The Eric Metaxas Show - Joseph Pearce (Encore)

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Biographer Joseph Pearce explores the life of Pope Benedict XVI, "defender of the faith," whom Pearce regards as one of the greatest popes in Church history. (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Metaxus show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's LegacyP.m. Investments.com. A Texas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. I'm really excited right now. I get to talk to somebody who is a decidedly literary person. and a man of great faith. His name is Joseph Pierce. He's been on the program before talking about many books. His books on Chesterton and Solzhenitsyn and so many others. He has a new book out about someone you may have heard of,

Benedict the 16th. I think you can tell from the name that he was Pope. Remember, Benedict the 16th, a biography titled Defender of the Faith by our friend Joseph Pierce. Joseph Pierce, welcome back. great to see you. It's great to see you again, Eric. It's been some time. Good to see you again. It has. And I just have to say congratulations on the book.

It's a beautiful book. I may not be a Catholic, but I am a Christian and I have been a huge admirer of so many Catholic Christians through the years, obviously Chesterton at the top of the list. But Benedict the 16th, always in awe of him, his leadership, his intellectual abilities, his fierceness as a defender of the faith. So it seems appropriate to me that you titled the book, Defender of the Faith.

What was it that led you, Joseph, to write this biography? Well, like you, Eric, I've been an admirer of Benedict 16th for many years since, time when he was Cardinal Ratzinger prior to that. We need to remember that as well as the relatively few years he was Pope, he was St. John Paul II's right-hand man for a quarter of a century prior to that. So this man was basically the most powerful man in the church, apart from St. John Paul II, for a period of a third of the century. And it's a time, I think, of restoration for the church

after what we might call the madness and miasma of the modern. of the 1970s where the world where the church was, well, these certain members of the church were, were seduced into trying to become like the world to sort of follow the world. And you and I both admire Chesterton. And, you know, Chesterton said, we don't want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world. And I think the St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI moved the world rather than moving with it.

And there's a crucial difference. I think you're quite right. And I think there are a lot of people, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, are a little bit baffled by the leadership of Pope Francis. And also, don't really understand how it can be that someone like Benedict the 16th would have chosen to step aside. I mean, that's virtually unprecedented in 2000 years of the church. Any thoughts on that? Because I think so many people are just, just baffled. Don't understand what happened because I personally was so excited to have that kind of a pope leading the Catholic Church. And so I was dismayed at that news, of course. Yeah, I was too, saddened, dismayed. They're both appropriate words for how many of us felt when we got the shocking news that Benedict 16th had chosen to retire. I think that one of two things I would say, and a lot of this is conjecture. So I think that we do need to specify when we're dealing with conjecture.

But he clearly was hoping to retire when after St. John Paul II died, he wasn't looking to be Pope. So he took that burden upon his shoulders as an act of duty and responsibility. And I think that by the time he got to his late 70s, you know, he was. beginning to feel that he wasn't up to the job. But there's also a lot of corruption around him in the curia. And he felt and I hope that perhaps a younger man would have the vigor, the vibrancy of relative youthfulness, to be able to tackle this corruption. And I think that he resigned in the hope that we would have a decisive figure like his predecessor and like himself as one to leave the church. And that's my reading of it. Again, as I say, it's speculative and it's conjecture.

Well, I want to talk to you about the life of Benedict the 16th. By the way, how old is he today and now? Well, last week, he celebrates 95th birthday. So he's had a long, long, arduous life. That's hard for me to believe that he could be 95. My goodness. Now, so let's talk about his life. Obviously, German, his last name, Ratzinger. Talk us, I assume in your book, you go through his life from the beginning. Yeah, basically, the book is a biography and an overview of the legacy. So it's not a conventional biography, or Benedict of the 16th, but it does tell the story from the beginning, from his childhood,

where, of course, he grew up as a child under the tyranny of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. So he knows what totalitarian secularism is because he experienced it firsthand, as did, of course, St. John Paul II, with his experience of communism and the Nazis of both. So these men know the dangers of the absence of God in human affairs because they experienced it firsthand as young men. And I think that, you know, that St. John Paul II saw in Cardinal Ratzinger, someone who had the same understanding, not just of authentic Christianity and orthodoxy, but also of the dangers of secularism.

