Capital punishment with Prager (UPDATED)

UPDATE 8/9: You can now hear the interview online here.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, August 8 at 11 am PT, Joe Bessette and I will be on The Dennis Prager Show to discuss our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. 

Capital punishment on EWTN

Yesterday, Joe Bessette and I appeared on EWTN’s The World Over with Raymond Arroyo to discuss our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.  The segment can now be viewed online. 

Msgr. Swetland’s confusions

Msgr. Stuart Swetland is a theologian and the president of Donnelly College.  You might recall that, almost a year ago, he gained some notoriety for his bizarre opinion that having a positive view of Islam is nothing less than a requirement of Catholic orthodoxy.  As that episode indicates, the monsignor is not the surest of guides to what the Church teaches.  If there were any lingering doubt about that, it was dispelled by his performance during my radio debate with him last week on the subject of capital punishment.

McCaffrey and Murray on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

At Catholic Media Apostolate, Roger McCaffrey and Fr. Gerald Murray discuss my book (co-authored with Joseph Bessette) By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.

Arguments from desire

On his radio show yesterday, Dennis Prager acknowledged that one reason he believes in God – though not the only one – is that he wants it to be the case that God exists.  The thought that there is no compensation in the hereafter for suffering endured in this life, nor any reunion with departed loved ones, is one he finds just too depressing.  Prager did not present this as an argument for the existence of God or for life after death, but just the expression of a motivation for believing in God and the afterlife.  But there have, historically, been attempts to develop this idea into an actual argument.  This is known as the argument from desire, and its proponents include Aquinas and C. S. Lewis.

Is Islamophilia binding Catholic doctrine?

Catholic writer Robert Spencer’s vigorous criticisms of Islam have recently earned him the ire of a cleric who has accused him of heterodoxy.  Nothing surprising about that, or at least it wouldn’t be surprising if a Muslim cleric were accusing Spencer of contradicting Muslim doctrine.  Turns out, though, that it is a Catholic priest accusing Spencer of contradicting Catholic doctrine. 

Cue the Twilight Zone music.  Book that ticket to Bizarro world while you’re at it.

What’s around the web?

John Searle is interviewed at New Philosopher.  He’s in fine Searle form (and well-armed, as you can see from the photo accompanying the interview):  “It upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up.”

Jeremy Shearmur is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine about his work on Karl Popper and F. A. Hayek.  Standpoint magazine on Hayek and religion.

A memorial conference for the late E. J. Lowe will be held this July at Durham University. 

Steely Dan is being sued by former member David Palmer.  GQ magazine looks back on Steely Dan’s Aja, and The Quietus celebrates and cerebrates the 40^th anniversary of Pretzel Logic.  Donald Fagen’s book Eminent Hipsters is reviewed in City Journal and in the New York Observer.

See you in Sydney

I’ll be in Australia next week for the CAEC speaking tour I announced recently.  Blog activity will be sporadic at best until I return.  You can find information about the tour here, and a YouTube promo here.  The Catholic Weekly of Sydney has run an interview with me that you can read here, and a separate radio interview can be heard here.

Easter Triduum

Frank Turek of the radio program CrossExamined informs me that they will be rerunning his recent interview with me this Saturday at 10 am ET and again on Easter at 5 pm ET.  You can listen here.  I wish all my readers a holy Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  Those who have not seen them might find of interest my posts from last year on “The Meaning of the Passion” and “The Meaning of the Resurrection.”

TLS on radio

Here you can find an archive of my interview Thursday night on The Jim Bohannon Show regarding The Last Superstition. It begins roughly one-third into the broadcast. We had a vigorous exchange, though I think we ended up talking past each other to some extent. And then there was the caller who wanted to turn the discussion into a debate about the Rapture, with Jim to all appearances happy to oblige. I thought it best at that point to sit back for a while and let them go at it.

TLS radio podcast

My recent interview on The James Allen Show is now available for your listening pleasure. Go here and follow the relevant link.

TLS radio podcast

The podcast of my interview on The Jeff Whitaker Show from last Thursday is now available for your listening pleasure. My segment begins a little more than halfway through the show. Jeff slightly mispronounces my name. It's not "Fess-er" but "Fay-zer," like the phasers of Star Trek fame. (As a student once put it on a kind end-of-semester evaluation: "Set your phaser to fun!" Been trying to live up to that ever since.)

TLS on radio

New Jersey readers and podcast listeners everywhere might be interested to know that I will be on The Jeff Whitaker Show Thursday at about 3:35 pm Eastern time to discuss The Last Superstition. Tune in and see if I can boil down 2,500 years of philosophy into 25 minutes, including commercials. With a head cold.

Steele on conspiracy theories

OK, one more post on conspiracy theories, and then I’m done with them for a while. Here is an important article by David Ramsay Steele on the JFK assassination, which emphasizes two points I made in a previous post: that conspiracy theories of the sort I have been criticizing unmoor themselves from any rational foundation by making the conspirators so powerful that all the relevant evidence becomes untrustworthy; and that the “just raising questions” pretense of conspiracy theorists keeps them from seeing that the answers implied by their loaded “questions” are so fantastically implausible that no one who thinks them through very carefully could take them seriously for a moment. Steele’s points apply mutatis mutandis to 9/11 inside job theories, which are vastly less plausible than JFK conspiracy theories in any case.

Steele, incidentally, is the author of the highly recommended From Marx to Mises, and also of Atheism Explained, a better book on atheism than anything written by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, or Hitchens. (Still totally wrong, mind you, and in particular woefully inadequate in its treatment of Aquinas. But not dishonest and incompetent like the other books. Steele and I had a very gentlemanly radio debate on atheism last year.)