Chaos in Our Souls

First Things Podcast

First Things

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, RJ Snell joins Mark Bauerlein to discuss his new book, “Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope.” Music by J. S. Bach/C. Gounod, public domain. Track edited, cropped, and merged with another track.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by the Master of Arts and Catholic Education program at the Augustine Institute
0:21.2	Graduate School of Theology. Dedicated to the renewal of Catholic education, this degree
0:26.0	equipped school teachers and administrators to bring Christ to the center of every classroom
0:30.4	through a focus on sacred scripture, theology, Christian anthropology, and the traditional liberal arts.
0:37.4	Learn more at augustin.edu backslash Christian anthropology, and the traditional liberal arts.
1:11.9	Learn more at augustin.edu back the editor of public discourse, an excellent journalism. today. He is director of academic programs at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
1:16.2	He's the editor of public discourse, an excellent journal that I know many of our listeners watch every week. And his books include Achadia and its discontents, metaphysical boredom
1:24.5	in an empire of desire. And there's a new book out entitled Lost in the Chaos,
1:30.9	Imminence, Despair, Hope. That's our topic today. We've known each other. Welcome RJ, first name basis.
1:36.6	Yeah, thanks, Mark. Really good to be with you. Appreciate the chance to chat.
1:40.3	Your title is a riff on a book by Walker Percy. You talk about it in the opening pages. What did that previous book
1:46.7	Lost in the Cosmos? What did it say? And what do you mean by moving from Cosmos to your title, Chaos?
1:56.5	Well, I've been a big fan of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos for a long time.
2:01.6	So it came out in 1983.
2:03.6	He's responding to the famous book, and I think it was a PBS miniseries, Cosmos.
2:08.6	You know, we're just Stardust.
2:10.6	And if we're just Stardust, Percy is asking, what in the world is meaning?
2:14.6	How can we understand subjectivity in the individual? You know, Percy had spent a lot of time thinking and through the lens of 20th century existentialism.
2:24.3	As a young man when he had tuberculosis, he had read a lot of Gabriel, Marcel, he'd spent a lot of time with Kierkegaard,
2:31.3	and he was pretty convinced that the conditions under which the late 20th century
2:35.3	the late 20th century person found him or herself was not a good one to be an individual. We had
2:40.6	lost ourselves. Lost in the cosmos begins with these hilarious wonderful thought experiments.
	...

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