Beatrice Institute Podcast Ryan McDermott

As a bioethicist and Catholic deacon-in-training, Dr. Michael Deem has spent years in the medical trenches as well as in theological and philosophical research. Michael Deem joins Grant in this episode to answer questions such as, “Do bioethicists actually change minds?” “Does healthcare flourish under a provider-of-services model?” and “Are bioethical principles self-evident?” Their discussion covers territory from contraception to logic to the style of recent Catholic popes.

How can we help locally, but in a way that works economically? This is the challenge that thwarts many solidaristic startups. Luckily, Sara Horowitz has picked up the gauntlet. Sara Horowitz has been both the chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the founder of the Freelancers Union and the Freelancers Insurance Company and talks eloquently on mutualism.
Join Grant and Sara’s discussion on mutualism, in which they expound on friendly societies and the history of mutual aid societies and ask the questions: What should be the current strategy of protecting laborers? Why do local movements seem invisible to the public eye? And, what is necessary to make mutualism successful?

How is mathematics a liberal art? How can being good at math translate into virtue? 
Dr. Francis Su, the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, is well aware of mathematics’ place in human flourishing. In this episode, he and Grant converse over these questions. They also discuss the reverence evoked by math and the transcendence found in it, the effectiveness of mathematical assessments, and popular mathematical literature.

Modernity strives to break with the past, especially genealogy. However, is it possible for a society to break a genealogical thread?
In this episode, we explore the meaning and value of genealogy, a way of thinking that will shape the rest of this series. We ask how different forms of genealogical thinking can reconnect us to the past without limiting our future to the past. We see how critical genealogy does the important work of challenging both of those kinds of modernity claim that purport to leave the past behind, and noble origin stories which claim a purely virtuous inheritance from the past. But we also see how recovering the past can offer possibilities for flourishing in the future. In Chinese ancestor rituals, medieval family trees, and modern reconciliation ceremonies, we see how communities use creative genealogy to open up new connections and new beginnings.
For the full season, complete show notes, and resources, visit Genealogies of Modernity.

We often think of modernity as a time period in history. But people have been claiming to be modern since at least c. 550 AD, when the Roman writer Cassiodorus used the term modernus to mark off everything that had happened since the fall of the Roman Empire. Harvard scholar Michael Puett takes us back much further, to the third century BC in ancient China, when a series of emperors claimed modernity to consolidate their rule. Puett argues that modernity is best understood as a claim to freedom from the past. By recognizing two forms of modernity claim—one that tries to erase the past and another that tries to master it—we can better understand what is at stake in our own invocations of “modernity."

For the past three years, Ryan has been working with an interdisciplinary group of scholars to produce a narrative podcast about Genealogies of Modernity. Today’s episode is a sneak preview of the first episode of that series, which will be released in its own feed starting the first week of November. In the thread of the Beatrice Institute podcast, Ryan has focused on interviewing scholars who are interested in the complex relationship between the past and the present. This narrative podcast doubles down on those interests with focused inquiries into the nature of modernity, the genealogical imagination, and the ways the past continues to be present and available to us today. Each episode tells a story, or set of stories, that echo but also challenge a particular standard narrative of what it means to be modern and how a particular modern phenomenon came about. 
We’ll be releasing the first three episodes in the Beatrice Institute stream so that you, our core audience, can have early access. And we’re also hoping that you will share the series with your friends. That would be a huge help. For now, enjoy episode one, “Mountain Modernity.”