It poses interesting questions when the sort of consensus on what is good and bad, what is wrong and what is right starts to break down because then the question becomes how do you justify your moral codes, how do you justify your law codes?

Well, if you don't have a sacred authority, they can only be justified in terms of themselves and then you move into a kind of pragmatic world where, as we're seeing emerging around us in America and the United Kingdom and in Europe today, it tends to become whoever shouts loudest or whoever has the most powerful lobby group, it gets to determine what the moral code by which society is to be organized is.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Frances Foster. I'm Constantin Kissinger. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Brilliant guest today is a Christian Theologian and a Klesiastical historian who is also the author of the rise and triumph of the modern self. Dr. Carl Truman, welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks for having me on, guys. It's great to be here.

It's a real pleasure to have you on the show before we get cranking. I've given you an introduction. You've of course written a fantastic book or many books.

Tell everybody who doesn't know who you are already. Who are you? How are you where you are?

What has been your journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us on yet another podcast as you explain to us before we start.

Well, I live in the United States, place called Slippery Rock, which is about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh in Western Pennsylvania, but you can tell by my accent.

It was born and brought up in the UK born in Birmingham grew up in Gloucestershire, consider myself a west country boy. I'm a some of a follower of Gloucester rugby club.

Studied at the University of Cambridge, the classics and then went to the University of Aberdeen where I did a PhD in Reformation history and taught at the University of Nottingham, Aberdeen and then at a place called Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, emigrated here in 2001.

Primarily, my work has been in Reformation history, but five or six years ago, due to things going on in the township where I live near Philadelphia, I got sort of pulled into a whole transgender issue, which lies partly behind the books I've written more recently.

So I guess now I spent very little time on ecclesiastical history and most of my time talking on very politically incorrect topics with with guys like yourself married two kids, one grandchild.

That's fantastic. We're very happy to hear that, but you mentioned the the trans issue and I hope people on this point gone, well, this is going to be another conversation about the trans.

We've had plenty of those. I think everybody knows what they think about it at this point, really. I don't want to talk to you about that, but the reason I think that people like you are really in demand at the moment, certainly from people like us, is Francis and I have always been fascinated by history and I do feel that historical perspective gives us has a certain explanatory power for things that are happening in the present and your book, the triumph of the self, the modern self rather, it really talks about

our self perception, changing over time and how we view ourselves changing over time, sure the trans conversations part of it, but it seems to me that actually what you're talking about is the entire world view that we as human being have of ourselves has changed in a dramatic way.

What has been that change and what has caused it in your opinion?

Yeah, it's a great question and I think one of the things that a lot of people, a lot of the mistakes a lot of people makes, we tend to view things like the trans issue in isolation, we don't set it against the broader background of things that have been happening over a long period of time, particularly in the West.

Again, I know you don't want to keep on the trans issue, but just reflect on it for a second. For the statement, I'm a woman trapped in a man's body to make sense.

We have to have come to a position in Western society where we intuitively give inner feelings, tremendous authority, authority that even even aces the authority, the external authority of our own bodies.

So when you look at it that way, I think that the question becomes, how do we reach the point where we see ourselves so much in terms of inner feelings rather than for a better external obligations?

Why is it that I think of myself as the feelings that dwell within rather than my connection to my location, to my family, to my ancestors, to my employer, to my local community?

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