«To reject natural right is tantamount to saying that all right is positive right, and this means that what is right is determined exclusively by the legislators and the courts of the various countries. Now it is obviously meaningful, and sometimes even necessary, to speak of “unjust” laws or “unjust” decisions. In passing such judgments we imply that there is a standard of right and wrong independent of positive right and higher than positive right: a standard with reference to which we are able to judge of positive right. Many people today hold the view that the standard in question is in the best case nothing but the ideal adopted by our society or our “civilization” and embodied in its way of life or its institutions. But, according to the same view, all societies have their ideals, cannibal societies no less than civilized ones. […] If there is no standard higher than the ideal of our society, we are utterly unable to take a critical distance from that ideal. But the mere fact that we can raise the question of the worth of the ideal of our society shows that there is something in man that is not altogether in slavery to his society, and therefore that we are able, and hence obliged, to look for a standard with reference to which we can judge of the ideals of our own as well as of any other society.» (Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History).

Pater Edmund talks to Gabriel Sanchez about Leo Strauss’s defense of natural right against historicism and positivism. The discuss questions such as: Who is Leo Strauss and why should integralists care about him? Was he esoterically a nihilist? Why did he criticize Thomists? Is he better than Alasdair MacIntyre?

• Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953.
  Idem, “Introduction to Political Philosophy: Plato’s Meno,” Lecture Course, 1966.
• Idem, “An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John’s [In Honor of Jacob Klein, 1899-1978],” Interpretation 7.3 (1978).
• Seth Benardete, Encounters and Reflections, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968 [Reprint: New York: Dover, 1992].
• Idem, “History and the Liberal Arts,” The Saint John’s Review 47.2 (2003).
• Gladden J. Pappin, “The Mutual Concerns of Leo Strauss and His Catholic Contemporaries: Passerin d’Entrèves, McCoy, Simon,” in: Geoffrey M. Vaughan (ed.), Leo Strauss and His Catholic Readers, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2018, pp. 137-166.
• Gabriel Sanchez, “Have the Principles of the Right been Discredited? Leo Strauss’s Rome and Ours,” The Josias (2014).
• Idem, “MacIntyre, Strauss, and Some Voegelin,” Opus Publicum (2018).
• Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, “Leo Strauss’s Objections to Thomism,” Sancrucensis (2013).
• Idem, “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra,” Sancrucensis (2016).

Music: Morten Lauridsen, O Magnum Mysterium.

Header Image: Matteo di Giovanni, Massacre of the Innocents (detail).

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

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In which, your hosts take aim at Frederick II (the other Frederick II), and discuss Prudence as truth and the distinction between false and true Prudence. Along the way they also touch on: Prudence as the Queen of the virtues; why Arnold Schoenberg (!) was a good artist; legalistic American bureaucrats in post-war Germany; and why man is not the measure of all things. They also get around to MacIntyre on managers (boo!) and Pieper on Prudence (hooray!). But they never do get around to that old radio standby, an exhaustive scholastic division of the virtue of prudence (listeners dying to hear a long disquisition on the ways in which “part” and “whole” are said will have to console themselves with the long digression on the transcendentals that did make it into the episode).

Bibliography and Links:

Header image: William Russel Flint, Penelope Bringing out the Bow and Quiver (detail).

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

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P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

In which your editors get brain worms, join a Bayou death cult, discover why they are “all like that,” achieve the goods internal to the practice of podcasting, and still find time to discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal work, After Virtue. 

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

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P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome.

Honking geese, Byzantine chariot racing, and a rousing discussion of the deep and essential connection between the liturgy and the common good—in this episode, your hosts are joined by Jonathan Culbreath and Doctor Peter Kwasniewski. Along the way, they discuss the liturgy as focal point for the common good in the church and in secular society, public versus private devotion, and compare Charles de Koninck’s defense of the common good against personalists and totalitarians with Erik Peterson and Romano Guardini’s defense of the liturgy against certain members of the liturgical reform movement. In the end the inevitable technical difficulties serendipitously keep the discussion on time. All this and much, much more!

Music for this episode is the “Sanctus” from the Missa Honorificentia Populi Nostri, by Peter Kwasniewski. The header image shows church bells in Nowa Huta, Poland.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

How ought we to think of our common life as human beings created in the image of God? Do our modern habits of thought prevent us from understanding what was going on in the Middle Ages? And more importantly: can the Middle Ages help us to escape the errors embedded in our common life today and thus open a path towards unfeigned peace? What is sovereignty? Is it necessary for peace? How do nature and grace relate, and what follows from that for the relation of temporal and spiritual power? Pater Edmund is joined by Alan Fimister and Andrew Willard Jones to discuss the later’s book Before Church and State.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

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P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

A freewheeling discussion in which our editors have a very TAC moment  discussing the connection of the music of the spheres and the virtues, and then set out to discuss Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, but somehow talk more about Plato. Important topics are covered such as, how much virtue does it take to refrain from throwing a baby from an upper-story window? Is there any sense in which Bertrand Russell has virtue? All this, and so much more!

The editors had so much fun that the time slipped by without even getting to the supernatural virtues or the post-enlightenment revolt against virtue.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

That Christ died for our sins is at the heart of of the Christian faith: “For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). But what does it mean that He died for our sins? How did Christ’s death save and redeem us? Prof. Michael Waldstein and Professor Timothy Kelly join the editors to contemplate the mysteries of salvation.

The theme of today’s episode is closely linked to our project at The Josias, as we write in our About page, “A truly Catholic account of politics cannot be understood except with reference to the whole perennial wisdom of practical and speculative philosophy, and to the integral tradition of Sacred Theology.” Today we contemplate the “vertiginous heights” of Sacred Theology.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

Historian and theologian Alan Fimister joins the editors to discuss whether Pope Leo XIII was right to ask French Catholics to recognize the Third Republic. And more generally: does political engagement in modern parliamentary politics engender liberalism in Catholics? What form of government is best anyway? Alan defends the Lancastrian theory of the English Constitution as a mixed-form republic as the best.

If you have questions or comments, please send them to [email protected]. We’d love the feedback.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

Restlessly seek power after power ceasing only in death, or just try to be a little crueler every day? Wherein the gang flows along the surface of life’s path as they please; unleash Newman’s critique of political liberalism; ponder what it means for liberal education that Basil and Julian were fellow-students at the schools of Athens; decry the shortcomings and superficialities of great books educations; and ask whether Christians can be gentlemen in the end.

All this and much more!

Bibliography for pts 1 & 2:

If you have questions or comments, please send them to [email protected]. We’d love the feedback.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

The philosophers have only interpreted liberals in various ways. The point, however, is to own them.

Wherein liberalism is said in many ways, and revealed in Strauss’s war on the Redemptorists, and whether or not the Abbot of Heiligenkreuz should have the power of life or death over local peasants. The hosts are joined by Felix de St Vincent, for a rousing discussion over what liberalism is, when it began, and whether it is necessary to be “cruel to be kind, in the right measure.”

Stay tuned for part 2 where we determine whether opposing liberalism means embracing cruelty, discuss Cardinal Newman’s definition of a gentleman, and much more.

If you have questions or comments, please send them to [email protected]. We’d love the feedback.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount.  Even $1 a month would be awesome.  Click here for more.