The Classical Mind

Round 1: Voting will be open from Monday (3/16) until Monday (3/23) ***Vote Now!***
Round 2: Voting will be open from Monday (3/23) until Saturday (3/30)
Round 3: The first semi-final round will be Monday (3/30) until Wednesday (4/1); the second semi-final round will be Thursday (4/2) until Saturday (4/4)
Round 4 (the final): Voting will be open from Monday (4/6) until Monday (4/13)
In this special bonus episode, Fr. Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson pivot from their usual textual analysis to the “Battle of the Books.” Harnessing the competitive energy of March Madness, they set out to seed the last twelve books discussed on the podcast into a tournament bracket, where the ultimate winner will be decided by listener votes. The seeding process is guided by two primary criteria: the quasi-objective historical influence of the text and the quasi-subjective literary or theological quality of the work.
The books included in the tournament are:
* Lilith by George MacDonald
* Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville
* Proslogion by Anselm
* The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
* Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
* The Aeneid by Virgil
* Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
* The Federalist Papers
* The Journey of the Mind to God by Bonaventure
* Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
* The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
* The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels


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In this episode, Father Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson are joined by Dante scholar Catherine Illingworth to navigate the harrowing depths of Dante’s Inferno. The conversation centers on the profound medieval understanding of sin not merely as a broken rule, but as a fundamental distortion of love and human nature. The hosts and their guest explore how the damned souls, such as Francesca and Paolo in Canto V, consistently refuse to take responsibility for their actions, instead blaming external forces like romantic love for their eternal demise. This introduces the foundational concept that hell is a realm where souls have misordered their affections, elevating earthly desires above their love for God and ultimately choosing their own ruin.
The discussion dives deeply into the mechanics of divine justice, specifically the concept of contrapasso, where the physical punishment seamlessly mirrors the internal reality of the sin. Through vivid examples like Capaneus, whose unyielding pride becomes his own internal and eternal torment , and Odysseus, whose final voyage represents the ultimate theological fraud of attempting to achieve salvation through human merit alone, the episode illustrates how sin deforms the human soul. The group also grapples with the modern reader’s severe discomfort with eternal damnation, contrasting contemporary universalist tendencies with Dante’s vision of a highly physical, meticulously structured afterlife where characters literally become the landscape of their own making.
Junius has a video on courtly love that may be helpful to understand some of the conversation.
Catherine Illingworth studied religion and literature at the Yale Divinity School before pursuing a PhD at UCLA in medieval literature with a specialized focus on Dante. She recently stepped away from the academic world after her young son, George, was diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative genetic disease. In response to the immense financial barriers preventing children from accessing existing, life-saving gene therapies, she founded the Bradstreet Foundation to help families lacking a commercial pathway for treatment. You can learn more about her vital advocacy work at geneforgeorge.org, and follow her updates on TikTok and Instagram by searching for Catherine Illingworth.
Endnotes:
* Catherine: “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot
* Junius: No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
* Wesley: Unreal, Unearth by Hozier


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This bonus episode of The Classical Mind serves as “front matter” to prepare listeners for a three-month reading marathon of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Join Wesley and Junius as they explain that the work is a “comedy” not because of humor, but because of its trajectory: it begins in the darkness of Inferno and ends with the “blessed life” and vision of God in Paradiso. The discussion explores the poem’s intricate architecture, consisting of 100 cantos and an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme called terza rima. The hosts emphasize that Dante intentionally wrote the poem to be read using the medieval fourfold method—literal, allegorical, moral (tropological), and eschatological—allowing it to function as both a narrative journey and a transformative spiritual school for the reader.
The episode also provides the vital historical and cosmological context required to navigate Dante’s world, from the “funnel” of Hell beneath Jerusalem to the mountain of Purgatory on the opposite side of the globe. The hosts explain how the Earth was viewed as the “cosmic dump” at the absolute bottom of a sphere-shaped universe, putting Satan as far from God as possible. Additionally, they break down the 13th-century political strife between the Ghibellines and Guelphs, noting that Dante’s own exile as a White Guelph deeply colors the text. By synthesizing the theology of Aquinas and Bonaventure with the classical poetry of Virgil, Dante created an “encyclopedia of medieval thought” that remains a high point of the Western canon.



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In this episode of The Classical Mind, Fr. Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson explore George MacDonald’s 1895 fantasy novel, Lilith. The discussion navigates the tension between MacDonald’s occasionally “fumbling” literary style and the profound, “mythopoeic” power of his spiritual vision. The episode also touches on MacDonald’s universalist leanings and his belief that even “evil that is good for you” acts as a redemptive force. Ultimately, the episode highlights how Lilith challenges readers to move beyond a dry love of books to a lived experience of the supernatural reality they represent.
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Endnotes:
* Junius: Phantastes by George MacDonald
* Wesley:
Our Next Work: Inferno by Dante Alighieri


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In this episode of The Classical Mind, hosts Father Wesley Walker and Dr. Junius Johnson dive deep into the fascinating, complex topic of Medieval Exegesis—”specifically how the medievals read the scriptures.”
Moving beyond single book analysis, this discussion traces the history of Christian exegesis from the Patristic era (Paul, Origen) to the evolution of the foundational Four Senses of Scripture (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical).
Discover the critical, often-misunderstood meaning of the Literal Sense and learn how this ancient, nuanced method of biblical interpretation offers powerful intellectual tools for solving modern-day false dichotomies.
Endnotes
* Junius: The Mystical Ark by Richard of Saint Victor
* Wesley: The Selected Spiritual Writings of Hugh of Saint Victor


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