PODCAST · religion
The Eucatastrophe
by The Eucatastrophe
Join Dave and Joel as they meander through politics, pop-culture, church and society to consider how a theological imagination creatively envisages and serves the common good.
Episodes
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Doubt
Dave and Joel discuss the doubt that can creep up on (or consume) a Christian. Dave considers how doubt can mean the unravelling of a person’s entire world. What are the sources of the Christian’s doubt? They discuss epistemic individualism, hyperstimulation and the loss of the sublime, and...
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Fratelli Tutti
Joel and Dave discuss Pope Francis’s encyclical, ‘Fratelli Tutti’. Francis turns over a bunch of tables – selfish egoistic consumption, financial speculation, nationalism, war, the death penalty, ‘parallel monologues’ of digital culture, despotism that robs traditions, mockery of the good, and…
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2020
Dave and Joel ponder 2020. Increasing consumption, watering-down industrial relations protections, rising poverty, and diminishing concern for the most vulnerable. What does it really mean to ‘build back better’ (shudder)? Doing so may mean infusing politics with a religious sense of personhood,...
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The Needs of the Soul
Dave and Joel discuss Simone Weil’s brilliant work of political philosophy, ‘The Need for Roots’. They look at the first chapter, ‘The Needs of the Soul’, where Weil paints a picture of the ways in which a just political order provides spiritual nourishment for its subjects. How is beauty related...
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Post-Liberal Religious Liberty: Part 2
Dave poses the hard questions in part 2 on Joel’s book, ‘Post-Liberal Religious Liberty: Forming Communities of Charity’. What does the ‘spiritualising of subjectivity’ mean? What is ‘the ecclesiological account’ of religious liberty? What’s with this Augustine love-fest? Joel contrasts his…
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Post-Liberal Religious Liberty: Part 1
Dave interrogates Joel about his recent book, ‘Post-Liberal Religious Liberty: Forming Communities of Charity’ (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which offers an answer to the question: why does religious liberty matter? In part 1 of a two-part descent into Joel’s brain, the claim that religious...
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Narcissism in the Church
Dave and Joel discuss narcissism as a dominant force within the Church and wider society. Narcissism is characterised by an obsession with one’s public persona, coupled with a radical lack of empathy. Within the narcissist lies, not an intense love of self, but an emptiness that demands constant...
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The Church and the Student’s Vocation
Dave and Joel discuss life as a student and how the church can fail to support it. In the Australian context, where theology and the pursuits of the university have largely been separated, universities have become easy for Christians to instrumentalise. They are places unrelated to the church’s...
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Theology and the University
Joel and Dave discuss why theology is central to the purpose of the university. John Henry Newman argues pursuing knowledge demands theology – it ‘enters into every order’, he writes. Spit-balling on this theme, Joel and Dave consider how theological claims are always present in the university,...
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The Idea of a University
Dave and Joel mull over what the university is for. The Australian Government has insisted funding for universities should be aligned with ‘job ready graduates’. In the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman railed against such ‘utility’. For him, the university exists to cultivate knowledge. Dave...
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Star Wars: A Lament
Joel and Dave lament the decline of Star Wars into the mess that was ‘The Rise of Skywalker’. Why has Star Wars been a fixture in our lives? How did JJ Abrams crush our hopes and dreams? After discussing the power of enchantment and mythic story-telling, Joel and Dave rant about the film’s...
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C.S. Lewis and The Inner Ring
Dave and Joel discuss C.S. Lewis’ famous paper, ‘The Inner Ring’. Lewis warns against the desire to be part of the invisible clique. In itself, this ‘inner ring’ may not be evil, but Lewis argues that its allure can easily lead to a sense of purposelessness. All relationships and work become…
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William Cavanaugh and the State
Joel and Dave discuss William Cavanaugh’s article, ‘“Killing for the Telephone Company”: Why the Nation-State is Not the Keeper of the Common Good’. Cavanaugh is critical of attempts to baptise the State as the site of Christian politics. The State, he argues, is birthed in violence…
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COVID-19 and Resurrection
For this, the last in the COVID-19 Trilogy ™, Joel and Dave think out loud about how the Easter narrative can shape and challenge our political response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. What does it mean to worship a crucified and resurrected Messiah at a time when some claim sacrificing the vulnerable...
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Online Church and Covid-19
Dave and Joel discuss doing church in a pandemic. Churches can, in their very physical presence, resist the drift towards non-places – places that cultivate weak ties and treat persons as fungible. Buildings and bodies matter. But now we are all forced online. Church has become a Zoom meeting....
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Covid-19 and Total Depravity?
