From Utopia to Dystopia III: How Atheistic Existentialism Countered Saint Siluoun's "My Brother Is My Life" with Sartre's "Hell Is Other People"
10/06/2026
In this episode, Fr. John discusses the once popular philosophical movement known as Existentialism, and the way in which one of its leaders, Albert Camus, broke from others in a search for transcendent Truth.
From Utopia to Dystopia II: Totalitarianism, Hard and Soft
03/04/2026
In this episode, Fr. John describes how ideological world building created not only a hard totalitarianism in the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, but a perceivable "soft" totalitarianism in the liberal democracy of Cold War Western Europe and America.
From Utopia to Dystopia I: How Christians Like C.S. Lewis Saw Nihilism for What It Was
09/01/2026
In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John tells how traditional Christianity provided certain critics of ideological world-building with a new way of seeing the West.
Liberal World-Building II: American Anticommunism in the 1950s
05/12/2025
In this episode, Fr. John describes the anticommunist character of liberalism in America during the Cold War, noting how in its promotion of individual rights it accommodated and even emphasized religious belief, but did so conditionally.
Liberal World Building I: When J.S. Mill met Friedrich Nietzsche
14/11/2025
In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John looks at the origins of the main rival to the world-Building ideologies of Communism and Nazis, American liberalism.