On this episode, I converse with the journalist Damon Linker concerning the Pulitzer prize successful American playwright, Eugene O’Neill. Our dialog principally facilities round A Lengthy Day’s Journey Into Night time, the semi-autobiographical account of the tortured dynamics inside in his circle of relatives. We talk about O’Neill’s uniquely Catholic variety of atheism, of how his work resonates with themes from Simone Weil, in her essay, “Literature and Morals,” the distinction between a transcendence that orders the self to the nice and the transcendence that’s ordered in direction of the obliteration of the self, and eventually, O’Neill’s his tragic imaginative and prescient of the human particular person.
Damon and I had initially deliberate to debate The Iceman Cometh as nicely, however we ran out of time. Fortunately, we acquired again collectively to report a PATRONS ONLY episode on Iceman. Should you’d prefer to assist the podcast, and take heed to our dialogue of Iceman, please signal as much as be a patron right here:
https://www.patreon.com/eudaimoniapod
As at all times, I hope you get pleasure from our dialog.
Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at The Week.com. In recent times, he has taught within the Essential Writing Program on the College of Pennsylvania and labored as a consulting editor on the College of Pennsylvania Press and as a senior editor at Newsweek/The Day by day Beast. Till November 2014 he was a contributing editor at The New Republic. Linker is the creator of The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders. His essays and evaluations have appeared in The New York Occasions, The Washington Put up, The Wall Road Journal, and different main publications. He has edited First Issues journal, served as a speechwriter for New York’s Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and taught political philosophy at Brigham Younger College. Linker studied historical past, philosophy, and writing at Ithaca School, graduating with a BA in 1991. He went on to earn an MA in historical past from New York College and a Ph.D. in political science from Michigan State College. Born in New York Metropolis, Linker lives in suburban Philadelphia together with his spouse and two youngsters.
Jennifer Frey is an affiliate Professor of Philosophy on the College of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology on the Catholic College of America. Previous to becoming a member of the philosophy college at USC, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities on the College of Chicago, the place she was a member of the Society of Fellows within the Liberal Arts and an affiliated college within the philosophy division. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy on the College of Pittsburgh, and her B.A. in Philosophy and Medieval Research (with a Classics minor) at Indiana College, in Bloomington, Indiana. She has printed extensively on motion, advantage, sensible purpose, and meta-ethics, and has just lately co-edited an interdisciplinary quantity, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology. Her writing has additionally been featured in Breaking Floor, First Issues, Fare Ahead, Picture, Regulation and Liberty, The Level, and USA As we speak. She lives in Columbia, SC, along with her husband, six youngsters, and 6 chickens. You possibly can comply with her on Twitter @jennfrey.
Music credit, “Assist me Any person,” by Brian Eno and David Byrne, licensed beneath CC BY-NC-SA 2.5
