Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Thank you. Welcome to Mortification of Spin.

This week we're going to do something slightly unusual.

We're hoping to introduce our audience to an important thinker that you may not have heard of, but who has an extremely interesting biography. His name is Dietrich von Hildebrand. He was a leading philosopher, Catholic theologian. And what makes him in some ways most distinctive and most interesting is he was a very early opponent of Adolf Hitler and the rise of Nazism.

And we're very grateful to have on as our guest today, John Henry Crosby.

John Henry's bio describes him as a translator, a writer, a musician, and a cultural entrepreneur. And he's the founder of

the Hildebrand Project, which is designed to foster deep cultural renewal through publications,

events, fellowships, and online resources that draw on the continuing vitality of this man,

Dietrich von Hildebrand. So it's great to have you on the

program, John Henry. Oh, Carl, I'm delighted to be on. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Now, I'm guessing that most of our audience will not know anything about Dietrich von Hildebrand.

So I wonder if you could give us the 32nd Wikipedia version of who he is and why he's significant.

Yes, well, that's a challenge because he was a German philosopher. But by the same token,

let me try. So let me do it like this. I'll say to you that Dietrich von Hildegrand was a great

lay Christian, well, I'll back up and say he was a Christian convert who found his way to

Christianity through the beauty of the saints. And as a philosopher, he then explored his faith

and then devoted his life to unpacking both Christian thought and culture in his writings.

He was, of course, a significant figure in the Catholic world because he was one of the first

lay Catholics, not an ordained person, to delve deeply into Christian theological and spiritual matters.

This is a newer phenomenon in the Catholic world and did this beautifully in books like

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