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We're back with another edition of the
Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emily Jashinski,

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culture editor here at the Federalist.
As always, you can email the show

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at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST.

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Make sure to subscribe wherever you download
your podcasts, and if you want

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to support our work, go over
to the premium version of our website.

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Sign up at the Federalist dot com. We are joined today by Kristin van

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Uden. She is an author.
She's a spokesperson over at the Sophia Institute,

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and she's the author of a new
book that I'm excited to talk about.

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It's called When the Sickle Swings,
Stories of Catholics who survived Communist oppression.

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There's a lot of reasons I'm interested
to dig into this topic. But

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first, Kristin, and just welcome
you to the program. Thanks for joining,

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Hi, am Elie, thanks so
much for having me. Yeah,

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and maybe we'll just start by having
you tell us a little bit about your

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background. I think it's your first
time on the show, so just let

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us know how you ended up at
Sophia and how you ended up writing this

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book. Sure, so I like
to say that I started writing this book

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really in college. I was very
I've always been very drawn to stories of

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survivors of totalitarianism, grew up reading
about the Holocaust, and then when I

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discovered communism in many of these less
widely publicized stories, I just felt this

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real call to memorialize these and start
to take these down before it's too late.

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So I completed an independent study oral
history project my senior year where I

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interviewed Catholics from all walks of life
who had survived communism all throughout the globe,

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and then continue this to this day. Conducted the majority of these interviews

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within the past two years, so
it's kind of been something that's been latent

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on the back burner until I had
the chance to do it, and now

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I have. I ended up at
Sophia a few years ago, and really

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it's such a dream job that I
get to talk about and read Catholic books

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for a living. So I am
usually on podcasts and radio shows as an

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author spokesperson for I like to say
authors who are either dead or Italian who

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can't speak for themselves, either through
a language barrier or from countries so sometimes

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both probably yes, exactly, we
have I think three or four who hit

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both of those criteria. So I
am now talking about my own book,

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which is very exciting, but yes, it's it's very interesting role. There's

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so much in the Church's treasury in
terms of reprints that have just gone out

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of print and are not available until
publishers like Sophia bring them back and resurrect

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them. So I get to do
that on a daily basis and also write

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this book, and I'm hoping to
continue this work. You'll notice that the

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stories in the book center around four
countries main Cuba, Czechoslovakia, and a

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bit of Hungary in Romania, and
that's due to the availability of interviews.

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So I have lots of Polish friends, but no Polish interviews in the book.

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So maybe a sequel or something down
the line, I can continue that

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project. But I really found that
these stories, while not completely comprehensive of

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the Catholic experience under communism, are
representative in the sense that across the board

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there are very many similarities with how
these policies were implemented, and then on

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the other side, the resilience of
the survivors and how they navigated life under

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these regimes. So I think it's
a pretty representative set that will provide for

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many people perhaps a starting point for
a topic they have not delved in too

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much before. And so, speaking
of starting points, the one where I

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want to begin is actually in the
sort of era of Marx and Angles and

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Darwin, the Nietzsche and all of
these thinkers who informed what ended up happening

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in the Soviet Union, informed what
ended up happening, inspired what ended up

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happening in China and Cuba, in
the countries that this book touches on.

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You write about this in the introduction
to the book, and I want to

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ask you right here if we could
just start by how this post Enlightenment,

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Industrial Revolution era skepticism, this idea
that God was dead, and Nietzsche wrote

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impassionately, with very passion, I
should say about the possibilities that are now

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on the horizon after God has been
killed. That leads directly to these failed

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communist experiments, or I suppose successful
communist experiments, un failed utopian experiments.

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How did religion specifically come to the
lack of the religion, the skepticism of

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the religion come into Marx a sort
of lapsed Lutheran But in some ways,

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you could maybe call that a lapsed
Catholic. I know where we interview tons

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of leafs Catholics on the show,
and I'm a Lutheran, so have a

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little fun with the topic. But
you know, in that kind of intellectual

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cauldron, how important is religion to
being one of those dominoes that leads us

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to, you know, ultimately places
like Cuba. Yeah, that's a great

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question, and I'm glad you bring
up Nietzsche specifically, because of course Marx

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and Engels are the godfathers of this
movement, but Nietzschean thinking obviously is also

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somewhat at the bedrock. And it
reminds me of a book that I relied

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on heavily for sort of the ideological
part of this project, which is Father

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Vincent Micheli is the Gods of Atheism, where he very astutely goes through these

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sort of godfather figures of what we
consider now to be standard modern atheism.

