Spencer Klavan On God And The Humanities
The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan
4.6 • 836 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Spencer is a writer and podcaster. He’s currently an associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books and the host of the “Young Heretics” podcast. He’s also the author of How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises and the editor of Gateway to the Stoics. You can follow his latest writing on Substack.
For two clips of our convo — on finding God in the humanities, and why so many gays throughout history have been drawn to the Church — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Spencer’s upbringing in NYC and London and elsewhere; his rigorous schooling in Britain; his dad the prominent novelist; his lapsed Catholic mom and lapsed Jewish dad; Spencer as a teen converting to Christianity — “conversational, not doctrinal”; coming to terms with his homosexuality; Yale for undergrad and Oxford for a PhD in the Classics; his initial calling as an actor; learning Latin and ancient Greek; how the Greeks had two words for forgiveness; the Gospels; Aquinas; the Scientific Revolution; how evolution is compatible with Christianity; James Madison; Tocqueville; the suffering that brings one closer to God; the waning of both the humanities and religion in American life; climate doomerism; postmodernism; Judith Butler; the transing of gender-dysphoric kids; Alasdair MacIntyre; and how genetics is “necessary but not sufficient” for seeking truth.
Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Brooks on his new book How to Know a Person,” his fellow NYT columnist Pamela Paul, and the authors of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? — John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. Also: David Leonhardt, Cat Bohannon, and McKay Coppins.
Have a question you want me to ask one of those future guests? Email [email protected], and please put the question in the subject line. Send any guest recs, pod dissent and other comments to [email protected].
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Hi there and welcome to a new just cast. |
| 0:32.3 | So grateful for you listening to us every week, |
| 0:36.8 | hit new records last week in terms of a single podcast. And |
| 0:41.8 | the Leosapier podcast on gender identity turned out to be, you know, before I did it, I was like, |
| 0:49.5 | you know, people are so sick to death of trans stuff. And I talk about it too often. Everyone thinks I'm mad, so I should probably just let all. |
| 0:57.4 | But I put something like that up there and suddenly, wound. |
| 1:00.4 | It's huge traffic. |
| 1:01.8 | Lots of people are interested. |
| 1:03.3 | If you put something that's intelligent out there, I think, and relatively calm, |
| 1:08.3 | I don't think these topics that people tell me are totally done or overplayed |
| 1:14.5 | are necessarily done or overplayed. Anyway, I should trust my instinct sometimes on these things. |
| 1:19.6 | So thank you for keeping listening and for increasing your subscriptions to us. |
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| 1:36.4 | doing, no ads. You're not going to have me telling you how great my new lawnmower is on this |
| 1:43.0 | podcast because we are going to stick to the |
| 1:47.0 | true and the good and the beautiful to coin a phrase, which comes to mind with our guest this week, |
| 1:53.2 | Spencer Claven. He's a writer and a podcaster. He's currently an associate editor at the |
| 1:59.2 | Claremont Review of Books and the host of Young Heretics Pod. |
| 2:04.1 | He's the author of How to Save the West, Ancient Wisdom, for Five Modern Crises. |
| 2:09.9 | And you can follow his writing on Substack as well. |
| 2:14.3 | Spencer, thanks so much for joining us today. |
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