Welcome to the podcast, First Things Podcast, The Editor's Desk.

I'm Rusty Reno, editor of First Things.

And we have today Nathan Pinkowski, who teaches at the University of Florida, to talk about his marvelous article on Jean L'

Wespé's

the Camp of the Saints

titled the Spiritual Death of the West

in the May

2023 issue. Thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you very much for having me.

So

tell us who is this author and give us a little background on this very controversial novel.

Yeah, certainly. So genre spy is one of the most, I think,

certainly one of the more prominent literary figures in the latter half of the 20th century, early 21st century.

He certainly doesn't have the name recognition that someone like Michel Welbeck has.

He's of an older generation, but he was almost joined the Academy Francaise.

He lost a close vote. He won in 2003 the most important

literary prize that the Academy Francaise offers. And he had a distinguished literary career

writing about a number of different subjects, travel stories early on. He made his name doing that. Then he sort of switched into this

other kind of genre, which you might call poetic millenarianism, looking at declines of civilizations

and cultures and imagining kind of alternate histories, what might happen if suddenly an extinct culture reappeared or members of this extinct culture reappeared.

So he was, and also I should add too, he was very well respected in not only Catholic literary circles because he was a Catholic,

but also amongst the literary

...