Old Books with Grace

The Love of Learning with Zena Hitz

On the season premiere of Old Books With Grace, Grace welcomes Dr. Zena Hitz, author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, tutor at St. John's College, and founder of the Catherine Project. Why is it important to love learning for its own sake and not instrumentalize it? How can we cultivate an intellectual life? What does Augustine of Hippo mean by curiositas? Hear Grace and Dr. Hitz's thoughts on these questions and more...

God’s Love, Thomas Aquinas, and Tradition with Fritz Bauerschmidt

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).

C.S. Lewis & Medieval Humanism with Chris Armstrong

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.

Talking Tolkien with Kaitlyn Facista

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.

Breaking Medieval Stereotypes with Beth Allison Barr

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.

Contemplative Reading and Thomas Merton with Sophfronia Scott

Grace welcomes Sophfronia Scott, author of The Seeker and the Monk, and director of the MFA creative writing program at Alma College. Sophfronia and Grace discuss learning to have meaningful dialogue with books as you read, even when they were written by long-dead writers, and Sophfronia shares her wisdom on reading Thomas Merton and on the practice of reading contemplatively.

Twentieth-Century Literature and Holiness with Jessica Hooten Wilson

This week, Grace welcomes Jessica Hooten Wilson to Old Books With Grace, to chat about her new book, The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints, and the power of literature to reveal the subtleties of the good life. Sometimes holiness can be alarming, bizarre, and fascinating... and novels and their novelists, like Flannery O'Connor, C.S. Lewis, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, can help us to conceptualize the holy life in all its difficulty and otherworldliness.

Prayer and Liturgy with Kayla Craig

Grace welcomes Kayla Craig, author of To Light Their Way, a collection of prayers and liturgies for parents, and the creator of the wonderfully helpful @liturgiesforparents instagram account. We talk prayer books, the definition of liturgy, how written prayers help us find words, and the wonderful, ecumenical prayer sources and books that Kayla has enjoyed and recommends.