Talking about the "things that matter most" on June 113:00 – My Visit to Hell
Nearly seven hundred years ago the Italian poet Dante wrote The Inferno, an epic tale of the fate awaiting doomed souls in the underworld. Now, the story continues! Thomas Travis had always thought the toughest streets in the ghettos of Atlanta were next door to hell. But he didn’t know just how close they were until the threat of racial violence sent him fleeing down the stairs of an abandoned building only to fall headlong into a tortured realm of fire and ice, the place of the damned. The only chance of escape was to trust the strange elderly woman who met him there and insisted on being his guide. She claimed to know the way out, but it would lead through all the terrifying circles of divine judgment, each one deeper and more tormenting than the last. In the lowest pit, the Lord of Darkness himself lay in wait. Thomas had lived a godless life, and now there was hell to pay. If his soul could be purged on the journey, he just might make it. But the odds were against him. In hell, the only guarantee is justice and the only way out is down. Paul Thigpen with us – the novel is My Visit to Hell.
3:20 – God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis
What does the future hold for European Christianity? Is the Christian church doomed to collapse under the weight of globalization, Western secularism, and a flood of Muslim immigrants? Is Europe, in short, on the brink of becoming "Eurabia"? Though many pundits are loudly predicting just such a scenario, Philip Jenkins reveals the flaws in these arguments and offers a much more measured assessment of Europe's religious future. He is with us to make his case.
4:00 – Feast of St. Barnabas
Barnabas, a Jew of Cyprus, comes as close as anyone outside the Twelve to being a full-fledged apostle. He was closely associated with St. Paul (he introduced Paul to Peter and the other apostles) and served as a kind of mediator between the former persecutor and the still suspicious Jewish Christians. We celebrate his feast day with Steve Ray.
4:20 – Praying Scripture for a Change: An Introduction to Lectio Divina
Many Christians find prayer difficult and, as a result, do not do much of it. The fact is, many simply do not know how to pray. Even St Paul notes this sad fact when, in Romans 8:26, he says, We do not know how to pray as we ought. In a new short book, written for a popular audience by well-known Catholic biblical scholar Dr. Tim Gray, we discover the secret of the saints which can enable us to enter into a lively dialogue with God. Their secret: the ancient art of Lectio Divina (divine, or sacred reading), which is reading, meditating on, and praying the Scriptures. As St. Cyprian notes, Diligently practice prayer and lectio divina. When you pray, you speak with God; when you read [the Scriptures], God speaks to you. Here, we discover that we don t need a mystic gene or divine epiphany to hear God; we simply need to take up the Bible and read.
5:00 – How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization
The world owes a debt to the Catholic Church that it doesn't even realize. The Church built, and sustains, Western Civilization. She has had a pivotal role in shaping Western civilization for the last two thousand years. Tom Woods joins us in studio to discuss how the father of atomic theory, the father of aviation, and the father of Egyptology were all Catholic priests; how Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five hundred years before Adam Smith; how the Church was the great defender of the sanctity of human life and the individual against the state; and how the Church bestowed the most unique gift to the World what we now know as the university
You have a richly informative program, and I am glad to have happened upon it recently. I am commenting on your discussion of Muhammed and his most intolerant religion: I think it should be against the law for anyone to enter the USA who subscribes to the teaching that a person can or should be killed who converts or refuses to convert from one religion to another. That would automatically exclude militant Islamists, and it would require any others entering to renounce that age-old practice of Islam. Then if some convert from Islam were murdered, it would empower the police with additional charges against not only the murderer, but also anyone who taught the murderer to kill. This law would probably have to rise to the level of a constitutional amendment, but I think it could be enacted.
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