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The Josias Podcast, Episode XXI: We Live in a Society

We live in a society in which the few live in excess, while the many live in miserable and wretched conditions. We live in a society in which the poor are defenseless against the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors. We live in a society in which these evils are compounded by a devouring usury practiced by avaricious and grasping men. We live in a society in which innocent children are murdered in abortion clinics. We live in a society in which the sin of Sodom is paraded with open pride and enjoys the favor of the laws. We live in a society in which depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. We live in a society in which the holiness of the sacred is despised; sound doctrine is perverted; and errors of all kinds spread boldly. We live in a society in which the divine authority of the Church is opposed and her rights shorn off. We live in a society in which by institutions and by the example of teachers, the minds of the youth are corrupted. We live in a society… We live in a society? Do we actually live in a society? What sense does it make to call the clownish chaos of our lamentable times a “society”? The editors are joined by P.J. Smith of southern Indiana to discuss these and related questions.

Bibliography and Filmography

Music: “Vesti la Giubba” from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, sung by Luciano Pavarotti.

Header Image: Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (2019)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XX: Eric Voegelin

Continuing a series of reflections on important 20th century critiques of modernity and liberalism that has included episodes on Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, the editors are joined again by Gabriel Sanchez to discuss Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics. They discuss Voegelin’s critique of positivism, the problem of representation, and the thesis that modernity is “gnostic”.

Bibliography

Music: Also sprach Zarathustra, by Richard Strauss.

Header Image: Photograph of a Tree in the Mist, by Pater Edmund

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XIX: Justice

Justice, according to St. Thomas, is the perpetual and constant will to render each one his right. Distributive justice, commutative justice, potential parts, quasi-integral parts, debt, cannibalism—in this episode, the editors cover it all.

Bibliography

Music: “An die Musik“, by Franz Schubert, performed by Matthias Goerne (baritone) and Helmut Deutsch (piano).

Header Image: Circles in a Circle (1923), by Wassily Kandinsky (detail).

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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Ang Integrismo sa Tatlong Pangungusap

Ang Integrismo Catolico ay isang tradisyon ng kaisipan na itinatanggi ang paghihiwalay ng liberalismo ng politika mula sa pakikialam sa huling layunin ng buhay ng tao, at naniniwala naman na dapat patnubayan ng pamamahalang politikal ang tao patungo sa huling layuning niya. Ngunit dahil nahahati sa dalawa ang layunin ng buhay ng tao – isang pansamantala o temporal, at isang walang-hanggan – naniniwala ang integrismo na may dalawa ring kapangyarihan na namamahala sa tao: ang kapangyarihang temporal, at ang kapangyarihang espiritwal. At dahil naman ang layuning pansamantala ay nakapasailalim sa layuning walang-hanggan, nararapat lamang na ang kapangyarihang temporal ay ipasailalim rin sa kapangyarihang espiritwal.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XVII: Empire

Does natural law demand a world government?

Bibliography

Music: Johannes Brahms, Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Berlin Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel.

Header Image: The Spanish Riding School in Vienna.

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XVI: The Resurrection of Christ and the Society of the Blessed

The editors are joined by special guest Daniel to discuss the Resurrection of Christ. Along the way they explore what it means for Christ to be New Adam, the necessity and fittingness of the Resurrection, and the meaning of the Resurrection both as the cause of the order of human society and the principle of the life to come. A very blessed Easter Season to all our readers and listeners!

Bibliography

  • The Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter 16
  • The Gospel according to St. John, chapters 20-21
  • The Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 3:23-38
  • The Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 21
  • Genesis, chapters 27-45
  • The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans (all of it)
  • The First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 15
  • St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIIa qq.53-56
  • Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi

Music:

Heinrich Ingaz Franz von Biber, Missa Salisburgensis, performed by Vaclav Luks with Collegium 1704

Header Image:Matthias Grünewald, The Ressurection of Christ (detail from the Isenheim Altarpiece).

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

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XIV: The Virtue of Fortitude

A familiar voice returns after a long absence. Three voices discuss what it means to be brave, the cowardice of Dr. Proudie, the softness of clerics more generally, the brilliance of Monteverdi, and the exquisite comedy of Plato’s Laches.

Bibliography

Music:Claudio Monteverdi, Sanctorum Meritis II, from Selva morale e spirituale (text)

Header Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Dragon Striking down Lion 

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

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

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The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: Against Natural Law

Guillaume de Thieulloy

A PhD in political science (EHESS), Guillaume de Thieulloy is the publisher of a group of French conservative media properties. He’s also a former staffer of the vice president of the French Senate, Jean-Claude Gaudin. This paper was originally presented at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture fall conference, November 3, 2018. An Italian translation of this essay can be found here.

It is striking for historians of the French Revolution that, a few months after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789), the Terror began and, with the Terror, the first experiment of massive murders decided by a political power against its own population—especially in the Vendée. This huge gap between human rights and Terror seems strange: one cannot easily understand how, after the public recognition of human dignity, the same political power can organize massive slaughters of human beings.

Continue reading “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: Against Natural Law”
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The Josias Podcast Episode XIII: Leo Strauss

«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?

Bibliogaphy

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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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.

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The Relations of the Spiritual and Civil Powers

Henry Edward [Manning], Archbishop of Westminster

Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892) was one of the most important figures in the formation of modern Catholic Social teaching. A convert from Anglicanism, Manning was enthroned as the second Archbishop of Westminster in 1865, fifteen years after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England. In 1875 he was made a cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. Manning had a life-long interest in political economy, and his intervention in the London dock-strike of 1889 was one of his many contributions to the Catholic response to the ‘social question’ of the 19th century.

But another life-long interest of his was the relation of Church and state. He often discussed this question with the politician William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898). As young men Manning and Gladstone had been friends, and they continued corresponding for most of their lives—their correspondence fills four volumes. But in their positions the two men grew apart—Gladstone’s shift from Toryism to liberalism occurring at approximately the same time as Manning’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism.

Gladstone was enraged by the First Vatican Council’s definition of Papal infallibility in 1870. In 1874 he published a polemical pamphlet entitled The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, in which he argued that the Council had laid down ‘principles adverse to the purity and integrity of civil allegiance’. Manning responded with a pamphlet of his own entitled The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance, in which he refutes Gladstone by showing that in part Gladstone misunderstands the Roman position, and in part is simply wrong about the nature of the Church.

In the second chapter of his pamphlet Manning lays out the Catholic position on the relation of the spiritual and temporal powers. While there are a few disputable points—Manning accepts the positions of Bellarmine and Suarez on the origin of civil society and the indirect nature of the pope’s temporal authority (both possible but disputable positions)—the chapter is on the whole a good summary of ‘integralism’. The whole of the chapter is reproduced below.

The relations of the Catholic Church to the Civil Powers have been fixed immutably from the beginning, because they arise out of the Divine constitution of the Church and of the Civil Society of the natural order.

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