Faith And Philosophy EPISODES

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A single moment at Abbey Gate still captures a whole era of American foreign policy: a Marine identifies a threat, asks for permission to act, and is told no until the danger disappears into the crowd. Hours later, the Kabul evacuation turns into a massacre that kills 13 American service members and scores of Afghan civilians. Five years on, we slow down and tell the story with the weight it deserves, because remembrance means more...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A 94-year-old cardinal walking into a Hong Kong courtroom might be the clearest sermon you’ll hear all week. Cardinal Joseph Zen sits beside Jimmy Lai’s wife as Lai, a 78-year-old Catholic and pro-democracy publisher, is sentenced to 20 years under Hong Kong’s national security law. Then a reporter asks Pope Leo XIV about Lai, and the answer is chilling in its restraint: “I cannot comment on that.” We sit with the contrast, because...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Ninety hours of World War II history sounds like a stunt until you realize what it does to your perspective. I just finished Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy on Audible, spread across six years, and I can’t stop thinking about what it means to “walk” from North Africa to Sicily, up the Italian campaign, and into the final push across Western Europe. This isn’t a cheerleading tour of victory. It’s a clear-eyed account of how the U...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Something snapped in American life and it didn’t start yesterday. We rewind to a question so many of us have asked at kitchen tables, over beers, and at our kids’ games: what happened to our country? Then we walk back through three books that, taken together, offer one diagnosis: America is in the middle of a cultural revolution, and the battleground is institutions, education, and the stories we tell about ourselves. We connect K...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A 78-year-old man sits in solitary confinement in Hong Kong with a 20-year sentence hanging over him. He could have left. He could have said the words that would have set him free. Jimmy Lai refused to lie, and that single act of conscience explains why authoritarian power reacts so fiercely to one person who won’t be bought or frightened into agreement. We trace Lai’s story from his rise as a self-made publisher and founder...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message America just hit a milestone that should make all of us pause: 250 years of self-government. We’re not doing a victory lap or a doom spiral. We’re making a case. Do the principles that built the United States still hold up, and if they do, why does it feel like we’re struggling to live them? We walk through three “nuggets” that tie the whole America 250 series together, drawing on Brett Baier’s The Case for America along with the ...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Where do your rights come from, and what happens to a country when it gets that answer wrong? We tackle the most radical political claim baked into the American founding: unalienable rights don’t come from the state, they come from God, and government exists to protect what you already have. That single idea flips the usual power equation and draws a hard line around conscience, belief, and the limits of political authority. We le...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message America starts as a broke, debt-soaked upstart with a near-worthless currency and almost no industrial muscle, then turns into a nation that produces a massive share of what the world makes. That’s not a trivia fact to us. It’s a question worth wrestling with, because the answer points to what actually drives prosperity and what quietly kills it. We pull three “nuggets of wisdom” from John Steele Gordon’s An Empire of Wealth and l...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message He told America judges are umpires, not lawmakers. Two decades later, Chief Justice John Roberts is still calling balls and strikes, but sometimes it sounds like he’s redrawing the strike zone. We dig into the irony and the real-world consequences of Roberts’ “institutionalist” approach, starting with one of the most debated Supreme Court decisions of our time: the Obamacare individual mandate in *NFIB v. Sebelius*. We walk throug...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A leader can denounce the system all day and still end up defending it with their decisions. We take a sharp look at what we call Donald Trump’s “Fauci moment” during COVID: elevating Dr. Anthony Fauci as the public face of “the science,” then publicly turning on him while keeping him in place. That choice, we argue, didn’t just create confusion. It made Trump own parts of the lockdowns, the shifting guidance, and the sense that no...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Iran’s nuclear clock isn’t measured in election cycles or think-tank white papers. It’s measured in days. That’s the premise driving this Liberty Minute as I respond to Cardinal Robert McElroy’s homily calling U.S. action in the U.S.-Iran war “immoral” and “needless.” I take the claim seriously and do the one thing our public arguments rarely do: I run the Catholic just war theory criteria all the way through, using the facts and t...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message Dan Hurley is famous for sideline fire, technical fouls, and an all-consuming drive to win, but *Never Stop* reveals a different story underneath the noise. We walk through the moments that make his memoir so much bigger than college basketball: the burned-out Seton Hall chapter where he admits how dark things got, the counseling that helped him climb back, and the long fight to become someone separate from a family legacy that mad...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A lot of us meet Fulton Sheen in fragments: a quote card, a grainy clip, a meme. But when you actually sit with his work, something steadier happens. During Holy Week, I reflect on three books that quietly re-ordered my interior life: Peace of Soul, The World’s First Love, and Life of Christ. They feel like three doors into one home, leading from a restless conscience, to a stronger Marian devotion, to a real encounter with Jesus C...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A Berlin classroom TV in 1989 flickers back to life as we open with a personal “Liberty Line” on what happens when people lose their fear—and why that matters for the courage we see across Iran today. From that human spark, we move straight into the hard edges of policy: why the United States chose to act, why the timeline narrowed, and how nuclear math—not rhetoric—drove urgency. We unpack Mark Halperin’s clear framing of continu...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message What if a single covert operation rewired the modern Middle East? We revisit the 1953 CIA–MI6 coup that toppled Mohammad Mossadegh and restored the Shah, then follow the consequences forward: repression, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and a foreign policy defined by proxies and confrontation. Drawing on Stephen Kinzer’s research, we explore a hard question with fresh urgency: did the quest for short-term stability seed decades of blo...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A map doesn’t just change with borders; it changes when the rules do. We trace a straight line from the Abraham Accords through October 7, the region-wide June escalation, and the strike that removed Iran’s Supreme Leader to explain why the Middle East just entered a new era. The thread is simple but profound: normalization unsettled the status quo, terror tried to reverse it, and a coalition responded by targeting not just fighter...

FAN MAIL--We would love YOUR feedback--Send us a Text Message A speech in Munich rattled the furniture of polite consensus, and we had to unpack it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio didn’t just talk policy; he drew a bright line around what the West is and why it’s worth defending—faith, history, art, science, and a shared way of life. We dig into that message, the reaction it sparked, and the practical path it implies for America and Europe if we truly want a new Western century. We start wit...