The Civitas Podcast

Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with Steven D. Smith for a conversation on natural law, religious freedom, the First Amendment, modern paganism, and the freedom of the church.

Smith is the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego and co-director of its Institute for Law and Religion. His books include Law’s Quandary, Pagans and Christians in the City, and The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom.

The conversation begins with a problem in modern legal reasoning: judges often speak as though law rests on moral realities that their stated assumptions cannot explain. Smith discusses the loss of natural law in American jurisprudence, the resulting suspicion that judicial decisions are simply political, and the possibility of recovering a more coherent account of law. Leithart and Wood also ask whether contemporary secularism is genuinely neutral or whether it functions as a competing form of religious belief.

Turning to the First Amendment, Smith argues that its religion clauses originally marked a limit on the national government’s authority rather than establishing a comprehensive theory of religious freedom. He explains how later Supreme Court decisions changed that arrangement and why disputes over church and state cannot be settled by appeals to religious neutrality alone.

The episode concludes with the freedom of the church. Smith traces the idea from medieval conflicts between spiritual and temporal authorities through the American founding and into modern cases concerning church autonomy. Leithart, Wood, and Smith consider why churches must be free to govern their own affairs—and what society loses when the church is made to conform to the demands of the state.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with Michael Lamb for a conversation on Augustine, political hope, the common good, rhetoric, coercion, the Church, and the possibilities and limits of political life.

Michael Lamb is the F. M. Kirby Foundation Chair of Leadership and Character, Executive Director of the Program for Leadership and Character, and Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Oxford Character Project. His research focuses on leadership, character, and the role of virtues in public life, and he is the author of A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2022).

In this conversation, Lamb introduces the major modern interpretations of Augustine’s political thought, from Augustinian liberalism and realism to communitarian and civic republican readings. Against portrayals of Augustine as simply pessimistic about politics, Lamb argues that Augustine offers a more complex account of hope as a virtue - one that resists both despair and presumption while making room for meaningful political action within the limits of the present age.

The conversation explores Augustine’s understanding of temporal and eternal goods, the common good, political persuasion, civic peace, and the role of rhetoric in forming both judgment and desire. Leithart, Wood, and Lamb discuss whether political actors should seek to “win,” how Augustine engages opponents on their own terms, and how his training in rhetoric shapes the way he argues, exhorts, and seeks to cultivate virtue.

The discussion also turns to some of the more difficult questions in Augustine’s political theology, including his defense of coercion in the Donatist controversy, his understanding of liberty as freedom from domination, and his complicated relationship to Christian rulers and imperial power. The episode concludes by considering the political significance of the Church: not as a pure community standing outside the world, but as a mixed body, a school of virtue, and the place where worship, sacrifice, mercy, and the right ordering of loves give concrete form to Augustine’s vision of civic and theological life.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with Reuben Slife for a conversation on David L. Schindler, American liberalism, religious freedom, Catholic social thought, the nature of rights, and America’s place within the mystery of Christ and the Church.

Reuben Slife is an editor at New Polity and the editor of America in the Mystery of Christ and the Church, a new collection of David L. Schindler’s writings on America, accompanied by Slife’s substantial critical introduction. Slife is also preparing to begin doctoral studies at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C.

In this conversation, Slife introduces Schindler as an underappreciated early postliberal thinker whose work challenged the assumptions of American Catholic neoconservatism. Drawing on Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul II, and the Communio tradition, Schindler argued that Christianity cannot simply supply moral values to an otherwise neutral political and economic order. The world and its institutions are already ordered toward God in Christ, and every social system therefore embodies an implicit theology and ontology.

The conversation explores Schindler’s debates with Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, George Weigel, and John Courtney Murray, especially over the neutrality of liberal institutions, the “naked public square,” religious freedom, and the First Amendment as an “article of peace.” Leithart, Wood, and Slife discuss whether rights arise from our separation from others or from our prior relation to them, how liberal individualism helps sustain the logic of abortion, and how sinful assumptions become embedded in laws, institutions, and cultural habits.

The discussion also considers Schindler’s account of cosmic liturgy: creation comes from God and is ordered toward its return to God in praise. From Mother Teresa’s contemplative service to the Eucharistic life of the Church, Christian action is not secular work with religion added on top, but participation in the world’s intrinsic glorification of God. The episode concludes by asking how Americans can receive the genuine goods of their national inheritance—freedom, opportunity, invention, religious liberty, and social peace—while allowing those goods to be purified and more deeply situated within Christ and the communion of the Church.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with Michael R.J. Bonner for a conversation on liberalism, Christianity, freedom, secularism, Iran, and the theological roots of the modern political order.

Michael R.J. Bonner is a scholar, writer, and political consultant based in Ontario. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and has written widely on Iranian history, especially the Sasanian Empire and late antiquity. His books include In Defense of Civilization and The Crisis of Liberalism: The Origin and Destiny of Freedom.

In this conversation, Bonner discusses The Crisis of Liberalism, arguing that liberalism is far more difficult to define, defend, and sustain than many of its champions assume. At its heart, Bonner suggests, liberalism is a political commitment to personal freedom, but that commitment rests on deeper assumptions about human equality, free will, individual autonomy, historical progress, and the separation of religion from the secular realm. Drawing on John Gray, Francis Fukuyama, John Locke, scholastic theology, and the Böckenförde dilemma, Bonner argues that liberalism depends on Christian theological claims that it cannot finally justify on its own.

