Sacred and Profane Love

With the recent passing of the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, I decided to devote episode 20 to his provocative and comprehensive analysis of Wagner's famous opera, which he lays out in his book, Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2003). In this episode, I speak with philosopher Fiona Ellis (University of Roehampton), about the self-transcendent and potentially redemptive and religious character of erotic love. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

After a long winter's nap–i.e., the end of the semester madness followed by holidays with my family–I am back to releasing new episodes of Sacred and Profane Love. I am starting the Spring semester with a discussion of Nabokov's celebrated but controversial novel, Lolita. In episode 19, titled "Love and Lust in Lolita," I speak with Becca Rothfeld, award winning essayist, literary critic, and PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard University, about the tensions we readers are forced to navigate between the awesome beauty of Nabokov's prose and the ugly perversion that is the central focus of our attention in the novel. As readers, it is natural to wonder how we can appreciate the beauty of the novel's prose and the cleverness of its structure, given its dark subject matter.

In episode 18 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with my friend, Fr. Gregory Maria Pine, O.P., about the virtue of hope in Cormac McCarthy's painfully beautiful novel, The Road (which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007). In our conversation, we talk about why hope requires an open future and a sense of uncertainty, and how hope is a state of character that strikes a middle position between presumption and despair. We also explore the essential connections between hope and love, and how this plays out in the relationship between the man and the boy who must journey down the road together.

In episode 17 of Sacred and Profane Love, I speak with Dr. Angela Knoble about Graham Greene's masterpiece, The Power and the Glory. Set in Mexico during a period of brutal religious persecution, Greene's novel explores questions of what true power and glory consist in, and what sort of love and life can make one a witness to it.

In episode 16, "King Lear's Vision," I speak with Professor and poet Troy Jollimore about the connections between love and perception. In his recent book, Love's Vision, Jollimore, drawing on Plato and Iris Murdoch, argues that true love consists in grasping the objective value of the beloved rather than the projection of it. This vision involves the bestowal of patient, loving, and imaginative attention on the objectively valuable qualities the beloved truly possesses. We explore this theme of love's vision (or lack thereof) in Shakespeare's darkest and wildest tragedy, King Lear. Reading Lear, we conclude, can help to open our eyes to the fact that we need to get out of our own way—i.e., to put aside our deep insecurities and vices—in order to see and love people for who they really are.

In episode 15 of Sacred and Profane Love, titled, "Faustian Ambitions," I speak with my colleague and neighbor, Professor Anne Pollok, about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous tragedy, Faust. For the purposes of our conversation, we use the Norton Critical Edition, translated by Walter Arndt and edited by Cyrus Hamlin, which is available here. Goethe's drama deals with the infinite striving that lies at the heart of the human condition, and how our quest for the transcendent can go terribly awry.

In episode 14 of Sacred and Profane Love, "Walker Percy on Being Lost in the Cosmos," I speak with associate professor of Literature, Jessica Hooten Wilson, about Walker Percy's dystopian, science fiction novel, Love in the Ruins. We discuss the darkly comic adventures of Dr. Tom More as he tries to figure out how to live and love in the ruins of a society that seems eerily familiar to our own. We also discuss Percy's satirical take on the self-help genre, Lost in the Cosmos. So bring out the Early Times this weekend, settle down on the porch, and enjoy a conversation about one of our greatest Southern writers.

In episode 13 of Sacred & Profane Love, "Jane Austen on the Virtues of Social Life, I speak with professor Karen Stohr of Georgetown University about how Austen brings into relief the social dimensions of virtue in her novels. We discuss the importance of social roles and environments for the exercise and development of virtue, and how friendship and family life are the best contexts in which virtue can be fostered and strengthened. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In Episode 12 of Sacred & Profane Love, "Meaning, Murder, and Divine Madness," I speak with the eminent moral theologian, Fr Michael Sherwin, O.P., about Donna Tartt's breakout bestseller, The Secret History. We discuss how the novel is best situated within both the Southern Gothic and the Southern Catholic Gothic literary genres, and how Donna Tartt, like Flannery O'Connor, understands the task of the novelist as helping us come to see ourselves and our world as it truly is.

In episode 11 of the Sacred and Profane Love Podcast, I speak with Scott Moringiello, assistant professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University, in Chicago, Illinois, about Robinson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gilead. Among other things, we discuss the connection between contemplation, love, grace, and the ability to pay attention.