They’re putting chips! In people’s brains! We have to talk about it. But this is Young Heretics—so let’s not talk about it from a panicked, world-is-ending catastrophe mindset, or from a naïve, tech-will-save us progressive mindset. With one eye on tradition and one eye on the future, I want to embark this week on an attempt to seriously argue that what we’re doing with tech is, and always has been, actual magic—with all the enticements and dangers that come along with that. Pre-order my new...

I'm joined today by Johnny Burtka, whose new Gateway to Statesmanship is a collection of writings on one of our most neglected virtues. Statesmanship is the art of leading in complex and difficult times, especially when all of the options on the table involve painful trade-offs (sound familiar?). Johnny and I discuss the changing conditions of history, the fight over "Christian nationalism," and what it would mean for a modern politician to recover the ancient virtue of prudence. Pick up...

Since last we spoke, I have literally traveled around the world--and I can say with certainty there's nowhere I'd rather be than here. This week, a few reflections from my trip to Cambodia about what every culture has to grapple with when it comes to depicting God--and what's unique to the Bible. No one has ever seen God. So how can anyone know him? It's a question fundamental to both art and science, and absolutely everyone everywhere has to face it. Pre-order my new book, Light of the...

Why is the Gen Z Bible a joke and not a translation? In this installment of our series on register, I'm doing a close reading (yes, actually) of a passage from the Gen Z Bible. Bear with me, because there's actually a method to my madness, and it speaks to the strengths and weaknesses of another, much more widely used version of the bible--the Message. Pre-order my new book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World: https://a.co/d/2QccOfM Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan...

Is it spirit or flesh? Matter or form? Symbol or symbolized? On this episode I want to argue that these questions aren't only religious questions--or rather, they're religious questions that cut right to the heart of reality. They've become newly important as anti-humanists propose to leave our embodied life as human beings behind. Discard the spirit and you get senseless matter; discard the matter and you get heartless calculation. Only with the two combined can we be fully human. Pre-order...

I've got a new book coming out! Light of the Mind, Light of the World: How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths about God will come out on August 13, and it's available now for pre-order. We are confronted today by a dark philosophy that views the world as a machine and humanity as a mistake. But as listeners of Young Heretics know, this philosophy is not only evil: it's also hopelessly out of date. Light of the Mind, Light of the World is a story of how God reveals himself through...

The veneration of icons is one of the longest-lasting and most intense controversies in the history of the church. But it's not just a matter of religious practice: it also happens to touch on even more ancient and profound issues in the nature of perception and reality. So, just exactly what Young Heretics has been all about this year! Thanks to encouragement from you guys, I'm going deeper on the subject of icons, art, and reality (though not much deeper on the whole Travis Kelce/Taylor...

Is the Message a good translation of the Bible? Is it even a translation? This is one of the questions I get asked all the time, and with good reason: people like the vividness of a more plainspoken translation, but they worry about the accuracy of bringing the Bible so far down to earth. How can we tell the difference between a faithful but idiomatic translation, and one that goes off the reservation? How do translators think about these things, and how should we? It's such a profound issue...

Today I'm tackling (no pun intended) a very important philosophical question of our age: why does anyone care what Taylor Swift thinks? No, seriously--that's a real question. It's basically the one that Plato deals with in his Ion. Trying to answer it can lead us to some pretty fascinating insights about the nature of celebrity and even reality itself. Who would have thought the Biden Administration's efforts at courting celebrity would take us into 9th-century Thessalonikē and the Eastern...

"This sickness is not unto death, but..." what? On this episode of Words, Words, Words, I answer a listener question about how to understand what Jesus says about Lazarus' illness shortly before healing him. It's a juicy question that leads into all sorts of issues about ambiguity (good and bad) and how to understand the Bible. Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language...

People are fighting online (shocking, I know) about whether therapy is a godsend, a scam, or something in between. Without delving too deep into the Twitter weeds, we can actually extract a pretty important insight from this debate: whatever the merits or drawback of any particular therapeutic practice, our understanding of spiritual matters--our actual psychology or "study of the soul"--is badly in need of a reboot. As part of my ongoing investigation into the relationship between the inner...

In this new occasional series, I want to try and help you guys answer some of the questions you often ask about translation--how it works, what challenges it presents, and how to pick a good edition of a work originally written in a foreign language you don't speak. Each time I'll pick a small sentence from a famous work--this time it's the first line of Homer's Iliad--and talk through some of the questions that it raises. Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation):...

Election 2024 is in motion, and no question it's an important one--but will it be the decisive cataclysm that everyone will surely make it out to be? Somehow it almost feels as if we hope it will: as if we're longing for some definitive event to deliver a verdict on where all this turbulence is headed. But deeper currents are moving beneath far beneath the surface of politics, and there is, if you can believe it, something more real than the presidential race. Subscribe to my new joint...

