The Eric Metaxas Show - Margarita Mooney Clayton (continued)

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Margarita Mooney Clayton continues her examination of how beauty shaped Christian civilization with her book, "The Wounds of Beauty: Seven Dialogues on Art and Education."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis 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 legacy p.m. Investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Ladies and gentlemen, we ask you now to count down from 10, silently, if you don't mind. And when you get to one, you'll hear one of the greatest voices on this or any other planet.

Three, two, one. Eric Matt Taxi! Hey, the folks, welcome back to the program. Now, before we continue our substantive conversation with Margarita Mooney, we get to goof around. We have J.P. Sears with us for one segment. He is a comedian, but he cares about truth. But don't comedians, most good comedians, care about truth? J.P. Sears, welcome the program.

Thank you. Good to be here. Hey, I love that question. Don't most good comedians care about truth? Absolutely. The good ones do because the number one, the most important principle in comedy is the truth principle. There has to be a grain of truth or more in the joke in order for it to resonate with people,

for it to be funny. And I think even better is a joke has the truth principle finds two, where not only is it rooted in truth, but it then exposes someone to consider a greater truth that they hadn't been thinking of before. Well, you've been a comedian for some time now. I want to ask you, before we get, the reason you're here ultimately is because you appear in the documentary,

a new documentary called The Real Anthony Fauci, based on the book by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the real Anthony Fauci. And it's a gruesome story. I mean, it is a gruesome story when you realize how we have given tremendous power to individuals like Anthony Fauci. And he has the personality. They kind of smile.

They kind of make you feel good. And you have no idea what they've been doing behind the scenes, which is monstrous. And we want to be clear, gain of function research, working with the Chinese. in labs, in Wuhan, China. This is as dark as it gets. It is wrong. And yet, when the information comes out, he used all his power to cover it up. And we are still seeing most of the mainstream media.

This is a level of complicity. Big pharma, big tech, mainstream media. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, except guess what? We're no longer buying that lie that, oh, it's a conspiracy. conspiracy theory. No, no, no. This is called an actual conspiracy, and it's been uncovered, and it's despicable, and we will never stop talking about it, because now we know we can connect the dots. This film, the real Anthony Fauci, the movie, does that from May 23rd, which is some days ago, for 10 days. So I don't know what that adds up to, June 2nd or 3rd, whatever that is.

You can see the film for free. The real Anthony, if you have to go to the website, folks, the real Anthony Fauci movie.com, the real Anthony Fauci movie.com. But we're all kind of responsible for this because this is horrific, it's monstrous. But I want to talk to you J.P. Sears a little bit about comedy because what I've noticed is that as things have gone totally insane in haywire, there have been comedians who are not where you are or I am with regard to faith or politics, but they are seeing the craziness and they're commenting on it, whether it's Bill Maher, or there are a number of people who are saying, wait a second, we're being lied to, what's going on. So there, there's a vital role that, that comedy plays in telling to. So I just

want to ask you, JPC, there's two questions. First of all, how do people find you online? Yeah, the best place to find me is my website, awaken withjap.com. Awaken withjp.com. Yeah, and that'll be linked to all of my online content on YouTube and everything. But Awakenwithjapy.com is the single best place. Okay. So that's my first question. Awakenwithjapy.com is the answer.

Because you really are funny and you comment on a variety of things. But I also want to ask you, like, what's your story? Now, those, how did you get into comedy? Where did you grow up? You know, first of all, where did you grow up? Yeah, I grew up in Ohio, a small farm town called Bowling Green. And I lived there until I was 23. And then I lived all over since San Diego, South Carolina.

Now I've been in Texas for the past six years. And how I got started into comedy in comedy is a big happy accident. I stumbled into it. But I have been doing health coaching for 13 years. personal training, exercise, nutrition with clients. And, you know, this one day I started having this idea to convey a perspective for a comedy video. And I thought, well, I can't do that.

