Religion & SpiritualityChristianity

Paradise and Utopia

Fr. John Strickland, and Ancient Faith Ministries

Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Christendom

Play

Open in

20 episodes
English

Episodes 20

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

June 10 · length unknown
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.
April 3 · length unknown
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.
January 9 · length unknown
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.
Dec 5, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Nov 14, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Oct 31, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Sep 19, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Aug 29, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Jul 4, 2025 · length unknown
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.
Jun 27, 2025 · length unknown
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.
May 30, 2025 · length unknown
Communist World-Building I: The Revolution from Above
In this episode, Fr. John begins a discussion of ideological world-building during the twentieth-century age of nihilism. The Communist leadership of the Soviet Union under Stalin drew on the philosophies of both Marx and Nietzsche to advance a terrifying counterfeit of the transformation-imperative in ancient Christian cosmology.
Feb 20, 2025 · length unknown
Dehumanization II: The Great War and Its Cultural Outcome
Father John describes the way the First World World shattered confidence in utopia with Western Christendom, and how the growing specter of nihilism caused a small and diverse group of intellectuals to return to traditional Christianity in the years that followed.
Feb 13, 2025 · length unknown
Dehumanization I: Artistic Modernism and the Dismal Sciences
In this episode, Fr. John reviews the rise of modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century, an artistic movement that largely annihilated centuries of tradition in Western painting, music, and literature. He continues by exploring the rise of dehumanizing and demoralizing views of the human condition advanced by atheistic social scientists of the period such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.
Jan 16, 2025 · length unknown
Dostoevsky IV: Restoring Christendom's Paradisiacal Culture
In this final episode telling of Dostoevsky's encounter with the "specter of nihilism," Fr. John brings attention to the novelist's characters that most revealed the radiant hope of Christ. The first of these was Prince Lev Myshkin in the novel The Idiot. The second was Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. The episode concludes with an excerpt from Age of Nihilism about Dostoevsky's vision of the heavenly transformation of the world.
Jan 9, 2025 · length unknown
Dostoevsky III: Repentance Will Save the World
In this episode, Fr. John reflects on Dostoevsky's spiritual prescription for Christendom as it began to fall under the specter of nihilism. Repentance was the center of the paradisiacal culture of the first millennium, and in his novels Dostoevsky countered atheistic contemporaries like Nietzsche by showing how neglect for it leads only to the human being's self-destruction.
Apr 4, 2024 · length unknown
Dostoevsky II: Shattering the Illusion of Utopian Rationalism
Returning to a literary career after a decade of exile, Fyodor Dostoevsky confronted one of the great delusions of secular humanism: that man is ultimately a rational being whose happiness depends on the exercise of self-interest. Characters in his novels The Idiot and Demons were designed to demonstrate that nihilistic self-destruction is the only outcome of such convictions. Father John concludes the episode by showing how nihilism played itself out in the fictional moral collapse of Dostoevsk
Mar 21, 2024 · length unknown
Dostoevsky I: A Believer among Atheists.
In this summary of the second chapter of his book, The Age of Nihilism, Fr. John discusses the early life and faith and incarceration of Russia's great novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Unlike his contemporaries--particularly Nietzsche--the novelist found in traditional Christianity the only hope for a Christendom living under the terrible specter of nihilism.
Mar 14, 2024 · length unknown
The Making of an Antichrist IV: "Behold the Man"
In this final presentation on the nihilistic philosophy of Nietzsche, Fr. John considers the philosopher's final work, an autobiography entitled Ecce Homo. The book's strange title is discussed in light of Nietzsche's claim to be the West's alternative to Christ. The episode ends with a spiritual and psychological reflection on why, having completed the work, Nietzsche went totally insane.
Mar 1, 2024 · length unknown
The Making of an Antichrist III: An Anti-Gospel
In his continued account of Friedrich Nietzsche, Fr. John discusses the megalomaniac philosopher's effort to replace the Gospel with an atheistic "transvaluation of all values."
Jan 11, 2024 · length unknown
The Making of an Antichrist II: Unmasking Secular Humanism
Friedrich Nietzsche is in many ways the father of modern nihilism. In this episode, Fr. John describes the philosopher's relationship to the atheism of contemporary utopian Christendom, and how the music of Richard Wagner played a role in leading him toward nihilism. As with previous episodes, this one introduces the listener to some music that is both beautiful and historically important.

Showing 1–20 of 20 episodes