Joel and Dave consider the question on everyone’s minds during this pandemic: is toilet paper hoarding evidence for total depravity? The Australian Prime Minister called such hoarding ‘unAustralian’. Joel and Dave discuss how our understanding of the person may be connected to our understanding…
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A Hidden Life
Dave and Joel discuss Terrance Malick's A Hidden Life, a film recounting Franz Jägerstätter's journey towards martyrdom as he refuses to swear loyalty to Hitler. What can this film teach us about the nature of Christian witness during a time of dehumanising and demonic oppression? How can nature...
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The Not-So-Good Place
Dave and Joel rant about the television show ‘The Good Place’. What does this show say about our culture? In a word: decadent. Gripped by a desire for meaning and transcendence, we (like ‘The Good Place’ characters) settle instead for a life of perpetual consumption followed by boredom and then...
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Culture Wars
Joel and Dave discuss the paradigm of ‘culture wars’. Left v right, conservative v progressive – are these the battlelines of our times? In the 1990s, James Davison Hunter thought that these groups were locked in an interminable conflict, appealing to fundamentally different claims and sources of...
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Getting to Know Dave & Joel
Dave and Joel cap off the year by getting uncomfortably confessional. Answers are given to penetrating questions like, ‘Is there a correct way to pack a dishwasher and how does this relate to pursuing a career in legal scholarship?’ ‘What’s Dave’s favourite flavour of self-sabotage?’ ‘How easy...
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Advent when the world’s on fire
Is the despair apocalypse upon us? Dave and Joel talk about how things seem pretty dark. In Sydney, state-wide bushfires have turned the city into a scene from Blade Runner 2049. Our politics seems to be locked into the same old paradigms. Our churches and religious communities often appear…
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The Joker
Bonus episode! Dave and Joel ramble about The Joker, directed by Todd Phillips. Why was this a potentially good film wrapped in a strikingly average film? Was this Joker the equivalent of an evangelical sermon - all explanation, no mystery? Can you have the Joker without the Batman? What was all...
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The Church that Disagrees
Joel and Dave think out loud about what it means to be the Church when we keep on disagreeing with each other. Schism is tragic, but unity is difficult. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than Church conversations on sexuality. What does it mean to disagree well, or is the response to...
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Friends with Bad Opinions
Dave and Joel discuss whether you can be friends with someone who has awful opinions. Dave expends too much energy raging against something he heard on daytime television. According to Ellen DeGeneres, George W. Bush is simply another person whose opinion she disagrees with, but who nonetheless…
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Does Pluralism Defeat the Common Good?
Is it wrong to seek the good or virtuous society in the face of evident pluralism? In some classical Christian thought, the king was tasked with cultivating virtue, including love of God. Joel and Dave discuss contemporary Christian voices who challenge this. For liberal thinkers like Nicholas...
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Consumerism
Dave and Joel discuss a monstrous multi-headed hydra: consumerism. How difficult it is for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Many Christians think greed is the problem. But what if money is? What if it runs hand in hand with a consumerism that promotes freedom as an end in itself, and...
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Faithful Presence
Joel and Dave discuss a potential alternative to Christians adopting the tactics of special interest groups, madly scrambling for power in the competitive world of politics. They reflect on James Davison Hunter’s proposal for ‘faithful presence’. Hunter argues that Christians must form persons…
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To Change the World
Joel and Dave consider what is needed to create cultural change. They discuss James Davison Hunter’s claim that Christians are all too individualistic, pietistic, and worldview-istic. And his argument for networks of elites at the centre of cultural institutions. Is this Christian theorising of...
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Liturgical Crimes
This week Joel and Dave go all 'why, church? why?' and discuss many of their pet peeves about how churches can order their worship. From pastors trying to out do the creeds, to 40 minute explain-athons, they've got complaints about everything!
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Disability and Dignity
Joel and Dave discuss how disability poses a challenge to a liberal understanding of dignity grounded in personal autonomy. How can a Christian personalist perspective provide resources for understanding disability and human flourishing? What does it mean to view people with intellectual...
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The Individual v. The Person
Joel and Dave discuss what it means to be a person. Liberal thought tends to understand the dignity of the individual as arising from a capacity for ethical freedom. This poses difficulties – not simply for how we understand the ends of the individual, but how we understand those who do not fit…
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Loneliness and the Search for Self
Dave and Joel are taking the week off. Never fear! As a substitute enjoy a recording of Dave's recent public lecture 'Loneliness and the Search for Self' where he talks loneliness, totalitarianism, social media, and the redemptive power of art.
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Bullshit
Dave introduces Harry Frankfurt's influential essay 'On Bullshit'. Frankfurt describes a new form of discourse that disentangles itself from traditional categories of truth and falsehood. What happens to politics, academia, and religion when language becomes a game? Can concern for social justice...
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Folau and Religious Liberty
Joel and Dave discuss religious liberty and the on-going case of Israel Folau, a now former Wallabies rugby player with a not so good meme-game. They consider several problematic arguments circulating: the claim that contract is foundational; an emphasis on brand management; and a focus on...
