Robert Lee Williams tells how even a little tech in prison can make a big difference.Af Plough

Simon, Tim, Matt, Jim, and Paul discuss how narrative theology or what is known as the Yale School or postliberalism defines Christianity as a community of practice, which can serve as entry into understanding religion in general. Following the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, narrative theologians such as George Lindbeck, Stanley Hauerwas, James McCle…

In Philippians Paul portrays kenotic love as the very substance of divine reality, power, and truth, and it is in imitating this self-emptying love and not grasping after life that we become imitators of Christ and a community of the Spirit. This marks the central message of Paul rediscovered by Hegel. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, …

Trent Maxey, Professor at Amhurst College and author of "The Greatest Problem" runs down how Shinto as a native religion is an invention of the modern state in Japan, and how the "secular" state has used Shinto on the order of the American deployment of Christianity. He describes the dishonesty in supposed neutrality toward religion, and the differ…

God is love is definitive of God's personhood and the opening of his personhood in Kenotic Love is the possibility of personhood. This personhood of knowing God is definitive of the personal and of what it means to know and think as persons. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.…

James and Helen Rebanks talk about raising sheep and cattle in the Lake District. James describes the landscape where their families have lived for six hundred years, and how they have begun practicing regenerative agriculture as a way of restoring the land that recent conventional agriculture had damaged. He gives details about the sheep and cattl…

Trent Maxey, of Amhurst College and author of "The Greatest Problem" on delineating the role of the secular, political and religious in Japan, continues to address the problem of a too simple narrative of secular and religious, and even of the way power functions. Jim, Matt, Jon, Simon, and Paul join the discussion. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed …

Acknowledgement of God and access to wisdom, reason, and understanding of the self and the world are synonymous. Where Kant and the modern age deny access to God as foundation to reason, and attempt to establish foundations within reason, the Bible and Hegel point to God as the possibility giving rise to reason. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this…

Tim Maendel describes his love of hunting and the connection it gives him to the human species' natural history.Af Plough

Trent Maxey, Professor at Amhurst College and author of the book, "The Greatest Problem" describes the amorphous nature of Shinto, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam in connection with culture, economics, violence, and modernity. He questions the usual categories under which religion, east and west, is perceived and points to our continual enmeshmen…

The Prologue of John depicts the point of creation as incarnation and this is fulfilled through the Spirit. God would be known throughout creation as Christ knows him and makes him known, and this is the point of history and the work of the Spirit as depicted in John, developed by Origen and Maximus, and built upon by G.W.F. Hegel. Become a Patron!…

Rhys Laverty writes about the Alderney Breakwater, a crumbling jetty in the Channel Islands that protects a way of life.Af Plough

Norann Voll learned some of life’s most important lessons from her father while caring for sheep.Af Plough

Allan, Brian, Jonathan, Jim, Matt, and Paul discuss Charles Taylor's secularization thesis, its factuality and reality as compared with Derrida's theory of difference, Slavoj Žižek's primordial lie and the reality of the knowledge of good and evil, and then how it is that Bulgakov's Sophiology addresses the secondary nature of creaturely sophia. Be…

David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov provide the basis for this discussion between Matt, Simon, Tim, Jim, and Paul on how the antagonism in religion has folded into secularism to create a secular experiential reality for fundamentalists of both atheism and religion. Bulgakov's Sophiology once again points toward the synthesizing reality of Chris…

Peter Mommsen asks if humans should live by the laws of nature.Af Plough

Matt, Brian, Jason and Paul discuss the work of Sergius Bulgakov's sophiology in addressing transcendence and immanence and the futility connected to the new atheism, as compared to Slavoj Žižek's therapeutic atheism. The hope for goodness and truth as inherent to the personal faith journey is discussed. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast…

The final words of Jesus in Matthew summarize orthodox Trinitarian belief and the economy of salvation, and the Nicene Creed and Gregory of Nyssa take up this formula as the foundation for orthodoxy and combatting heresy and for describing the dynamics of sin (a dynamic of trinitarian absence) and salvation. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this pod…

In an excerpt from her book, Joy Marie Clarkson explores the natural metaphors that we use. Are you a tree, she asks, or are you a potted plant?Af Plough

Greta Gaffin asks if humans should return to nature, and looks to the lives of two saints who taught us to make peace with it instead.Af Plough

In this continued introduction to World Religions and Cultures a review of the work of Rene Girard as it folds into Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger helps define the interactive roles of culture and religion as modes of orientation in identity, and as completed in Christ and the Church. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider do…

In two passages from I and II Corinthians, Paul utilizes the mirror or mirroring to illustrate incompleteness and immaturity and fullness. He points to the focus on the spectral, the partial, the created - as in many religions which focus on the sun and its eclipse - as the problem. In Psychoanalysis this mirror stage is universal and without cure,…

David McBride introduces his new translation of The Leper of Abercuawg, a thousand-year-old Welsh poem in which an outcast seeks comfort in the wild.Af Plough

Joy Clarkson discusses her new book, and the importance of metaphor. Why are metaphors important? How can they help us live well – and how can they go wrong? Why should we not think of ourselves as computers? And what does all this mean for our language about God? In the discussion, Joy and Susannah range widely through topics including apophatic t…

Jim, David, Tim, Brian and Paul discuss the possible relationships between Christ and culture, particularly in a secular age, and discuss the opposed positions of Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger and the resolution posed by David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our w…

The Council of Chalcedon, as read by Maximus the Confessor, provides a solution to the issue of difference and unity, the problem of the one and the many, or the answer to how their can be unifying love in a universe seemingly built on dualism, difference, and multiplicity. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to s…

William Thomas Okie says plants can talk; but is anyone listening?Af Plough

Colin Boller explains how regenerative agriculture helps farmers care for the land and pay the bills.Af Plough

There are a variety of Christianities in which resurrection is excluded (theological liberalism), not needed (fundamentalism and penal substitution), or deemphasized (evangelicalism or pietism). The answer to the resurrectionless or semi-resurrectionless religions is the gospel, as the defeat of death, a cosmic salvation, a lived righteousness, a r…

In the conclusion to the interview with Girard specialist Michael Hardin, Michael explains how a non-sacrificial hermeneutic, taken up in the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, given a Christological center is the dynamic for reading the Bible and understanding God, not through morality but in character and ethic…

Clare Coffey gives a defense of the dandelion, the plant that always comes back.Af Plough

Matthew Scarince and Sebastian Milbank discuss Tolkien and technology. Susannah chimes in. Is J. R. R. Tolkien anti-technology? What is the relationship between magic and technology in the world of the Lord of the Rings, and in ours? What do the elves have to do with that? What can we tell by looking at the rings, the palantíri, the silmarils? Shou…