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Because we have to remember atheism as
we know it today as this default state

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almost in the West, was not
always that way. It came from somewhere,

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and it came from somewhere quite recently, actually, within the past two

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centuries and so Nietzsche, I think
he was another lapsed Lutheran. Also,

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I remember in the book it discusses
he's quite devout as a child, and

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then that just ends obviously. But
father Michelli makes the excellent point that atheism

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is not really the absence of worship, but it is the worship of idols,

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and that just really stuck with me, that there's this yearning in the

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human soul to worship something, and
when it's not filled in the proper channels

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by going to God and religion,
then something else worldly will take its place.

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So communism filled this vacuum very neatly. There had to be a certain

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degree of buy in from the populace
for communism to be viable, and that's

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where the utopian thinking comes in,
because they're promising the world they're promising,

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and when you listen to what they
promise in the propaganda, it does sound

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very nice and desirable, this land
of equality where there are no sort of

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racial differences, economic differences, no
disparities, complete and total lack of suffering.

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And if it sounds too good to
be true, of course it probably

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is. This is where the religious
element really comes in, because Christians know

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that this sort of utopia cannot exist
on earth that were still a fallen people.

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Jesus came, and of course the
redemption has been secured, but that

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does not mean that heaven can exist
on earth. The Catholics who I interview

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in this book were very cognizant of
knowing that they were storing up their treasures

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for heaven for the next life,
and even when they won political temporal victories,

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the main source of their motivation was
to focus on keeping holding on to

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their souls essentially, and this is
what I found. And there's various examples

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we can go into of communist authorities, whether that's through threatening trying to force

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people to apostatize even though they're purportedly
atheists, So what would it matter if

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someone believes in a fairy tale,
you know, to coercing this sort of

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behavior is the state seeks to take
this place of God and for whatever reason

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that is, that is the main
battle that had to be fought was within

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their own souls. So a few
examples of this. Actually, there's one

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story from Cuba that I heard from
several people I interviewed is really illustrative of

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this, and it's this propagandizing and
sort of indoctrination that occurred in the elementary

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schools. So of course indoctrination begins
very early to try to form the next

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generation. What they would do is
line all the kids up and have them

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all close their eyes and stick out
their hands and say, okay, ask

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God for a piece of candy.
And of course the minutes would tick by,

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nothing would happen. They would get
antsy, and then they said,

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ask Fidel for a piece of candy, and lo and behold the teachers would

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go around and place a piece of
candy and everybody's hands and it was great.

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Therefore, Fidel is the one who
provides for all your needs, and

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God is just some made up fairy
tale archaic. So yes, this human

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drive towards religion, the need for
a worldly replacement when it is not through

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these channels of religion, and how
communism takes fills that vacuum and becomes really

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a religion unto itself. And another
thing that you get into in the book

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is how they're actually this becomes law
in communist societies, and a lot of

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people are familiar with this history.
But Christen, if you could refresh us

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on actually the steps that dictators.
Communist dictators took to cleanse their countries their

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societies of religion. So I identify
five main steps in this process, and

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this could be applied pretty wide across
all religions. There, of course,

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was a concerted effort against most religions
within communist countries. In the Catholic context,

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there is a little bit of an
additional type of persecution because the Catholic

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Church has both the Institution of the
Church and the sovereign state of the Vaticans.

