Audio Sustenance for the Crucible of Life

Recommendations for edifying listening as an alternative to fear porn

May 14, 2026

This is a quick follow-up born of a sense that I ought to provide some alternatives to the mental inputs which are so incapacitating for the reasons I outlined yesterday.

We all derive comfort from the human voice, and it is for this reason that it is so tempting to fill the mind with yet more of what causes it harm. With that in view, I want to recommend two sources which I listen to.

The sources are both Christian, and for those for whom Christianity seems foreign a certain amount of transposition will be required. One also must elide those points which seem initially to go against the grain of one’s own doctrine, or at least hold one’s own doctrine temporarily in abeyance. That is a small price to pay for the value they provide, and on further investigation it often happens that any apparent differences are superficial.

It is true that there are Islamic sources which are equally edifying. I have a strong affection for Al-Qurshayri’s 10th-century Epistle on Sufism, for example. But that is not available in good English in audio, at least so far as I am aware.

But as concerns modern sources, I find post-Enlightenment Islam1 generally more insufferable than post-Enlightenment Christianity. Leaving aside the frequently doubtful personal qualities and motivations of those appointed to shoehorn what I call Brand Islam into the West, their mode of presentation defeats for me any hope of the content bearing fruit, dripping as it tends to with a type of certainty of which only the genuinely ignorant are capable. All this is exacerbated for me by the tedious insertion of Arabic honourifics upon a prophet whose revelation they reject at every turn in favour of a highly curated subset of things made up some two hundred years later. Combined with a degraded form of English and a barely-contained glee at the harm inflicted by their arrival in the countries whose language they now apparently speak means that whatever pearls they intend to cast before me are simply not worth the trouble of picking out from the mud.

I completely understand that not everyone will respond to that particular genre in the same way as it strikes me, and if you have found sources which work for you, then good for you.

The Screwtape Letters

Written by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), an academic, author, lay member of the Church of England and wonderfully read by John Cleese, The Screwtape Letters comprises a veritable mine of wisdom and insights for a believer of any stripe into the reality of life as it is actually lived. Though modern in terms of his epoch and mode of delivery, Lewis bears a genuinely traditional stamp.

Teresa of Ávila

A Carmelite nun and saint of the Catholic Church, Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) led a hard but (and) devout life. She treated her dedication to Christ as a marriage and lived in obedience to those with authority over her. While she addresses herself in the first instance to the women of her own community, I have benefited much from learning about her life and practices.

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Of course the Islamic world did not go through the progressive destruction of the vertical axis as in the West (moving from the Forms of Plato to the immanent essences of Aristotle, the nominalism (denial the reality of universals) of Ockham, and the isolated, thinking subject (cogito) as the foundation of certainty in a world of meaningless, mechanical matter of Descartes—all of which produced the firestorm which cleared the way for the so-called Enlightenment. However, the Islamic world imported all the results of that process. And while it may blame colonialism for that, the fact is that any society that does not embrace what Jacques Ellul called Technique (modernity, pragmatism, that which is the cancer of the modern world) will be destroyed by Technique itself. The analogous processes one may witness in the two other major classical civilisations, India and China, are too obvious to require comment. But modern (what I call Brand) Islam is essentially schizophrenic. And it is this which I object to since I don’t want imported into and imposed on my country something which cannot and does not work anywhere else. Its advocates can point to no genuine correlation between doctrine and praxis, and where it seems to exist it is vestigial or highly subjective at best. From where I sit, the purveyors of Brand Islam are much more interested in benefiting from what the West produces than in trying to square the circle of their own contradictions. Iran has survived because it has modern scientists who use rationalist methods to achieve material outcomes. Any overlay of philosophy at this point is qualitatively no different that the fig leaf of morality used in the West to justify its unhinged policies. The actual state of affairs is elegantly encapsulated by how I have heard Russian-speaking Muslims joke: Нет бизнес-плана без Ислама—(nyet biznesplana bez islama)—that is: there’s no (real-world) business plan without (the insertion of some lip service paid to) Islam. And in a civilisation in collapse on the basis of dynamics some of which are summarised in this footnote life on parallel lines of this type (what I have termed here schizophrenia) is not Tradition, it is a superstition, a tax paid to God who if He is anywhere is found between two lines which never meet.