Yesterday students across the country participated in a walkout from school to protest against guns, which they understand to be the problem underlying recent school shooting. There’s a strange blindness, though, to the much deeper problem, at least as I see it: the increasingly blunted claim that life and humanity make on us. In a traditional way of thinking, life is something awesome, sacred – to take life is dreadful to contemplate. Not so much, though, anymore. Why?

On a new podcast episode of Great Minds with Michael Medved, Michael talks with historian Richard Weikart about the historical background behind this fall of human life from its once very high pedestal. How did it come about that we now see it as hardly more exalted than animal life? This important discussion focuses on Dr. Weikart’s appropriately titled recent book, The Death of Humanity, which as he explains, has more than one meaning. Find it now on the Minds with Medved website.

Photo: Richard Weikart and Michael Medved, by Nathan Jacobson.