I'm not a comedian. I don't even know how to make a video, let alone upload to YouTube. But I figured it out and I thought it'd be a bad idea, but I did it anyway. And that woke something up inside of me, this creative satisfaction and also this fulfillment from being able to reach a lot of people with, yes, comedy, but more important to me at least, is a more meaningful message conveyed through the comedy. So I uploaded one YouTube video and then a couple weeks later I had this masterful idea. I thought, maybe I could do another one. And that was about nine years ago. And after about a year of once

and a while uploading videos, I realize like, I'm actually capped into something sustainable. This is so fulfilling to me. It's so fun. It's bringing joy and thinking to people's lives. And then eventually I let go of the previous career of health coaching to just go all in on comedy, both comedy videos, stand-up comedy and other opportunities that have come along. Did you, as a kid growing up, did you know you were funny? Like, because, you know, I don't, I'm just fascinated at how people develop. Did you know you were funny, but you just kind of put that to the side? Yeah, there were two things.

I knew I was funny as a kid. You know, I was a class clown. I was always making my family laugh. But I didn't have enough belief in myself to think that I could be funny professionally as a comedian. So it took me, honestly, until I was about 33 years old to figure out, oh, like, I can actually do that. But yeah, as a kid, I had no ambition of being a comedian and certainly making videos online. There was no internet when I was a kid. So that kind of thing was certainly not part of my vision.

But I've realized for myself, when I do my best to follow my heart, and I'm not perfect at it, but when I do, life works out better than what my mind could plan. And what was your faith journey, your political journey, were you always kind of where you are now, or did that happen at some point? Yeah, I've grown, evolved and changed quite a bit. So, you know, when I was in my early 20s, I got into sort of a new age spirituality, living out in California,

and there's a lot of great stuff there. And but the really where, where I started to really cherish Christian values and getting into politics simply because I love freedom and if freedom's being challenged, I'm on board. I need wherever that arena is. So in the spring of 2020, freedom became a political issue. And from my, I might sound crazy, Eric, but from my point of view, starting in 2020 and it's still going on, evil had never been so obvious to me. You are singing my song.

That's exactly what I say over and over. It had never been obvious so that almost everybody says, wait a minute, this is not just different or different point of view. There's no other category. This is evil. And therefore, the only answer is God. And a lot of non-Christians were kind of waking up to that. So that's, I mean, that's fascinating to me that you had that journey.

I want to remind people, They want to connect with you. Awaken withjp.com. We've been very serious here, folks, but this is a funny guy. Awakenedwithjp.com. And I also want to say, we've been talking about the film that you have a small part. It's a documentary, so you don't play a role. You don't play Evil Knievel or Napoleon Bonaparte.

You actually play yourself and you speak. But the film is the real Anthony Fauci movie.com. You can still see it for free. the real anthony fouchi movie.com. Unfortunately, it's important. Fortunately, it's free. The real Anthony Faucimovie. com.

J.P. Sears, got to have you back. Thank you for what you do. Well, it's been a joy talking with you, Eric. I appreciate you having me on and would love to do the dance with you again. Do it again. God bless you. With the overturn of Roe v. Wade, lots of companies are coming out saying they'll pay for employee abortion

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Hey there, folks. I told you that I would have Margarita, Mooney back on the program because I want to talk about her book, The Wounds of Beauty, more than we got to talk about it last time. There's so much to talk about. It's such an important concept. It's called The Wounds of Beauty, Seven Dialogues on Art and Education. So Margarita, Mooney Suarez, Clayton, first of all, welcome back. Thank you. And I want to, I want to, want to talk to you again about this central idea that we're putting forth, because this is really the larger thesis, is that God is real. He created us in his image, and we are inescapably created for goodness, truth, and beauty. These are not inessentials or non-essentials. And this atheistic,

Marxist idea, this modernist idea, that we're just animals and we just need the basics, we need food and shelter, and that's enough. Beauty doesn't matter. That's a lie. Ultimately, it's a satanic lie. It's a destructive lie, and it's a lie that has come into culture big time, obviously since the beginning of the 20th century, and it's worked its way through the culture, and it has corroded people's souls. And the only way back is we have to rediscover a vision of goodness, truth, and beauty. And that's really what you and I are talking about. And it's what you get at in your book The Wounds of Beauty.