And that's why the two men, I mean, look at the two terms coined by them. It was St. John Paul II who coined the term the culture of death. and it was Benedict the 16th, actually on the eve of his election, that spoke about the dictatorship of relativism. So I think the early lives of both these men enabled them to see the horrors and terrors of a godless politics, which unfortunately in modern 21st century America, many of the younger generation appear oblivious of. Well, I think that's the heart of it, and it's why I admired John Paul the Great. and I admire Benedict, because they understood what is at stake.

They had lived through it themselves. Obviously, if Benedict the 16th is now 95 years old, he was fully aware in the midst of the Nazis in Germany. He was fully aware of what was happening at the time he saw it. And I think because John Paul, the second, similarly saw it, first, the night. Nazis, then the communists, the Soviets. They understood the levels of wickedness that can come about. I think that there are many people today, Joseph, younger people who they simply can't comprehend it, or if they grew up in America, as you didn't, but if they grew up in America the way I did and didn't have parents like mine who had lived through this hell, they simply cannot conceive

of how evil things can be when you pull God out. out, but the men were talking about they saw it with their own eyes and they spoke about it. Yes, basically the vacuum as caused by the absence of God is filled with viciousness. It's as simple as that. But we have the naivete based upon two things, I think. First of all, the dictatorship of relativism, to use Pope Benedict's own words, where we basically don't believe there's a coherent and cohesive reason governing things. both St. John Paul II and Benedict of the 16th, following in the tradition of the church, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, insisted upon the indissoluble union, the indissoluble marriage between faith and reason.

So in a world which has abandoned that for emotion and feeling and relativism and self-empowerment, you know, that we end up with the anarchy, which is the consequence of their absence. And the other thing is, of course, the absence of history. that we are so ignorant of history, particularly the younger generation, that they've been deliberately not taught it, because the history teaches lessons that the radical relativists don't want us to learn. So we now have a generation of people

that know nothing about the Nazis, nothing about the communists, nothing about secularism, and the consequence, of course, is we're in danger of making us at in the same mistakes. And we're making the same mistakes, but we're talking about it with Joseph Piers. folks. We'll be right back.

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it is a spiritual battle. So just because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the Soviet Union crumbled, it didn't mean that wickedness had left the world. There's just as much evil in the world that just takes on different forms. And what we have seen since the fall of the Soviet Union, of course, is that Marxism, apart from China, which is its own story, but Marxism becomes cultural Marxism. And it affects us everywhere we look in the United States of America. It is at its heart a spiritual battle. It's an ideological. battle. But it seems to me that Benedict the 16th,

he understood this. He understood what he was at war with. Yeah, I mean, to me, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and that other great figure, who wasn't a Pope, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, these three men experience, they're almost

exact contemporaries, and they experienced the same reality, that grim reality of secular fundamentalism. And what Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, which really plays to what you just said, Eric, is that the battle between good and evil takes place in each individual human heart. So it's a spiritual battle, basically, between the Homo Viator, the Pilgrim Man, the man on the journey who's called to get to heaven, and Homo Superbus, proud man,

who refuses the journey, who wants to do his own thing. That battle takes place in each individual human heart, and the trouble with Marxism, it actually plays to the proud man. actually not just sanctions pride, it glorifies pride. Yes, you be your own God. You do your own thing. You don't have to serve anybody else. So non-Servium, right? This is the spirit of Marxism. So it is about literally being good and evil, ultimately between God and the devil that we're seeing played out before us. Well, look, we have to be quite blunt about it. Marxism is a satanic project. There's nothing neutral about it. The kind of atheism that we're talking about, when we talk about real atheism, it's satanic. It is not some neutral anodyne thing. And you saw this

