Old Books With Grace

In this last episode of the season, Grace welcomes Dr. Fritz Bauerschmidt to chat about reading difficult authors of the past, like Thomas Aquinas, the love of God as the central feature of Christianity, and the flexibility and strength of tradition. Frederick Christian (Fritz) Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland, specializing in medieval and modern Catholic theology, and a deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He is the author of several books, most recently The Love That is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (Eerdmans 2020), The Essential Summa Theologiae: A Reader and Commentary (Baker Academic 2021), and How Beautiful the World Could Be: Christian Reflections on the Everyday (Eerdmans 2022).

Grace welcomes Dr. Chris Armstrong to the podcast to talk about his book, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians, and think through medieval Christian humanism's influence on C.S. Lewis, and how some of these medieval ideas might help think more creatively and faithfully about community, faith, and history today. Dr. Chris R Armstrong is an educator, academic entrepreneur, author, editor, and church historian (Duke Ph.D., Gordon-Conwell M.A.). He currently serves as Program Fellow in Faith, Work, and Economics for the Kern Family Foundation (WI). He taught from 2004 to 2013 at Bethel Seminary (MN). From 2014 to 2018 he served as faculty member and founding director of the Opus faith & vocation initiative at Wheaton College (IL). His Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C S Lewis (Brazos, 2016) retrieves the Christian humanism of the Middle Ages. Chris serves as Senior Editor of Christian History magazine (www.christianhistorymagazine.org) and blogs at gratefultothedead.com. He enjoys playing tabletop games with friends, listening to jazz, and improving his jazz piano skills.

This week, Grace welcomes Kaitlyn Facista, creator of the online community Tea with Tolkien.  Naturally, they drink tea and talk Tolkien! Topics of discussion include: the upcoming Amazon series (and Kaitlyn's sneak peek of it in London!), how to throw a Hobbit party, why the Silmarillion matters, and the ever controversial Tom Bombadil, among other things.  Kaitlyn Facista is a Catholic convert, wife, mother to four babies at home + two in heaven, and hobbit at heart. She lives with her family in the Midwest. Hobbies include thinking about Tolkien (obviously), making friends on twitter, and spending time with Our Lord in her parish Adoration chapel.  She is the author of To Middle-Earth and Back Again and Thirty Days in the Shire and contributor to Catholic Hipster: The Next Level: How Some Awesomely Obscure Stuff Helps Us Live Our Faith with Passion. She has also written for The Grotto Network and The Catholic Woman.

Beth Allison Barr, author of Making Biblical Womanhood, is here and we are talking about history and how it shapes us, resisting the urge to impose our norms and ideas back onto the past, about medieval women, gender-bending medieval saints, good places to start reading medieval texts, and more fascinating topics...   Larissa Tracy's Women of the Gilte Legende: A Selection of Middle English Saints Lives   Beth Allison Barr (PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is James Vardaman Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she specializes in medieval history, women's history, and church history. She recently served as president of the Conference on Faith and History (2018-2021) and is an active supporter of Christians for Biblical Equality. Barr is a regular contributor to The Anxious Bench, the popular Patheos website on religious history, and has written for Christianity Today, the Washington Post, Religion News Service, The Dallas Morning News, Sojourners, and Baptist News Global. Her work has been featured by NPR and The New Yorker. She is also a Baptist pastor's wife and the mom of two great kids.

Welcome to the last season of the Seven Capital Vices and their Remedies Lent Series! It's time to discuss lust and chastity. Rather than think through actions, Grace gets to the bottom of lust: depersonalization of others for the sake of pleasure. Chastity, in contrast, is like a blend of fidelity and the gift of seeing all people as full, precious image-bearers, never to be reducible to bodily pleasure or for that matter, just bodies.

In this episode, penultimate in the Lenten Vices & Virtues series, Grace probes the vice of gluttony and the virtue of abstinence, which includes restraint and fasting. And what's more Lenten than to talk about fasting? And as is usual for the series: we talk about gluttony and abstinence in highly simplistic ways. Gluttony has little to do with pounds on the scale, and take courage: you're not a glutton for merely enjoying tasty food. Listen to find out more.

Today I talk avarice and generosity. Let’s begin with something really important that you probably would not know from looking at the lives of most Christians: scripture contains more warnings about money than about sex. Avarice, or covetise, as medieval English authors often called it, is the umbrella term for a whole host of disordered attitudes about money and acquisition. Let's explore further into something that likely afflicts each and every one of us...

Sloth is probably not what you think it is. It really has almost nothing to do with potato chips and couches and reality television. Sloth instead is a spiritual vice afflicting our willingness to do hard things in the service of love. The gift of strength and the virtues of constancy and perseverance are opposed to it. Listen in and learn about the most misunderstood of the vices.