Recommended podcast: Chris E. W. Green's Speakeasy Theology

Lately I’ve really been enjoying Bishop Chris E. W. Green’s podcast called Speakeasy Theology. Green is a bishop in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches and Professor of Public Theology at Southeastern University in Lakeland, FL. Green’s background is Pentecostal, but his move into the CEEC has put him in an interesting place where he is deeply invested in the Episcopal tradition while still embracing a strong Spirit-filled embodiment of faith.

His podcast isn’t particularly fancy or polished. It does have theme music, but generally consists of Green in conversation with one or two others, delving into some aspect of theology and/or practice. I particularly appreciate his humble approach to these conversations. While many podcast hosts and theologians would work to make their own points and push their own agenda, he is very willing to just ask questions and let his guests provoke the conversation in the direction they want to go.

A couple recent episodes that stuck out to me: first, God Is More Exciting Than Anything with Dr. Jane Williams. Dr. Williams talks about loving theology, loving prayer, loving God, and serving the church. Green doesn’t do extensive introductions of his guests on the podcast, so as I listened all I gathered at the beginning is that Dr. Williams is a British professor of theology. As the discussion went on, Green asked some questions about advice on the life of a Bishop, and the impact on the Bishop’s family, and what a Bishop should prioritize, and as he listened to her advice with great esteem, I thought wait, I need to connect some dots here. So I Googled Dr. Jane Williams, and found that in addition to being a professor of theology, she’s been married for more than 40 years to Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. (Lightbulb!) What stuck out to me about this interview, beside the wonderful conversation and counsel from Dr. Williams, was that she was presented (deservedly) entirely on her own authority and merit, with no reference to her husband. This felt like a beautiful and, sadly, remarkable display of respect by Dr. Green.

The second episode I want to recommend is titled The Difference is Doxological, Green’s conversation with Richard Beck. Beck is a professor of experimental psychology at Abilene Christian University and a long-time blogger. (I’ve read Beck for a long time and blogged about his thoughts frequently enough he has his own tag on my blog.) Beck’s specialty is the intersection between psychology and theology, and his discussion with Green is a wonderful hour wrestling with how we think about the acknowledged work of God in people’s lives vs. the work that God does through the common grace of psychological practice. Beck also talks about his own faith journey of deconstruction and rebuilding, giving his long-time readers like Green and me some good background for his blogging.

I’ve recommended Chris Green’s books here before, and I’m happy to recommend the podcast, too. It’s worth a listen.

Podcast Recommendation: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

For a long time my podcast listening has been almost exclusively nerdy tech podcasts mixed up with nerdy theology podcasts, with an occasional news or true crime mixed in to liven things up. Somehow I have almost entirely bypassed any that were music-related. (I did listen to a couple episodes of Song Exploder right after it debuted, but it just didn’t hook me.)

Somewhere along the line, Rob Weinert-Kendt on Twitter started linking to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by British host Andrew Hickey. It took me only a couple episodes and I was hooked.

The format of the podcast is one song per 30-ish minute episode, but each episode covers far more than just the titular song. Hickey provides background on the artist, the influences that formed that artist, stories about the creation of the song, and so on. You come away from the episode having learned a lot not just about a particular song but also about the developing music scene in the Americas (and, once you get in a ways, in Europe). He starts with the first inklings of what would become rock music as they emerged in the big band scene. (Episode 1: “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet.)

500 episodes is a significant feat for any podcast, and setting out that goal in the title of your show seems rather ambitious, but I’m willing to bet that Mr. Hickey has all 500 songs charted out, and the moxie to see it through. He’s currently up through Episode 157 (“See Emily Play” by Pink Floyd), and is publishing a lot of bonus material for Patreon subscribers. I’m learning a lot as I go, so even if some interruption keeps the series from completion, it’s still been an excellent investment of time.

So, if you’re interested in rock music, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is highly recommended.

Podcast Listening, Social Distancing Edition

Back in the old days (say, before March 2020), my podcast listening tilted heavily toward current events. For my own mental well-being, that isn’t a good listening diet whilst being at home for weeks on end. So, in addition to my usual handful of sermon podcasts, what’s a guy to listen to? How about stories about people far worse off than ourselves?

