Sometimes, you have to face up to despair before you can find an honest way to hope. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan returns to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to uncover the surprising hope that waits just beyond the edges of Eliot’s dark vision.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is known as one of the most depressing poems ever. Eliot refuses to offer any BS or happy talk: his spare, cold look at the woes of modernity can help us understand where hope lives when everything else goes dark. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan argues that this work also contains the seeds of Eliot’s eventual conversion to Christianity and hope for us in our own depressing age.

Was C.S. Lewis the 20th century’s greatest thinker? Lewis was a war veteran, the unofficial pastor of the West in its darkest hour, and a supremely gifted philosopher with a masterfully light touch. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan takes the audience through a close look at Lewis’s The Abolition of Man to prove that those who dismiss Lewis as “just the Narnia guy” are just plain wrong.

At the Battle of Actium, the fabled lovers Antony and Cleopatra made a doomed last stand against Julius Caesar’s heir, Octavian. In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan and Cornell historian Barry Strauss talk through the battle that ended the Roman republic, and the sex, treachery, and feuding that transformed the world.

It all starts with Homer: the man, the myth, the musician. Spencer Klavan walks through the glorious tale of valor, tragedy, and heroism known as the Iliad, reading aloud from the rhythms of the original Greek and recounting this ancient tale of the war for the most beautiful woman in the world.