Conservative Politics and the Danger of Secularism What is a cultural Christian? Those who have traditionally been opposed to Christian beliefs, people Like Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, and others are publicly siding with Evangelicals for conservative causes associated previously with church-goers. They don't believe, but identify as "cultural Christians." What are we to make of all of this? Is it a good thing or something we need to be wary of? Learn about the new rise of secular conservatis...
Jul 29, 2024
Christianity Vs. Christian Nationalism and the Woke Right Today's culture has really shifted as more people are disconnected from faith. Proponents of what we may term "traditional values" are on the rise even though they don't ground such values in any transcendent ethic. Others, claiming to be Christians place their political battles on par with their religious beliefs and some have adopted the tactics that those on the left have used such as cancel culture against their opponents. How can we ...
Jul 22, 2024
Why Are Churches Blessing Same Sex Couples While Denying Same Sex Marriage? There’s an alarming trend beginning to emerge in churches today across Christendom. Conservative Catholic, Orthodox and even Evangelical churches have taken to offer blessings to same-sex couples while still trying to hold that same-sex unions are against the teachings of scripture. Should "pastoral care" trump the clear teaching of scripture on what we understand as an immoral lifestyle? And how do we as evangelicals el...
Jul 15, 2024
One Nation Under God: How America’s Christian Heritage Shaped Our Country We’ve heard the phrase “American Exceptionalism.” Just what is it that makes America different? In a word, it’s Christianity. Because Christianity so changed and infused the culture, Christian ideas provided the foundation of the American experiment. Indeed, America could not have existed without it and those Christian principles are necessary to maintain the nation as the founders envisioned....
Jul 08, 2024
How We Became a Crotch-Driven Culture Pride month, transgender ideology, throuples, onlyFans, sexual self-expression, InCels, and abortion. It seems that almost all the issues that capture the attention and the headlines today center around the pelvis. How is it that the center of our culture revolves around the vulgar and the crass? How did civilization lose its way? In this podcast, Dr. Harry Edwards and I discuss why in the 20th century culture turned from elevating the human condition to a m...
Jul 01, 2024
Understanding In-vitro Fertilization As A Christian Reproduction, in vitro fertilization, and all of the questions that go along with it have been making the headlines recently. Did the Southern Baptists really oppose IVF treatments for infertile couples? How can pro-life people be against bringing more babies into the world? Just what issues are there with IVF and other reproduction-assisting procedures? Are there dangers to the parents? Listen in as Lenny explores all those questions and more....
Jun 24, 2024
Pope Francis vs Augustine: Are People "Fundamentally Good"? In a recent 60 Minutes television interview, Pope Francis made the claim that people are "fundamentally good in heart." Such a statement by the head of the Roman Catholic church seems to directly contradict Catholic theology, going all the way back to Saint Augustine! Is the pope renouncing the doctrine of original sin? What about human nature and human depravity? Is the pope even Catholic? In this podcast, I'm joined by Reasons to Beli...
Jun 17, 2024
What's the Big Deal About The Trinity, Anyway? The Trinity. It forms the center of Christian doctrine, yet most Christians today either don’t understand it or ignore it as something not important. But if God wasn’t a triune being, our salvation would be impossible. How can we make the Trinity more comprehensible? In this episode I interview Dr. Fred Sanders of Biola University, an expert on the Trinity, as we explore the deep things of God....
Jun 10, 2024
Leveraging Culture for Christianity It's no secret we're no longer living in a Christian culture when we see all of the various ways that church has been displaced in our society. How can we share our faith with people who simply aren't interested in religion anymore? By leveraging the desires and the thoughts that people do have to show them that Christianity actually is the answer that they're searching for....
Jun 03, 2024
What Does Athens Have to Do With Jerusalem? That question was first famously asked by the church father Tertullian when he was contemplating the relationship between Greek philosophy and church theology. Today, many people wonder the same thing. Do we need all that egghead scholasticism or can’t we just love Jesus? Yet, for most of Christian history the pastors *were* the professors! It is only recently that some mistakenly separate belief from intellectual scholarship. Listen in to learn just h...
