Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and, and To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse (B and H). His writing has appeared in Deseret Journal, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, American Mind, Claremont Review of Books and Public Discourse.

The question "what is a woman?" is only confusing, Carl Trueman argues, because the prior question — what does it mean to be a human being — has already been answered wrongly, or abandoned entirely. His new book The Desecration of Man traces how that happened: a long arc from Luther through Rousseau and Nietzsche, through the sexual revolution and the death of serious art, to transgenderism, artificial intelligence, and the hollowed-out Church of England hosting iftars in its cathedrals.

This is the third time Trueman has joined Thinking Class, and in this conversation we think out loud about:

the Faustian bargain the West made with its own tradition
why radical secularism is defenceless against Islam, and
what a genuine recovery of human dignity would require — not at the macro-political level, but in a person's own life and community.

Follow Carl Trueman

Carl Trueman's new book The Desecration of Man is available from Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3OkKwsL
Buy Carl Trueman's books here: https://amzn.to/4cP0nJm
Follow Carl at First Things: https://firstthings.com/
Carl will be speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in June — details at: https://www.arc-conference.com/

About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes.

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