When Amaziah, Priest of the Shrine of Bethel, confronts the prophet Amos for conspiring against King Amaziah, Amos replies with a very specific denial: “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.” And it’s hard to run for president of the United States without insisting early and often that “I’m not a politician.” What about philosophers? What happens when you ask a philosopher whether or not she’s a philosopher? We might find that out today as we talk with Rebekah Spera and David M. Peña-Guzman about their recent book Professional Philosophy and Its Myths from Lexington Books. And even if we don’t, I imagine we’ll find ourselves posing questions about the field that we call academic philosophy that are worth posing.

Living among human beings gives an observant person plenty of occasions to think about delusion. Whether one watches the young revolutionary or the aging politician, the conspiracy theorist or the devotee of conventional wisdom, human beings take a peculiar joy in fooling ourselves. And we don’t have to limit ourselves to a single explanation of delusion either: Calvin’s workshop for idols and Nietzsche’s clever forgetting ape both make good sense, depending on whom one watches and in which moment. One could even imagine someone wondering, and forgiving the gendered language of his moment, “What a piece of work is man!” And if that last one rings true, you’re already geared up to hear about Shakespeare’s explorations of human delusion, specifically in his tragedies. Rhodri Lewis’s recent book Shakespeare’s Tragic Art puts delusion in the center of the conversation, and Christian Humanist Profiles, with a very clear mind indeed, is glad to welcome him to the show.

In the middle of the twentieth century a process of collection started, one that would profoundly shape of Biblical studies for decades to come, all the way to our own moment. To say more than that would run afoul of any number of chapters of Andrew Perrin’s book Lost Words and Forgotten Worlds: Rediscovering the Dead Sea Scrolls from Lexham Press, so I’ll try not to overstep. Instead I’ll say that his book stands both as an introduction to this fascinating collection and its place in our knowledge of Biblical cultures and that for someone like me who studied Qumran back when Bill Clinton was president, the book provides some interesting new questions to pose.