Philosophy of Religion
Pensees
by Blaise Pascal(1670)
The unfinished masterpiece. Fragments toward a defense of Christianity that became, by accident, one of the most honest accounts ever written of what it means to be a thinking reed in an indifferent universe. Krailsheimer's translation.
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Episodes featuring this book
What Did Dostoevsky Actually Believe About God?
Hell is not punishment from God. It is the inability to love. This three-hour episode traces the Orthodox Christian tradition that shaped everything Dostoevsky ever wrote, from Isaac the Syrian and Maximus the Confessor to Gregory of Nyssa and the hesychast monks. What does it mean that sin is not a crime requiring penalty but a sickness requiring healing? That salvation is not a transaction but a transformation of the whole person? These are the questions buried inside The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. This episode is a companion to our earlier Dostoevsky exploration. Where that episode examined his ideas through a philosophical and psychological lens, this one traces them to their source: kenosis, theosis, apophatic theology, prelest, and sobornost.
Zoroastrianism: The Religion That Invented Good and Evil
Where did the idea of good and evil actually come from? Fall asleep to the complete philosophy of Zoroastrianism, the most influential ancient religion most people have never heard of. This three-hour episode traces the full arc of Zoroastrian thought, from the passionate hymns of the Gathas to the living communities that carry this ancient fire into the present. This episode explores the cosmic dualism of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, the revolutionary ethics of free will and the goodness of the material world, the astonishing influence this tradition exercised on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the Zoroastrian communities that continue to practice the world's oldest revealed religion.
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Leo Tolstoy was born on a vast Russian estate in 1828, a place of quiet and privilege that would shape everything he became and everything he later sought to destroy. He wrote two of the greatest novels in any language: War and Peace, which dismantled the myth of great men by showing that history is made by the countless small decisions of ordinary people, and Anna Karenina, which asked whether passion alone could ever carry a life. But his novels were only the beginning. In his fifties, the foundations of meaning collapsed beneath him entirely, and he turned to the Gospels with genuine seriousness for the first time. What he found there was not a theology but a practice: nonresistance to evil, love without exception, simplicity, and labor. These teachings cost him his marriage, his comfort, and his standing in the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated him in 1901. They also inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who built movements on the same tradition Tolstoy began.
Divine Hiddenness and Reasonable Nonbelief
When someone prays and hears nothing back, when a sincere seeker finds only silence, what does that tell us about whether God exists? Divine hiddenness is one of philosophy's most emotionally charged problems. If a loving God exists and wants relationship with us, why does he not make himself known to those who genuinely seek him? This exploration examines the problem from every angle, beginning with the raw experience of unanswered prayer and tracing it through scripture, the mystics, and contemporary analytic philosophy. John of the Cross described the dark night of the soul; Mother Teresa endured fifty years of spiritual darkness documented in her private letters. J.L. Schellenberg's argument from reasonable nonbelief gives the ancient cry rigorous philosophical form, claiming that the very existence of sincere seekers who find nothing is incompatible with a perfectly loving God.
Why Does Evil Exist If God Is Good?
Augustine of Hippo asked why we do what we know is wrong, why nothing ever satisfies us, and where evil comes from if God is good. This episode tells the complete story of the philosopher who shaped Western thought more profoundly than almost any other figure. It follows Augustine from his African childhood to the streets of Carthage, through nine years with the Manichaeans, to the garden in Milan where everything changed. The episode explores his revolutionary ideas: evil as the absence of good, the will divided against itself, time existing only in the mind, memory as a palace larger than the world, grace that breaks chains human effort cannot loosen, and the two cities built on two loves that have been at war since the beginning of history. It also confronts the difficult dimensions of his legacy, including his teachings on predestination, original sin, and the endorsement of coercion against religious dissenters.
The Saint Who Made Aristotle Christian
Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology to build one of the most comprehensive intellectual systems in Western history. This episode follows his life from his childhood at Roccasecca through his defiance of family opposition to join the Dominican order, his studies under Albertus Magnus, and his career at the University of Paris. It examines his masterwork the Summa Theologica in depth, including the Five Ways of proving God's existence, his metaphysics of being and existence, divine simplicity, natural law ethics, the theory of virtue, and his understanding of grace. The story concludes with his mystical vision of December 1273, when he declared all his writings to be straw, and the long arc of his legacy from condemnation to canonization to the modern Thomistic revival.