Lecture Title: “Péguy for the Present”
Details: Thursday, April 9, 2026 @7:00 PM CST.
Lecture: The rise of Christian nationalism has lent new urgency to longstanding questions about how politics and religion are meant to relate. For the French Catholic socialist Charles Péguy (1873-1914), their interaction is the fulcrum of history, a dynamic confrontation that creates and gives meaning to both the ties that bind people together and the cataclysms that break them apart, a tension that reflects the one between the apocalyptic vision of the Gospels and worldly traditions of cultures, nations, and the Church itself. Through his idiosyncratic reading of philosophy, the history of France, and his own fraught political moment, Péguy discovered a distinctly modern idiom in which to navigate that tension, setting an ironic, yet deeply felt patriotism within a Catholic universalism that served as a foundation for both his socialism and his pluralism. This talk will explore Péguy in his moment: his defense of Alfred Dreyfus, his confrontation with Jean Jaurès and the French Socialist Party, and his relationship to the Catholic literary revival. It will also show how his thought develops from the combative anti-modernism of his youth into the stranger, subtler, and yet more abundantly hopeful perspective born of his return to Catholicism, concluding with a reflection on his often-cited and little understood dictum “all begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”
Speaker Bio: Jack Hanson is a writer, editor, and scholar of religion. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times, Commonweal, The Nation, The Drift, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University. He is associate editor of The Yale Review and a lecturer at Yale. He lives in Brooklyn.
How to Join: All patrons at the Worker-Scholar tier or above will receive access to the live course. The recording will be made available to patrons at the Salt of the Earth tier. Go to Patreon here.