Sacred and Profane Love
Q&A with Jennifer Frey
Tell us about your podcast. Why did you start doing one?
I certainly never imagined I would do a podcast, but I was the PI for a multi-million dollar Templeton Foundation grant titled “Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in Life” from 2015 to 2019, and as it happened we didn’t spend all of our money, so near the end of it I decided to do a podcast that I hoped would help us reach a broader audience. After thinking about the concepts in the title of my grant for a few years I came to think that the methods of philosophy were inadequate to take the full measure of them; in particular, I felt it was necessary to turn to literature, art, and theology for help. So, I settled on the concept of a podcast that explores great literature through the lenses of philosophy and theology, and that is what each episode of “Sacred and Profane Love” does. In a sense, it is a philosophy podcast (I am a philosopher, after all, and almost every episode references at least one great work of philosophy), but it certainly goes well beyond the material most philosophy podcasts would want to focus attention on. In my opinion, this is a feature rather than a bug.
The podcast is currently funded by The Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. I produce the audio content (I use a podcasting service, Squad Cast), which is then edited by a CUA philosophy student, William Deatherage. Currently, I release episodes during the academic year as my schedule permits, which works out to roughly 12-15 episodes per season. You can access it wherever you download your podcasts but if you want to access the show notes the best place to go is my blog — thevirtueblog.com.
The three episodes I find myself most often returning to are 1, 4, and 8. In episode 1 I speak with a prominent American theologian, Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Angelicum, Rome), about Aquinas on the operation of divine grace and how grace is a central theme in the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. We have rich discussions of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, “Greenleaf”, “Revelation”, and “The Enduring Chill”. I love this episode because although O’Connor is widely read and admired for her brilliant writing, I think she is mostly misunderstood, in large part because many consumers of her fiction are ignorant of Aquinas. In O’Connor’s stories, divine grace is necessary for her characters to pierce the veil of perception and see the world as it truly is. Because the action of grace in her stories is often violent or grotesque, she was sometimes called a nihilist, a label she vehemently rejected. Rather, O’Connor described herself as a Hillbilly Thomist, and episode 1 tries to explain what that might mean (As a side note, the theologian I interviewed is a banjo player from Georgia who founded a bluegrass band called The Hillbilly Thomists.
In episode 4 I speak with the award winning poet, philosopher, and literary critic Troy Jollimore (Cal State-Chico) about Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Madame Bovary. This episode explores the general theme that love and virtue require a clear vision of reality, including the reality of what makes for a good and happy life in one’s circumstances. Troy and I agree that the trouble with Emma Bovary is that she has internalised a very shallow, sentimental, romantic, and frankly fantastical vision of love; this fantasy, which Emma tries to project onto her own life, prevents her from being able to give or receive true love in her real life, with predictably terrible results.
In episode 8, I speak with philosopher Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia University) about Greek tragedy and moral agency. We discuss Bernard Williams’s essay “The Women of Trachis: Fictions, Pessimism, Ethics” in relation to Sophocles’s tragic play. Tragedy, we note, tends to put pressure on the picture of ourselves put forward by moral philosophers — namely that we are autonomous agents who by and large shape ourselves and our lives through choices made in accordance with rational principles. We discuss Williams’s belief that “stark fiction”, of which Greek tragedy is but one instance, offers us a palliative to “the tireless aim of moral philosophy to make the world safe for well-disposed people”.
Can you recommend one other philosophical podcast and tell us about one good episode?
I don’t listen to many philosophy podcasts, but I’ve always enjoyed Elucidations by Matt Teichmann. I think (in an obviously biased way) that one excellent episode featured my husband, Chris Frey, on Aristotle and the concept of nature.
Besides straight up philosophy podcasts, could you recommend another podcast?
As for non-philosophy podcasts, I am a huge fan of The Paris Review podcast. The Paris Review is, of course, the Platonic form of the literary magazine, and their (relatively new) podcast is a mix of archival audio of famous authors who have published in the magazine, which is mixed in with short stories and poems from the archives (usually read by famous actors). Each episode centres around a theme that is explored in clever and surprising ways, and the production quality is absolutely incredible.
