The truth never goes out of style, and First Things relies on readers like you to keep promoting

the truth in public life. For the price of one cup of coffee per month, you can access all our

subscriber perks and support the important work of First Things. Visit Firstthings.com

slash subscribe to gain full access to all of our articles as well as our prestigious monthly print edition.

That's first things.com slash subscribe.

Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.

This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First

Things magazine. I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor of First Things magazine. And I'm here with you

today at the editor's desk. Well, I'd like to welcome James Wood onto the editor's desk for our regular podcast,

where we look at material from the recent issue of First Things Magazine.

In this case, we're going to look at James' review of two new books about, you guessed it, folks,

the issue of our time, post-liberalism. Welcome to the podcast,

James. Happy to be here. Good to see you. Okay. Post-lib, I mean, it seems like it's kind of a

worn-out topic, but you say that two books from polity press, kind of a, I would describe

polity as a heterodox press, left, right, heterodox press, but, you know, they'll do a lot

of good books, that two books from polity on post-liberalism are a sign of the times.

Yeah.

What do you think they tell us, just the fact that they came out?

Yeah.

Well, even just as you described that press already signals that, you know, they're trying

to engage the interesting conversations.

They're not just trying to rehash the old settled, you know, settlements and just kind of pushing out Pablam. They're like, hey, what's interesting? What's hot? What are people talking about? And so they published these two books. There's also another really good book that I didn't include in the review because I have it being reviewed elsewhere. And it's probably a little bit less accessible. A guy named Stefan Borg is another book, also critiquing post-liberalism, but from a charitable perspective. And that's one of the things I noticed about all three of these. That's quite interesting. I mean, you know, because this conversation has mostly been pushed aside by critics for a long time. They don't really want to engage it. They think it's not worth engaging. But now we have three monograph-length books at reputable publishers.

...