Sacred and Profane Love Sacred and Profane Love

In this episode, I discuss Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with Aaron Gwyn.  I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I speak with Stephen Karian, renowned scholar of 18th century British literature, on the poems of Jonathan Swift, the promise and perils of satire, and the pleasures of reading profane poetry written by one of the great Divines.  I hope you enjoy our conversation. Read along with us at .

In this episode, I am joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips to discuss poetry, classic texts, art, and truth. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I speak with the classicist Julia Hejduk on Ovid's The Art of Love. I hope you enjoy our conversation!    

In this episode, I speak with my colleague at TU, Boris Dralyuk on Vladmir Nabokov’s delightful take on the campus novel, Pnin.  We explore our endearing hero’s journey from being a man on the wrong train to becoming an American behind the wheel at long last.  I hope you enjoy our conversation.    Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, and has taught there and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020 he received the inaugural  from the Washington Monthly. In 2022 he received the inaugural  from the National Book Critics Circle for his translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. You can find him on X .   Jennifer A. Frey is the inaugural dean of the , with a secondary appointment as professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy and religion. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in the . Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the .   She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and Medieval Studies (with a Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology, and she has edited three academic volumes on virtue and human action. Her writing has been featured in First Things, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.  She lives with her husband and six children in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is on X      

In this episode, I speak with the political theorist Patrick Deneen about Don DeLillo’s award winning novel, White Noise.  We explore the novel’s undercurrents of existential angst in a world of distraction, amnesia, and unfulfilled longings. I hope you enjoy our conversation.