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So one of the common charges you'll
see levied against practicing Catholics is that

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they're a fifth column for the Vatican
or a Vatican agent, which in many

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cases is just clearly ridiculous. So
with that in mind, these five steps

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are number one outlaw the public worship
of the Church, So maintaining control over

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the public sphere was very important to
communist regimes. We see they institute their

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own calendar of holidays and events,
so Victory Day, for example, of

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celebrating victory during World War two,
May Day, Labor Day, International Women's

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Day is actually originally a Communist holiday, and this sort of takes the place

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of the church calendar that would you
typically occur within the church year would be

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outlawed. That would not be allowed
to take place on the public roads,

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and the very act of going to
daily or weekly mass or receiving the sacraments

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would be either made outright illegal,
and this could be accomplished through the seizure

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of property and the closing of property, or in the very least highly discouraged.

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So a woman I interview from Czechoslovakia
recounts having to go to church with

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her head down, looking at the
floor, not paying attention to anyone else

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who was there, because it was
highly likely you would be hauled in front

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of state security and asked to inform
on your fellow parishioners. And she could,

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with a clear conscience, just tell
them I don't know who was there.

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I don't know the identity of the
priest. People would lose their jobs

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if they were seen coming out of
mass. So the sacraments really had to

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go underground at that point, and
that's heavily what I recount in the later

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section of the book. Second is
to round up the clergy and religious.

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So this is a human rights abuse
that most Communist countries that I studied undertook

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In one form or another. In
Cuba, hundreds of priests and religious were

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expelled on a ship to Spain,
and then in Czechoslovakia this took place under

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two separate actions called Operation K and
Operation R after the check words for monk

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klustierty and nuns for Hoolnitze, and
these were i mean, even on a

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larger scale than in Cuba. Thousands
of monks and nuns were rounded up,

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deported to central locations and then pressed
into forced labor. One nun recounts the

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poor conditions she had to work in, and she was also just working with

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these these day laborers who would be
very crass in front of her and undress

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and things like that right in front
of her. So really forced obviously so

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many human rights violations just with them
as one action fairs to seize and repurposed

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church property. So this is one
of those instances where you can say,

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well, of course communists don't believe
in private property, so they seized everyone's

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property, which is true, but
it does allow them this modicum of control

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over these other five points, because
if they own the church property, then

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they can more easily persecute and control
both the clergy and the laity. And

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also steal the treasures of the church, be that wealth or vestments, even

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smaller things like that. Fourth is
control the laity, which we alluded to

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earlier. This system of informants and
coercion that would push the laity right to

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the edge without actually taking military or
police action against them. It would place

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them in these impossible situations where it
was easier to just join the party or

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to just stop going to Mass.
And this is very similar to the Catholic

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concept of red martyrdom versus white martyrdom. White martyrdom is sort of the daily

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death to self, and someone I
interviewed referred to this in her own life

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as death by a thousand cuts,
where you're not necessarily asked to give your

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life in this ultimate moment of sacrifice, but you live a life with tons

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of little daily sacrifices that amount to
the same really dedication in the end.

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And I would say most people who
survived this period without losing their faith suffered

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at least a degree of white martyrdom. And then finally, and this is

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one of the most powerful tactics that
we saw even in the United States,

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is to infiltrate the church hierarchy with
Party men. So even in the US,

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a former Communist agent, Bella Dodd, who was converted back to the

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Catholic faith by a Bishop Fulton,
Sheen told him that she had placed thousands

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of men in the seminaries who were
either loyal to the communists or willing to

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do their bidding for some sort of
money or blackmail. And this happened.

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And we can go into this a
little bit later. Really a throughout the

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communist world, most dramatically in Czechoslovakia, where there was actually a National Church

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that was schismatic from the Vatican but
loyal to the communist state, and not

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only would it serve to control the
church on a day to day basis,

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but also to even try to change
doctrine to be friendlier to communists. The

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most powerful example we have of this
today is the National Church in China,

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where unfortunately this tactic is getting good
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the concept of control government control came
up, not just economic control, of

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course, but sort of personal or
I should say control over people just in

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general, so not just economically,
but also control over their cultural decisions,

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their family lives, what we consider
I was going to say the private sphere,

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but that's obviously very much not in
there. You know, they don't

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want that distinction to sort of even
exist. Why then, again, this

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may sound obvious to some people,
but I think it's interesting from the perspective

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of an author who's been interviewing survivors
of communist oppression. Why is control over

