American Political History

Every government claims the right to do what no private person may — to tax, to jail, to send men to die. By what right? For most of history the answer was God’s will or the king’s sword. Then a handf...

4 Jul 202329min

“Rights” is the most powerful word in American political life — and one of the slipperiest. Everyone claims them, on every side, for opposite things, and almost no one stops to define what a right act...

4 Jul 202329min

The free-will defense answered the problem of evil — but it rested on one claim: that we are free. So this episode puts freedom itself on trial, against a God who knows the future before it happens an...

4 Jul 202330min

In the year 524, a condemned man named Boethius sat in a cell awaiting a brutal execution and wrote down the question that has haunted the West ever since: if there is a God, whence comes evil? It is ...

4 Jul 202328min

For a thousand years they would not stand together. Greek reason was the pride of the pagans the Church had buried; Roman law was the law of the empire that fed Christians to the lions; and the philos...

4 Jul 202328min

In the year 1 BC, an ordinary, loving husband wrote home to his pregnant wife with a casual instruction: if the child is a girl, expose it. It was normal. It was legal. And it captures the world that ...

4 Jul 202331min

The Romans had a horror of one word — rex, king — and after they threw out their last one, they spent five centuries building a government designed so that no single man could ever rule them again. Th...

4 Jul 202330min

In 585 BC, the sun went dark over a battlefield — and one Greek had said it would, not by reading the will of the gods, but by working out that the heavens run on a pattern the human mind can grasp. T...

4 Jul 202332min