by Jeremy Daggett
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
The Awl’s newsletter this week:
You had a mission this week: to notice people doing tiny kindnesses for each other.
The responses are ordinary and fantastic. I loved the service information sign outside the Tube station:
Thought for the day: in a world where you can be anything, be kind.
I love that the mission was to notice. These things are always around us, but we have to practice seeing them.
(Via Kottke)
The great interviewer gets interviewed (Overcast)! This is from April of last year.
Topics include:
As I mentioned in my recent post, I now listen to Rob Bell’s podcast. It’s consistently good, challenging, and timely. I still like his interviews the best but now I listen to his solo episodes too. Rob started a series at the beginning of April on what he calls alternative wisdom. It’s the “wisdom after wisdom,” or counterintuitive wisdom. Part 1 was particularly good (Overcast).
Alternative wisdom for this episode:
Sit in the waiting. In the silence. In the absence.
In the moment when things have fallen apart, be present, because something important is happening.
This is probably the hardest advice for someone who is currently there. Sure, in hindsight it can seem helpful. But really be there, live in it, and you just might see something you didn’t see before.
Wisdom is being stripped of your identity and waiting. It's in the nothingness that something new will be born.
Depending on how you’re doing right now, this definition of wisdom might be easy to accept. Or you might want to punch Rob in the face. Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy the episode.
I love spoken-word audio. Audiobooks. Podcasts. iTunes U lectures. It all started with Jim Dale reading aloud the Harry Potter books on family road trips from Arkansas to Maine and back, first on cassette tapes and then on compact discs. Now I live in a city in southern Peru and most days I have a 30-60 minute commute, and I get to listen. We handwash our dishes and hang our clothes on the rooftop to dry, so I get to listen.
In early 2015, I started dabbling in podcasts that touched on questions of faith, the Bible, spirituality, and what it means to be human. I had already been listening to a lot of podcasts at that point, but they were almost exclusively tech podcasts. A year in on my little project I wrote about my favorite religious podcasts. At that point, the Smart Speed feature on my favorite podcast listening app, Overcast, had saved me 35 hours of listening time. It has now saved me 143 hours. Did I mention I love spoken-word audio?
I’m still going strong with Newsworthy with Norsworthy, the Liturgists, and Nomad, though I’ve tinkered with my podcast app so that The Bible for Normal People, Rob Bell’s podcast, and the Bible Project now play before the other three.
That’s right, I now listen to Rob Bell’s podcast and I really like it. His updates on his book tour and speaking appearances can be a bit laborious at the beginning of every episode, but it’s a free podcast and his platform is how he makes his living so I respect the self-promotion. The actual content of the episodes is phenomenal and accessible. And, as was the case two years ago, his interview episodes are incredible (e.g. this one where he interviews Pete Holmes about his HBO show Crashing or this one where he interviews Krista Tippett). I still can‘t bring myself to say “the RobCast” though.
The Bible Project is a non-profit that creates videos and podcasts to explore biblical themes and the literary structure of the Bible. Their mission is to show that “the Bible is a unified narrative that leads to Jesus and has profound wisdom for the modern world.” Even though the YouTube channel their main product, I haven’t watched many of their videos. Instead, I listen to the podcast, where they might spend three or four or five episodes talking through what will eventually become a 5-minute video. The creators, Tim Mackie and Jon Collins, are fun and easy to listen to and have a great dynamic. My good friend Jake Blair has used their video series quite a bit here in Arequipa and turned me onto their podcast.
The Bible for Normal People is just a few months old but has quickly become a favorite. Pete Enns and Jared Byas interview brilliant guests and try to make their scholarship and experience accessible to a broader audience. I’ve enjoyed every one of the first eleven episodes, though some episodes may not pass the “Bible for normal people” test.
I’ll link to some favorite episodes from these three new (to me) podcasts soon.