So I don't know where to start. I guess I want to ask you about you have seven dialogues with seven people in the book, some of whom I know. I know Francis Meyer. You have him. You're talking to him in the book. in one of these chapters on the origins of the pessimism in contemporary education and on the power of beauty to cure it. What does he mean by that? Well, in my discussion with Fran Meyer, we focus a lot

on the writings of Sir Roger Scruton. And Roger Scruton was actually a student sort of rebel in the 1960s, but got really turned off by the destruction in the student protests in 1968 across Europe. And so that title is really kind of from one of Scruton's essays called The Uses of Pessimism. And I think the idea that I'm trying to get out with my conversation with Fran Meyer is that human beings are made for the absolute. And any political system that tells you that you can be completely satisfied or completely happy or completely fulfilled in this life is false, right? So what Scruton is saying, what Fran Meyer is saying is that, look, we need to be pessimistic in the sense of recalling that

the world is fallen and that we are by nature incomplete. And any kind of striving that tries to satisfy all of our senses is actually going to end up deepening the void. You know, we've talked a bit, Eric, about some of the political ideologies that are trying to dissolve beauty in architecture or in art schools. But the other danger is really the kind of endless entertainment that claims to be fulfilling us, whether that's, you know, music or images. And why is that kind of entertainment dangerous? Well, because it's misleading. To the extent that images on social media look so absolutely perfect, then they're not pointing you to something beyond themselves. And so this kind of fake beauty that a lot of people are filling up.

Like, we have this hunger for beauty. So a lot of people find it through aesthetic consumption of one kind or another. But I picked the title, The Wounds of Beauty, to remind people that true beauty wounds us because it points us to something beyond itself. So just think of the last time you experienced a beautiful sunset or a gorgeous concert or you were really moved by a piece of art. That true beauty doesn't leave you feeling filled. It leaves you feeling inspired,

but it moves you to seek out the source of that beauty. Actually, we were talking about CS Lewis last time. I've been reading a lot of Thomas Howard, who in one of his essays, because there's a new collection of his essays coming out by Ignatius, refers to some famous passages of C.S. Louis, Lewis is where he talks about precisely this, that there is something about looking at a glorious landscape that it's beautiful and satisfying and also frustrating because somehow you want to

enter the landscape. You want to become one with the beauty. And that's the promise when we get to heaven. When we're one with God, we step into, we become part of the beauty. And of course, Lewis talks about it as Zainzuht. It's this kind of, um, you feel an unfulfilled desire that somehow in its unfulfillment, it's pointing you toward the fulfillment, toward God, toward a greater beauty. The beauty is pointing you to what you're really looking for. And that you can't, as you just said, you cannot be satisfied by, I look at the landscape and I'm filled up. No, I look at the landscape and on the one hand, I'm filled up.

On the other hand, I'm frustrated because I want more of it. I want to know the author of the beauty. Precisely. You know, Eric, when I was in graduate school at Princeton University, studying sociology for my Ph.D., I split my time between the library, you know, reading all these books on economic development and political history and all that, and the beautiful university chapel. And look, I had my struggles as a young person like everyone did.

You know, people close to me died or people betrayed me. And even though I was going to church and like the Princeton University Chapel is a beautiful place, I still thought that in order to feel better when life was tough, I would just go out with my friends and talk and share everything. And I got a lot of emotional support. Or, you know, we'd go do something fun. Let's just go to the beach or let's go, let's just go to the pool, right? So I sort of tried to drown my sadness with emotional fulfillment. And, you know, it didn't work because at the end of those great experiences, there's still this void in you.