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people's most fundamental belief so central to
every iteration of communism? And I asked

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that with one additional point from your
book where you write or since Karl Marx

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publishes writings the Church has condemned communism
is an ideology of false Messianism in which

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man usurps the place of God.
You wrote about Pope Pious the eleventh writing

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communism isn'trinsically wrong and no one who
would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it

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in any undertaking whatsoever. So Man
taking the place of God in communism and

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God then being so central of a
target for the Communists to knock down,

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just explain a little bit why every
time communism pops up that is so central

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to their mission. Yeah, it's
a great point. And again I say,

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I think that there is a huge
degree of spiritual warfare in this battle

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where a lot of this is happening
and playing out on either the economic,

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political, or just human level.
But ultimately the ideologies boiled down to complete

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a complete disparity in cosmology and in
world view. Of course, the famous

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quote from Stalin that he would seek
to be the engineer of souls is very

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revelatory to the heart of this project. They're seeking to engineer Homo sovieticos,

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the new man in the Soviet image
in this case, or worldwide communism in

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really the image of the state or
the image of the good proletariat. And

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this comes through in certain points.
It's important to remember because people often think,

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oh, yeah, communism is atheist, but that's sort of just a

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byproduct. But communism is overtly atheist
this is written. They don't hide this

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fact. This is something that is
one of their main platform points and one

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of the reasons that they look down
on and use these tactics of derision towards

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religion is that they do believe that
religion is backwards and is a less evolved

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state of the human of the human
person I would say human soul, but

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that doesn't really jive with their ideology. Again, the battle to save one's

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own soul and really one's own sanity
and freedom was sort of the first frontier

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before any sort of organized resistance could
occur. One example from Romania comes to

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mind. Someone I interviewed who grew
up in the Cheches Group period remembers having

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to sit down and see him on
TV. He would have these three to

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four hour rants every day where he
would just go on and it was expected,

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of course by the state and by
all the various little party informants,

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that you would be intently listening to
this until he became the star of everyone's

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favorite Christmas show and execution. But
he really commanded the airwaves in this way

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to just drum in his ideology,
if not through the convincing propaganda, just

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through straight repetition, which which can
sometimes be effective because it just wears the

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mind down. And this person that
I interviewed remembers that her family would do

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this active resistance, which seems small
but in retrospect was really quite powerful,

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which was just turning off the TV
or turning down the volume and praying the

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Rosary together as a family during that
time, or going out to play,

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or just doing something else. And
it is really important to protect your own

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mind because it is a seductive ideology. We know even the Devil, the

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Father of Lives, was able to
seduce even the garden. This is something

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that can and does get into people's
psyches, so as we know just from

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looking at the death count of communist
regimes, this is something that to many

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seems obviously evil, but when you're
in the thick of it can be quite

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convincing. One other example I wanted
to bring up on this topic is another

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one from Cuba, this time from
the political prisons, and this is a

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tactic that Communist soldiers actually used in
the Spanish Civil War too, so it

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spans kind of time and place within
the communist world, and they would try

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to induce the Catholic prisoners to apostatize
to give up their faith, saying,

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oh, you know, you can
just go to confession after you get out.

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If you apostatize, I'll set you
free. Then you'll be free.

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Run to confession and you'll be fine. You get to see your family again.

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And many saw through this and saw
that this was a bad deal.

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But after being tortured and starved for
months, many others believed the guards and

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would give in and would do whatever
performative apostasy was required of them. And

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then the guards would look at them
and laugh and say now you're going to

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hell and shoot them on the spot. Anyway, So it speaks to this

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sort of deeply, this deep hatred
and animosity towards religion that in my opinion,

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transcends any sort of rationalism that communist
thinkers purport to be representatives of.