played out. Solzhenitsyn saw it with his own eyes in the labor camps, in the gulog. He wrote about it. The tremendous cruelty and inhumanities, it's really, I think, Joseph, incomprehensible to most people in the West. And it's why we've allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked so badly for so long. so that now, in a sense, by seeing the horrible fruit, by seeing some of the things happening that we could never imagine, we're finally understanding, aha, maybe we've missed something, maybe, you know, these prophetic voices, whether it's Ratzinger, Solzhenitsyn or Wojelia, how do you pronounce it,

they saw this, they tried to tell the world about it. Yeah, exactly. These men are giants who straddled the 20th and early 20th century. They're prophets. And prophets are often stung rather than listen to. And that's the problem that we really need to learn the lessons that they were teaching and preaching. Because if we don't, we're going to repeat the horrors of the 20th century. And we do need to remember the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history in terms of the body count.

And if we don't learn those lessons, we will repeat that carnage. That's the bottom line here, and that's why, you know, we do need the coherence and cohesiveness of the teaching of people such as Benedict the 16th to guide us through the darkness into which we are wondering. I have to ask you about your own story. You've been on the program before, but we have many new listeners who, first of all, they're wondering, what is that lovely accent? Where do you live now? What is your story? How did you come to be who you are today, which is to say, a writer of many books and a man of deep Christian faith? Well, I mean, I told the story, Eric, in a book called Race with the Devil, my journey from racial hatred to rational love. But in a nutshell, I, as a very young man, as a 15-year-old, to be precise, got involved with white supremacist politics.

I was very anti-Christian, very anti-Catholic, and very secular, and I sort of worship that secular fundamentalism about Hitler. So it was through the reading, first of all, of writers such as G.K. Chesterton, who, as you can see behind me there, still looks after me like a guardian angel. You know, it was the reading of Chesterton and Bellark and C.S. Lewis and J.R. Tolkien and some of these great Christian figures that led me away from the darkness. And that coupled with a spiritual healing, which I didn't even understand until I could look back in retrospect, this miraculous healing coupled with the reason that I was receiving from these great Christian writers

that led me away from the abyss. And really my life since my conversion has been one of gratitude for that conversion and a desire, if you like, to make up for all the bad things I did prior to my conversion by trying to live a good and faithful life and bring other people to the truth of Christ. And where did you grow up, Joseph? I grew up in the east end of London in England. So the accent you see here is a London accent somewhat mutilated by 20 years in the United States. That's so interesting.

Well, so yeah, so it's hard for many people to believe. One of the reasons I ask you is because people need to understand there's redemption, there's forgiveness. And to think that you were not just flirting with genuine white supremacy, See, today these terms are thrown around there. They've become utterly meaningless, but you were in the thick of it. You were, you know, hated God. We're pro-Hitler.

We forget that that does exist, and we've cheapened it, you know, beyond our understanding of it. But you were filled with that kind of a hate, and God reached you. It's an amazing story. You tell it in your book, Race, with the devil, is that the title? Race of the devil and the sub-tile is my journey from racial hatred to rational love. To rational love. Well, there's a term, rational love.

It sounds very Catholic in a good way. I just think it immediately brings to mind great theologians, but the idea of rational love. Say a little bit about that term. Yeah, well, the key thing, of course, one of the problems in the modern world is a misunderstanding about what love is. So for the relativist, love is a feeling, it's an emotion, it's intrinsically irrational, right? There's nothing you can do about it. It comes, hits you, and it goes away. Whereas for the Christian, to love is freely, freely and rationally choose to lay down your life for the beloved. It's encapsulated in the paradox of Christ that the

first shall be last, that basically love is putting yourself last and putting the other first. And the paradoxes, of course, that in doing that we actually grow ourselves, not just spiritually, but in happiness. The more we give ourselves to others, the actual happier we become. It's a paradox. It's counterintuitive. But the key thing is the rational choice to freely and rationally choose to lay down our lives for our brothers. That is what Christian love is. And that's what I discovered through the faith and reason of these people that I read and through the healing grace of Jesus Christ. And how did you, as an angry, very young man,

stumble on any of these authors? Was it Chesterton the first one? How does a young man in the east part of London stumble on Chesterton? My goodness. Well, there's actually a parallel, which I tell in my book, between my discovery of Chesterton and C.S. Lewis's.

