Category: Blogposts

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

• Henri Grenier, Moral Philosophy, §§ 1032-1036.
• Petrus Hispanus, “Notes on Right and Law,” The Josias, 2017.
• Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 1891.
• Pierre Manent, “Modern Democracy as a System of Separations,” Journal of Democracy 14.1 (2003).
• Todd Phillips (director), Joker, 2019.
• Snowpire, JOKER – Starring George Costanza from Seinfeld, 2019.

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.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

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

• Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics.
• Gabriel S. Sanchez, “MacIntyre, Strauss, and Some Voegelin.”

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.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

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

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa IIae qq. 58, 61, 79, 80
• Plato, The Republic, especially Book I
• Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
• Carl Hoffman, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art
• David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
• The Paraphasic, “Notes on the Internet as a Social Space“
• The Paraphasic, “A Rumination on the Foundation of Civil Society“

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.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

The Josias Editors discuss punishment and the good of order in a teleological universe.

Bibliography

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II Q. 60; II-II Q 64, A 2; II-II Q. 108.
• Plato, Gorgias.

Music: “Bin ich nun frei Wirklich frei,” Das Rheingold, Richard Wagner. Vienna Philharmonic, George Solti, Gustav Neidlinger as Alberich.

Header Image: Alberich, by Arthur Rackham.

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

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

Does natural law demand a world government?

Bibliography

• Pope Pius XI, Ubi Arcano, 1922.
• Henri Grenier, World Government is Required by Natural Law, The Josias, 2015.
• Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., Secularized Fraternity or Solidarity and the Failure of the European Union, Sancrucensis, 2016.
• Idem, French Nationalism, The Karlskirche, the Empire, and the Meaning of Europe, Sancrucensis, 2016.
• Idem, Empire I: the Philosophical Poet, Sancrucensis, 2012.
• Idem, Empire II: Herodotus, Aristotle and Jokes, Sancrucensis, 2012.
• Idem, Empire III: Gustavo Dudamel at the Spanish Riding School; or Virgil and the Horses, Sancrucensis, 2012.
• Rafael de Arízaga, Sovereignty and the Supreme Power, Pax in Bello, 2019.

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.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

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

• Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae 123-140.
• Plato, Laches.
• Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues.
• Anthony Trollope,Barchester Towers 

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.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS

«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

• 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.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | RSS