Sacred and Profane Love

In this season finale, internationally acclaimed poet Dana Gioia and I discuss Seneca's thought in general, and his tragic work The Madness of Hercules in particular. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I speak with my colleague, Lars Engle, on the poetry and person of John Donne. There is no poet more attuned to the connections between the sacred and the profane than Donne, and it was a pleasure to hear Donne's poetic voice through Engle's readings. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I discuss Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with Aaron Gwyn.  I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I speak with Stephen Karian, renowned scholar of 18th century British literature, on the poems of Jonathan Swift, the promise and perils of satire, and the pleasures of reading profane poetry written by one of the great Divines.  I hope you enjoy our conversation. Read along with us at .

In this episode, I am joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips to discuss poetry, classic texts, art, and truth. I hope you enjoy our conversation!

In this episode, I speak with the classicist Julia Hejduk on Ovid's The Art of Love. I hope you enjoy our conversation!    

In this episode, I speak with my colleague at TU, Boris Dralyuk on Vladmir Nabokov’s delightful take on the campus novel, Pnin.  We explore our endearing hero’s journey from being a man on the wrong train to becoming an American behind the wheel at long last.  I hope you enjoy our conversation.    Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, and has taught there and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020 he received the inaugural  from the Washington Monthly. In 2022 he received the inaugural  from the National Book Critics Circle for his translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. You can find him on X .   Jennifer A. Frey is the inaugural dean of the , with a secondary appointment as professor of philosophy in the department of philosophy and religion. Previously, she was an Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina, where she was also a Peter and Bonnie McCausland faculty fellow in the . Prior to her tenure at Carolina, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and a junior fellow of the .   She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and her B.A. in philosophy and Medieval Studies (with a Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. In 2015, she was awarded a multi-million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, titled “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” She has published widely on virtue and moral psychology, and she has edited three academic volumes on virtue and human action. Her writing has been featured in First Things, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.  She lives with her husband and six children in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is on X      

In this episode, I speak with the political theorist Patrick Deneen about Don DeLillo’s award winning novel, White Noise.  We explore the novel’s undercurrents of existential angst in a world of distraction, amnesia, and unfulfilled longings. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Six years ago I launched a literature, philosophy, and theology podcast.  I had no assumptions that anyone would listen to it; it was an output for a grant project on virtue, happiness, and meaning of life. Today, I am thrilled to announce the launch of season 5 of Sacred and Profane Love, now fully supported by , where I am privileged to serve as dean of their Honors College. In this episode, I explain the hiatus and share some exciting news about the podcast, including our new friends over at Switchyard. Learn more at .

In this episode, I speak with my colleague, Agnes Mueller, who is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina, about why Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, is a must-read during our ongoing pandemic. We talk about Modernism, Plato, and Nietzsche. We see the novella as exploring sickness, death, and eros, and we find similarities and continuities between the lovesickness that grips von Aschenbach and cholera that eventually kills him. We also ask whether Mann’s novella is a rebuke of, or perhaps even a vindication of, Plato’s ideal of erotic love. Either way, we agree that the novella is a deep engagement with Platonic ideas and is one of the best treatments of love in literature, period. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Agnes Mueller (M.A., LMU Munich, Germany, 1993, Ph.D., Vanderbilt U, 1997), a Professor, is an expert on recent and contemporary German literature. She is core faculty in Comparative Literature and affiliated with Women’s and Gender Studies and with Jewish Studies. Her publications are on German-American relations, multicultural studies, gender issues in contemporary literature, German-Jewish studies, and Holocaust studies. Her 2004 anthology German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? (U of Michigan P) is widely used for teaching and research. In addition to all levels of German language and culture, she regularly teaches advanced undergraduate and graduate classes, and has lectured in Germany, Canada, and the U.S. Her most recently published book is entitled The Inability to Love: Jews, Gender, and America in Recent German Literature now available in German translation as Die Unfaehigkeit zu lieben. She is currently at work on a new project, entitled Holocaust Migration: Jewish Fiction in Today’s Germany. In it, she traces the ways in which challenges of living in a multi-ethnic society where past trauma is dispersed are negotiated. Jennifer A. Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. Prior to joining the philosophy faculty at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department.  She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Studies (with Classics minor) at Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Her writing has also been featured in First Things, Fare Forward, Image, The Point, and USA Today. She lives in Columbia, SC, with her husband, six children, and six chickens. You can follow her on Twitter @jennfrey Sacred and Profane Love is a podcast in which philosophers, theologians, and literary critics discuss some of their favorite works of literature, and how these works have shaped their own ideas about love, happiness, and meaning in human life. Host Jennifer A. Frey is inaugural dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. The podcast is generously supported by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and produced by Catholics for Hire.