Tell Spencer your thoughts about this episode!

Mark Schroeder, a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and author of many books, joins Spencer to talk about his new book, When Things Get Personal. One of the book's key ideas is the signal/noise distinction. Roughly, this amounts to the distinction between what truly reflects on a person and what reflects on external influences on that person's thought and behavior. Personal relationships require us to draw this distinction somehow, and drawing it in the wrong place leads to various relationship dysfunctions.

Tell Spencer your thoughts about this episode!

Honestly, a great episode! After a 5-year Hiatus, Christian Miller returns to the podcast to talk about his new book, The Honesty Crisis, which addresses six ways in which technology undermines the virtue of honesty. Topics include AI student cheating, sermon plagiarism by pastors, and the extent to which the norms of honesty are more flexible in certain contexts.

Tell Spencer your thoughts about this episode!

Longtime friend Brother Dunstan Enzor -- a monk briefly famous for telling a United Airlines customer service representative "I love you; God bless you; I'll pray for you-- but you have not been helpful" -- joins Spencer to dissect a great work of literature-- John Milton's Paradise Lost. The topics that come up include the nature of free will, the privative account of evil, the problem of evil, and the apophatic approach to knowing God.