wandering

In this episode, Joel and Travis continue to talk about politics, specifically about rights. What are rights? What kinds of things constitute rights? Does every right have a correlative duty? How do rights relate to law? To morality more generally? And is health care a (human) right--if it is, what would it mean to be such? In the process, they discuss Nicholas Wolterstorff, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), but fail to talk about any political figure or party. Go figure.

Joel and Travis talk rights - human, moral, legal, what have you. What is the source of rights? Why do we have rights? Is there a correlation between rights and duties? What do we get wrong about rights when we look at them through the lens of an agonistic society? (And what in the world is an agonistic society?!) Get mad that Joel doesn't support your side in the political war in today's podcast!

Joel and Travis discuss Tim Keller's article "A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory". Keller details various approaches to justice and where biblical justice is similar and different from each. And Joel takes it one step further, discussing how Keller may in fact share in a fundamental error about justice that is present in each account. (Don't blame Travis! He likes Keller!)

For Keller's article: https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/a-biblical-critique-of-secular-justice-and-critical-theory/

For the pdf of "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas": https://sites.asiasociety.org/asia21summit/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/3.-Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf

So, have you had enough of people telling you that your political view is wrong? Well, Joel and Travis are here to tell you that you're wrong: You haven't had enough of people telling you that your political view is wrong. They'll do it again, but perhaps in a different way than you're used to. What really is politics? Is government the central part of politics, or does the heart of politics lie elsewhere? And someone fix Joel's road, for crying out loud!

Joel and Travis discuss virtue in Plato's Republic--what is it like, why would it be hard to teach, and how it might relate to politics. Virtue is not a mere obedience to rules, nor is it some ordering of the soul where reason uses shame to control the appetites. It is rather a ordering of the soul by love of the Good/Beautiful. How does this relate to biblical virtue? How can we grow in it? Teach it? And who should you vote for in November? Some of these questions are almost answered in this episode.

Joel and Travis talk about teaching virtue--particularly how teaching virtue is really a training of the desires, or an opening of one's eyes to the goodness and beauty that we are so often blind to. What blinds us, so that our desires are badly directed and confused? Is there a way to fix this? What do we learn from Jesus, Socrates, and others (like Dallas Willard) about learning to love what is truly good?

Joel and Travis discuss the strange (and annoying to some) method of teaching virtue that both Jesus and Socrates seem to use. The goal? To discover their methods for teaching virtue, and specifically to see how these methods are not as direct as we would like virtue-teaching to be. Rather than starting by telling people they are terrible and need to be better, both often seem to use methods that make their interlocutors show themselves to have failed morally and epistemologically. Do we need to adapt how we teach today, particularly in the Church? Are we teaching like sophists, or like Jesus?

Joel and Travis discuss how Jesus and Socrates—perhaps the two greatest teachers of virtue in history—received some negative reviews on their teaching styles, but also transformed history. What specifically about their teaching both fostered virtue and aggravated so many people? Strangely, it was likely the same element of their teaching that makes them more difficult to understand than what they seem and to many, really annoying. And better at teaching virtue than any of us. Why is teaching virtue so difficult, annoying, and inspiring? How is it different than normal teaching? We explore that topic here.

Joel and Travis ask the same question that Meno asked Socrates: Can virtue be taught? And they ask a lot of the same questions that followed: What is virtue? Are there people that have taught it? What did their teaching look like? And so on. Over this and the next couple of episodes, they try to answer how to teach virtue...in the hopes that maybe they can start!

Joel and Travis give an account of the Christian story that is non-sophistic. Or, put another way, an account of the Christian story seen through a Jesus-centered lens. This provides a solution to the view of the divine that led to the Euthyphro Dilemma, as well as to a recognition that most critiques of the biblical God arise from a sophistic interpretive framework. We are all "natural" sophists, so this episode paints a picture of how it is to look at Christianity that is no longer corrupted by our tendency to sophistry.