EIGHT YEARS. OVER 300 EPISODES.
I don’t have a “team.” I don’t have sponsors.
It’s just me, the guests, and you.
Are you a supporter of this effort and offering? If not, support the show by becoming a paid member on Patreon today.
It’s what makes the show possible.
Thank you.
LISTEN ABOVE VIA SOUNDCLOUD or
SPOTIFY • APPLE PODCASTS • POCKET CASTS • CASTBOX • PLAYERFM

Friends,

There is a revival happening for beliefs. Religious beliefs are everywhere, and they are funny and tragic and challenging.

The way people usually describe this is that it’s an attempt to come to terms with a world in turmoil, that it gives people a sense of order.

But it’s also easy enough to think of it in other ways: as the gods drawing nearer; or as people discovering new meaning, seeing new things, and so finding themselves broken open as new believers.

Broken open, I say because the revival itself – especially the revival we think of most when we use the word “revival,” Christianity – is itself broken.

Christianity: seized again by the political, as it has been for centuries.

Christianity: not peace but the sword.

Christianity: a word at the end of the world.

Christianity: it says, “hate your neighbor.”

On the next episode, I’ll be talking with someone about my own life, my own opening up to christianity – but especially esoteric christianity. But first, I wanted to look at Christianity in the lives of others.

I wanted to talk about Christianity, the way its living in many of the people experiencing that revival now, and converting, and also in my own life. 

On this episode, I talk with writer LAMORNA ASHwhose latest book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religionchronicles her conversations with christian  converts and the newly faithful in the still-secular UK.

In the process of writing the book, Lamorna has her own reevaluations of christianity and her own beliefs as a queer person. Of these conversations, Lamorna writes, “They taught me how to believe the belief of others.” It’s a beautiful sentiment and means that Lamorna is untangling the many ways to believe and understand.

But it raises questions, too.

How to believe others’s beliefs if they are threatening? If they are aimed against you? And what about when those beliefs are aligned with powerful political forces… can they be said to even be beliefs then, and not just coerced behavior?

I’m so excited to share this episode with you, because Lamorna has a insight into what’s happening right now in the christian (and not-yet and never-will-be christian world.) 

SHOW NOTES

We didn’t get to talk much about Lamorna’s first book, a loving portrait of labor and nature, Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town.

Here are the two Christian Wiman poems I mention at the top of the episode:
“All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs“
and
“Every Riven Thing“

A few other things to check out related to this episode:The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas

The Next Conversation: Argue Less, Talk More by Jefferson Fisher

Times Square Red, Times Square Blueby Samuel Delaney

I wrote about Steiner’s concept of knowing yourself and the material world as illusion in my recent post on the Marduk story as a story about the Archangel Michael.