You're listening to a special edition of The World and Everything in it.

I'm Lindsay Mast, and I'm so excited to share today's interview with you.

As we begin, I want to take a minute to thank our new donors for an encouraging first week of our December giving drive.

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occasion? Your support means we can continue to bring you the kind of coverage we know you rely on,

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grateful to welcome you as we work together. Thank you. In a moment, my conversation with historian and

author Joseph Leconti.

When it comes to health care, people are really frustrated with how much it costs.

That's why Medashear is such a welcome relief.

It's called health care sharing.

More than a million Americans are doing this, and many people save thousands of dollars a year.

Find out more with a simple text. Text the word

world to 70246. That's world to 70246.

In the mid-1930s, a cultural crisis was engulfing the West.

Modernism, Freudian psychology, the theory of evolution, social Darwinism, and the eugenics

movement all took their toll on values and beliefs that had long been taken for granted.

Add to that changing geopolitics, and there was, as our guest Joseph

LaConte puts it, a gathering storm. It was in the midst of that storm that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R.

Tolkien set out to fight back by writing their now famous fiction. LaConte offers a deep dive into

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