My favorite tech and Apple-focused podcasts are still The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast. I also listened through the entire backlog of Hello Internet and am now current with it. I love On Being with Krista Tippett (though I can’t stay subscribed because the current feed publishes both the main interview and an unedited version of the same interview, so I just pick the episodes I want to listen to when I run out of other things I want to listen to). I occasionally listen to an episode of You Made it Weird with Pete Holmes. He’s a tremendous interviewer, has amazing guests (I don’t know half of them, but they’re famous, so you probably know them), and the backlog is an endless archive of hilarious and fascinating conversations. And I’ve found Personality Hacker to be fun and enlightening (thanks to Michael Daniel for the recommendation).
Here’s a screenshot of my primary playlist in Overcast, organized by priority (that means that as new episodes are published from any of these podcasts, the playlist sorts them based on my preference).
You’ll notice that my love for tech podcasts still rules, but the spiritual/religious world wins out in quantity. Then again, if we count by sheer runtime, The Talk Show might win single-handedly with episodes like this massive, 3-hour extravaganza. Have no fear—I listen to all of these at 2x speed with Smart Speed turned on, so a 3-hour episode only takes me about an hour and 20 minutes to get through. It would be impossible to listen to as much as I do at 1x, and 1x now sounds unnaturally slow.
(My thanks to Steven Hovater for challenging me to greater listening speeds. He was recently seen praising Overcast for it's new 3x speed feature. It’s official, Steven. You’re nuts.)
This is one of the best conversations I’ve listened to in a really long time (Overcast). Partially because Pete Holmes is a great interviewer, and partially because I’ve been listening to the lead singer of Jimmy Eat World piped through my headphones and speakers (and direct to my ears once, live!) for the last 15 years. It’s fun to think about my journey from when I first heard Bleed American to now, and hear Jim talk about his own journey during that same time, eventually creating Integrity Blues just last year.
Topics for the show include:
Two bits that stuck out to me:
Finding yourself arriving at a place that you didn’t expect is exciting…Chasing your ideal expectation is actually a very limiting way to live.
And:
You want to talk cosmic? Think about the cosmic odds than any of us exist. That’s sacred.
So good. 🎧
If you call yourself a follower of Jesus and are looking for ways to be more open and conversational about your faith without being a jerk, Surprise the World is a good place to start.
The author, Australian theologian Mike Frost, shares five habits that can help you find a better rhythm of connecting your faith and your everyday life. The premise is that Christians should live in a way that provokes questions, and then be ready to share why we live the way we do. It’s all about being open, hospitable, willing to listen, and always ready to learn. If more Christians lived this way I think it would indeed be a surprise to the world.
It’s short, sweet, and easy to read, packed with practical suggestions, interesting stories and theological tidbits. If you read it and try out any of his suggestions, I’d love to hear how it goes.
One of the best interviewers of our time, Krista Tippett, interviews one of the great thinkers our time, Richard Rohr. The result is well worth 52 minutes of your time (Overcast).
Everything Rohr says about non-dualistic thinking is thought-provoking. I also loved the bit about asking God for one good humiliation a day (and when he gets it, analyzing his own response to it). Finally this, on what it means to be human:
The ‘truly human’ is always experienced in vulnerability, in mutuality, in reciprocity.
Vulnerability transforms you. You can't be in the presence of a truly vulnerable honestly vulnerable person and not be affected. I think that's the way we were meant to be in the presence of one another.
Do you see your life as something you create? Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?
How much of our lives do we live somewhere else? We live the week for the weekend. We live the month thinking about our next trip. We work this job for the next job, as a step-stool or stop-gap. We go back to school, because after that we’ll finally do what we were made to do.
Dream big. Make plans. But if we live only in the future, we’re missing it.
Sometimes it’s not the future that drags us away, but the augmented present. It’s a present space distorted by a constant drive to refresh our feeds. Social media are another harmless aspect of our lives—important and powerful, even—until we let them consume our every waking moment. We no longer live here, but are living there, thoughtlessly, constantly in that world. And we fail to recognize that there is something divine about this breath.
How to Be Here is a mindfulness book, not about withdrawing but about being radically present. It’s an easy read with lots of one-line paragraphs and 3-page chapters (i.e. classic Rob Bell). I actually read this book on paper!
