What if the deepest divide between conservatives and liberals isn’t simply about policy, but about time?

Conservatives often locate America’s promise in an inherited past—its founding principles, traditions, institutions, and moral order. Liberals are more likely to locate that promise in an unrealized future: a more equal, inclusive, and just society that America has yet to become.

In this episode, Scott and Bill explore these competing visions through the theological concepts of protology and eschatology. Protology asks about first things: creation, original order, and what went wrong. Eschatology asks about last things: redemption, fulfillment, and the destination toward which history is moving.

Is the conservative project a search for a lost Eden? Does liberalism transform politics into a pursuit of the promised kingdom? What happens when the right romanticizes the past or the left treats progress as inevitable?

Scott and Bill consider whether American politics can hold memory and hope together. A nation cannot live entirely in its memories, but neither can it survive without a vision of what it might become.

Scott and Bill head back to ancient Greece—by way of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. They explore what Nolan does with Homer’s strange, violent, morally complicated epic and take up a provocative debate sparked by Ben Shapiro and Ezra Klein: Has Nolan “Christianized” The Odyssey?

What happens when a pagan story about glory, cunning, fate, and the gods is reframed around guilt, mercy, homecoming, and redemption? Is Nolan imposing a Christian moral universe on Homer—or revealing themes that were already hiding in plain sight?

Along the way, Scott and Bill talk myth, movies, Christianity, modern politics, and why stories written nearly three thousand years ago still have the power to tell us something unsettling about ourselves.

In this episode of New Persuasive Words, Scott Jones and Bill Borror wrestle with one of theology's oldest and most unsettling questions: the scandal of particularity. Prompted by a provocative argument from Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony, they ask whether the Enlightenment's quest for universal reason came at the cost of dismissing the particular people, stories, and traditions through which faith has always been lived.

Hazony contends that Enlightenment thinkers viewed the Hebrew Bible as an obstacle to universal morality because of its stubborn insistence on a chosen people, a promised land, and a God who acts within the concrete history of a particular nation. Scott and Bill explore whether this critique gets the Enlightenment right—and whether Christianity itself can ever escape the scandal of God's choosing one people, one place, and ultimately one person in Jesus of Nazareth.

Is particularity the enemy of justice, or the very condition that makes love possible? Can genuine universality exist without first embracing the local, the historical, and the embodied? Along the way, the conversation touches on Jewish-Christian relations, the legacy of the Enlightenment, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and why every attempt to erase particular identities often creates new forms of exclusion.

A conversation about election, universality, and the strange possibility that the path to what is truly universal always begins somewhere unmistakably particular.