Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAn Empire of Reason - The Social Contract
Season 11 Episode 9
Every government claims the right to do what no private person may — to tax, to jail, to send men to die. By what right? For most of history the answ…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason - What Is a Right?
Season 11 Episode 8
“Rights” is the most powerful word in American political life — and one of the slipperiest. Everyone claims them, on every side, for opposite things,…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason - Are We Free?
Season 11 Episode 7
The free-will defense answered the problem of evil — but it rested on one claim: that we are free. So this episode puts freedom itself on trial, agai…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Problem of Evil
Season 11 Episode 6
In the year 524, a condemned man named Boethius sat in a cell awaiting a brutal execution and wrote down the question that has haunted the West ever …
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason - The Higher Law
Season 11 Episode 5
For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empi…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason - Christian Morality
Season 11 Episode 4
In the year 1 BC, an ordinary, loving husband wrote home to his pregnant wife with a casual instruction: if the child is a girl, expose it. It was no…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason – Roman Law
Season 11 Episode 3
The Romans had a horror of one word — rex, king — and after they threw out their last one, they spent five centuries building a government designed s…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason – Greek Logic
Season 11 Episode 2
In 585 BC, the sun went dark over a battlefield — and one Greek had said it would, not by reading the will of the gods, but by working out that the h…
3 years, 2 months ago
An Empire of Reason – Inheritance of the West
Season 11 Episode 1
We hold these truths to be self-evident — but they were not self-evident. For almost the whole of human history, on nearly every patch of the globe, …
3 years, 2 months ago
The French and Indian War - Pontiac’s War
Season 10 Episode 10
In the spring of 1763, the British colonies were lighting bonfires for the greatest victory in their history — and within weeks the frontier they had…
3 years, 2 months ago