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Most people know Isaac Newton as the father of modern science. Fewer know that two thirds of his written output was on alchemy and theology — and that he kept it secret because it would have gotten him hanged. This week I read my essay Newton Contra Athanasius, tracing the strange inner life of the man behind the mechanical universe: the abandoned child who reimagined God as a distant sovereign, the secret Arian who spent decades building a forensic case against one of the greatest theologian of the early Church, and the unwitting architect of a worldview that is only now beginning to crack.

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William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and René Girard walk into a bar...

And share a secret: the price of literary genius is the torment of mimetic cuckoldry, resolved through a type of repentance. I talk about how Girard found this secret in Shakespeare, and how Joyce had already encoded it in a single chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen Dedalus, presenting his Shakespeare theory to a roomful of erudite groundlings, ends up outcast as their scapegoat. The mob wins in the short term, but the artist persists.

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My French-Canadian friend Martin joins me to discuss the history of Quebec. Discover how this province, once the stronghold of French Catholic conservatism, underwent a rapid secular revolution in the 1960s. What role did the Catholic Church and later secular nationalism play in preserving Quebec's unique identity against Anglo dominance? We explore the demographic strategy of "La Revanche des Berceaux" – Revenge of the Cradles – and delve into the consequences of the shift from Catholicism to secular nationalism. What can the history of Quebec teach us about the demographic challenges facing the broader Western world today?

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