Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAn Empire of Reason - The Rights of Englishmen
Season 11 Episode 10
Before the American colonists ever claimed the rights of man, they claimed the rights of Englishmen. For the first ten years of the quarrel with Brit…
3 years, 3 months ago
An 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 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, 3 months ago