In this reflection on an emerging post-Christian Christendom, Fr. John Strickland discusses two ways in which eighteenth-century philosophes—from Voltaire to Thomas Jefferson—worked to subvert the paradisiacal culture of the old Christendom. He explores their use of photic imagery such as "enlightenment" and their introduction of the tripartite utopian model of history consisting of ancient, medieval, and modern periods. He concludes with a brief description of Edward Gibbon's famous and influential work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

In this episode Fr. John Strickland discusses various ways in which Christendom's leadership rejected the reformational Christianity that had provoked the wars of Western religion and replaced it with science, philosophy, pietistic Christianity, and a new religion known as deism.

In this reflection, Fr. John Strickland relates how Christianity ceased to motivate and regulate statecraft in Christendom following the Wars of Western Religion. He discusses the cases of France, England, and New England. He concludes with an account of westernization in Eastern Christendom under Peter the Great of Russia.

In this episode Fr. John Strickland discusses various ways in which Christendom's leadership rejected the reformational Christianity that had provoked the wars of Western religion and replaced it with science, philosophy, pietistic Christianity, and a new religion known as deism.

In this reflection, Fr. John Strickland relates how Christianity ceased to motivate and regulate statecraft in Christendom following the Wars of Western Religion. He discusses the cases of France, England, and New England. He concludes with an account of westernization in Eastern Christendom under Peter the Great of Russia.

In this reflection, Father John Strickland turns from secular humanism to reformational Christianity to see how Christendom's paradisiacal culture was subverted by both the Protestant "Counter-Reformation" and the Roman Catholic "Neo-Reformation." Ironically, Protestant fathers like Luther and Calvin did much to perpetuate the anthropological pessimism and cosmological contempt of their rivals like the earlier Pope Innocent III, opening the door even wider to the wholesale secularization of the West.

This is part 2 to last week's special video episode, on the revolution of art during the Italian Renaissance.

In this special video episode (the first of two parts), Father John discusses the background to the revolution in art during the Italian Renaissance. Though it produced some of the most stunning and innovative works ever, secular humanism represented a radical departure from the heavenly orientation of traditional Christian art.

In this, the first episode of the Paradise and Utopia video edition, Father John provides a video lecture from his office in Puget Sound, showing, with the use of powerful, full-color icons such as those of Andrei Rublev, how hesychasm inspired some of the greatest art in the history of eastern Christendom.

In this episode, Fr. John Strickland recounts the efforts of three Italian humanists of the quattrocento ("fourteen hundreds") to rescue the dignity of man from the pessimism of Western culture. Departing from traditional Christianity's dignification of man through communion with God, they looked instead to Neoplatonism and there found a model of the fully autonomous human being, Prometheus.