Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think

Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think

Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up

For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don't challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment.

In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Ross joined Tyler to discuss what getting routed by Christopher Hitchens taught him about religious debate, why the simulation hypothesis resembles ancient Gnostic religion, what Mexican folk Catholicism reveals about spiritual intermediaries, his evolving views on papal authority in the Francis era, what UFO sightings might tell us about supernatural reality, why he's less apocalyptic than Peter Thiel about the Antichrist, and why he's publishing a fantasy novel on Substack before AI potentially transforms creative writing.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.

Recorded January 16th, 2025.

Help keep the show ad free by donating today!

Other ways to connect

Photo Credit: Abigail Douthat ©

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(295)

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's ...

22 Jul 0s

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land...

15 Jul 54min

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human ...

8 Jul 46min

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern...

24 Jun 50min

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue ...

17 Jun 53min

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Br...

10 Jun 1h 1min

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to ...

27 Mai 45min

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: ...

13 Mai 55min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
foreldreradet
treningspodden
mikkels-paskenotter
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
rss-kunsten-a-leve
hverdagspsyken
sinnsyn
rss-sarbar-med-lotte-erik
gravid-uke-for-uke
dopet
fryktlos
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
rss-bisarr-historie
hva-er-greia-med
rss-impressions-2
jakt-og-fiskepodden
rss-var-forste-kaffe