Nuclear Barbarians

John and I finish up our series on the esoteric origins of the Enlightenment by diving into romanticism, mesmerism, the forgotten aspects of Jung, American New Age stuff, and way more!

Next up: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two Chief World Systems.

In our penultimate Hanegraaff episode, John and I take a look at how “magic,” “superstition,” and the “occult” became epithets divorced from critical reasoning, the uncomfortable overlap between occult and scientific practices, and I deliver a brief monologue on how all of this shows up in the work of HP Lovecraft.

In our second episode on Hanegraff’s Esotericism and the Academy, John and I dive into the “history of error,” and how Protestantism and refinements in historical practices began to put pressure on the Renaissance conceptions of perennial philosophy and ancient wisdom.

John also had some corrections for Hanegraff!

John and I are back with our new series. This time we’re working through Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture.

Hanegraff’s project looks at the debates over the recovery of ancient texts and their impact on Christian life and thought and what that means for us today, especially when it comes to our weird world of scientism on the one hand and woo-woo New Age-y stuff on the other. The material is dense and you might feel a little overwhelmed listening to the podcast—don’t worry! After the first two episodes (the first half of the series) it gets way easier and more fun, but this episode in the next are necessary listening/reading (if you want to follow along in the book) to appreciate the second half.

However, if you haven’t listened to our series on Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity, don’t listen to this one just yet. You can start the Gillespie series here, as it provides great and more accessible background for the Hanegraaff.

John and I finish up our series on Michael Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity—offering a break down of his final chapter and our closing thoughts.

John and I spend this, our penultimate episode in the series, discussing Hobbes—his anthropology, his physics, his politics—and the nature of modernity’s “new science.”

If you have questions for our final Q&A episode, please leave a comment!

John and I return to Gillespie’s book to talk about Luther, Erasmus, and Descartes and to dig into the motivations behind the ideas that inspired the philosophies that brought about the scientific revolution.

Grant Dever joined me to talk about his recent work on the loss of Indian Point, lowering energy costs in America, the vitality of energy prosperity for America’s future, and more.

Autopsy of a Perfect Policy Failure: The Closure of Indian Point by Grant Dever

Liberating America: Overcoming Energy Scarcity and Inflation by Grant Dever

John and I continue our journey through Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity, this time we dig into Petrarch, Martin Luther, the underpinnings of enlightenment humanism, and more.

John returns for the first installment of another reading series. This time we’re tackling Michael Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity, a book that aims at getting to the root of some of the major questions we face today as products of both the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.

This is also the first in what John and I hope will be a longer project of delving into the history of the philosophy of science. After Gillespie we hope to explore works by Francis Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Leibniz, Thomas Carlyle, David Hume, Edmund Husserl, and others.

We aim to conclude each author with a Q&A episode. So, if you have any questions, please leave a comment on the Substack—we’ll round them up and get to them at the end of each series.