When C.S. Lewis first read Chesterton during World War I, he was an atheist. But he couldn't help liking Chesterton, nonetheless, when I first read Chesterton, I was a white supremacist, and I couldn't help liking Chesterton nonetheless. And both of us, what C.S. Lewis said, that Cheston had more common sense than all the moderns put together, except, of course, is Christianity. And that was my exact my belief. So when I first read Lewis, in surprise by joy speaking like this, then I thought, I've got to find out who C.S. Louis is because his understanding of Chesterton is the same as mine. And then, of course, I start buying everything by Lewis.

So, you know, these two men, especially G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, you know, I held my hand, led me on. And again, through baptizing my head as well as my heart, you know, again, this connection between faith and reason led me out of the darkness of the secularism and the hatred that basically in which I'd lived since I was 15 years old into the light and truth of Jesus Christ. Did you have any inklings, no pun intended, when you were a younger person before you were 15, that you had a literary bent? Because, you know, not every white supremacist is stumbling into Chesterton and Lewis. Well, I've always been a writer. So I made a national poetry competition final when I was nine. And in the white supremacist movement, I was editing my first youth newspaper when I was. when I was 16.

So it's part of what I am. I just thanks. And that's what I was saying. I'm now hoping that the gifts I was given that I used so diabolically when I was a young man can now be used for the heavenly cause and undo perhaps some of the damage I did through my hatefielding prose. I think it's safe to say that that's happening. We're going to be right back talking to Joseph Pierce, the new book Benedict the 16th. We'll be right back. Well, we rolled up Interstate 44 like a rocket sled on rails.

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His own book is Race with the Devil, My Journey from Racial Hatred. to rational love. You do have a love of Shakespeare and of literature in general, and I know that you have edited a series of books. Is that for Ignatius? Who did you do that for? Yeah, that's the Ignatius Critical Editions. And actually, the story behind that, Eric, is I was teaching literature for Arvivere University in Florida. And I was horrified by the radical feminism, anti-Christianity, Marxism, queer theory, and the rest of it that was in the textbooks that I was given to my students. And I thought, why am I, first of all, putting this into the hands of my students, and why am I patronizing these books? Because if you're a professor

and you're setting a text, you're not buying one copy of a book, you're buying dozens. So I suggested to Ignatius Press, we should bring it out our own critical editions of classic works of literature. which would have tradition-oriented criticism of the works and not this postmodernist. So what, first of all, God bless Father Fesio for saying yes to that. God bless you for thinking of it. Every time, if somebody says I want to read a work of classic literature, almost always, if you stumble into a Barnes & Noble and you grab one of them, it will have a preface and two introductions.

by people who are radically opposed to a biblical sensibility or even to a Western sensibility. So what are some of the books in that series that you have edited? What works of literature? Yeah, so the key thing is, as you completely say, the modern academy poisons the reading of literature through these theories. So we have 27 books in the series now. There are seven Shakespeare plays amongst them. So Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and others. But we also have American literature, so the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and others.