May 28, 2024
J. Warner Wallace: The Inside Scoop on True Crime Can a homicide detective who dealt with murderers and death really uncover important truths about how to live? In this fascinating interview, Lenny speaks with Det. J. Warner Wallace about his career as a cold-case detective and his new book The Truth in True Crime. In it, Wallace shares the fifteen most important principles to improve your life, strengthen your faith, and make you a better human being....
May 20, 2024
Learning From 35 Answered Prayers in the Bible Throughout the Bible, we see the heroes of the faith coming in prayer to God for all kinds of issues, But have you really studied just how they prayed? In this interview with Dr. Nathan Ward, author of _Our Eyes Are On You: A Study of Biblical Prayer_, we discuss what specific things effective prayers have in common and how our understanding of God's nature and attributes should inform our petitions....
May 13, 2024
What Dangers Does AI Hold For The Future? Artificial intelligence is quickly being integrated into more and more systems we use to work and create. But are there dangers to it? Past doomsday scenarios in film may not be realistic, but ther are some legitimate cautions we should heed that accompany the benefits of AI. In this episode, Lenny joins the Kirkwood Center roundtable to look at the benefits and potential pitfalls of AI, including some areas of concern that aren’t normally discussed....
May 06, 2024
Belief, Denial, and Delusion: Lessons from Jeremiah People will hold their beliefs strongly. If a belief is justified, that should be the case. But what happens when we believe things that aren’t true because we simply don’t want to? We have many examples throughout history of people denying or deluding themselves into believing things about God that are simply wrong, and they even use scripture to try and prove it! In this podcast, we examine how our denial or biased understanding of God makes ...
Apr 28, 2024
Losing Culture: How Relativism Makes People More Savage Why do we see more incivility in our society today? We read about the increase in mass shootings, student violence against speakers with whom they disagree, and an ever-growing online belligerence. And what's worse is our country and our world are being divided among ideological lines where no thought or no charity is given to the person holding a differing view. Here, our panel explores how we are losing our culture--specifically how relat...
Apr 21, 2024
Fake News! How the Misinformation Police Get It Wrong What counts as misinformation, disinformation or fake news? Are people so led astray by today's social media that they continually confuse facts with opinion? Lenny examines a journalarticle by political sciientists who claim to show how people get their facts and opinions wrong. However, there's a big problem... the researchers themseves don't understand knowledge. By misdefining what counts as fact, theitr paper provides an example of how t...
Apr 15, 2024
Deconstruction, Doubt, and Christianity: The Bobby Conway Interview Doubt about the claims of Christianity have existed since the day of Jesus's resurrection. Many young people today are deconstructing their faith based on their doubts. But what happens when the one wrestling with doubt is a pastor? How does he face his congregation each week? In this riveting interview, Lenny talks with pastor and apologist Bobby Conway about the difficulties and doubt he faced even while pastoring a church. He...
Apr 08, 2024
Defusing the Wars Against Men and Culture: The Nancy Pearcey Interview Our culture is in crisis in many different ways. Depression rates are soaring, young men are finding it more difficult to find their place in this world, confusion over the value that our bodies hold is commonplace, as is the idea that morality isn’t rooted in fact. In special interview with Nancy Pearcey, we discuss several of the most crucial issues that are rocking our culture today. Her books like Saving Leonardo, Total T...
Apr 01, 2024
Christianity and Masculinity: What Does it Mean to Be a A Man? What does it mean to be a Christian and a man in 2024? Is it the hyper-aggressiveness and crudity of an Andrew Tate or is it a benign passivity of a Ward Cleaver? Here, we examine the extremes, the stereotypes, and the assertions of how manhood has gone wrong. But we also look to Jesus—the primary example of what being a true man is—and offer a model of biblical manhood that becomes something a bit different from what both the secula...
Mar 25, 2024
A Paleontologist's View of Darwinism and Intelligent Design Evolution is a hot=button issue. As our science progresses, is the evidence for evolution beoining more concrete or more tenuous? Here, I interview Dr. Günter Bechly, an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist who has devoted much of his life studying Darwinism. He highlights the incredible problems facing the modern neo-darwinian synthesis and how design makes much better sense of the data....