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That you can say this is backwards
and anti rationalists all you want, but

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if you don't believe any of it's
true, why luxury in this cruelty towards

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someone who holds these beliefs. So
to me, that showed that this really

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demonic element, that someone would target
a soul in the state of grace in

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that way and you see examples of
this from across the communist sphere that they're

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saying the quiet part out loud,
that the hatred of religion goes beyond just

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a simple facts based narrative. Yeah, speaking of Cuba, you have an

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interesting chapter on Cuba, an interesting
section of that chapter, specifically on the

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Bay of Pigs and how faith informed
a lot of the actions of a lot

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of the men that were involved in
that operation. But that reminded me of

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a question I wanted to get in
front of you, which was about liberation

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theology, because one of the biggest
of attacks on you know, the conservative

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the anti communist approach to the twentieth
century and still today is that this is

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the church sort of colluding with the
capitalist forces of oppression. And of course

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we don't need to get into rebutting
that because I don't think either of us

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are in need of persuasion, and
most of our listeners are neither. But

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how the teachings of the church,
if you could talk about maybe how the

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teachings of the church are abused by
liberation theologists in this search of utopia in

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ways that often do put man ahead
of God. Yes, this was a

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very insidious tactic that speaks to that
fifth point that I got to earlier about

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infiltration. This is not only just
merely boots on the ground infiltration within the

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ranks of the Church, but also
an ideological infiltration that I think, unfortunately

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we're seeing the effects of to this
day with some of the narratives currently coming

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out of the Vatican. Even liberation
theology. Is this the system of distorted

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Catholic truth, and it really hones
in on the principle of Catholic action.

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Catholic action, when viewed historically,
is actually something that's promoted by the popes.

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It basically means that Catholics should not
live in cloisters unto themselves, but

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be out in the world doing good
works and forwarding as pious. The Tenth

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said to restore all things in Christ
and to make Christ king over even secular

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countries. And so in Cuba,
the Catholic action movements were very active,

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especially at the schools throughout the twentieth
century, and we'll see they did not

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buy into this false distortion of liberation
theology, and the main Catholic action groups

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00:26:00,880 --> 00:26:06,000
were actually some of the anti communist
guerrillas who I end up profiling for the

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book, so many people unfortunately did
fall into this distortion, and it's sort

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of marrying Marxist principles of concern for
the poor and redistribution of wealth with Catholic

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principles. Of of course, charity
is important and the poor will always be

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00:26:22,759 --> 00:26:33,119
with us, so it's really a
dishonest allocation of Catholic principles to enable Marxist

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00:26:33,200 --> 00:26:42,319
policies. And the infiltration ideologically occurred
in very different but equally insidious ways throughout

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00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:48,960
communist occupied countries, and I compare
in the book The Liberation Theology of Latin

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America to this sort of more formalized
infiltration in Eastern Europe. So in Czechoslovakia,

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for example, as I mentioned before, a percentage about a lets seven

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00:27:00,240 --> 00:27:04,279
percent of the clergy stayed loyal to
the communist state rather than to the Vatican.

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So this is objectively a schismatic act. It can be compared to what

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happened in the French Revolution, where
the revolutionary government forced priests to take an

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oath of loyalty to the state rather
than to the Vatican, and these were

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known as the Juring Priests, and
many of them refused, and the ship

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00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:29,519
righted itself in France eventually, but
in Czechoslovakia sadly, a number of these

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00:27:29,559 --> 00:27:33,680
priests performed this oath so to speak, and stayed loyal to the Vatican.

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But this made the lines very clear. You could pretty much suss out which

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priests were loyal to the Vatican,
which priests were loyal to the state,

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and there was this sort of clear
delineation. Of course, sometimes people went

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back and forth, and there was
a lot of gray area too, but

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that type of thing makes it obvious
where you have to stand, and the

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challenge just becomes how to survive underground. With liberation theology, it was more

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00:28:00,799 --> 00:28:06,920
it just leaked into the public consciousness
and psyche more so that it was hard

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to define who was on what side, so to speak. And I think

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that's harder to root out because these
poisonous ideas can get in and a perish

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00:28:17,559 --> 00:28:22,359
that is otherwise one hundred percent true
to the faith can adopt some of these

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and allow just an inch of communist
control at a time, and over time

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00:28:26,200 --> 00:28:30,519
that amounts to a generalized apostasy or
too Before you know it, you wake

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00:28:30,640 --> 00:28:37,359
up and Catholic doctrine has been completely
subverted. So this it's a very almost

