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Hello. slash Origins Podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Origins Podcast.

I'm your host, Lawrence Krause.

In this episode, I'll talk to the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt.

I first read his book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, and found it compelling reading about that myth and its development throughout history, with its ultimate adoption by Judeo-Christian theology, and its subsequent demise, at least among rational individuals.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for his seminal work, The Swerve, which also won the National Book Award.

It starts out as a riveting detective story of the 14th century discovery of Lucretius' poem

on the Nature of Things, and then turns into a brilliant discussion of the significance

of the dissemination of this work for helping spur the Renaissance interest in science and nature,

and helping remove God from getting in the way of our understanding of the universe. I found his

recent book, Tyranny, fascinating. That book returns him to one of the areas of his great distinction

as one of the world's leading Shakespearean scholars, as well as being a literary historian.

It was written after the election of Donald Trump, and it uses Shakespeare to describe how

a population can allow a tyrant who lies to gain power. For me, Stephen's great skill,

besides his native eloquence, is to describe how literature relates to reality, and that provides us

additional insights we can all use. Patron subscribers can find the full video of all of our programs

as soon as they're released at patreon.com slash origins podcast. It was a pleasure to spend time

with this brilliant mind and scholar.

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