Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Literature-philosophy-theology conversations • Great Books, classics, modern novels • Poetry analysis and readings • love, virtue, meaning, happiness • sin, grace, suffering, evil, redemption • satire, tragedy, existential angst • liberal education, humanities debates
This podcast features long-form conversations with philosophers, theologians, poets, literary critics, and other scholars about major works in the Western literary tradition and their implications for the inner life. The discussions use novels, poetry, drama, and classic theological texts as occasions for examining perennial questions about love, desire, happiness, suffering, virtue, sin, redemption, and what gives human life meaning.
A consistent thread is the interplay between the “sacred” and the “profane” in art—how writers portray religious longing alongside bodily desire, moral failure, satire, violence, or cultural decay, and what these portrayals suggest about truth and beauty. Listeners can expect close attention to literary form and voice as well as to moral psychology: how characters rationalize wrongdoing, how self-deception works, how guilt and repression shape a life, and how conversion or transformation is narrated. Several conversations explicitly explore tragedy and the “tragic wisdom” literature can convey, including how classical tragic vision changes when read in light of later religious perspectives.
The range of texts spans ancient philosophy and drama, Christian classics, and modern literature, including discussions of poets and satirists, major modernist and postwar writers, and contemporary fiction. Alongside interpretation of particular books, the podcast regularly turns to broader questions about the purpose of the humanities and liberal education, the role of “Great Books” in intellectual formation, and the limits of purely theoretical moral reasoning compared with the kind of knowledge literature can offer.
Overall, the show is oriented toward serious, text-centered dialogue that treats literature as a resource for moral and spiritual reflection, while also attending to aesthetic questions about art, imagination, and whether beauty can be found amid darkness or evil.
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Episodes:
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Episode 71: Dana Gioia on the Tragic Thought of Seneca
2024-Jun-21
56 minutes
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Episode 70: The Poetry of John Donne w/ Lars Engle
2024-Jun-07
63 minutes
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Episode 69: Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" w/ Aaron Gwyn
2024-May-24
57 minutes
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Episode 68: The Poetry of Jonathan Swift with Steve Karian
2024-May-03
56 minutes
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Episode 67: Poetry, Art, and Truth with Carl Phillips
2024-Apr-12
44 minutes
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Episode 66: Ovid's "The Art of Love" with Julia Hejduk
2024-Mar-22
47 minutes
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Episode 65: Boris Dralyuk on Nabokov’s Pnin
2024-Mar-01
47 minutes
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Episode 64: Patrick Deneen on DeLillo's White Noise
2024-Feb-16
59 minutes
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The Podcast Returns!
2024-Feb-16
2 minutes
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Episode 29: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice with Agnes Mueller
2024-Feb-15
74 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 43 - The Closing of the American Mind with Brad Carson
2023-Sep-01
66 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 50 - "Are the Humanities in Crisis" with Zena Hitz and Chad Wellmon
2023-Aug-25
79 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 45 - Roosevelt Montás on Great Books and Intellectual Transformation
2023-Aug-18
75 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 41 - James Baldwin is bringing the fire with Dr. Cornel West
2023-Aug-11
67 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 1 - The Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor with Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P.
2023-Aug-04
52 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 55 - Christopher Snyder on Tolkien and Virtue Ethics
2023-Jul-28
69 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 56 - Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil
2023-Jul-21
72 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 48 - Crime And Punishment With Thomas Hibbs
2023-Jul-14
75 minutes
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Re-run: Episode 51 - A Canticle For Leibowitz With Christopher Frey
2023-Jul-08
96 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Summer Update
2023-Jul-07
1 minute
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Episode 63: St. Augustine's Confessions with Russell Hittinger, Part III
2023-Jun-14
73 minutes
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Episode 62: St. Augustine's Confessions with Russell Hittinger, Part II
2023-Apr-19
87 minutes
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Episode 61: St. Augustine's Confessions with Russell Hittinger, Part I
2023-Mar-17
100 minutes
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Episode 60: Randy Boyagoda on Original Prin and Dante's Indiana
2023-Feb-24
55 minutes
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Episode 59: TS Eliot with Anthony Domestico
2023-Jan-16
97 minutes
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Episode 58: Justin E.H. Smith on Edgar Allan Poe
2022-Dec-30
91 minutes
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Episode 57: JM Coetzee on Philosophy, Fiction, and the Academy
2022-Dec-16
84 minutes
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Episode 56: Dana Gioia on Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil
2022-Dec-02
72 minutes
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Episode 55: Christopher Snyder on Tolkien and Virtue Ethics
2022-Nov-01
69 minutes
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Episode 54: Karen Swallow Prior on The Scarlet Letter
2022-Oct-14
75 minutes
