Stop me if this sounds familiar:

In our world, at this moment, dialogue is dying, and righteous indignation abounds. People shout over each other, screaming louder and louder, but it isn’t clear that anybody is listening.

That’s from the new book Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us (Princeton). In this episode of Gospelbound, I was joined by the authors, Morton Schapiro and Gary Saul Morson. Schapiro has been president of Northwestern University in Chicago since 2009. Morson teaches Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern and is currently at work on a study of The Brothers Karamazov, which I can’t wait to see. You can read his remarkable summary in the May issue of First Things. Morson changed my life trajectory when he taught me Tolstoy and Dostoevsky during my undergraduate years.

Schapiro and Morson describe fundamentalism as “radical simplification of complex questions and the inability to learn either from experience or from opposing views.” They warn, “We are entering an era when politics seems to be conducted as war by other means.” And a little later: “Fundamentalist thinking is utopian, if not apocalyptic. One knows the truth, and those who disagree are ignorant, evil, or insane. All goodness belongs to one’s own camp.” You can read Morson’s previous essay, “Death of the Liberals,” and draw your own conclusions about whether 20th-century Russia could recur today.

Among their proposed solutions is a recovery of casuistry, or employing case studies especially from great literature for experience-based learning. I asked them about grand theories and alternative facts and economics, and I’m grateful they agreed to join me on Gospelbound in the spirit of further learning and dialogue. It’s not easy to be a college president these days, but I was a proud alum when Schapiro drew the line last year when protests against him turned anti-Semitic. I don’t believe the problem today is fundamentalism, per se, but whether obeying the law of love fulfilled in Jesus Christ to treat our enemies the way we would want to be treated.