Dostoevsky II: Shattering the Illusion of Utopian Rationalism

Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsky's protagonist Raskolnikov and the real-life moral collapse of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Om Podcasten

A series of forty reflections on the history of Christian civilization, or Christendom. The entire podcast is organized around the theme of "paradise and utopia" - that is, of the civilization's orientation toward the kingdom of heaven when traditional Christianity was influential, and of its "disorientation" toward the fallen world in the wake of traditional Christianity's decline in the west following the Great Schism.