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00:28:37,400 --> 00:28:45,599
impressive, wily tactic, but to
colonize the minds and to use words,

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00:28:45,799 --> 00:28:51,000
especially words of the Bible against the
Church in order to sort of co opt

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00:28:51,039 --> 00:28:55,920
it for their own purposes was basically
the movement behind liberation theology, and what

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00:28:56,039 --> 00:29:00,559
we're seeing is still today. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah from the

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00:29:00,640 --> 00:29:04,880
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359
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and maybe drawing on I think a
lot of people who don't pay super close

360
00:30:21,079 --> 00:30:22,960
attention for good reason, maybe to
Latin American politics, because we have so

361
00:30:23,039 --> 00:30:26,559
much going on in our own politics. This is very much everything you're just

362
00:30:26,640 --> 00:30:32,720
describing is very much still alive.
You need look no further than Amlo right

363
00:30:32,759 --> 00:30:37,079
to our south to see some of
this language and lines of argumentations still being

364
00:30:37,200 --> 00:30:41,200
used. But maybe drawing on some
of your interviews and some of your research,

365
00:30:42,039 --> 00:30:48,839
what would you say or what stories
maybe would you share with younger people

366
00:30:48,440 --> 00:30:56,240
or people in the United States now
that are maybe suffering for various reasons and

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00:30:56,480 --> 00:31:03,640
look to socialism. Let's maybe you
even start slightly lighter than communism. Look

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00:31:03,680 --> 00:31:10,799
to a form of democratic socialism that
really involves an expanded state, not just

369
00:31:11,200 --> 00:31:17,119
you know, not just some version
of some boosted version of Obamacare or something

370
00:31:17,200 --> 00:31:22,240
like that, a real expanded state. Are there lessons in particular that you

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00:31:22,400 --> 00:31:26,720
think would resonate or should be heeded
by people in that position, which I

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00:31:26,839 --> 00:31:30,480
asked, because there are a whole
lot of people I think in that position.

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00:31:30,480 --> 00:31:33,559
Sure, some advice that I would
give, which is going to sound

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00:31:33,599 --> 00:31:40,400
bad, but be pessimistic in that
look at what you like. I'm a

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00:31:40,480 --> 00:31:45,039
cheerful pessimist. This kind of attitude
that I find with people who survive communism

376
00:31:45,079 --> 00:31:48,440
too, is just this implicit distrust
of the government, which is a very

377
00:31:48,519 --> 00:31:55,039
healthy thing to have. But just
look at the trade off for what you

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00:31:55,160 --> 00:31:59,920
are getting versus what you could be
giving up. Theoretically. Sure, if

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00:32:00,519 --> 00:32:05,559
if you're giving up certain freedoms and
they're not being used against you at the

380
00:32:05,640 --> 00:32:08,240
moment but could be in the future, that is something you always have to

381
00:32:08,319 --> 00:32:14,160
keep in mind because if it can
happen, it probably will. And one

382
00:32:14,200 --> 00:32:16,839
example that that's not even from politics, but I just heard yesterday of the

383
00:32:16,920 --> 00:32:20,920
twenty three and meters leak and I'm
just like, oh, I'm so glad

384
00:32:20,960 --> 00:32:28,640
I never did that. Information just
being leaked to hackers, And apparently hackers

385
00:32:28,680 --> 00:32:35,720
have been targeting specific gene groups to
make a statement on Israel and Palestine for

386
00:32:35,799 --> 00:32:42,039
example. So if such a thing, if such a dystopian nightmare could happen

387
00:32:42,160 --> 00:32:45,279
in your wildest imagination, like,
don't become paranoid. But that is something

388
00:32:45,400 --> 00:32:52,440
to take into consideration the trade off, and they're typically when freedoms are taken

389
00:32:52,440 --> 00:32:55,359
away, there is no going back. That is a one way process.

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00:32:55,920 --> 00:33:02,160
Once it's set in motion, typically
only goes towards their centralization and totalitarian control.

