Paradise and Utopia

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.