Enter the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. Hosted by Paul M. M. Cooper, this podcast takes lengthy (90 minutes to 3 hours) looks at ancient civilizations, what drove them to flourish, and then what caused their downfall. Cooper is a British writer and archivist with a PhD focused on the cultural and literary significance of ruins. His podcast isn’t particularly fancy from a production standpoint - mostly him narrating, occasional voice actors reading historical documents, and some background music - but he delves into the history of great civilizations and brings them to life.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve listened with fascination as Cooper described the fall of the Roman Empire in Britain, the Mediterranean Bronze Age, and the Khmer Empire of medieval Cambodia. (I didn’t get that one in college history class!) There are only ten episodes in total right now, so I only have another 8 or 10 hours of listening left ahead of me, but it’s been quite enjoyable.

If you’ve got an interest in ancient history or in hours of narration by a guy with a nice British accent, it’s worth a try. You can find it on YouTube, SoundCloud, or generally wherever you listen to podcasts.

A healthier approach to a mid-life crisis...

Andrew Osenga started a new podcast earlier this year called The Pivot. Episode 3 is his discussion with musician, producer, and composer Don Chaffer. Toward the end of the interview, Don talks about how he’s started writing for musical theater, and how it provides an outlet that he needs as a 40-ish father and husband.

…when you have kids in particular you just give and give and give and give. And one day you wake up and you’re like ‘what do I get, what’s my part in this thing? Because I used to do a lot of stuff I liked… sometimes I would go out to eat or watch a movie! That was crazy!’. I told a monk friend of mine one time, he said ’tell me everything’. And I said ‘well I feel like between family and work I’ve got nothing left.’ And he said “yeah! and a hundred years ago you’d be dead by now, too.” So, there’s just something about this phase of life, it’s just - he’s like, ‘people died at that point just because they were too pooped to keep living’. And I feel like - so that’s what a mid-life crisis is. You hit these limitations and you think ‘I’d rather have, you know, a Corvette and a hot blonde with a boob job. And so you do these crazy stupid things, blow up your whole life. And it’s like – one of the jokes I’ve made is that my mid-life crisis was music theater instead of hookers and blow. But it’s true. I think that it became - one of the things I realized is that you find a healthy outlet to give yourself some space, to do some things you enjoy. Because that’s important. You can’t live on only sacrifice. It ends up being a negation. While love and sacrificial love are endless, hypothetically, they aren’t for a human, right? They’re only endless because they come from somewhere else. There’s some point you kinda run yourself out and you realize ‘I don’t have infinite capacity here to be a loving husband and father. I’ve gotta do something for myself.’ The other piece of it for a marriage is to try to invite each other into it together. Not necessarily doing the same things, because usually that isn’t going to help - you need space from each other - but invite each other into that headspace of like, ‘do some things for yourself. I’ll do some things for myself. We’ll get a babysitter if we can afford it. Or swap. I’ll take the kids tonight, you take them on Wednesday.’

I resonate with that more than I’d like to admit many days. (I bet my wife does, too.)

Another view of 'love of neighbor'

I was catching up on my backlog of On Being podcasts and came across a fascinating discussion with writer Alain de Botton. de Botton is an atheist, but provided a description of the idea of love of fellow citizen (in my words, “neighbor”) that was insightful to me.

MR. DE BOTTON: …I think you’re onto something huge and rather counterintuitive because we associate the word “love” with private life. We don’t associate it with life in the republic, with civil society. But I think that a functioning society requires two things that, again, just don’t sound very normal, but they require love and politeness. And by “love” I mean a capacity to enter imaginatively into the minds of people with whom you don’t immediately agree, and to look for the more charitable explanations for behavior which doesn’t appeal to you and which could seem plain wrong, not just to chuck them immediately in prison or to hold them up in front of a law court but to…

MS. TIPPETT: Or just tell them how stupid they are, right?

MR. DE BOTTON: Right. Exactly. We’re permanently — all sides are attempting to show how stupid every other side is. And the other thing, of course, is politeness, which is an attempt not necessarily to say everything, to understand that there is a role for private feelings, which if they were to emerge, would do damage to everyone concerned. But we’ve got this culture of kind of self-disclosure. And as I say, it spills out into politics as well. The same dynamic goes on of, like, “If I’m not telling you exactly what I think, then I may develop a twitch or an illness from not expunging my feelings.” To which I would say, “No, you’re not. You’re preserving the peace and the good nature of the republic, and it’s absolutely what you should be doing.”

I really like this definition of love of neighbor that way - to work to understand them by giving them the benefit of the doubt, to look for the most charitable explanation for their position. We as Christians could take that idea to heart.

A couple recent podcast episodes worth recommending

I listen regularly to a handful of podcasts, and irregularly to a couple handfuls more. This past week I’ve run across a couple episodes that I feel are particularly worth recommending:

Radiolab Presents: More Perfect: “The Political Thicket”.