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00:33:05,240 --> 00:33:09,599
With these stories, Communism was implemented
pretty rapidly in these countries. So

392
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:15,720
Cuba is a good example of a
sort of gradual approach because when Fidel seed

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00:33:15,839 --> 00:33:21,720
power after the revolution in the late
fifties, when which aus did Batista,

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00:33:21,759 --> 00:33:27,240
who was basically not very popular among
any demographic, so people were ready for

395
00:33:27,319 --> 00:33:30,759
a change and they put their hope
in Fidel. He actually lied and claimed

396
00:33:30,799 --> 00:33:34,440
that he was not communist. He
was famous for saying the revolution is as

397
00:33:34,519 --> 00:33:37,599
green as palm trees and sort of
alluding to the fact like this this is

398
00:33:37,680 --> 00:33:42,519
not red this is not communists,
and of course, within several years it

399
00:33:42,599 --> 00:33:46,599
became obvious that he was lying.
One person I interviewed named Arturo, who

400
00:33:46,680 --> 00:33:52,720
survived that period, talks about how
he never fell for Castro's lives, and

401
00:33:52,119 --> 00:33:57,039
that was impressive to me because towards
the beginning, it seemed many people did

402
00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:00,880
have hope that he was telling the
truth. He talks about how he grew

403
00:34:01,000 --> 00:34:07,159
up reading reader's digest. He would
get an American somehow American readers Digest from

404
00:34:07,199 --> 00:34:12,920
his neighbor, and he developed these
critical thinking skills, and he also through

405
00:34:13,000 --> 00:34:16,800
that developed an understanding of how communism
was implementing itself in the rest of the

406
00:34:16,880 --> 00:34:22,760
world. So I think he remembers
reading about Cardinal Vincenti from Hungary, who

407
00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:28,400
many people I interview remember his story
and as like this watershed moment where they

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came to this realization about communism,
and he was very wary of Fidel's lines

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00:34:36,599 --> 00:34:39,960
after this. So I guess this
just speaks to the importance of education into

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00:34:40,079 --> 00:34:47,039
developing these soft skills of critical thinking
where people like to kind of turn away

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from the humanities and call it a
useless job, especially in the age of

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AI, but it's girding your mind
to be able to recognize bias, for

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00:34:57,199 --> 00:35:01,800
example, when you come across it
and lie and political projects that might be

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simmering under the surface, but the
truth won't come out until later. So

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interesting. Kristian van Union is the
author of When the Sickle Swings, Stories

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of Catholics who survived Communist oppression.
Kristin When is the book out? It

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00:35:17,000 --> 00:35:21,920
is out officially on November twenty first, but available for pre order right now

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00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:27,719
at Sofia Institute dot com. Fantastic
congratulations on the book. We talked to

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00:35:27,960 --> 00:35:30,920
Sophia authors pretty often, but just
as we're closing out here, can you

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00:35:31,199 --> 00:35:36,159
let us know a little bit about
Sophia for people who aren't familiar. Yes,

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00:35:36,239 --> 00:35:39,639
so Sofia Institute Press is a Catholic
publisher. We publish about six or

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00:35:39,719 --> 00:35:44,519
seven new books monthly, and that's
a combination of reprints or you might hear

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00:35:44,559 --> 00:35:49,559
from me again and new and upcoming
authors who really deals with anything from the

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spiritual life to these more political texts, and basically how to live within this

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00:35:52,719 --> 00:35:59,000
world, how to navigate as a
practicing Christian in kind of this almost dystopia

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00:35:59,079 --> 00:36:02,800
that we're currently in. Well,
I appreciate you coming on to talk about

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00:36:02,800 --> 00:36:07,360
this book. Christen, thank you
so much for your time. Congratulations on

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00:36:07,840 --> 00:36:10,440
this one. Thank you, Emily. Take care. Of course you've been

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00:36:10,480 --> 00:36:14,960
listening to another edition of The Federalist
or radio Hour. I'm Emily Kashinsky,

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00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:17,519
culture editor here at The Federalist.
We'll be back soon with more. Until

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then, be love versus freedom and
anxious for the fray. Heard the fame

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00:36:30,519 --> 00:36:36,039
by ser reason, and then it
faded away