Gotham & The Sacred Podcast COMING IN FEBRUARY

Excited to share that starting in February, we will be launching the first season of the Gotham & The Sacred Podcast. This season, we will explore the notion of Functional Fatality: When the Sacred Loses Authority. The season will begin with eight 20-minute discussions that lay out the ideas embedded within Functional Fatality. These episodes will ask serious questions and propose possible answers or solutions, but ultimately, these answers would be up to you (maybe?).

Following is our outline of the first season episodes, prior to our interviews and guest hosts which will most likely incorporate another 8 sessions or so. Guests will be announced shortly.

Season One: Functional Fatality — When the Sacred Loses Authority

Episode 1 — The Apocalyptic Frame

Summary: This opening episode frames the central problem of the season: why modern society increasingly speaks in the language of crisis, collapse, and apocalypse. It argues that contemporary anxiety reflects not merely political or economic instability, but a deeper moral unveiling—the exposure of a society whose sacred foundations have lost their binding authority.

Episode 2 — Why the Sacred Once Made Society Possible

Summary: This episode examines the functional role of the sacred in sustaining moral order before the rise of modern governance. Drawing on classical and sociological insights, it explains how transcendent authority once restrained power, unified moral meaning, and made sacrifice intelligible—functions that law and markets struggle to replace.

Episode 3 — Civilizations, the Sacred, and Collapse

Summary: Turning to history, this episode explores why civilizations tend to fragment after sacred authority erodes. It shows that collapse rarely begins with economic failure or invasion, but with elite moral decay, declining legitimacy, and the loss of shared meaning that once justified sacrifice and social cohesion.

Episode 4 — When Freedom Had a Shape: Classical and Medieval Moral Order

Summary: This episode reconstructs the moral architecture of the classical and medieval world, where freedom was oriented toward virtue and purpose rather than choice. It explains how teleology, natural law, and sacred authority made moral obligation intelligible—and why modern autonomy struggles to replicate those functions.

Episode 5 — The Early Modern Moral Break

Summary: Examining the transition to modernity, this episode traces how early modern thinkers attempted to secure political peace by redefining authority, obligation, and freedom. It argues that while this shift stabilized politics, it quietly hollowed out the sacred foundations of moral order.

Episode 6 — Why Secularization Was the Wrong Diagnosis

Summary: Contrary to popular narratives, this episode argues that modern society did not lose belief in God but lost the authority of the sacred to bind behavior. It explains how belief became expressive and optional, leaving moral language intact but increasingly powerless.

Episode 7 — Functional Fatality: Belief Without Authority

Summary: This episode introduces the central concept of the season: Functional Fatality. It describes a condition in which the sacred persists symbolically but no longer regulates behavior, unifies society, or restrains power, producing moral relativism, institutional fragmentation, and rising extremism.

Episode 8 — Can the Sacred Be Recovered?

Summary: The season concludes by asking whether moral authority can be renewed without coercion or nostalgia. This episode explores the limits of policy solutions and argues that any recovery of the sacred must occur through practices, institutions, and forms of moral life capable of re-embodying obligation in a pluralistic age.