This episode is brought to you by the Master of Arts and Catholic Education program at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology.

Dedicated to the renewal of Catholic education, this degree equips school teachers and administrators to bring Christ to the center of every classroom

through a focus on sacred scripture, theology, Christian anthropology, and the Traditional Liberal Arts. Ephraim Radner is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at University of Toronto.

He is the author of our back page column. So

our first things readers, all of you know his work very well, of course. And he has, of course,

many books, including Time and the Word, Figuero Reading of the Christian Scriptures, a commentary

on Leviticus that I think you did with Rusty's series, and a new study entitled

Mortal Goods, Reimagining Christian Political Duty.

That's certainly a timely topic, and that's what we'll discuss today.

Welcome, Professor Radner.

Thank you so much, Mark.

Great to be here with you.

You open with an interesting observation,

and that is that politics really springs from parenting. Children inspire political understanding.

How does that work? Well, yeah, you're right. The whole book actually came out of something I tried a few years ago, sort of very personally, to write a letter to my two young adult children and my son-in-law about what is a good life.

And trying to share that with them in part because, I don't know, I was getting older, they were getting older,

I'd been sick, all these questions about how long do we have with each other?

What's important to share?

And so I wrote this letter, which was more than a page, it was a number of pages, and subsequently

felt that, I mean, they took it and they read it, and I got

some feedback, but there was a sense that I got from them that it lacked a certain context,

and that context had to do with our culture and our, if you will, political setting in which a lot of the things I was trying to share with them really didn't make any sense outside of that context, or without recognizing the changing character of that context for all of us, trying to share these things

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