Series
A Kant scholar on why he joined Turning Point, and what Charlie Kirk got right.
Recorded beginning the night of Charlie Kirk's assassination, these episodes explain why a philosophy professor left the ivory tower to build the Turning Point Education Prep Year, and read Kirk as a contemporary Socrates, an apologist, and a man with three fixed points.
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36:30Recorded the night of Charlie Kirk's assassination at Utah Valley University, this tribute explains why a Kant scholar chose to work with Turning Point USA ('what else would we do?'), calls out colleagues retreating to the ivory tower, and hopes 'a thousand new Charlie Kirks' will rise up with truth and love rather than hate.
Lecture-style series build on themselves. Numbered so you can follow the thread.
36:30Recorded the night of Charlie Kirk's assassination at Utah Valley University, this tribute explains why a Kant scholar chose to work with Turning Point USA ('what else would we do?'), calls out colleagues retreating to the ivory tower, and hopes 'a thousand new Charlie Kirks' will rise up with truth and love rather than hate.
47:16Drawing on the Gorgias and the Apology he was teaching at Prep Year, Dr. Firestone casts Charlie Kirk as a contemporary Christian Socrates who exposed the sophistry of the modern university, and recalls that Kirk's real vision was something closer to Aristotle's Lyceum, a place to pursue virtue and human flourishing.
54:44A session from Dr. Firestone's spring 2025 apologetics class examines how Kirk used cosmological, moral, and cultural arguments in campus debates, followed by student Q&A with Scott Polender of Turning Point Academy on how apologetics fits into classical Christian education.
1:12:19Dr. Firestone takes viewers with him and his students to the September 21, 2025 memorial at State Farm Stadium, from the pre-dawn crowds and the worship music to the speeches, and reflects that the service felt like the revival in America Kirk always wanted.
1:06:21For the podcast's first anniversary, Dr. Firestone reconstructs a late-2023 phone call in which Kirk asked why a Kant scholar would join Turning Point, and lays out the four commitments they shared (the Bible as point of orientation, the Western tradition, the founding documents, and Kant's human superpowers) plus the classroom visit that never happened.
1:04:26Analyzing clips of Kirk's campus dialogues, Dr. Firestone shows how Kirk's three fixed points (Bible, Western intellectual tradition, founding documents) map onto Kant's four human superpowers and how Kirk deployed cosmological, moral, teleological, and ontological arguments, including the Kalam argument borrowed from William Lane Craig.
46:45One year to the day after Kirk's death, Dr. Firestone takes off the wristband he wore through Prep Year and gives a room of Gospel Light high schoolers the three points of orientation Kirk lived by: the Bible for the soul, the great books of the Western tradition for the mind, and the founding documents for the body politic. Kant stays at the door; the inheritance and what it costs to accept it are the whole subject.
5 episodesKierkegaard on risk, Aristotle on courage, and what to do when life becomes unlivable.
5 episodesA five-part walk through the Meditations, 25 minutes at a time.
5 episodesA working definition, and why philosophy needs faith, logic, ethics, and myth.
