Podcast: Ross Douthat and Meir Soloveichik on the State of American Belief

The New York Times’s conservative Catholic columnist discusses his argument for belief with a leading Orthodox rabbi.

The cover of Believe, by Ross Douthat.

The cover of Believe, by Ross Douthat.

Observation
Jan. 24 2025
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A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Podcast: Ross Douthat and Meir Soloveichik

 

Ross Douthat occupies one of the most fascinating roles in the religious life of the American public. He is a serious Christian, a devout Catholic, a learned student of American religious history, and a perspicacious observer of the spiritual drives that are an inescapable aspect of the human condition. But what makes his role so fascinating is that he is also an opinion columnist at the New York Times. And readers of the New York Times tend to be considerably less religious, and if religious, then considerably less traditional in their religious habits and beliefs, than Douthat. So there are times when he stands on the fault line between two different epistemological universes, called on to explain the world of faith to progressive America.

In a couple of weeks he will publish Believe, a new book that takes notice of the longing for spiritual transcendence among non-religious Americans, people who look to exercise regimens, or astrology, or claims of extraterrestrial life to engage in a kind of spiritual play. To them, Believe has an arresting argument, which is that in light of what we now know about the universe, the claims of religion—not of occult and supernatural paganism but traditional, monotheistic religion—are a great deal more persuasive. Believe is a form of contemporary, monotheistic apologetics.

Earlier this week, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver hosted Ross Douthat together with Rabbi Meir Soloveichik for a keynote discussion at the Redstone Leadership Forum. Rabbi Soloveichik is the leader of Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University. The Redstone Leadership Forum is Tikvah’s flagship gathering of some 100 student delegates from our college chapters at over 30 campuses.

This week, we bring you the recording from that live event.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

More about: American Religion, Catholicism, Decline of religion, Judaism