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Get to know the Beatrice Institute podcast hosts, Ryan McDermott and Grant Martsolf, as they take turns interviewing each other. In this wide-ranging conversation, Ryan and Grant explore utilitarian tendencies in higher education, what religious institutes can offer a university community, and the relationship between immortality and incorruptibility. Ryan plays “would you rather” with Grant, and they meditate on two differing apocalyptic views of history.

  • “Nursing is the gentle art of caring”: teaching nurses not to be utilitarian

  • John Rawls’s theory of justice is an Enlightenment fantasy

  • Rawls’s “veil of ignorance” is impossible because culture always invades the hospital

  • A substantial portion of patient outcomes depends on what happens after they’re discharged

  • Beatrice Institute gets “butts in seats” in humanities classes

  • Learning more about your religion in college makes you more likely to practice it into adulthood

  • Intellectual friendship desires the other to succeed in the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty

  • A twenty-first-century research university is here to maximize benefit as understood according to a liberal, capitalist order

  • Today’s community health nurse is the closest thing we have to the nineteenth-century doctor who abided with a family in their joys and sufferings

  • Historical humanities help us understand the unfolding of human history across time

  • The basic plot of the Bible is like a Jane Austen novel: it begins with conflict and breakdown of social relations but ends with reconciliation and marriage

  • Forget the Benedict Option, we need to return to the days of the early Church, when there just lay people, a few priests, a few deacons, the occasional bishop, and families

  • Incorruptible bodies are simultaneously participating in the resurrection and in this world that is passing away

  • Modernity gives people technical skills but not the vision of the good those technical skills should serve

  • What does a social order that promotes human flourishing look like?

  • If health is just not dying and not aging, then immortality is the telos

  • What goodness and beauty will flourish when what we know collapses and something new is born?

Links 

Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 by Ryan McDermott

“Integrating Political Philosophy into Health Policy Education”

Tyler Cowen

Jeremy Bentham

John Rawls

Carnegie Mellon University

Christina Hoenig

“What Makes Faith Stick During College?”

“The No. 1 Reason Teens Keep the Faith as Young Adults”

East Liberty Family Health Care Center

Genealogies of Modernity Journal

“Ryan McDermott Receives $300K from National Endowment for the Humanities”

Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker

Walker Percy and the Modern Search for the Self with Jessica Hooten Wilson

Walker Percy

Michael D. O’Brien

"Q and A with The Lighthouse Author Michael D. O’Brien"

Fourth Lateran Council: 1215 (see Canon 50)

“Genealogies in Motion: Trees of Consanguinity”

Gallery of Legal Trees

“Hundreds of Years of Data Growing on Trees”

The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher

Benedict Option website

Eclipse of the Sun by Michael D. O’Brien

“Benedict’s Creative Minority”

“Salt and Light: Creative Christian Minorities in an Age of Upheaval”

Sophia House by Michael D. O’Brien

“The Rose of No Man’s Land”

“The Touching History Behind Rose of No Man’s Land Tattoos”

iGen by Jean M. Twenge

Peter Moe

The American Health Care Paradox by Elizabeth Bradley

Ken Liu

Paul Kingsnorth