We have Victorian literature, Wuthering Heights, Pichodorian Gray, so Frankenstein. So I say 27 titles in the series. And certainly people want to be able to pick up a critical edition of these great works and not be poisoned or affronted by the nonsense that the modern academy is poisoning this literature with. then that's the series to go to. Well, again, God bless Father Fesio and Ignatius Press. I want to say to everybody, folks, if you're interested in great literature,

go to Ignatius Press. I don't know how many books I bought over the years from Ignatius, but just most of Chesterton and so many other great authors there. But the idea that you came up with this idea, is the series continuing? Yeah, it's ongoing. series is ongoing, so we hope to continue to add titles to it as time goes on. So how does somebody, you know, coming from a postmodernist or critical theory point of view,

screw up Moby Dick, for example? I mean, it's just amazing to me that some of these books doesn't seem possible to mess with them, but obviously they've tried. Well, you know, I'm always reminded of the words of G.K. Chesterton. He said it doesn't matter how much he made the point of the story stick out like a spike, the critics would go and carefully empower themselves and something else. And that's exactly what these, because they don't want to see what's really there.

You know, Jane Austen, and again, three of her books are in the series. Now, she's being a great philosopher where she juxtaposes pride and prejudice, because if you are motivated by pride and not humility, you will approach reality, including literary texts, with a perspective which is prejudiced.

So these people bring their pride and prejudice to the text, and they don't see what's there, they see what they want to see this there, or they just condemn what is there. Well, I mean, it needs to be said that a lot of the authors you've mentioned, particularly Jane Austen, was a profound Christian. There's no way around it, is there? No, there isn't. But it's amazing how, I mean, particularly the introduction of both of Wuthering Heights, for instance, that Emily Bronte was a person's daughter and a lifelong, practicing believing Christian. And I spent the first half of the introduction to that text exposing the critical nonsense where they tried to turn her into just about everything except the Christian that she was based upon ignoring the facts, inventing the facts, and misreading

certain things she wrote. So I went through and just meticulously destroyed that nonsense in order to get back to the real author who was a profound lifelong practicing Christian, which is evident in the work. It's really amazing. What is the title of your Oscar Wilde book? My book's the unmasking of Oscar Wilde. And again, that was the, you know, pull the mask of Oscar Wilde. You actually find deep down a life, somebody had a lifelong love affair with the church. He was an unfaithful lover. He was a messed up human being. But when he was received into the Catholic church on his deathbed, it was the, it was the consummation of a lifelong love affair. So what wanted to do was to rescue Oscar Wilde from those who had made him a gay icon and a figure of

the so-called sexual liberation movement, because he said, he said that my homosexuality was my pathology, my sickness. Now, in some countries in Europe now, you can go to prison for saying that. They should send everyone to reading jail who says that. I got to tell you, your book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, I've recommended it. it very, very often. It's a spectacular book, and it really is a very, very important correction. I mean, all you're doing in the book really is telling the truth, but it becomes a correction to the ridiculous lies that, as you say, Wilde himself would have protested against the portrayal of him as some proud libertine. We'll be right back, folks, talking to Joseph Pierce. The book is

Benedict the 16th. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Joseph Pierce, P-E-A-R-C-E, who has a new book, Benedict, the 16th, Defender of the Faith. We were just talking, Joseph, about your book on Oscar Wild, and I thought it's an extraordinary thing, really, that all through the 20th century, we've had this battle, really. It's between atheist, Marxism, and really the Christian worldview, between truth. and then what really is anti-truth. And it's interesting to me how it's everywhere. I mean, you see it in literary studies. You see it in the academy. You see it in politics. You see it just about everywhere.

And it seems to me that we're living in a clarifying moment where it has become, it is clearer that I think that a lot of people that were asleep or that could ignore it are less able to ignore it today. Yeah, certainly is my hope that this will be a wake-up call to the silent and somnambulant, the sleepwalking majority, that we are fighting a battle here with the culture of death, the dictatorship of relativism. So I am hopeful of that, but we do need to remember, of course, that there's never going to be a heaven on earth and novel evil triumph over the church on earth.

But really, the end of the world for each of us as well. when we die. And all we need to do is to be good and faithful servants in the relatively short period of time we want active service, you know, in the battle against evil here on earth. Because if we are good and faithful servants on active service in this life, then we will gain the eternal victory, which is beyond the reach of all of this nonsense. Well, and it's interesting, too, because I think if you don't see it as a spiritual battle, then either you become some kind of utopianist.

