Athenian Stranger and I get together to discuss the modern origins and interest in pagan revival in Europe during the modern period.

We go through a lot of material here and try to approach this from a philosophical and history of scholarship to address the question of where this interest comes from and why it started happening in the modern period. The answers are in some ways more mundane than you might think but also much bigger in scope than many realize. We do not get into the specifics of the content of today’s internet neo-paganism, which is probably the least interesting part of this whole discussion. I have enjoyed reading the Eddas and other primary source materials myself and will do so again in the future. But that is not what this discussion is about.

If you have questions, please do ask them in the comments and Athenian and I may do a follow up episode.

Also: Athenian mentions the one passage in the New Testament which mentions the word philosophy — φῐλοσοφῐ́ᾱ — and I said it was from 1 Corinthians 1-2. I was mixing up the words “wisdom” and “philosophy.” The actual text is Colossians 2:8 …

Βλέπετε μή τις ὑμᾶς ἔσται ὁ συλαγωγῶν διὰ τῆς φιλοσοφίας καὶ κενῆς ἀπάτης, κατὰ τὴν παράδοσιν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, κατὰ τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου καὶ οὐ κατὰ Χριστόν

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.

Many have tried to tackle the question of why the Christian church dwindled in the modern age. One answer is that perhaps it is trying to become "modern," but modernity does modern better.

Brandon listened to my conversation with Nate Fischer on this subject a while back and had some thoughts he wanted to add to the discussion. We finally managed to connect and have that talk.

In the opening set up for my conversation with Brandon, I had assumed that I had talked with Nate 10 months or a year ago, but it was just December of last year. If you haven’t listened to that episode and want to set the table for my chat with Brandon, you can listen to it here: https://www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/p/26-nate-fischer-can-technology-solve

Building on my post from a couple of weeks ago about the imago Dei as the "person-in-community," the theology of the image of God has social, moral and political implications.

Dimes and I discuss his recent piece at The Vanguardist Journal.

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Spoons joins me and we talk about this thing called "the right." Well, he ends up getting me thinking and I spurg on at length about a couple of things. But it ended up being a fun time.

There are a number of political battles in which people throw around this idea that human beings are made in the image of God but do so in an unexamined way. Let's explore this idea some.

Prior to writing my recent piece on the “Hero Myth” I bounced some ideas around of the participants in a group chat dedicated to the scholarship of the Greek and Latin classics as well as the “Great Books.” This generated enough pushback and discussion that I thought it might benefit my readers and audience to have a discussion with Stephen and Joe, exploring the content of the Hero Myth and why they feel it has value in today’s context. Because my piece was written before recording, it also allowed me to develop the “Steward” archetype further and how we might present that alternative to a society that is predisposed to the Hero Myth and resistant to the symbol of the Steward. I think you will enjoy this discussion.

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It is one of those phrases that gets thrown out by the advocates of policies like mass immigration and/or DEI, but we don't much talk about why this should be the case.

I had Ben on to discuss an interesting observation of his, that our fixation on WW2 clouds the reality that most of the themes, issues and problems of today were already established for us by 1925.