Spe Salvi Institute Podcast

In this conversation, Robert Mixa and Andrew Petiprin talk with artist Fen de Villiers about the nature of artistic creation and the state of contemporary art.
We explore his artistic practice and sculptural work, tracing the lineage from early 20th century art movements and their radical reimagining of form and space. De Villiers reflects on how those movements — from Italian Futurism to Art Deco—challenged what art could be, and what lessons they hold for us today.
But do we need to simply imitate the past, especially the Italian Renaissance? And is beauty the right word for what art needs now? We discuss why that term has become inadequate, and what vitality in art actually means for the 21st century.
Learn more about Fen de Villiers and his art here: https://www.fendevilliers.com/
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Is a business a community, or just a bundle of contracts between self-interested strangers? And is "the common good" anything more than a pious slogan when it comes to the economy?
In this conversation, Andrew Petiprin and Robert Mixa are joined by Mark Hoipkemier, author of The Price of the Common Good: Markets, Corporations, and Political Economy (University of Notre Dame Press), to talk about what's really at stake in market economies beyond self-interest and profit.
Much of the book is a sustained argument with the Chicago School of law and economics — the tradition running from Milton Friedman through Coase, Posner, and the theory of the firm as a "nexus of contracts." On that view, a firm looks less like a community than like a market: a set of bargains struck between individuals who each have their own ends. Hoipkemier thinks that picture is simply wrong. An exclusive focus on individuals and contracts, he argues, has left many economists "blind in one eye" — able to see individuals clearly enough, but unable to notice the intertwined common projects we actually inhabit, in our dominant economic institutions no less than in private associations or politics proper.
Part of what has made the Chicago School so durable is that its critics — stakeholder theorists on the left, localists and populists on the right — have struggled to offer an alternative with comparable conceptual elegance and explanatory power. This book is an attempt to supply one.
Hoipkemier's central claim is striking: not that economic institutions ought to embody communal purposes, but that they already do. Our economic institutions pull citizens, often unwittingly, into shared projects that answer the deepest political questions of how we live together — and who we become in the process. To describe those projects he recovers the classical idiom of the common good and puts it to work on contemporary cases like Uber, corporate law, and globalized auto manufacturing.
We discuss:
- The Chicago-school theory of the firm as a market
- What Hayek got right about spontaneous order and price signals, and what his framework misses about the shared political vision markets themselves depend on
- The route from Hayek through Polanyi back to Genovesi, and what the Neapolitan tradition offers that the Anglo-American one doesn't
- Whether the goal is a "second language" — a public grammar for talking about common goods — rather than a wholesale replacement for economics
- How reducing business and trade to narrow money terms obscures the goods they serve, and feeds the social breakdown typical of late capitalism
- The history of the corporation and markets
Mark Hoipkemier teaches in the Business, Ethics, and Society program at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, and previously in the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics program at the University of Navarra.
 
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In this episode, Andrew Petiprin and Robert Mixa explore one of Western literature's most enduring texts—Homer's Odyssey—through the lens of Christopher Nolan's recent film adaptation.
Together, they investigate how the early Church Fathers read the epic as a proto-Christian narrative of spiritual homecoming and redemption, and how Nolan's film, by contrast, offers a distinctly post-Christian interpretation of the same material.
What does it mean that the patristic reading of Homer emphasized pilgrimage, asceticism, and the soul's return to God? And what does it reveal about our contemporary moment that a major filmmaker now approaches the same epic through a Post-Christian secular framework—one concerned with individual agency, psychological resilience, and immanent meaning rather than divine purpose?
Drawing on the wisdom of the Church Fathers, Hugo Rahner's groundbreaking Pagan Myths and Christian Mystery, and contemporary film analysis, Andrew and Robert examine:
-How Neoplatonism and Christian theology reshaped the medieval reception of Homer
-The patristic practice of finding Christian truths concealed within pagan narratives
-The role of nostos (homecoming) as a spiritual metaphor in patristic exegesis
-Nolan's reimagining of Odysseus as traumatized war veteran and the role of the gods in this film
-What the cultural shift between these two readings suggests about the spiritual trajectory of the West
This conversation invites viewers to consider whether the loss of a sacred cosmos—reflected in how we now tell ancient stories—represents genuine progress or a profound impoverishment of meaning.
Note: Robert referred to Rahner's Pagan Myths and Christian Mystery during the conversation; the work was published in 1957 and not in the 1930s. 

