Send us Fan Mail Dr. E Michael Jones is back, this time to discuss the historical influence of philosophy and science on culture. How modern science has been used to justify modern forms of political oppression. The conversation references Dr. Jones' book Logos Rising, and is relevant to the serial theme I've been running lately on the history of metaphysics.

Send us Fan Mail The fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a world scrubbed of God and person, leaving only function. What drove both roads is older than either. It is the Promethean spirit — the will to possess knowledge by force rather than receive it as gift. Today, an endpoint of that arc is arti...

Send us Fan Mail Parts I through III traced mimesis in Ancient Greek philosophy, René Girard's mimetic theory, the Scripture and the Church Fathers. Here in Part IV, we arrive at Medieval Scholasticism. It is said to have baptized Aristotle. With that, it also built a great intellectual edifice that set off the modern Western academia. But Aristotelian demonstratio and scientia is based on natures and teleology, not persons and imitation. The change of focus set a chain reaction that caused t...

Send us Fan Mail Parts I and II covered the role of imitation in philosophy: essential, but incomplete. In this Part III we compare the account of imitation in René Girard's mimetic theory to the scriptural narrative of the Fall. We are made to imitate: Scripture says man is created in the image and likeness of God. The trouble in Eden starts not because Adam and Eve decided to imitate God. It's the mode of their imitation. In turning to perceive God as their rival, they take the Serpent as t...

Send us Fan Mail Part 2 after René Girard and the Philosophers. Girard argued that Plato and the philosophers who followed him sidelined imitation — neglecting the rivalrous, appropriative mimesis that drives human conflict. Plato did quiet over the dangerous side of imitation. But imitation is everywhere in classical metaphysics. It's the engine of Plato's cosmos and Aristotle's telos, and the master principle of the Platonic-Christian tradition that follows. This episode traces how imitatio...

Send us Fan Mail While Plato was teaching his students to contemplate the eternal forms, the theatre portrayed women of Thebes tearing a king apart with their bare hands. I talk about how the founding gesture of philosophy was walking away in silence from archaic scapegoating, blood sacrifice, etc., and that René Girard, twenty-five centuries later, gets us to turn around and take a close, analytical look.

Send us Fan Mail In Part I we saw Newton's anti-Trinitarianism and his science as a single revolution, opposed to the idea that divine form can enter matter and restructure it from within. This week, the counter-argument. We turn to the man in the opposing corner: Athanasius of Alexandria. We introduce his magnum opus, On the Incarnation. First, the metaphysics — form, matter, ousia, the Image. We then interpret the main thesis, which is that the same Divine Logos who created the world became...

Send us Fan Mail Most people know Isaac Newton as the father of modern science. Fewer know that two thirds of his written output was on alchemy and theology — and that he kept it secret because it would have gotten him hanged. This week I read my essay Newton Contra Athanasius, tracing the strange inner life of the man behind the mechanical universe: the abandoned child who reimagined God as a distant sovereign, the secret Arian who spent decades building a forensic case against one of the gr...

Send us Fan Mail William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and René Girard walk into a bar... And share a secret: the price of literary genius is the torment of mimetic cuckoldry, resolved through a type of repentance. I talk about how Girard found this secret in Shakespeare, and how Joyce had already encoded it in a single chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus, presenting his Shakespeare theory to a roomful of erudite groundlings, ends up outcast as their scapegoat. The mob wins in the sho...

Send us Fan Mail My French-Canadian friend Martin joins me to discuss the history of Quebec. Discover how this province, once the stronghold of French Catholic conservatism, underwent a rapid secular revolution in the 1960s. What role did the Catholic Church and later secular nationalism play in preserving Quebec's unique identity against Anglo dominance? We explore the demographic strategy of "La Revanche des Berceaux" – Revenge of the Cradles – and delve into the consequences of the shift f...