What is the difference between a people and a nation? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Ernest Renan's influential lecture "What is a nation?". Renan argues that a nation is not formed by common descent, language, religion, or geography. Rather, a nation is a spiritual principle that requires sacrifice, and a forgetting of the past. Marc and Alex discuss Renan's definition of a nation and how it formed the development of nation states in the modern period. Registration is still open for New Polity Conference 2025! Ernest Renan's lecture can be found hereSubscribe to New Polity Magazine! Check out Marc's essay "National Forgetting"

In this special episode of Political Saints, Marc Barnes and Nicolas McAfee discuss the heroic political life of St. Thomas More. Thomas More was the Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 until 1531. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, he was convicted of treason and was executed. Pope Pius XI canonized Thomas More as a martyr in 1935.

Dr. Nicolas McAfee is the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Center for Thomas More Studies. He is the author of Political Wisdom in Late Shakespeare: A Way out of the Wreck (Lexington, forthcoming).You can find more on Thomas More Studies here: https://thomasmorestudies.org/New Polity Conference 2025 is only a few months away! Register at https://newpolity.com/eventsSubscribe to the greatest magazine on earth: https://newpolity.com/magazineCheck out our books at https://newpolity.com/press

For the last five years, the Political Right has been debating over a program for regime change in America: should populism be used to construct a new elite class? Should a new administration retire all government employees? Can the bureaucratic state be maintained but filled with new conservative staff? In this podcast, Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Willard Jones discuss subsidiarity as the solution to this debate, and how it provides a program for genuine regime change. Dr. Andrew Jones' new book The Church Against the State is available for purchase!Subscribe for all our best essays Join the conversation on our Discord

What is the meaning of national identity? Does strong national identity necessarily create a hostile relation with other nations? In this podcast, Marc Barnes and Alex Denley discuss Joseph Ratzinger's short book "The Unity of Nations." Through a discussion of the political theology of Origen and St. Augustine, Ratzinger shows how the early Christians viewed their relation to the nations, and Christianity's nation-unifying gospel. Registration is open for the New Polity Conference 2025! Subscribe to New Polity magazine for all our best essays: Check out the books published by New Polity press: Join the conversation on our Discord

Registration is open for New Polity Conference 2025!

Are we headed to a grand and glorious technological future? In this talk, Andrew Willard Jones expects the opposite: "The Future is Always Worse Than You Think It Will Be." As he explains, there are two paths with the development on new technologies: one which leads to an extension of the humane world into greater areas, and another, the technocratic, which closes and mines the world from within.

Registration for New Polity 2025 conference is now open! Don't miss out on our early bird price: https://newpolity.com/events/2025

Register here for New Polity 2025: Our Kind of People

The fifth annual New Polity conference takes “the people” as its theme and object of wonder. Motivated by the apparent victory of populism in the United States’ 2024 election, and inspired by the Holy Roman Pontiff’s love for Latin America’s “theology of the people,” this meeting of theologians, philosophers (and, let’s face it, preachers) is devoted to thinking deeply about "the people."

What makes us a people? Is it blood? Is it language? Is it love? Violent assertion? A shared history? Is the United States "a people"? How do "a people" get formed out of a mass, a crowd, a mob, a family, a village? And where does God enter into all of this? Does the Church, the universal People of God, negate or embrace the particular peoples that it liberates and saves? Can nationalism be redeemed? What about folk music? All of this is up for discussion and debate, the subject of our good humor and great conversation at New Polity 2025: Our Kind of People.

Pre-order The Church Against the State at https://newpolity.com/press

All the energy and vitality today is on the political right; the old conservative reactionary stance has been replaced with active, rival voices aimed at constructing a new regime. One such voice is Bronze Age Pervert and his followers. Through their series "The Politics of Paganism," Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones have explored the Nietzschean proposal, arguing that it is doomed to failure. The pagan cosmos is a closed world which cannot provide the freedom and vitality that Nietzsche extols. In this final episode, Alex Denley and Dr. Andrew Jones discuss the failure of the Nietzschean alternative and the open world of a Christian political order.