And so I began to study really the mystical tradition in Christianity, reading people like Edestein who became St. Teresa Benedict of the Cross or St. Teresa of Avila. And for me, what really changed me was learning the great tradition of Christian contemplative prayer because there you find an inner peace. And so what I then learned was that this great tradition of contemplative prayer is supposed to prepare you to receive the beautiful things of the world, an art, architecture, music without needing to be filled by them because you know the source. And you don't know about the source. You know the source because you're doing this kind of deep prayer that brings you to

know God. That's interesting. I mean, that's a, that's a sort of Catholic way of saying what I myself have heard and have said the same thing. The question is, how do I respond? And the only way really to respond is to be inwardly praising God for the beauty. In other words, it leads you to worship, not to worship the beauty, but to worship the author of the beauty. And that's the only satisfying response. But I've never heard it put that way and that some of these contemplatives helped you to get there. That's absolutely fascinating. Well, also, you know, Eric, I was lucky to go on a retreat when I was in graduate school.

And so what I realized was that prayer, knowing God through worship and prayer, was the only thing that gives lasting satisfaction. Now, it's not that practicing prayer or worship, you sort of float above everybody else and you have this kind of spiritual ecstasy all the time, but that the great traditions of Christian prayer and worship are there to continuously invite us to the relationship with God, that a relationship with God isn't only about how hard I work and how much I give to others and how many causes I care about, all of which are good things. But the message of Christianity is ultimately that our happiness isn't coming to know God. And when I practice that, then everything else I did in my work and in trying to help other people, I had a sense of the holistic picture, right? That, look, I can't solve all of my friends' problems. I can't solve

all the world's problems. We are called to be salt in the world and we are called to work in the world. But we're not called to be activists in the sense of turning everything into a strategy because in the end, as I mentioned, this world is fallen and it's broken. So we need that prudential wisdom. And as we actually think learning these great traditions of beauty are actually about learning how to live properly in the world. And if we don't educate people for that, And honestly, if our worship is full of a lot of noise, a lot of young people are turning to things like yoga to find that inner peace. You know, and the fact that they're not finding that inner peace through their own traditions of worship and prayer is a little bit worrisome. Yeah. And yoga, you can find demons. We'll talk about that on another program. But there's some dark spirituality at the back of that. And we're not kidding around.

We have to go to a break. Folks, I'm talking to Margarita Mooney, Suarez, Clarez. Clayton. Make up your mind. Margarita Mooney, the author of The Wounds of Beauty. We'll be right back. Love lost such a cost. Give me things that don't get lost. Like a coin that won't get tossed. Are you tired of not getting a good night's sleep? Well, my friend, Mike Lundell has created the perfect solution. He didn't just stop at the pillow. He also created the Giza Dream bed sheets. Made from the world's best cotton called Giza, these sheets are ultra-soft and breathable, yet extremely durable.

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It has worked for about 70% of the half a million people who've tried it and have ordered more on one of them. Go to Relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief to find out about this offer. Feel the difference. Welcome back. Talking to Margarita Mooney. about her book, Margarita. It's called The Wounds of Beauty. And again, it's a beautiful and important title,

the idea of the wounds of beauty, that it's not about beauty ultimately, but that beauty is important. That's right. And, you know, one of the other interviews I do in the book, which we haven't talked about yet, is with a woman whose nickname is The Cheese Nun. Now, who is the Cheese Dun?

That's what I wanted to know when somebody asked me if I knew her. And so I looked her up, And the cheese nun is a Benedictine sister from the abbey of Regina Loudis in Connecticut, who got a PhD in microbiology from the University of Connecticut and makes artisanal cheeses. And they actually made a documentary about it called the Cheesan. I mean, honestly, I was waiting to ask you about this because it is really, it says one of these people is Sister Noella, Marcellino, OSB, on the Benedictine Way,

and its pattern of authentic living as expressed in chant and cheese making. I didn't see that coming. Well, precisely. So when I wanted to introduce students to these ideas, the first thing I did, I was at, I was on the faculty at Yale at the time. I loaded up a group of students, some Catholic, some from a more evangelical, Protestant background, and we drove to this monastery to meet the cheese nut. And where in Connecticut is this month?

It's Bethlehem, Connecticut, kind of by Damberry. You mean Bethel, Connecticut? No, I think it's Bethlehem. It's not. It's not. I know Bethleh, I know Bethel. I mean, I know. Anyway, it doesn't matter because people can look up sister, Noella, Marcellina, and find it.