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Fleabag and Augustinian Desire
Joel and Dave talk about love, the popular show Fleabag, and Augustine’s Confessions. They discuss how our desires can both be directed towards something good but at the same time destructively disoriented, how desire needs grace – so we can experience each other as a subject of fathomless depths...
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Cultural Marxism Part 2
Dave and Joel discuss how talk of ‘cultural Marxism’ can distract us from a much more needed examination of liberalism. Rather than radical cultural Marxists, we have different ‘sides’ within an intra-liberal debate. Market freedoms or expressive individualism – the state facilitating forms of...
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Cultural Marxism Part 1
Dave and Joel discuss the concept of 'cultural Marxism' and the role that it plays in strands of contemporary conservative discourse. Does the term 'cultural Marxism' actually point to anything? How might supposed 'cultural Marxists' help the Church criticise contemporary social imaginaries? Can…
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Is Authenticity Redeemable?
Joel and Dave discuss the modern quest for authenticity, a key idea in our time. ‘Authenticity’ is often wedded to theories of ethical individualism, or even pursuing commodities in the market. The person true to his own understanding of the divine or moral conviction; the sneakerhead cultivating...
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Brittle Fundamentalism
This week Dave makes Joel uncomfortable by getting confessional, discussing his conversion to reformed Evangelical Christianity, and how it provided him with intellectual resources necessary to deal with a messy world. The power of Reformed theology, according to Dave, is its great explanatory...
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The Benedict Option
Joel and Dave discuss 'The Benedict Option', Rod Dreher's book arguing that Christians, now alienated from a world they thought was their own, must form parallel communities. (AKA Hauerwas for reactionaries.) While sympathetic to the communal themes, they have some problems. Is Dreher's 'option'...
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Sacrifice Zones
Joel and Dave discuss what happens when the state withdraws from a place, creating a sacrifice zone of economic and environmental devastation. They ruminate on dark things: geographic places and economic spheres in which those deemed unworthy of full moral consideration must live. How is this...
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Resisting Secular Space
Joel and Dave discuss the fire of Notre Dame. What does the outpouring of grief over a Christian cathedral tell us about the longings of a post-secular age? They contrast this with the tendency to create 'non-places' in late-capitalist, cosmopolitan cities: spaces transitory, ahistorical,...
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Avengers: Endgame as Eucatastrophe
Dave and Joel offer an unapologetically pretentious and exuberant review of Avengers: Endgame. They discuss narrative delight; Christian humanist heroes; desire for enchantment; and the joy of the eucatastrophe – the denial of universal final defeat. Wordsworth, Tolstoy, and Homer are mentioned....
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First Reformed, Hope & Despair
Dave and Joel discuss Paul Schrader's 'First Reformed' - what it says about a life of introspection, despair against a backdrop of cataclysmic climate change, the hope of natality, and the sense of alienation from one's own tradition. Spoilers abound.
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Christianity: it's a religion
Dave and Joel rail against a common line: "Christianity is a relationship, not a religion". Against talk of an individualised relationship, they discuss how Christian religion points to ethical formation for a common life. Religion is something - a practice, an orientation, a virtue - that shapes...
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Respecting Religion; Respecting Islam
Dave and Joel discuss what it means to respect a religion. In the wake of the Christchurch terror attack, there have been renewed calls to embrace our Islamic neighbours and reject anti-Islamic bigotry. While positive, much of this (and current) rhetoric does not address Islam on its own terms,...
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The Lonely Subject
Dave and Joel discuss whether loneliness is ‘baked-into’ a liberal understanding of society and political authority. They then turn to Hannah Arendt’s thought that loneliness is a precursor to totalitarianism because it reflects a loss of ‘common sense’. This, they wildly suggest, is echoed in…
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Religious Desire and Making Things Strange
Dave and Joel discuss the religious desire for the transcendent, and how this can go in terrible and banal directions, as well as the theological task of making things in the world strange. JRR Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy Tales’ provides the jumping-off point. It also provides the name...
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Who are we, why this podcast.
Joel and Dave lay some of their cards on the table, unpacking a few of the basic assumptions framing their conversations. They discuss how the primacy of the self-determining individual cuts across most political and religious thought and why they think that is a problem.
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Join Dave and Joel as they meander through politics, pop-culture, church and society to consider how a theological imagination creatively envisages and serves the common good.
HOSTED BY
The Eucatastrophe
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Eucatastrophe have?
The Eucatastrophe currently has 49 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Eucatastrophe about?
Join Dave and Joel as they meander through politics, pop-culture, church and society to consider how a theological imagination creatively envisages and serves the common good.
How often does The Eucatastrophe release new episodes?
The Eucatastrophe has 49 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to The Eucatastrophe on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Eucatastrophe?
The Eucatastrophe is created and hosted by The Eucatastrophe.
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