Faith Moore is BACK to kick off the Christmas season with a moving meditation on faith, loss, and the meaning of the nativity. We discuss how the characters in her new novel took shape, why Christmas always comes associated with a certain nostalgic melancholy, and what to eat for breakfast on Christmas morning. Plus some embarassing (maybe?) stories about when we were kids.

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All your questions answered! This week, as the Thanksgiving daze settles gradually over us all, I dig into the mailbag and pull out three juicy questions I haven't had time to answer yet in the course of the show. Did Plato invent the myth of Atlantis? What kind of love does Jesus ask for from Peter after his betrayal? And what did Paul mean that personal spiritual gifts shall fall away when we see love "face to face"? It's a deep dive into questions linguistic, spiritual, and philosophical. Plus: a dig at 19th-century Germans.

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"Civility" is almost a dirty word these days on both the right and the left. But Lexi Hudson has written a book to defend it, arguing that being civil--being a good fellow citizen--doesn't mean being nice or tiptoeing around disagreements. Civility is always under a certain kind of assault, but that doesn't mean it's hopeless. We discuss pictures of civility in Homer, Ovid, and the Old Testament, as well as high and low trust societies and whether our age is a uniquely uncivil one.

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What's to be thankful for? This Thanksgiving, the answer is: everything. Gratitude is a virtue we didn't cover during our series, but Cicero calls it the mother of all virtues and Aquinas files it cheek by jowl with justice. Spencer traces the etymology and rationale of thanksgiving down to its cosmic roots, opposing it to the philosophy of death that rises to confront us everywhere. Happy Thanksgiving--and again I say, rejoice!

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Does not Wisdom cry out? Michael Martin joins me to discuss how and why God prepares our reading lists. Michael traces an alternate stream of modernity that flows quietly alongside the decadent materialist one. From Jakob Bohme, to Coleridge and the Romantics, to modern farmsteading, we talk about why the political parties switched places and how the everyday world breathes forth supernatural wisdom.

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Do you want to see the world as it is, or as it ought to be? This difficult question is at the heart of the millennia-old debate over morality and art. Pulling back the camera to ask how we got to our current dysfunction, Spencer moves from Homer and Isaiah to Nabokov and Matthew Arnold, looking for answers to the questions that are currently wracking the culture. The digital age has shattered a lot of our old systems, but somewhere in the aftermath there is hope for a new middle ages and a re-enchanted world.

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What does it mean to be a man in a fallen world and a degraded age? Crime novelist and professional person-I-have-never-heard-of Andrew Klavan joins the show to discuss his brilliant new novel The House of Love and Death. We discuss Klavan The Elder's literary inspirations, thoughts on chivalry, and experience writing a recurring character almost against his will. Plus: why university administrators are so annoying.

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"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." So wrote Oscar Wilde in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, defending himself against charges of corruption in his art. But was he right? His own art, no less than his own sad and morally compromised private life, suggest otherwise. Spencer discusses the history of "art for art's sake" and the impossibility of excepting art from moral judgment, in Wilde's day as well as our own.

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Digital alienation, material politics, and the re-enchantment of the world: this week, reactionary feminist Mary Harrington joins Spencer to discuss the disorenting transformations wrought upon human societies and psyches by the advent of digital technology. The discussion ranges from Mary's realization that woke politics was destroying her life, to the war between the sexes, to the return of something that looks a lot like Medieval conditions--complete with angels and demons haunting the air.

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At the turning of the year, as fall passes into winter, the world hovers for an instant between past and future in the "otherworld," the space between life and death. And that is where we meet the Aes Sidhe, fearsome people of the hollow hills, who roam the earth each year in what has become Halloween. In this holiday special, Spencer dives into the haunted history of the enchanted world.

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Read my review of The Fall of the House of Usher: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-fall-of-the-house-of-mumbo-jumbo