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Episode 53: Paul Mariani on Robert Lowell
2022-Sep-30
59 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 52: The Hillbilly Thomists
2022-Sep-16
52 minutes
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Episode 51: A Canticle for Leibowitz with Christopher Frey
2022-Jul-11
96 minutes
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Episode 50: "Are the Humanities in Crisis" with Zena Hitz and Chad Wellmon
2022-Jul-01
79 minutes
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Episode 49: Christopher Beha on Lucky Per
2022-May-20
101 minutes
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Episode 48: Crime and Punishment with Thomas Hibbs
2022-Apr-27
75 minutes
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Episode 47: Justin E.H. Smith on Suttree
2022-Mar-18
80 minutes
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Episode 46: Katy Carl
2022-Feb-04
63 minutes
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Episode 45: Roosevelt Montas on Great Books and Intellectual Transformation
2022-Jan-14
75 minutes
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Episode 44: The Tragic Abyss with Dr. Kevin Kambo
2021-Dec-31
85 minutes
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Episode 43: The Closing of the American Mind with Brad Carson
2021-Dec-07
66 minutes
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Episode 42: Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter
2021-Nov-05
67 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 41: James Baldwin is Bringing the Fire with Dr. Cornel West
2021-Oct-21
67 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 40: The Tragic Vision of Eugene O'Neill
2021-Oct-05
89 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 39: Gabriel Marcel's Thirst
2021-Sep-20
60 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 38: The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
2021-Aug-29
55 minutes
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Bonus Episode: Matthew Mehan on Children's Literature
2021-Aug-16
40 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 37: Boethius and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces
2021-Aug-02
57 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 36: The Realist Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz
2021-Jun-25
68 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 35: Morten Hoi Jensen on Jens Peter Jacobsen
2021-Jun-01
82 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 34: Dante's Paradiso
2021-May-17
102 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 33: Dante's Purgatorio
2021-Apr-12
84 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 32: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace
2021-Mar-16
83 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 31: The Hellish Desires of Dante's Inferno
2021-Mar-01
93 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 30: The Seducer, Self-Creation and The Aesthete
2021-Feb-09
85 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 29: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice with Agnes Mueller
2020-Dec-31
74 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 28: Agnes Callard on Antigone
2020-Dec-08
76 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 27: Karen Swallow Prior on Reading Joseph Conrad Well
2020-Nov-20
62 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 26: St. Augustine and the Index of Self-Destructive Acts
2020-Nov-05
62 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 25: On Solitude with Rilke and Merton
2020-Oct-15
72 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 24: On Reading The Plague in a Plague
2020-Jun-08
82 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 23: Lost in Thought with Zena Hitz
2020-May-07
98 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 22: Huxley on Love and Longing in the Dystopia
2020-Apr-20
102 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 21: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim
2020-Apr-04
79 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 20: Scruton's Wagner: Sex, Death, and the Sacred
2020-Feb-27
70 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 19: Love and Lust in Lolita
2020-Jan-17
73 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 18: Carrying the Flame
2019-Nov-20
55 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 17: The Death of a Whisky Priest
2019-Oct-10
54 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 16: King Lear's Vision
2019-Sep-20
55 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 15: Goethe's Faust
2019-May-24
60 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Episode 14: Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos
2019-May-17
55 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 1: Flannery O'Connor on Redemptive Love
2019-Apr-22
52 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 2: Doestoevsky and Transfiguring Love
2019-Apr-22
47 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 3: Walt Whitman on Civic Hope
2019-Apr-22
44 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 4: Madame Bovary
2019-Apr-22
55 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 5: Brewer on the Symposium
2019-Apr-22
42 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 13: Jane Austen on the Virtues of Social Life
2019-Apr-22
50 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 12: Meaning, Murder, and Divine Madness
2019-Apr-22
49 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 11: The Contemplative Realism of Marilynne Robinson
2019-Apr-22
52 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 10: A Twitch Upon The Thread
2019-Apr-22
53 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love, Episode 9: Podcast Revelations Of Love In John
2019-Apr-21
56 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 8: “Sophocles and Tragic Love"
2019-Apr-21
45 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 7: “Boasts of Love in Troilus and Criseyde”
2019-Apr-21
57 minutes
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Sacred and Profane Love Episode 6: Elena Ferrante on Friendship and the Intellectual Life
2019-Apr-21
53 minutes
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