The The Hey there. I'm Eric Metaxus.

This is Socrates in the city.

It's a little different from our typical Socrates in the city events.

In fact, it's very different.

There is really maybe not exactly a typical Socrates in the city event.

We've done a number of different kinds

of events, the most typical we do in a club, a private club in New York City. But we've done them

in a number of venues. We've done them in auditoriums. We've done them in Oxford, England,

at St. Aldeates, with a very small crowd. We've done them in the south of France with John Lennox.

But today we're doing something, even unlike all of those, we are in a private home. This is the

home of Tom and Loveless Howard. Thomas Howard is someone whose books I had the privilege to encounter around 1989.

Shortly after I had my own conversion to fate, somebody suggested that I must read this book by Thomas Howard.

And I read the book and it changed my life. That's the short version.

The slightly longer version is that I was so taken with what he was saying in the book,

Chance or the Dance, being the book, that I was astounded.

It was not just what Thomas Howard was saying in the book, which was itself astounding, but

the way he wrote it.

It's hard for me not to go on and on about his prose style.

It's simply spectacular and unique.

But what he writes about, which we will get to in the conversation,

I'd never encountered the idea before. He calls the book Chance or the Dance a critique of

modern secularism, but it really puts the medieval Christian worldview against the modern

...