The book is about embracing your God-given capacity to reflect God into the world in ordinary, everyday work. You can call it God’s image. Call it divine breath you breathe. In the midst of suffering and joy, work and recreation, we are spiritual beings who, by being present, can experience God and people and life in life-giving ways.
Here are a few bits I underlined, circled, highlighted or otherwise defaced the sacred page for the sake of remembering:
All work is ultimately creative work because all of us are taking part in the ongoing creation of the world.
Not the creative type, you say? You’re just a mom? Cool. On moms:
Could anything be more connected to the ongoing creation of the world than literally, physically bringing new human beings into existence and then nurturing that new life as it’s shaped and formed?
To my accountant friends, he talks about accountants as creatives, too.
Four spirit-affecting diseases:
Boredom. Cynicism. Despair. Comparison.
Think about your day yesterday. Do you suffer from any of these?
Then there’s your ikigai—what gets you up in the morning:
To be here is to embrace the spiritual challenge of your ikigai, doing the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you have to give the world.
Nothing like a Japanese word to get you thinking about why you’re here. I love that he helps you think through dropping everything to do that thing you love full time versus doing what you love as a hobby.
Not convinced? Listen to Luke Norsworthy talk to Rob Bell about the book. You don’t read books? Rob Bell will read it to you.
Even if you don’t read it, take a week or two to think about how you can be more present—at work, in traffic, in your relationships, doing what’s difficult, and doing what you love.
Does being here scare you? That’s fine, take your time. We’ll be here when you’re ready.
Chris McNeal, introducing the first installment of an eight-part series on the Bible and faith:
In the summer of 2012, I had to face the Bible class I had taught for two years and announce that I wasn’t sure if I believed in God anymore. In fact, I was basically sure I didn’t. I’ve always tried to be transparent with people, and I wasn’t going to pretend to believe in something I knew I really didn’t.
What it came down to was the Bible.
No book in history has been as consequential or influential, but I could no longer get behind it. Either my view of God was correct or my view of the Bible was correct.
But not both.
It took me three years from that summer to arrive at what I now believe. And once I figured out what I believed (and I did), it took me another year just to figure out how to talk about it. Today, I believe in God more strongly than I ever have in my life, and, in the interest of remaining transparent, I want to spend the next several weeks talking about where I’m at.
Because I really, really like it.
Chris is a friend of mine and I respect his thinking. I’m glad he’s able to share this as his perspective is essential for the church. He’s a lawyer by trade, which makes him a non-professional theologian who has gone deep because of his own questioning and pursuit of truth. That doesn't diminish his contribution. If anything we ought to pay even closer attention because he doesn't get paid to do this.
He’s also just fun to read. Take this section, for example:
The fossil record is more clear on this score than my early theologically trained but not biologically trained religious mentors had me to believe. Inerrancy alienated me and continues to alienate many from people who for decades of their lives personally have carried on the quiet and meticulous investigation of difficult scientific questions. In a desperate effort to cling to what we’ve always known, we fall victim to the pseudo-scientific word salads that evangelical leaders employ to keep us within their orbit.
This often takes the form of folksy soundbites that, to people with no background in these subject matters, make scientists seem out of touch and too big for their britches.
He’s halfway done with the series, so it’s a perfect time to dive in. After this, you can read parts 2, 3, and 4.
The harrowing tale by Michael Kimmelman at the NYT:
When the Grand Canal was completed, at the end of the 1800s, it was Mexico City’s Brooklyn Bridge, a major feat of engineering and a symbol of civic pride: 29 miles long, with the ability to move tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater per second. It promised to solve the flooding and sewage problems that had plagued the city for centuries.
Only it didn’t, pretty much from the start. The canal was based on gravity. And Mexico City, a mile and a half above sea level, was sinking, collapsing in on itself.
