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Paradise and Utopia

Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Christendom

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From Utopia to Dystopia III: How Atheistic Existentialism Countered Saint Siluoan's "My Brother Is My Life" with Sartre's "Hell Is Other People"

In this episode, Fr. John discusses the once popular philosophical movement known as Existentialism, and the way in which one of its leaders, Albert Camus, broke from others in a search for transcendent Truth.

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From Utopia to Dystopia II: Totalitarianism, Hard and Soft

In this episode, Fr. John describes how ideological world building created not only a hard totalitarianism in the Communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union, but a perceivable "soft" totalitarianism in the liberal democracy of Cold War Western Europe and America.

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From Utopia to Dystopia I: How Christians Like C.S. Lewis Saw Nihilism for What It Was

In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John tells how traditional Christianity provided certain critics of ideological world-building with a new way of seeing the West.

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Liberal World-Building II: American Anticommunism in the 1950s

In this episode, Fr. John describes the anticommunist character of liberalism in America during the Cold War, noting how in its promotion of individual rights it accommodated and even emphasized religious belief, but did so conditionally.

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Liberal World Building I: When J.S. Mill met Friedrich Nietzsche

In this new sequence of episodes, Fr. John looks at the origins of the main rival to the world-Building ideologies of Communism and Nazis, American liberalism.

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Nazi World-Building III: The War of Annihilation

In this final episode on Nazi Germany, Fr. John discusses the unparalleled nihilism of Hitler's "new order" for the West during World War II, a racist utopia grounded in a secular ideology.

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Nazi World-Building II: The Project of Cultural Coordination

In this episode, Fr. John describes how the Nazis, once in power, pursued a culture war against existing German values and beliefs by attacking Christianity, advancing neopaganism, and elaborating a racist utopia.

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Nazi World-Building I: When Nietzsche met Darwin in Hitler's Mind

In this episode, Fr. John launches into the darkest period of the age of nihilism, Nazi Germany. In it, he explores the conditions of Western culture following the First World War and how they subverted both traditional Christianity and secular humanism. He concludes with a review of the ideological mythology contained in Hitler's Mein Kampf.

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Communist World Building III: The Great Terror

In this final episode dealing with the Soviet Union under Stalin, Fr. John narrates one of the most chilling episodes in the ideological project to apply the transformation-imperative to a nihilistic, post-Christian Christendom.

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Communist World-Building II: Realized Ideological Eschatology

Father John continues his account of the Soviet Union's totalitarian project of building socialism by contrasting its nihilistic ideology with the sacramental experience of traditional Christianity.

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