When did we stop looking to great men gone by as role models? My guest today, Alex Petkas, is a recovering academic who founded the Ancient Life Coach podcast in order to make a more immediate connection between past and present. He's recovering Plutarch--once antiquity's most cherished moralist--as a guide for today. We discuss the transformation of scholarship from instruction to dissection, and how ancient pagans can help modern seekers get a hold of themselves. Listen to Alex’s Podcast,...

Claudine “Fake and” Gay is out at Harvard, and there’s something about this scandal that reveals what makes academic corruption so painful and infuriating: it’s the humiliation of having to believe a lie. As it happens, this is a news story that can illustrate—with a little help from William Shakespeare—the core issue in matters of sin, art, and our present national dysfunction.  Subscribe to my new joint Substack with Andrew Klavan (no relation): https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com Check...

Over on Substack, I’ve been gradually creating an audiobook reading of Milton’s epic poem of mankind’s fall, Paradise Lost. It’s one of the greatest works of English literature, well…ever. So this Friday, I thought I’d do something a little different: this is a free sample of the audiobook so you can get a feel for the poem and see whether you’d like to sign up to hear the rest. So here’s Paradise Lost Book 3, read aloud by yours truly. Sign up to hear the...

Everything is completely insane, so, in other words, it’s business as usual. Everyone seems to feel certain that we’re in for a year of madness, and it’s hard to disagree. But it’s also hard to remember that human life is always madness, playing out against the backdrop of the stars. That’s what the calendar itself represents. So on this first episode of the year, I’ll talk a bit about the history of leap years and the wisdom I want to seek with you in 2024. Check out our sponsor, the...

What is a TERF? I’m joined for this week’s interview by Louise M. Perry, one of the most insightful and thoughtful observers of the wreckage left behind by the sexual revolution. We discuss the “radical” part of being a “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” whether social norms can leave space for abnormality, and the limits of “cultural Christianity” as a sustaining civilizational force. Read Louise’s book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: https://a.co/d/0nVZ3nD Listen to Louise’s...

It's (still) Christmas!! On the feast of St. Stephen's Day (AKA Boxing Day), we gather around the cozy fire with our egg nogg and our gifts to talk about...martyrdom? Here's one extra Christmas special on the full twelve days of the holiday and the connections between Christmas morning, the first Christian martyr, and the final festival of Epiphany, when wise men came from the east to seal Jesus as the Messiah, not just for the Jews, but for the whole world. Check out our sponsor, the...

Academia delenda est...et tunc recolenda. "The academy must be destroyed...and then rebuilt." Today's guest, Inez Stepman, is a thoughtful obsesrver of the American education system and an insightful exponent of hard-nosed practical action plans to revive the country's academic health. We discuss the great American tradition of local, homegrown classical education and the role it will play in our uncertain future. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language...

It's that time of the year again: time for some very online doofus to point out that Christmas falls around the same date as the Saturanalia, as if no one figured this out until Reddit was invented. In fact, the date of Christmas is carefully posed against the date of Easter so that the whole liturgical year can emerge out of the "signs and markers" laid down in the heavens from the creation of the world. Chew on that, reddit bros! It's a very Young Heretics Christmas. Check out our sponsor,...

How do you do church in the digital age? Is there such a thing as an atheist? To what extent are our crazy times really unprecedented, and to what extent are they nothing the Church hasn't seen before? These are some of the questions I tackle with my friend Paul VanderKlay, a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a close observer of Jordan Peterson's rise to fame and the young men who find meaning in his work, and a rather unwitting YouTube sensation. Subscribe to Paul's YouTube...

Is Christmas just a rebranded pagan holiday? Or does the rabbit hole go somewhat deeper? After last week's foray into hermeneutics, this week I take a closer look at the history of Christian allegory, and why this particular form of reading became so important to the early church--and why it's still essential for understanding the meaning of Christmas (and everything else). Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/ Sign up to be in the...

Does science disprove God, or reveal his handiwork? My guest today, Stephen C. Meyer, makes some of the most powerful contemporary arguments that the "God hypothesis" is becoming increasingly necessary to make sense of science and of human life. Stephen has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science from Cambridge, and his lucid explanations of his subject have drawn wide attention--as well as resistance from the more hidebound materialists of our age. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language...

Literally, though, how do we read stuff? It's a question we rarely ask seriously, but it's an ancient one with profound implications for art, faith, and morality. This week I'm presenting an ancient distinction between literal and allegorical reading that helps to get past simplistic modern bickering over merely material truths. Carrying forward our conversation in art, this is a theme that will help guide the show in 2024. Check out our sponsor, the Ancient Language Institute:...