It still is, faster and faster, and the canal is just one victim of what has become a vicious cycle. Always short of water, Mexico City keeps drilling deeper for more, weakening the ancient clay lake beds on which the Aztecs first built much of the city, causing it to crumble even further.
When he says faster and faster, he means it. Some parts of the city are sinking at a rate of 9 inches/year. And this is what happens over time:
An element of magical realism plays into Mexico City’s sinking. At a roundabout along the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s wide downtown boulevard, the gilded Angel of Independence, a symbol of Mexican pride, looks over a sea of traffic from the top of a tall Corinthian column.
Tourists snap pictures without realizing that when Mexico’s president cut the ribbon for the column in 1910, the monument sat on a sculptured base reached by climbing nine shallow steps. But over the decades, the whole neighborhood around the monument sank, like a receding ocean at low tide, gradually marooning the Angel. Fourteen large steps eventually had to be added to the base so that the monument still connected to the street.
The city’s sinking is connected to an ongoing water emergency. How Mexico City residents get clean water is an engineering marvel. But any given day there is 20% of the population that can’t count on it. And when the city’s population is over 20 million, 20% is immense.
We’re only starting to see the effects of the last several decades of urbanization. There are bound to be many more stories like this in the near future. This is a new type of water crisis. I can’t help but wonder what role non-profits like Charity: Water, who have made it their mission to give access to clean water to rural populations, will play in addressing it.
A tremendous collection of stories from the Southern Poverty Law Center, each with corresponding advice for how to speak up:
People spoke about encounters in stores and restaurants, on streets and in schools. They spoke about family, friends, classmates and co-workers. They told us what they did or didn't say—and what they wished they did or didn't say.
And no matter the location or relationship, the stories echo each other.
As usual, a great piece by Craig Mod. In this case though, he took 28 days away from the internet to prepare:
Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous—it doesn't feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn't result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions—a healthy mind. Our measuring sticks for life tend to be optimized for material things, things easy to count. Houses, cars, husbands, babies, dollar bills. Attention is immaterial, difficult to track.
We deserve our attention.
He pulls in a few fascinating quotes from others and gives some practical advice that you can put into practice right away.
English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.
Two of the world’s hardest languages: Tuyuca and !Xóõ.
Seth Godin called this “five steps to digital hygiene.” I think of it more as five steps to wellbeing in the digital space:
- Turn off mail and social media alerts on your phone.
- Don't read the comments. Not on your posts or on the posts of other people. Not the reviews and not the trolls.
- De-escalate the anger in every email exchange.
- Put your phone in the glove compartment while driving.
- Spend the most creative hour of your day creating, not responding.
So good.
It’s sobering to think where we were a year ago. Colbert had just started his new gig on The Late Show and he interviewed Joe Biden on his third day. The Verge presented it as something “we won’t soon forget,” but we do forget, and we move on to the next story. Watching it again, this jumped out from the second part of the interview. Joe Biden:
Look, I don’t think any man or woman should run for president unless:
- They know exactly why they would want to be president, and
- They can look at folks out there and say “I promise you you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy and my passion to do this.”
This is the part that stuck with me, though, even after a year. Colbert:
It’s going to be emotional for a lot of people if you don’t run. Your experience and example of suffering and service is something that would be sorely missed in the race.
The words ‘suffering’ and ‘service’ aren’t being used very often these days to define leadership. Let’s start.
(By the way, if anyone can find Part I, please let me know)
1611, meet 2016. It only took 405 years to emojify the translation of the Bible we love to hate. It’s a marked improvement.
Available in iBooks for only $2.99.
Fantastic piece by Fuller Studio. Don’t miss the list of tips for reading the Psalms and the Spotify playlist of modern psalms.
Interesting film project from the Brehm Center at Fuller Theological:
The piece is intended to engage the theological imagination through words, images, and sounds. Like an icon, participants are encouraged to see through these pictures, giving voice to a concrete reality that is shot through with a deeper resonance.
The first one is called “Flight Into Egypt.” I’m looking forward to seeing others.
