Links from the show:* The Nicene Creed: An Introduction* Never miss an episode* Rate the episodeAbout my guest:Dr. Cary is a philosopher married to a midwife (he thinks about the mysteries of life; she puts her hands on them). He and his wife have three sons and two grandchildren. His favorite theologian is Martin Luther, which means he feels quite comfortable in a high-church Anglican congregation where they love both Word and Sacrament.Dr. Cary loves Luther because he thinks we know people by hearing their words, and that’s how Luther taught us to know God. He was writing a dissertation on this theme at Yale, while working on a double degree in philosophy and religious studies back in the early 90s. He was planning to write a little chapter on the Augustinian background to Luther’s theology, but this grew into a whole large dissertation, which then grew over the years into three books on Augustine, who is endlessly fascinating and different from what he had expected.Dr. Cary loves learning things by reading old books, and that is essentially what he teaches. As far as he is concerned the best old book is the Bible, because it contains the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It always cheers him up to teach anything that has to do with the Gospel. Consequently, he has written a theological commentary on the presence of the Gospel in the book of Jonah, as well as a little book based largely on conversations with his students where he hopes to lure them into trusting the Gospel rather than applying a whole slew of “practical” ideas to their lives—unbiblical ideas that do little more than make them anxious. It turns out the Gospel of Christ tends to cheer them up, too. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber* Connect with Wendy* Never miss an episodeAbout my guest:Wendy Brown is a political theorist who works across the history of political thought, political economy, Continental philosophy, cultural theory, and critical legal theory. Brown investigates the subterranean powers shaping contemporary Euroatlantic polities, with particular attention to the political identities, subjectivities, and expressions they spawn. She is the author or co-author of a dozen books, including States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity; Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire; Walled States, Waning Sovereignty; Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution; and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. Across her work, Brown aims to illuminate powers unique to our era and the predicaments they generate for democratic thought and practice. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Who Gets In: An Immigration Story* Connect with Norman* Rate the showAbout my guest:Norman Ravvin’s recent novel, The Girl Who Stole Everything, is his fourth. It sets out to tell divergent stories of contemporary Poland and Vancouver, which end up crossing in a village northwest of Warsaw. In The Globe and Mail Jade Colbert called it one of the best publications of its year from independent presses (see more below). His previous novels include The Joyful Child, illustrated by Melanie Boyle and lovingly printed at Gaspereau Press, and Lola by Night, published by independent publishers Cary Fagan and Bernard Kelly and later translated into Serbian. Ravvin’s early work, including his first novel, Café des Westens and his travelogue, Hidden Canada, were brought out as part of a longstanding collaborative relationship with Red Deer Press in Alberta. His fiction, non-fiction and editorial projects have won prizes in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. A native of Calgary, his writing and interests are also formed by youthful years spent in Vancouver. For two years he taught Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick and was fiction editor of The Fiddlehead. He lives with his family in Montreal. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation* Connect with Kristen* Rate the showAbout my guest:Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History and Gender Studies at Calvin University. She holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent book is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Verissimus: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius* Connect with Donald Roberston* Rate the show* Never miss a showAbout my guest:Donald is a writer, cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist and trainer. He is one of the founding members of the Modern Stoicism nonprofit, and the founder and president of the Plato’s Academy Centre nonprofit in Athens, Greece.Donald specializes in teaching evidence-based psychological skills, and known as an expert on the relationship between modern evidence-based psychotherapy and classical Greek and Roman philosophy. His work is highly interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, history, and psychology.He was born in Irvine, Scotland, and grew up in Ayr. He worked as a psychotherapist for about twenty years in London, England, where he had a clinic in Harley Street, and ran a training school for therapists. He emigrated to Canada in 2013 and began focusing more on writing and consultancy. He now divides his time between Greece and Canada.Donald is an experienced public speaker. His therapy practice specialised for many years in helping clients with social anxiety and self-confidence issues. His work, and that of his colleagues, has often featured in the media of different countries, including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, etc. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots against Castro, Kennedy, and Che* Connect with Carlos* Never miss an episode* Drop a 5-star About my guest:Carlos Harrison is a former reporter for the Miami Herald, where he won the Pulitzer Prize, and has worked as a national and international correspondent for Fox News. He is the author of fourteen books in English and Spanish, and has written numerous magazine articles and award-winning television documentaries. He lives in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege* Connect with Marilynne* Never miss an episode* Rate the showAbout my guest:Marilynne K. Roach works as a free-lance writer, illustrator, researcher, and presenter of talks on historical subjects. She has written for publications as varied as the Boston Globe, the New England Historic Genealogical Register, and the Lizzie Borden Quarterly. She is a member of the Gallows Hill Project that verified the correct site of the 1692 hangings, a discovery listed in Archaeology Magazine’s list of the world’s ten most important discoveries of 2017. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands* Connect with Nathan* More about Thorne* Never miss an episode* Rate the showAbout my guest:Dr. Nathan Price is Chief Scientific Officer of Thorne HealthTech (NASDAQ: THRN) and author of The Age of Scientific Wellness (Harvard Press/Belknap). Previously he was CEO of Onegevity, an AI health intelligence company that merged with Thorne prior to its IPO in 2021. In 2019, he was named as one of the 10 Emerging Leaders in Health and Medicine by the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2021 he was appointed to the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. He spent much of his earlier career as Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Systems Biology (now on leave), co-director with biotechnology pioneer Lee Hood of the Hood-Price Lab for Systems Biomedicine, and is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington in Bioengineering and Computer Science & Engineering. He is a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, received the 2016 Grace A. Goldsmith award for his work pioneering ‘scientific wellness’, was a co-founder of Arivale, received a Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award from the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”* Connect with Tomaz* Rate the show* Never miss an episodeAbout my guest:Dr. Tomaz Jardim is a historian of modern Europe who joined the Department of History in 2011. Prior to his arrival at Toronto Metropolitan University, he taught at Concordia University and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Dr. Jardim has taught courses on the World Wars, modern Germany, the Holocaust, Europe in the 20th century, and surveys of Western civilization. His research areas include the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and in particular, war crimes trials. His first book, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany , external link(Harvard University Press, 2012), explores the role of U.S. military commission courts in punishing concentration camp perpetrators. Dr. Jardim’s second book, Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the "Bitch of Buchenwald" , external link(Harvard University Press, 2023), explores how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch's zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators guilty of greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences.  Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe

Links from the show:* Watch Matt’s YouTube Channel* Rate the show* Never miss an episodeAbout my guest:I’m Dr. Matt Monger - though I publish under the name Matthew P. Monger.I am Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society in Oslo, Norway.I earned my PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on the Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts containing text from the Book of Jubilees.I have Bachelors and Masters degrees in Theology from MF a BA in Linguistics from the University of Oslo a an MA in Semitic Philology from the University of Oslo.I am originally from Virginia in the US, but have lived in Norway for over 20 years now. I started this website as a companion to my new Youtube channel. I want to make resources available so that people can not only hear what I have to say, but also go deeper into the texts themselves. Get full access to Dispatches from the War Room at dispatchesfromthewarroom.substack.com/subscribe