But I'm just so fascinated that you actually got to do this. Right. By the way, she's now moved out to a monastery in Shaw Island in Puget Sound. But at the time, she was in Connecticut. And I've since taken students back there many times. And they make us do agricultural work. So some of my students said, I didn't know nuns used. chainsaws. Well, the Benedictans have this committed life of liturgical prayer, the liturgy the hours.

They chant all of the Psalms, which, by the way, is a practice that I think a lot of Christians are recovering. In my house, we use the Book of Common Prayer with the Psalms and chant them with our students. But they also work with their hands. And chainsaws. And chainsaws. It is the Amish who do not use chainsaws. Benedictine nuns do. They clear the land. Yeah. And they farm. Do they use backers? They use all the traditional kinds of agricultural. So they don't draw the line at huge hydraulic equipment? They, as far as I know, they use any of it. Okay.

But the point is that Sister Nuela, who's been a sister now for 50 years, she had dropped out of, I think it was Sarah Lawrence College, and was a Vietnam War protester. And suddenly felt this deep loss of meaning and ended up going to a monastery to attend some sort of an event and to see. discovered what she needed was tradition and authority and ultimately God. But what I want to do in the book, The Wounds of Beauty, is introduce people a little bit to the Benedictian tradition because it's both deeply contemplative and it's also incredibly practical. It is about working the land. It's about craft. You know, one of the things happening in our culture is this return to arts and crafts, right? Everybody wants to be an artist and everybody wants to make craft. Well, we are meant to make things. And again, what I think the tradition of beauty and Christianity tells us is that in learning to be a craftsman, we should learn from the greats that came before us.

Because God has given us the capacity, as I said earlier, to bring order out of chaos. And we have to take the time to slow down and learn the great traditions of beauty. And so one of the other risks that I think we have now is it's almost this idolatry of science or the scientific method, as if somehow the natural world isn't also. created by God and revealing God to us and bringing us back. So what Sister Noella says, particularly about cheese making, beautiful cheese, great tasting cheese, comes from fungi. It comes from death, right? So what she says is that we can think analogously about human life and the meaning of creation, death, and resurrection by studying the natural world. So a lot of people are instinctively drawn to beauty through nature, but the Christian tradition doesn't idolize nature,

because nature decomposes. It's part of its natural cycle. And nature is moving through creation, death, and resurrection, but it's moving back to its creator. And again, I found that when students were able to spend a weekend with me at a Benedictine monastery, or I took some students for a week to a monastery in England and one in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, they're not just reading, they're actually living a different way of life. And then the challenge then becomes how to take these lessons of contemplative prayer, of chanting, manual labor, and live a more integrated, holistic, and happy life. People are so hungry for this. It's why many people are leaving the church, whatever church they're in, because they know there's got to be more. And this idea of groundedness, that's the, you know,

the term usually that I come up with when we're discussing something like this. What is it about working with your hands? What is it about being close to the land or close to your food sources? What is there about that that is somehow unavoidably important? It's fascinating to me that it is, that God keeps leading us back. We're created in a way that if everything becomes digitized, everything becomes in pill form, if everything is syllogisms, we become less human. I think there's a lot of humility to be learned. through manual labor. And there's a lot of knowledge that's communicated because in order to

take a few different pieces of something and make a great meal or in order to garden, in order to grow something, you have to learn how to take what's given to us in nature and create a more perfect, a better order out of it. And there's something really fulfilling with that. At the same time, working with nature teaches us our limitations. Nature doesn't bend itself to our pure will somehow. Well, that's because nature is closely related to this thing we call reality. Nature and nature's God. Man, deep stuff. We'll be right back.

Final segment talking to Margarita Mooney. The book is The Wounds of Beauty. We are talking to Margarita Mooney, Suarez Clayton. The book is The Wounds of Beauty. And we were just talking off the air about the actual location of this monastery that you visited in Connecticut. in Bethlehem, Connecticut. And we discovered that it's up sort of in the Waterbury area. So if you're in New Haven at Yale, you would feel like it's close to Danbury, but it's not that close to Danbury.

