Subversive Orthodoxy

We start a four-part set of field notes by admitting the word freedom still surprises us when we hear it from Solzhenitsyn, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Chesterton. We trace the “freedom we inherited” through American politics and pop culture, then question whether external rights, endless choice, and economic survival can leave the inner life unfree. 
• why the word freed...

We pick apart why “freedom” causes so many arguments by comparing the major definitions that shape politics, psychology, and moral philosophy. We end by naming what nearly all of them miss and why that gap pushes us toward a bigger story in part three. 

• inheriting words without checking what we mean by them 
• Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty as non-interfer...

“True worship is to work for justice and care for the poor and oppressed” sounds inspiring until you remember what that work actually feels like at 2 a.m. when you are tired, irritable, and out of patience. We sit with Dorothy Day long enough to let the romance burn off and the real questions show up: what do the poor really need to live with dignity, and what do the comforta...

Dorothy Day is the kind of person everyone tries to claim and nobody can fully control. One side calls her a socialist. Another side calls her a saint. She answered both with the same refusal: don’t use a label to dismiss the demand her life puts on you.

We walk through her story from early bohemian politics and labor activism to her Catholic conversion, then the f...

WALKER PERCY:  EPISODE SUMMARY

You can be comfortable, busy, and entertained and still be in despair. That’s the Kierkegaard line Walker Percy puts at the front of The Moviegoer, and it becomes our doorway into a bigger question: what if the real sickness of modern life is that we don’t even notice what’s missing?

We walk through Percy’s story, from a Souther...