Adrian Chen, in a gripping account of fundamentalism and the humanizing influence of Twitter, for the New Yorker:
By the end of the day, Phelps-Roper had more than a thousand followers. She took the incident as an encouraging sign that Westboro’s message was well suited to social media. She loved that Twitter let her talk to large numbers of people without the filter of a journalist. During the next few months, Phelps-Roper spearheaded Westboro’s push into the social-media age, using Twitter to offer a window into life in the church and giving it an air of accessibility.
It was easy for Phelps-Roper to write things on Twitter that made other people cringe. She had been taught the church’s vision of God’s truth since birth. Her grandfather Fred Phelps established the church, in 1955. Megan’s mother was the fifth of Phelps’s thirteen children. Megan’s father, Brent Roper, had joined the church as a teen-ager. Every Sunday, Megan and her ten siblings sat in Westboro’s small wood-paneled church as her grandfather delivered the sermon. Fred Phelps preached a harsh Calvinist doctrine in a resounding Southern drawl. He believed that all people were born depraved, and that only a tiny elect who repented would be saved from Hell. A literalist, Phelps believed that contemporary Christianity, with its emphasis on God’s love, preached a perverted version of the Bible. Phelps denounced other Christians so vehemently that when Phelps-Roper was young she thought “Christian” was another word for evil. Phelps believed that God hated unrepentant sinners. God hated the politicians who were allowing the United States to descend into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. He hated the celebrities who glorified fornication.
This is the type of story that makes you cringe, but you can’t stop reading. What strikes me is the humanizing effect of relationships with people who are different from you. The catalyst in this case was Twitter.
It’s a long piece, but worth finishing. Here’s one more bit:
As Phelps-Roper continued to tweet, she developed relationships with more people like Hughes. There was a Jewish marketing consultant in Brooklyn who abhorred Westboro’s tactics but supported the church’s right to express its views. There was a young Australian guy who tweeted political jokes that she and her younger sister Grace found hilarious. “It was like I was becoming part of a community,” Phelps-Roper said. By following her opponents’ feeds, she absorbed their thoughts on the world, learned what food they ate, and saw photographs of their babies. “I was beginning to see them as human,” she said. When she read about an earthquake that struck off Canada’s Pacific coast, she sent a concerned tweet to Graham Hughes: “Isn’t this close to you?”
I love podcasts (not just Serial). I got started on tech podcasts after Steve Jobs announced the iPad in January of 2010. My brother, Seth, encouraged me to watch the keynote, and it immediately plunged me into the world of Apple, design, and tech geekery. Since I listen to a few tech podcasts religiously, I thought it was time also to survey the landscape of religious podcasts. I started at the beginning of the year and have found a handful that I really like.
You’ll notice that I don’t include any solo podcasts in this list. There are a lot of great sermons out there, I’m sure, but I’m more interested in conversations than I am sermons (one exception: I listen to my friend Steven Hovater who preaches at the church at Cedar Lane in Tullahoma, TN). This even rules out a popular podcast like Rob Bell’s (sorry Rob, I still don’t like that name), except for when he’s interviewing folks like Charity Water’s Scott Harrison or Oprah Winfrey.
I’m sure there are gaping holes in this list. I haven’t gone to iTunes and explored the top podcasts in the Religion and Spirituality category. I never searched the top lists in tech either, so I wanted to try without in the Christian podcast world too. My exposure to these has been more organic (or just spurred on by searching for another N. T. Wright podcast guest appearance).
Here are my three favorite shows, three honorable mentions, and a few that I just couldn’t get into. If there are some podcasts you really like, I’d love to hear from you.
A quick glance at the backlog of Luke Norsworthy’s podcast and you can see he’s scored some amazing guests on his show. He’s also been doing this for a long time, so the audio quality, his interview skills, and the overall product have gotten consistently better. His sarcasm takes some getting used to, but he knows what he’s talking about, asks great questions, and really sets up his guests consistently to shine. I also like that he does a wrap-up episode at the end of every month, so that there can be some reflection on the month’s episodes.