But it is, yeah, Bethlehem, Connecticut. There are all these little towns that I've never visited in Connecticut. That's one of them. So, yeah, we were talking about cheesemaking, and we're talking about working with, I mean, being co-creators. Now it's interesting because this is who we are. God created us this way. But in the modern era, we've moved increasingly away from this as though we could find fulfillment in the digitization of everything

in the reduction of everything to these atoms in a way. Precisely, Eric, look, what's missing in the modern world of modern philosophy? It's mystery. and it's awe. And what's the beginning of worship? Aw, and mystery, right? So I have an article in Comment Magazine, why choose mystery over ideology?

And what I've been trying to do with these books that I've written and the talks I give and the work I do through Scholar Foundation through our conference on art, the sacred, and the common good, is try to help people in churches and in schools and their homes

to have more concrete experiences of beauty through the great traditions of sacred art, through chant, through beautiful music, through working with landscape artists, with architects who are taking what's good in the material world and making it even more beautiful. And when I do this, it teaches people that our world isn't a closed system of us versus them, of the haves and the haves-nots. The abundance of the earth has been far from being developed in its fullest form. God gave us the capacity to take the material forms of the world and create better things that we can share with other people.

But yet we live in a time of ideology, which is a reduction of reality to a one-dimensional way of thinking, which we've honed in on here, is a materialist way, that were ultimately nothing but a bundle of desires for food or for sex or for power or for glory. Look, the romantics even turned our emotions into nothing but uncontrolled. instincts with no order. And this goes against the Christian tradition, which has tried to take our instincts and our passions and direct them to make them become part of this unfolding mystery. So ideology is a closed system. It's reductionistic. It pits people, us versus them. And mystery tells us that, yes, we have certainty and we have truth, but that God's creative capacities and God's inspiration is still speaking in this time, and we can know with certainty that we're moving towards that by learning traditions and by opening our hearts to receive the gifts from God and

praising him. It's so fascinating because this can go wrong in both directions. And I'm literally these days reading, I mentioned Thomas Howard, but his first book, it's called Christ the Tiger, and he deals with this. Now it's dated in a way. because he wrote it in 1967, but it's him coming out of a sort of a dogmatic, I would say somewhat fundamentalist Protestant background and beginning to say, how does this dogma bring me into the world?

How do I deal with the world? And it's fascinating because it's not to say that dogma or theology or rules aren't important, but if you over-focus on that, you end up making an idol of these wonderful things, which is the opposite of God, which is the antithesis of worshiping God. So how do we maintain that balance so that all these good things lead us not to themselves but to God? And that's, it's kind of a lifelong project. But dealing with mystery, Alice von Hildebrand, whom I interviewed at Socrates in the city about eight years ago, I think she talks about that.

and about womanhood and what is veiled and mysterious and the sacred. And that obviously is something we've lost dramatically. We've run from in our culture. We don't understand mystery and beauty and veiling the sacred. We don't get that. And that's part of this conversation. Precisely. We live in a culture that's really been disenchanted,

and it's been cut off from the sacred. but I will say from my teaching and from my working with school teachers and church leaders, that beauty still speaks to the human heart. So what we're trying to do through Scholar Foundation as a follow-up to this book, we're partnering with associations of classical liberal arts schools in K-12, like Great Hearts Academies, Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, Society for Classical Learning, great organizations of parents, concerned people who are trying to take back education and grounded again on the great traditions

of philosophy, theology, arts, literature, music, yet still educators, and I think families struggle with time, right? You mentioned earlier that, look, we need, if we're going to get serious about beauty, we have to set aside time for worship, for leisure and contemplation. And that requires all of us to sacrifice something, something of our other desires, something of our lower desires, right? But I see a tremendous interest in young people who, when they see a beautiful painting, of Our Lady with the child Jesus, they can't help but look. And when you present young people with beautiful, harmonious music, it moves them, right? And so despite the fact that we've lost in our culture a sense of the sacred,

I still see time and again that beauty moves people. And that's why it pierces through ideology. Yeah, and there's no way to escape it. As long as you are a human being, you've been programmed by the one who made you to long for these things, to turn to these things. That's right. We've just got 30 seconds left. Scala Foundation.