Mar 18, 2024
Does #HeGetsUS Really Get Jesus Right? How do you reach a culture that thinks Christianity is not only unnecessary, but evil? The #HeGetsUs commercials made a huge splash during the Superbowl, but were they effective? And did they properly communicate the gospel message? Here Lenny, along with Dr. Harry Edwards and Dr. Jacob Daniel, discuss the pluses and the problems of the #HeGetsUS effort and offers a balanced, thoughtful view, shedding more light to a topic that has generated quite a bit of ...
Mar 11, 2024
Beware! The Language Games of the Woke Words matter. We use words in order to communicate ideas, in order to share feelings, and gain knowledge. But words can also wound and be weaponized. In fact, today political ideology has driven an intentional misuse of words and a conflict over how we even understand shared ideas. Here Lenny exposes the intentional obfuscation of terms and points out the language shell games that are sometimes used to try and shame and coerce us into holding a specific vie...
Mar 04, 2024
My LIVE Conversation with Jehovah's Witnesses What do you do when a Jehovah's Witness knocks on your door? Many people have a bit of a panic attack or want to shoo them away as quickly as possible, Christians included! But you shouldn't be afraid to engage these people, for it's rare enough that someone wants to talk to us about the things of God! I had the opportunity to capture a visit that a couple of Witnesses made to my door and I take you through the entire conversation, providing my think...
Feb 26, 2024
The Lazy Approach to Evangelism Evangelism. It's a word that can strikes fear into the hearts of a lot of people. We know we're supposed to evangelize, but how do we do so? Does it require tons of study? Doesn't it require feet of iron? Maybe there's a lazy way that we can still be faithful to our gospel command and share our faith with those who don't believe in Jesus. That's our topic as I interview author and apologist Eric Hernandez on his new book The Lazy Approach to Evangelism ....
Feb 19, 2024
Crisis of the Shrinking Family: The Tim Carney Interview We are in the midst of a baby-bust. For the first time in our history, the number of seniors are growing at a greater rate than the number of babies being born, which spells a dangerous future for our lives as well as our culture. Why has the millennial generation shied away from having kids? What are the *real reasons* for the hesitancy in becoming parents and what can the church do about it? In this interview with Tim Carney, author of t...
Feb 12, 2024
Andy Stanley, Alistair Begg, and Confusion over LGBTQ+ Issues What are we to make over the recent controversies that have encircled prominent Evangelical leaders about their stances on same-sex weddings, transgender grandchildren, and the like? A few months ago, Andy Stanley hosted a conference where he invited a "married" gay couple to speak to Christian parents. Last week, Alistair Begg got into hot water for his advice about attending such unions. How are Christians to discern what the right ...
Feb 05, 2024
Building a Bulletproof Faith in Your Kids The stats are clear. Once they leave home, Christian kids are leaving the church in alarming numbers. How can we help young believers stand up to the continual onslaught of peer-pressure, professors, and pop culture pushing them away from the faith? In this session, noted apologist Lenny Esposito provides parents and young people with specific tools to solidify their faith and help them see why Christianity makes the most sense of our world....
Jan 22, 2024
Losing The Family: Are Millennials Choosing Comfort Over Kids? It’s no secret that birthrates are declining in the west and it seems to be more prevalent with the millennials. Why are young people today reluctant to start families? In this podcast Lenny, along with Kirkwood Center colleagues Anthony Costello and Dr. Jacob Daniel review a couple of recent articles written by millennial women where they tell how they actually dread the idea of motherhood and how they aren't alone in their feelings...
Jan 15, 2024
Would The World Be Better Without Religion? Is it true that science fly you to the moon while religion flies you into buildings? Skeptics such as Richard Dawkins often claim that the biggest evils in the world are perpetrated because of religious beliefs. Does religion cause more wars, more hatred and prejudice than other views? What would a world free of religion look like? Join Lenny as he shows why such objections have no grounding in reality....
Jan 08, 2024
Top Podcasts of 2023 - The Best of the Best! Here it is. As we close out 2023 and welcome 2024, Lenny reviews all the interviews and roundtable discussions published over the year and highlights clips from the top five most watched podcasts of the year. Issues like neo-paganism, J.R.R. Tolkien and God in Lord of the Rings, and how Sigmund Freud shifted our culture towards a sex-saturated ideology are here. Interviews with Stephen Meyer, Austin Freeman and former militant atheist Sy Garte are inc...
Jan 01, 2024
