The Free Mind Podcast Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization

Alexandra Coţofană is an Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates. Dr. Coţofană is a cultural anthropologist who studies a range of topics including the cultures of political elites. Our conversation focuses on one of her quite unique study topics: the role of beliefs in magic and the occult in the elite politics of Romania. 

Brad Wilcox is Professor of Sociology and Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a non-resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute. We discuss two-way interactions between family structure and stability, socioeconomic outcomes, and culture in the U.S. context, and the important role families must play in any project of civic renewal. 

Smriti Mehta is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and the co-chair of UC Berkeley’s new Heterodox Academy (HxA) Campus Community, which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on their campus. I (Matt) co-chair a similar group at University of Colorado Boulder. We discuss what it’s like to start an HxA Campus Community, why it’s needed, what the hurdles are, and how we might overcome them. Smriti's podcast can be found here: Nullius in Verba | a podcast by Smriti Mehta and Daniël Lakens (podbean.com) 

Jennifer Smith is Associate Professor of English, Coordinator of Digital Humanities, and Associate Director of the Center for Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University. She is a noted medievalist, and also a 2022-2023 sabbatical fellow at the Benson Center. We discuss the life and legacy of the fifteenth-century English bishop Reginald Peacock, who was defrocked and exiled for heresy–i.e. canceled–for questioning the infallibility of the church and advocating the authority of reason.

Alice Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the social science of development at King’s College London, the author of The Great Gender Divergence, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, and the host of the Rocking Our Priors podcast. We discuss Dr. Evans’ research on gender inequalities over the past millennium globally, and its relevance to today’s movements and debates about feminism in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Lionel Shriver is an author and journalist, whose many books include We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) and most recently Abominations: Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction (2022). Our conversation focuses on one of the fascinating contradictions of Ms. Shriver’s life that she has written about.