What is the website and tell us very briefly, if you don't mind about the Schala Foundation? Scala Foundation's website is scalaFoundation.org. Its mission is to renew American culture through liberal arts education, beauty, and worship. You can find out about our recent conference where we do a series of talks on art, the sacred, and the common good,

where we uplift artists who are making great music and great art for today. You can find those videos on Scala's, YouTube site and you can find resources for parents, families, and educators on Schala's website about practical ways to live this out in the home and in schools. Scala is S-C-A-L-A-S-C-A-Skala Foundation. Margarita Mooney. Thank you for your time.

The book is The Wounds of Beauty. Just a joy to have you back. Thank you, Eric. Hey there, folks. We interrupt this program to continue doing the program. Is that confusing? Well, I'm confused. well, but we can be confused together.

Here's the bottom line. We've been having a substantive conversation with Margarita Mooney of the Scala Foundation. It's important that we step back sometimes and have these important philosophical conversations about goodness, truth, and beauty. And I just love that. But we're just interrupting that conversation to say, by the way, I don't even know if this this hour one or hour two because we're probably going to run this. But it is Memorial Day, so that's a special day.

So we're having an important conversation with her, but I don't want to forget to tell you that we all have an obligation to keep the Republic. Many of you know my book, If You Can Keep It, the Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In my book, If You Can Keep It, I talk about how every single one of us has an obligation to keep the Republic. It doesn't keep itself. The Constitution is a dead document unless we live it out. It's just sitting there. It's a piece of paper. And part of that is being active citizens, being sometimes activist citizens in keeping the Republic. Part of that is informing ourselves about what's going on, about what is true, and then taking action. But sometimes taking

action is just informing ourselves. So I want to mention to you, there is a film. We've talked about it quite a bit. The Real Anthony Fauci is a film. It was a book. It is a book. The Real Anthony Fauci. But it's a film. And you can see it for free today, tomorrow, I believe the rest of this week. The Real Anthony Fauci Movie.com is the website. The real Anthony Fauci movie movie dot com is the website. I have seen it and I just want to say it's delightful that somebody has made a film out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book because it puts all the pieces together and it educates us. We need to educate ourselves. We need to know what is going on so we can be a part of the solution. It is a vital thing. It's kind of like, you know, a basic duty, you know, when you're drafted

into the Army during the time of war, when you are asked to do jury duty, when you ask to pay your taxes, when you ask to vote, we have to do these things. And so I want to say, please go to the real Anthony Fauci movie.com. Please watch it.

I also want to say that we need your help in spreading the word about what we're doing on this program. So we invite you to sign up at my website, Eric Metaxus.com. There's a lot of stuff going on. A lot of stuff we want to communicate with you. I want to tell you, well, first of all these interviews with people. Like, amazing interviews we did at the NRB.

We haven't aired them yet. Other interviews we did in the studio at TBN that we still haven't aired them. A lot of great stuff. But we want you to share it. We want you to take these videos and share them. So you have to sign up for my newsletter, which is at Eric Matackas. access.com. I'm going to be traveling. I'm going to be in San Diego. I'm going to be in Chino Hills, California, and Jack Hibbs's church. I'm going to be in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As my father says,

Albuquerque. I'm going to be in Albuquerque preaching. Yeah. And also, don't forget the study guide for letter to the American church. That's really important. It's, it's amazing that we actually, people kept saying, we want a study guide for your book, Letter to the American Church, letter to the American Church. I said, well, finally, I said, okay, let's create a study guide. created a study guide. You can buy the study guide. You can buy it at Socrates in the city.com or at Amazon, but it's the study guide so that you can read a letter to the American church in a small group. But just lots for you to be involved in. Get involved. God bless you.