The conversation also explores the contested Christian roots of liberalism, including debates over free will, Pelagianism, Franciscan voluntarism, nominalism, human equality, and the image of God. Leithart, Wood, and Bonner consider whether liberalism’s dependence on Christianity is a strength, a problem, or both. Along the way, they discuss Western and Iranian political imagination, Zoroastrianism and the Sasanian Empire, secularism as a Christian inheritance, Hobbes, Kant, Comte’s religion of humanity, woke liberal catechisms, Orthodox political theology, symphonia, the Investiture Controversy, and whether liberalism can recover a meaningful account of what freedom is for.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down with John Ehrett for a conversation on political theology, economics, Luther, antitrust, and the church’s witness amid fragile regimes.

John Ehrett is an attorney and writer in Washington, D.C., currently counsel at Lex Politica. He has served at the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Education, and as chief counsel for Senator Josh Hawley. He is a graduate of Patrick Henry College, Yale Law School, and the Institute of Lutheran Theology, and writes Between Two Kingdoms, a Substack on political theology, public policy, postliberalism, and the Lutheran tradition. 

In this conversation, Ehrett discusses his book Martin Luther’s Theology of Antitrust, arguing that Luther’s critique of monopoly, usury, and predatory pricing was not merely economic but theological. Against the modern assumption that antitrust is a “morality-free zone,” Ehrett shows how Luther understood monopolistic behavior as a failure to love one’s neighbor, an attempt to usurp divine prerogatives, and a refusal to live faithfully under providence. From regulatory capture and consumer protection to Uber, AI, and the church’s authority to speak about economic injustice, the conversation explores what it might mean to think Christianly about policy areas often treated as spiritually neutral.

The second half turns to Ehrett’s forthcoming work on Gudina Tumsa, the Ethiopian Lutheran theologian and church leader sometimes called the “African Bonhoeffer.” Ehrett sketches Tumsa’s life under Ethiopia’s Marxist regime, his martyrdom, and his deeply ecclesiocentric political theology. Tumsa’s vision relativizes the state without despising the nation, insisting that “there is the Church, and there are these states.” Along the way, Leithart, Wood, and Ehrett discuss two-kingdom theology, Christendom, ecumenism, national belonging, and why the church’s unity is always a political threat to regimes that demand ultimate allegiance. 

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Peter Leithart and James Wood sit down for a second conversation with Dr. Ephraim Radner. 

Ephraim Radner is a theologian, Anglican priest, and one of the most penetrating thinkers on the doctrine of the church today. He is Professor of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College (University of Toronto) and the author of several major works including Brutal Unity, Hope Among the Fragments, The End of the Church, and Mortal Goods.

In this conversation, they take stock of the modern ecumenical movement — its genuine gains, its institutional failures, and the deeper roots of Christian disunity that no dialogue paper or cooperative venture has yet reached. Radner argues that division is not merely a pastoral inconvenience but a form of murder, and that the path toward unity runs not through procedure but through sacrifice. From the collapse of North African Christianity to the Joint Declaration on Justification to receptive ecumenism, Radner offers a searching and characteristically unsentimental assessment of where the church finds itself — and what faithfulness might actually require.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood have a conversation with Dr. Bradley Birzer, the author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson.

Dr. Bradley J. Birzer received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 1990 and his Ph.D. in American History from Indiana University in January 1999. Currently Amos Kirk Chair in history and director of American studies at Hillsdale College, Michigan, Birzer specializes in the history of the Jacksonian period, the American Civil War, the American West, and the American Indians. He is a senior fellow with the Center for the American Idea (Texas). He has recently edited a collection of James Fenimore Cooper's works of political and social criticism, and is co-author of a forthcoming encyclopedia of the American West.

His publications include:

Russell Kirk: American Conservative (2015)

Neil Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions (2015)

American Cicero: Charles Carroll of Carrollton (2010)

Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (2007)

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth (2003)

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Peter Leithart and James Wood have a conversation with Dr. Kevin Flatt, the author of Secularization, Social Order, and World History: Toward a Global Perspective.

Kevin Flatt serves as Professor of History and Associate Dean of Humanities at Redeemer University, and as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Societal Futures at the University of Waterloo. As associate dean, he provides academic leadership for the programs in History, Philosophy, Politics, and Religion & Theology. His teaching has covered several areas of world and Western history, including Canadian, European, and Middle Eastern history. His research on Protestantism in Canada has been widely featured in national and international media. In recent years, his scholarship has focused on the history and sociology of secularization. His most recent book, Secularization, Social Order, and World History (Routledge, 2026) places secularization within a world-historical comparative framework. Dr. Flatt lives with his wife and three children in his hometown of Kitchener, Ontario.

Books

Flatt, K. Secularization, Social Order, and World History: Toward a Global Perspective. Routledge, 2026.

Flatt, K. After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood have a conversation with Stefan Borg, the author of The Return of the Common Good: The Postliberal Project Left and Right.

Stefan Borg is Associate Professor in Political Science and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Swedish Defence University. His current research is focused on two distinct agendas: firstly, U.S. foreign, security and defence policy, and secondly, postliberal social and political thought.

Borg is the author of European Integration and the Problem of the State: A Critique of the Bordering of Europe (Palgrave 2015), and The Return of the Common Good. The Postliberal Project Left and Right (Routledge 2025). His work has also appeared or is forthcoming in international peer-reviewed journals such as European Journal of Social Theory, European Political Science, European Security, Geopolitics, Global Affairs, International Affairs, International Journal, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of International Political Theory, Journal of International Relations and Development, Middle East Critique, Parameters, Review of International Studies, and Security Dialogue.

He currently teaches on liberalism (Liberalism and its Critics) and convenes the undergraduate internship course at SDU.

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Peter Leithart and James Wood have a conversation with Peter Harrison, the author of Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age.

Peter Harrison is a former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford and is Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland. He presently holds a Professorial Research Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, Australia and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Ian Ramsey Centre, Oxford.

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