More Perfect is a short-run podcast (they plan to produce 7 episodes) by the wonderful folks at Radiolab that is focusing on the US Supreme Court. The Political Thicket is an episode about the 1962 Baker vs. Carr decision in which SCOTUS first really got involved in political decisions - in this case, by forcing Tennessee to reapportion legislative districts in a way that provided equal representation for both whites and blacks. Fascinating stuff.

Fresh Air: Christopher Eccleston On ‘The A Word,’ and Rethinking His Faith After ‘The Leftovers’

Fresh Air is hardly a novel or surprising podcast recommendation, but this Terry Gross interview with actor Christopher Eccleston was superb. I’m really only familiar with Eccleston from his season playing the lead in Doctor Who, but after this interview I also really want to catch up with The Leftovers.

Eccleston talks frankly about his wrestling with faith, talking about how he’s moved from an angry atheism to a more open viewpoint, and how the Biblical book of Job has loomed large in playing his character in The Leftovers. He also talks very personally about his struggles in relating to and caring for his father who suffered from dementia for 15 years before passing away in 2012.

A really fantastic interview - Terry Gross is of course a premier interviewer, and Eccleston is a very engaging and forthcoming subject. Worth 40 minutes.

Liftoff Episode 12: Geof makes the bigtime

When the Relay podcast guys announced a show about space, my first thought was “sure, Stephen and Jason are great, but they need Geof as a third host”. Well, he hasn’t made it that far yet, but I was excited yesterday to see that he did make it on to Liftoff episode 12 as a guest.

Geof works at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as a Payload Rack Officer for the International Space Station. I’ve heard bits and pieces about his job over the last year, but I learned a lot listening to him talk here. If you’re interested in space, Liftoff is worth a listen.

The first shoreline of the invisible world

There’s a beautiful bit in the On Being episode that was published earlier this week, from a 2008 interview that host Krista Tippett held with the late Irish poet John O’Donohue.

This quote reminds me of a lot of what NT Wright says about the spiritual dimension and about churches being beachheads where God’s kingdom overlaps and is shining into the world. Here’s what O’Donohue said:

The more I’ve been thinking about this, the way we make divisions all the time between the visible world and the invisible world, and it’s as if the invisible world is the poor relation and the visible world is ultimate ground and reality, and the more I’ve been thinking about this the more it seems to me actually that the visible world is the first shoreline of the invisible world. And the same way, I believe, with the body and the soul - that actually the body is in the soul, not the soul just in the body - and that in some way the poignance of being a human being is that you are the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way.

“The poignance of being a human being is that you are the place where the invisible becomes visible and expressive in some way.”

Beautiful.

A little bit of a bozo

Merlinmannwwdc2007.jpg My theme in any discussion over the past couple of years has usually come around to “well, yeah, but… it’s complicated.” So my head started nodding enthusiastically yesterday when listening to the Reconcilable Differences podcast, when I heard Merlin Mann say this about the possibility that he’s a contrarian (at about 22 minutes into the episode):

What a lot of people get and that some people don’t get is that you’re not trying to be difficult, but that the more you enjoy something the more you’re interested in seeing how it could be better. And here’s a thing that’s actually not such a big deal that you could make better. It’s not an insult, it’s not a slam. And for me, whenever people say “oh you gotta to out and set goals for yourself”, I’ll be “well, maybe”. You know goals can really be self-defeating if they aren’t updated and realistic. “Oh you should never have goals.” Well, that’s not true. Do you really wanna play tennis without a net? I feel like maybe I’m more of a contrarian? I feel like, whenever somebody comes up with something that’s, like, an unvulnerable pronouncement about how the world mostly always is, it gets my dander up a little bit, and I don’t feel like I have to say something, but I know I’m thinking that person’s probably a little bit of a bozo.

Preach, brother Merlin. Preach.

A Meal Shared Among Friends

I’ve had the sacraments (especially the Eucharist) on my mind lately after reading James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom, and then listening to the On Being podcast this morning I found this bit from Father Greg Boyle, a delightful Jesuit priest who has spent his life working with gang members in Los Angeles:

Jesus doesn’t lose any sleep that we will forget that the Eucharist is sacred; He is anxious that we might forget that it’s ordinary, that it’s a meal shared among friends, because if we don’t see that, then we’ll be unable to recognize the sacred in the ordinary, and that’s the incarnation.

Interesting to hear from a Catholic. But in my experience, this is a trap we Evangelicals have fallen into at various times, too.