In this episode of the Spe Salvi Institute podcast, Robert Mixa and Andrew Petiprin sit down to explore what it truly means to be American as the nation marks its 250th anniversary. Taking their cue from historian Wilfred McClay's acclaimed work Land of Hope, Robert and Andrew dig into the American story — its founding ideals, its struggles, its contradictions, and its enduring promise.
Is America, at its core, a land and a people marked by hope? What does that hope look like today, 250 years after the founding, and where does it come from? Robert and Andrew discuss the American experiment not as a finished product but as an ongoing story — one still being written, and one that calls its citizens to something greater than cynicism or despair.
Along the way, they revisit Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis" — the idea that the ever-receding frontier shaped the American character itself, forging a people marked by self-reliance, restlessness, and forward-looking optimism. Robert and Andrew ask what happens to a nation's hope once the frontier, in Turner's sense, has closed — and where that same pioneering spirit might be rediscovered today.
They also push back on a common narrative: that Americans were simply fleeing Europe, leaving behind a tired continent for a blank slate. Instead, Robert and Andrew suggest something deeper was at work — a people journeying forward in order to rediscover and recover an identity, an inheritance not abandoned but carried and renewed in a new land.
But every earthly hope, however noble, stands in need of purification. Drawing on Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Spe Salvi, Robert and Andrew consider how America's hope — for liberty, for justice, for a more perfect union — must ultimately be measured against, and purified by, the great and abiding hope of Christ. Only that hope does not disappoint.
The conversation turns to Mary, Stella Maris — Star of Hope — whom Benedict XVI presents at the close of Spe Salvi as the one who accompanies us through the storms of history. As America looks to its next chapter, Robert and Andrew reflect on why every pilgrim people needs a star to steer by.
Join us for a thoughtful conversation on history, identity, and hope at America's semiquincentennial.
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Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas does not just address artificial intelligence but the essence and dignity of our humanity. Like his papal predecessors, Leo XIV sees the age of A.I. as not merely being about technology but more fundamentally about us. What are we? What is intelligence? What is human intelligence? And, wrapped up in these questions, what are we for? While an encyclical cannot address everything and is not a philosophical or theological tome, the Pope does address some issues worth discussing, especially in the light of Christian hope.
In this conversation, Andrew Petiprin and Robert Mixa discuss themes in the encyclical, particularly the nature of technology, Christian Humanism, and why A.I. is not merely a tool but something else entirely.
Please consider supporting the work of the Spe Salvi Institute by donating on our website. We cannot do this work without your help.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has claimed that America is a "creedal nation" — that what unites us is not a common culture, heritage, or religion, but a set of ideas alone. In this episode, Andrew Petiprin and Robert Mixa take that claim seriously and ask whether it tells the whole story.
They argue that while America's founding principles matter deeply, reducing the nation to an abstraction leaves something essential out. America is not merely a set of propositions — it is a people, a place, a lived inheritance. It has a culture, a literary tradition, a moral imagination, a way of life that was handed down and built up over centuries. Ideas don't exist in a vacuum; they are carried by communities, shaped by customs, and sustained by concrete habits of heart and mind.
What happens to a nation that forgets its heritage and tries to live on ideas alone? And is the "creedal nation" vision a strength to be celebrated — or a subtle impoverishment that leaves Americans rootless and unmoored? Andrew and Robert bring the spirit of the Spe Salvi Institute to bear on one of the most important questions in American political life: not just what we believe, but who we are.

What does a secular Polish filmmaker have to teach us about the soul?
More than you might expect. In this episode, Robert Mixa and Andrew Petiprin sit down to explore the life and work of Krzysztof Kieślowski — one of the most quietly profound filmmakers of the twentieth century — and ask why his films continue to haunt viewers long after the credits roll. From the moral intensity of The Dekalog, a ten-part meditation on the Ten Commandments set in a Warsaw apartment block, to the mystery of The Double Life of Véronique, and the soaring ambition of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), Kieślowski created a body of work worth contemplating.
Robert and Andrew explore what it means that a filmmaker who identified as an "agnostic mystic" kept returning — compulsively, almost helplessly — to questions of providence, the hidden connections between human souls, the weight of moral choice, and the strange luminosity of ordinary life. Is there a theological grammar underneath Kieślowski's images? Why do his films feel like prayers? And what can Catholics and serious Christians learn from an artist who approached transcendence from the outside, and got closer to it than most? Listen in and learn why Kieślowski is worthy of high admiration.

In this episode of the Spe Salvi Institute Podcast, Andrew Petiprin and Robert Mixa sit down with Bishop Erik Varden, O.C.S.O. — Trappist monk, Bishop of Trondheim, and one of the most compelling Catholic voices in the world today. Born into a non-practising Lutheran family in Norway, Bishop Varden traces his remarkable spiritual awakening and journey to the Church, the monastery, and the episcopate, sharing his formation as a scholar of Syriac language and Christian anthropology, his conviction that even countries marked for centuries by the Christian faith stand in constant need of conversion, his appreciation for film directors like Krzysztof Kieślowski, his experience leading this year's Lenten retreat for Pope Leo XIV, and his deeply considered thoughts on the nature of Christian hope. Be sure to check out Bishop Varden's website, Coram Fratribus, at https://coramfratribus.com/

In commemoration of Pope Benedict XVI’s birthday on April 16, Robert Mixa and Andrew Petiprin sit down with Dr. Richard DeClue, Professor of Theology at the Word on Fire Institute and author of The Mind of Pope Benedict XVI: A Theology of Communion, to explore Pope Benedict XVI’s profound understanding of divine revelation as God’s personal self-communication in history rather than a mere collection of doctrines.
Drawing from Ratzinger’s groundbreaking study of St. Bonaventure, his pivotal role in shaping Vatican II’s Dei Verbum, and his vision of Christ as the living “Thou” of revelation, Dr. DeClue unpacks how Scripture and Tradition flow from the incarnate Word, inviting us into Trinitarian communion.

In this episode of the Spe Salvi Institute Podcast, founders Robert Mixa and Andrew Petiprin discuss Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic letter "Life in Abundance: On the Value of Sport", released ahead of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics.
Drawing on John 10:10 (“I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly”), the Pope presents sport as a “school of life” that forms body, relationships, and spirit—teaching resilience, generosity, respect, and joy—while urging the Church to guide athletes amid commercialization and the idol of victory.
Robert and Andrew explore how the letter echoes St. Paul’s call to be athletes in the spiritual life: “Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Cor 9:24-27) and “I have finished the race” (2 Tim 4:7). They show how physical sport trains the very habits of spiritual athleticism—discipline, endurance, humility, and hope—while also diving into the experience of “flow” as a foretaste of spiritual joy and sport’s civic value in building community and renewing culture.