You're trying to win here, whether it's a win for Marxism and the devil or a win for Christian values. But you forget that in the end, we're in a perpetual battle and that we're supposed to have hope in the midst of the battle. I think that those who aren't kind of naive utopianists are often defeated and grumpy. They just think that, well, it's all going to go to hell. Who cares? And because of that, they don't fight. They don't understand that we're called to be happy warriors in the midst of this, to speak the truth, knowing that there is someone hungry for it. And we may not know who it is.

But I think it's important for us to have hope. And I think by reading these stories, it does give us hope. Solzhenitsyn, I guess I have to say, is another one of those figures that you've written about who, I mean, if anybody knew that he was in a battle, even when he came to the West, you know, after leaving the Soviet Union, and then really not to be received here. I mean, when he gave his speech in 1978, the famous Harvard commencement speech in the rain, here you have this Old Testament prophet, in a sense, now being rejected by the West. He had been rejected by the Soviet atheist communist. Now he's being rejected by the materialists in the West. I don't remember if you write about that in your book on him,

that period. My book, Sir Bob, if you have, which takes it. Well, the first edition was published when he was still alive, but there was a revised edition that published after he died that took the whole life. But yeah, there's a lot on the Harvard address. It was a defining moment, basically, for me, even to this day, for those that are old enough to remember it, it's the way that I test whether someone's reliable.

You know, if they agree with socialists as Harvard address, they really understand the heart and root of the problem. If they take some sort of progressive response that, well, you know, communism is evil, but the West is good, you know, by which I mean the sort of the modern secular West, not Western civilization. Talking, sorry, socialism, by the way, said specifically to me, he said, I want you to make it clear that I'm not anti-Western. He said, if the iron kern had come down

and the cream of Western culture had coming over the top, of Western civilized culture, I would have rejoiced. He said, but what happened was the Iron Curtain came up, and all the dregs of Western decadence came in, Western materialism came in. And it was that Western decadence and that Western materialism that he was critiquing and criticizing in the Harvard address, basically saying that we have two ties of materialism here.

Both share the absence of God, both basically share materialistic understanding of cosmos, both communism and this Western hedonism have their roots, he said, in the Enlightenment. There's no question about that. And it's interesting to me that we're seeing those two strains come together to some extent. When you think about big tech and the cancel culture in America today, it's fascinating because there's a lot of Chinese communism mixed in with it. It's about power. It's about all those things. And it's also materialistic. It is fascinating that we're seeing in a way the coming together of those two strains at this point,

which I guess makes it a little bit clearer for some people. Yeah, I think it's good to not have a schizophrenic approach to the fight against evil. Many people did in the past that we sort of fought against one half of the evil, not the other half. I think we now see them as the same evil. And if it's the same evil, we can actually be defending ourselves from it without looking behind us. Well, the new book is Benedict the 16th. We just got about a minute left. What is Benedict the 16th doing with himself these days? It's amazing to me that he's just turned 95.

Well, he's clearly what is, our eyes set firmly on the finishing line. He's clearly now living a largely monastic prayer filled and prayer full last years of his life in order to please God attain. the reward that all of us hope for, which is the eternal presence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in heaven. And, you know, that I think is something which we should be grateful for what he's done for us in the past, but we think should understand that he's got his eyes very firmly fixed on his own future at the moment, and who can blame him for that? Do you know whether he's been writing in the last years? I think he's largely retired from such things. You think he's largely retired from such things? Because we always wonder,

Well, just wonderful Joseph Pierce to have you back again. I want to recommend all of your books to my audience, and they can find most of them at Ignatius Press. They can get a copy of Chance of the Dance by my dear departed friend, Tom Howard. So many wonderful books there. But Joseph Pierce, where can people find you? Is there a website? Yeah, if people want to check me out, it's very simple. J-P-P-E-A-R-C-E-R-C-E.com, not dot-com, but dot-co.

