On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the Professor and KC talk about the McLuhan space we currently inhabit, where “the medium is the message.” The world is in the midst of a digital revolution with the introduction of very rapidly improving “artificial intelligence,” where the gathering and dissemination of information both audio and visual is occurring at the speed of a self-replicating virus. While this world of AI is clearly the medium between one human brain that conceives information and another that receives it, what is the actual message? Do books no longer matter? Will creativity be but a long lost dream? Here’s a hint from one of the Mosaic Ark’s previous guests: “The Digital retrieves the Medieval.” Join the ladies for this surprisingly hopeful take on the current public obsession over AI, and why it may just help us break a 200 year-long degradation of learning. Please leave us your take on AI in the comments! —Streamed February 6, 2026

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, the ladies were joined by Catholic artist Joseph Maki. Inspired by the great European craftsmen who built the churches of the Middle Ages, Joseph is a woodworker and sculptor who creates beautiful works of art that hold a sacred purpose within the Catholic Mass. We spoke about his motivations for taking on this vocation, and also about his inspirations, including his love of Catholic traditions and of the myths created by Tolkien. We also discussed the challenge of bringing back the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages in light of the current arguments about the merits of using AI and 3D printing to create art, architecture and sculpture. We feel that we’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic and would love to get your thoughts on this, so please let us know them in the comments! —Streamed January 30, 2026

Why do men hold on so tightly to myths that have been scientifically disproven, defending them with the religious fervor of a nineteenth-century high church Anglican? On this week’s Mosaic Ark, we discussed the tale of two such men. Both challenged their church’s teachings; one proved that humans could develop over time, and the other was Charles Darwin. Listen as we discuss how St. John Henry Newman’s conclusion that Catholic doctrine could develop over time as a seed into a tree mirrors Charles Darwin’s theory that all life began with a single origin and evolved into multiple species over time, as a seed into a tree. What does each belief signify for humanity? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! —Streamed January 16, 2026

Was the world of Middle Earth, created by JRR Tolkien, Christian? Would it help answering that question to know that Tolkien’s initials were actually JRPRT, and that the “P” was for Phillip, more specifically his patron saint, Philip Neri? Or that Tolkien studied under Father Morgan at the Birmingham Oratory, who studied under St. John Henry Newman? “So Tolkien was Catholic, so what? He just wrote a fantasy story about magic based on old Norse mythology,” you might say. But you also might wonder if Christianity itself, or Catholicism in particular is just magical superstition. Ironically, if you did think this you would be in the company of the pagan Romans and later Arians, which, doubly ironically, was pointed out in a book written by St. John Henry Newman, “On the Development of Christian Doctrine.” You see, Tolkien had a spiritual family ancestry as impressive as Aragorn’s royal ancestry. Join us as we discuss Tolkien’s spiritual fiction and whether it was based on his magical upbringing in the Oratory, and let us know what you think in the comments! —Streamed January 9, 2026

On this week’s Mosaic Ark, we spoke with Tyler Hummel about his new book, Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie? And Other Questions About The True Meaning of Christmas Films. What started out as an amusing observation that many people considered Die Hard to be their favorite Christmas film led Tyler to wonder what kinds of stories actually make a film into a “Christmas film.” Is it that it has the story of Christ’s birth at the center? Is it that it is about people celebrating Christmas? Is it merely because the story is Christmas adjacent, taking place during Christmas time? Or is it something more simple, more primal? Could it just be nostalgia? The answer to all of these questions, it turns out, is yes! Listen along as we discuss the ritual of the Christmas film, and its many different variants, and please let us know what your favorite one is in the comments! — Streamed December 19, 2025

The debate has been raging over the past week. Does presenting evil or immoral material in literature or movies cause people to be desensitized to it, or even to seek it out? Did we say the past week? We’re sorry, we meant to say that this debate has been raging over the past 160 years, ever since Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, help create a new genre called children’s literature. Carroll wrote stories which would later collectively be called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a sequel called Through the Looking Glass. Carroll, writing under his real name of Dodgson, also wrote essays on the dangers of publishing literature which might lead readers into sin; being an Anglican deacon with a great love for the innocence of children made him particularly sensitive to this. Of course, there are those who believe that even Carroll’s stories of Alice are dangerous to children, but wasn’t that always the point of children's stories (a.k.a. fairy tales?) Weren’t fairy tales meant to warn people of danger? And what danger could possibly be had from reading about falling “upside down” into a dark underground hole where nothing is as it seems? Listen as we discuss the potential pitfalls of presenting stories aimed towards children, and please tell us what you think in the comments. — Streamed December 5, 2025

This week the ladies of the Mosaic Ark are back after a four-week break just in time to obsess over the first installment of the final season of Stranger Things. Along with other obsessive fans in the world, we’ve been engaging in conjectures about the direction of the story and how it will end. But as writers, we also found ourselves obsessing over the depth of the story’s structure and the many clues to Henry’s backstory. We loved the inclusion of a model of the Tesseract from Madeleine L’Engle’s classic children’s book, A Wrinkle in Time, as a plot vehicle. We also loved that there was more D&D lore. We talked about the Duffers’ strange habit of always including close-ups of the characters’ shoes when they come on stage for the first time. What kind of trope is this, and why do the Duffers use it? And what does it tell us about their skill as storytellers that we get so caught up in such details? —Streamed November 28, 2025

What makes a monster a monster? In this episode, we continue our discussion of Stranger Things, focusing appropriately enough for Halloween night on the monsters. From the Demogorgon of season 1, to Henry Creel’s transformation into Vecna in season 4, we tried to determine exactly why each of the monsters worked as vectors of horror. Why was the Demogorgon terrifying? Why was the body horror of the Mind Flayer so resonant? Why was the psychological torture that Vecna visited upon his victims before he killed them more terrifying than their actual deaths? And what of the humans of Stranger Things and the monstrous things they did; are their actions a separate horror, or inextricably connected to it all like so many corrupted vines? —Streamed October 31, 2025