Episode 15: Randy Boyagoda
The Making Every Class Catholic Podcast
In this episode of the Making Every Class Catholic podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Randy Boyagoda—novelist, essayist, book critic, and professor of English at the University of Toronto—for a wide-ranging conversation about literature, language arts, and what it means to read and tell stories as Christians. Randy invites us into a faith-informed way of seeing: a sacramental imagination that recognizes the world as “charged with the grandeur of God,” and that understands words as more than labels—sometimes even as instruments that shape reality, from Genesis’ “let there be” to John’s “the Word became flesh.” From there we get concrete: how Catholic teachers can approach any good literature (not just “Catholic books”) by attending to family life, vocation, and the deep human hunger for coherence. Randy also revisits his famous “I’m sick of Flannery O’Connor” essay—not because he’s tired of the great dead writers, but because Catholics need to read the living and the dead together. Along the way he offers practical pathways for finding contemporary Catholic voices, recommends books across ages and stages, and offers his unexpected (even contrarian) advice for cultivating young writers. Music by Braden Kuntz