bishop of Paris. This collection systematically arranged the theological judgments of Scripture and the Church Fathers on various topics. For almost four centuries, those seeking higher credentials in theology had to study, teach, and comment on Lombard’s Sentences. It was formative for the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. ...
A great spiritual master of our time, Fr. Donald Haggerty, joins the podcast to discuss his important new book, The Hour of Testing: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty. He offers profound reflections on the ongoing, and perhaps future, crisis within the Church, with an eye to arousing an appetite for the greater spiritual intensity God desires his faithful to live out in this time.
<...Mimetic desire, scapegoating: if you've been hearing these terms thrown around lately, it's because the French Catholic philosopher René Girard (1923-2015) is having a renaissance, with powerful people like J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel citing his influence on their thought. Trevor Cribben Merrill, producer of the new documentary Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard, joins the podcast to discuss Girard's principal ideas, ...
Ryan Hammill of the Ancient Language Institute joins Thomas for a practical discussion about how to learn Latin, as well as the central place of the classical languages (Latin and Greek) in classical Christian education, and the various schools of thought in today’s classical Christian ed...
The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, by the great English musicologist Christopher Page, covers the development of Christian liturgical music from its origins as an elaboration of the role of the lector to its flourishing in the monastic and cathedral singing schools of France, as Roman chant was spread across Europe. One of the most important developments was the gradual development of a system of notation...
A new biography of Ven. Fulton Sheen gives special attention to his high-profile converts, but reveals many other interesting facets of his life as well. Author Cheryl Hughes joins to discuss Sheen’s at times shockingly direct evangelization methods, his outstanding television presence, his lifelong struggle with vanity and ambition, and the mistreatment he suffered from his rival, Cardinal Spellman.
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 ...
There is increasing speculation and concern about the role of AI in the future of the arts. Surprisingly, many Christians are already embracing the use of AI to produce images of the saints. In this episode, Thomas and Susannah Black Roberts make the argument for why AI art is a contradiction in terms. It is analogous to pornography in that it scratches the itch to “create” without actually achieving the object...
Fr. Uwe Michael Lang, a liturgical historian and priest of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in London, is the author of the new book A Short History of the Roman Mass, from Ignatius Press.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- The origins of the Roman Rite and development of the Roman Eucharistic Prayer
- Problems with liturgical antiquariani...
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De Maria numquam satis: Of Mary never enough. This saying of St. Bernard is echoed by many other saints. St. Anselm, for instance, says that it is impossible to determine the limits of God’s grace in elevating Mary’s human nature. St. Alphonsus says that if there is anything good we can say about Mary, not contrary to the teaching of the...
In his new book, The Stigmatists: Their Gifts, Their Revelations, Their Warnings, Paul Kengor gives a historical overview of the phenomenon of the stigmata, focusing especially on one thing many stigmatists have in common: they receive visions, often prophetic ones.
The book devotes individual chapters to seven canonized or beatified stigmatists: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, St. Pius o...
A collection of highlight clips from past episodes.
82 A Habitual Counterculture - Brandon McGinley https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ep-82-habitual-counterculture-brandon-mcginley/
68 What I Learned from Making Music with Mark Christopher Brandt https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ep-68-what-i-learned-from-making-music-with-mark-christopher-brandt/
...Catholic poet Ryan Wilson rejoins the podcast to read poems from his latest collection, In Ghostlight, which deals with themes of memory in a "haunted" world, encounters with realities beyond us, and reinterpreting ancient myths (Orpheus as a hair metal singer!). He also introduces four Catholic poets from his new anthology co-edited with April Lindner, Contemporary Catholic Poets.
Links
Ryan Wilson, In Ghostlight: Poems https://l...
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