Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Leo and Restless Hearts in Algeria
Aired: 2026-04-27
Duration: 05:13


=== Conspirituality Podcast Intro (04:43) ===

[00:00:03]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:04]  My name is Matthew Remsky.
[00:00:05]  This is Conspirituality Podcast, where we investigate the roots and intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:00:16]  You can follow myself, Derek, and Julian.
[00:00:18]  We're all easy to find on Blue Sky.
[00:00:21]  The podcast is on Instagram and Threads, also easy to find under its own handle.
[00:00:27]  And you can find me on YouTube and TikTok as Anti Fascist Dad.
[00:00:33]  Also, I have a new book out with North Atlantic Books.
[00:00:38]  It's called Anti Fascist Dad Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times, and I'll put the link for that in the notes.
[00:00:47]  This Patreon bonus episode is called Leo and Restless Hearts in Algeria.
[00:00:54]  It's about an Augustinian pope visiting the birthplace of Augustine.
[00:01:00]  It's about the pope landing in the midst of a battle over colonial reparations demanded of the former French Empire.
[00:01:09]  In the midst of missiles raining down on Iran, in the midst of new rashes of Islamophobia and anti Semitism, and in the midst of Leo's own tense dialogue with a crumbling American empire.
[00:01:23]  On a two day whirlwind visit, Leo stood at an anti colonial shrine.
[00:01:30]  He honored Muslim and Christian martyrs.
[00:01:33]  He prayed for an unarmed and disarming peace.
[00:01:38]  And by invoking Augustine's multilingual pre colonial ideal of the pilgrim church, he refused the premise that Christianity and empire are the same project.
[00:01:53]  But I'm going to start with a daydream.
[00:02:00]  In 397, Aurelius Augustinus sat at a writing desk in his study in the villa attached to the basilica complex at Hippo.
[00:02:11]  In what is now Anaba, Algeria.
[00:02:14]  He'd moved into this house when the Christians of Hippo these were a polyglot congregation of Romanized Berbers, Greek and Latin speaking settlers, some Jewish converts they had made him bishop against his will the year before.
[00:02:30]  And his scribe sat beside him with a wax tablet, rolls of parchment beside him, ready for the final draft of the morning, the tools of writing brightened by the flames of oil lamps.
[00:02:43]  Augustine dictated his books and sermons when the communal house was quiet.
[00:02:49]  The limestone walls had gathered the cool of the night and would hold it close as the sun rose to cast beams through small high windows onto the mosaic floor.
[00:03:00]  The ruins of the Hippo Basilica complex are only a kilometer or two from the eastern shore, where fishing boats bob in the cobalt Mediterranean.
[00:03:10]  So, in my daydream, Augustine has a balcony.
[00:03:14]  And he gets up to pace and pause for a moment or two here and there as the horizon line sharpens before turning back to his scribe and dictating the opening of the confessions.
[00:03:29]  And I wonder if he paused after uttering the third sentence, vaguely aware of how it would resonate down through the days.
[00:03:35]  You move us to delight in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.
[00:03:45]  Twenty Latin words out of the estimated five million that Augustine left behind, opening a book that invented the Western interior self, a sustained first person narration of secrets addressed throughout to God, but also to the reader through the second person address, through the you.
[00:04:06]  This is a book that collapsed autobiography, philosophy, and praise into a single form, a book that originated the memoir, the confessional essay, and a journey into consciousness.
[00:04:19]  Before the confessions, no one we know of had written a book about what it felt like to be themselves.
[00:04:26]  Now, there's a great man theory of how this book and Augustine's influence come about.
[00:04:32]  He was a genius, goes the theory, perhaps divinely blessed, more capable than others by orders of magnitude to see what history required and how to push the human story forward.
[00:04:42]  You've been listening to a conspirituality bonus episode sample.

=== Subscribe For Bonus Episodes (00:26) ===

[00:04:47]  To continue listening, please head over to patreon.comslash conspirituality, where you can access all of our main feed episodes ad free, as well as four years of bonus content that we've been producing.
[00:05:03]  You can also subscribe to our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
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