That's my website and keep up to date with what I'm up to, what I'm doing, if they go to that site. Say it again, Joe. J-P-P-E-R-E-R-E-O. J-P-E-E-E-O. Well, Jay-Pierce, a joy to have you. God bless you, my friend. My pleasure always, Eric. Thanks for having me.

God bless. Just a few minutes left in today's show. And Albin, let me ask you a question. Yes, sir. Does, can you tell? that I've had my wig freshened? Yes. I didn't want to say anything because it can be embarrassing when you say you look extra special to do. And you know what it is? I think that because this is a radio program, tons of our listeners who don't see what we're doing, they wouldn't even know that I'm wearing a wig.

But, you know, a big wigged gentleman is never ashamed of his wig. I say that it's an it's an a it's an aphorism. a be wigged gentleman is never ashamed of his wig. And I just want to be very, very clear that my wig has been freshened and I feel delightful. Okay. You're well, you're well quaffed. Let me, let's talk about some, some non-wig issues since we just have a few minutes left today, folks. Tomorrow, which is Thursday, we do a fresh episode of Ask Metaxus. I'm excited about that, even though I have no idea what questions you're going to ask me. And by the way, if you want to submit questions, I never really mentioned it on the radio, but go to our radio website, metaxis talk.com, and submit questions.

Please hurry up. Otherwise, I can't do it tomorrow. So you've got to do it today. Go to metaxis talk.com and submit your questions. I should also say we're pretty excited. We have Catherine Englebrecht on the program. Is that tomorrow, Albin? Yep, it should be tomorrow.

Tomorrow. Some of you know she is the person that made 2,000 mules possible. She's a hero, folks. She is a hero. And I'm going to ask her some tough questions tomorrow because a lot of people have good questions. I say, wait a minute. What about this? What about this? I'm going to ask Catherine Englebrecht about it. 2000 mules is the film that she's in. We also are going to be interviewing the guys from the Babylon B. Oh, yeah. I believe is a satire website. I believe it's a satire website. I believe it's a satire web. It seems to be. Yeah, it's the original fake news website, I think. But the problem is the world is so crazy that half of the jokes seem real. So they've gotten in trouble. They were like banned from Twitter. That's how Elon Musk kind of got sucked into the Twitter thing because of our friends of the Babylon B. It's kind of wild, right? Yeah, they interviewed them. Yep. Also, I want to mention in the weeks ahead, we really have so many great guests. If you've read my book, is atheism dead. The chapters on sunlight and water, which are just insane. Most of that, I got from a guy named Michael Denton. He's with the Discovery Institute. He's written many, many books. He has a new book out. I don't have the title in front of me. I think it's the miracle of human beings or the miracle of man or something like that. It is just another insane, amazing book. Michael Denton, I want to get him on the program talking about his new book.

An old friend James Como, the head of the New York CS Lewis Society. He's been part of that since 1969. Since he was a young man, he's been part of the New York City. He has a new book on CS Lewis out about Peralandra, which is one of my absolute favorite books of all time. It's lesser known. It is magnificent. He has written a whole book about Peralandra.

And we're going to get him in the TBN studio. I'm very excited about that. We've also got Greg Lorry. My friend Greg Lory has a book coming up. My friend Michael Yusef has a new book out. Who else do we have? We've got so many people. We've got Pat Castle with Life Runners.

We've got Kerry Lake, who's running for governor in Arizona. Let me tell you something. That woman is going to be the most amazing governor. You think Santorum, you think Desantis is awesome. Carrie Lake, if she gets to be the governor, it's going to be great. It's going to be great. So she's going to be on the program next week. Lauren Bobert will be on in the next week.

She got a lot of great stuff going on. Final reminder to you that we're doing a fundraiser with CSI. There's a lot of grief in the world, folks. We've got to all do something. What can you do? Go to Metaxus. Talk.com. Click on the banner.

Give something to help Ukrainian refugees. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.