At first I was only listening to episodes with guests I had heard of. Now I listen to all of them. Luke exposes me to theologians, pastors, and practitioners both academic and popular outside my realm of exposure within my church tradition (the churches of Christ) and my seminary studies (Harding School of Theology). I like that I share a similar background with Luke because he asks his guests the same questions I’m asking.
Some favorite episodes:
Exploring reality through the lenses of science, art, and faith.
The science, art, and faith trifecta makes for some great conversations. Mike Gungor (of Gungor Music) and Mike McHargue (better known as Science Mike) are your hosts. Most of the episodes consist of both Mikes taking on a specific topic, like creativity, or, the multiverse. Lisa Paino is a semi-regular co-host, and they’ve interviewed other guests such as Peter Enns, Rachel Held Evans, and Kristen and Rob Bell. They’ve put together one knockout special episode, featuring a range of guests in a conversation about LGBTQ.
The show has had a run of just over a year, and it’s been good. I’ve listened to the whole backlog. Their background in evangelical circles leads them to address issues and perspectives that I think are interesting. They mix an interview style with a topical approach. The episodes are artfully crafted and the audio quality is great. They have a progressive bent, but use a healthy, open approach in each conversation. While they don’t represent the full spectrum of atheism, both Mikes have been atheists at one point in their lives, which translates into extra sensitivity and openness to doubt.
Some favorite episodes:
Christian community, mission, and the future of the church.
The Nomad Podcast is the longest running of the three (since early 2009), so it has a tremendous backlog. They hit the pause button in mid-2011 but rebooted just a few months later and have been publishing new episodes once or twice a month since. The hosts, Tim and Dave, are disenfranchised Christians looking for signs of hope. They have a phenomenal host dynamic and seem really to care about people. They’re from the UK, which means they offer a great, European perspective, and have accents that automatically make them both funny and intellectual (to my US-American ears at least). These guys are really fun to listen to.
Each episode starts with a pre-interview, shares the actual interview, and ends with a followup conversation. The introductions and conclusions might be laborious for some of you, but again, the accents keep me coming back. Since they’re based in the U.K., they have a guest list that differs quite a bit from Luke Norsworthy’s. They’ve had Tom Wright on several times (including for their pilot episode), which is awesome. They always ask good questions, going with their general attitude of wanting exposure to a wide set of voices and perspectives (including both women and men). Most of the episodes are interviews, but they also publish some “Nomad Extras” (shorter, solo-reflections on specific topics like the refugee crisis), and seasonal series like “12 Days of Christmas” and “An Interfaith Easter.” There’s something about the premise of the podcast, “looking for signs of hope,” that I like more than “you just came out with a book so I’m going to interview you.”
Some favorite episodes:
I’m subscribed to the aforementioned three shows, and will likely listen to a new episode soon after it’s published. The following three I listen to occasionally. I’m not subscribed, but I keep them in my podcast app and check back when I need something new to listen to.
Here are a few podcasts I thought I would like, but for some reason or another I couldn’t quite stick with (read: they’re probably due another listen). Either something about the style, the hosts, or the audio quality rubbed me the wrong way.
I worry that these podcasts aren’t sponsored enough. Everything I listen to in the tech world is sponsored and a good business for those who host the podcast. It ensures it’s worth their time to keep making a great podcast. Luke Norsworthy has had a monthly sponsor most months this year. The Liturgists have just launched a Patreon campaign to fund more episodes like the one they put together on LGBTQ. Of all the episodes I’ve listened to of Nomad, they’ve never hinted at trying to make some money, except joking about raising money to interview Christian thinkers and practitioners in the U.S. of A.
I hope that some of these folks can find a sponsorship model that works for them and is sustainable, so they can continue to produce great content. It takes a lot of work to produce a really good show. Their work deserves to be compensated.
If you use Apple’s built in podcast app, give Overcast a try. I love its Smart Speed feature (shortens silences), which has saved me 35 hours of listening time so far. I also love the way you can see which podcast episodes people you follow on Twitter recommend.
It’s free, so why not try it?
