Christopher and Riley return to the topic of the Beatitudes, this time discussing the fifth of the eight Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). They explore what it means to be pure in heart and even how to purify one’s heart, in a wide-ranging discussion including insights from Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul in the Phaedo and the Republic to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, to medieval Muslim mystic al-Ghazali’s Alchemy of Happiness. to ancient ...
May 13, 2021•55 min
Riley and Christopher return to the topic of the Beatitudes, this time discussing the fifth out of eight Beatitudes, “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). They explore mercy in light of it’s apparent opposite, justice, and seek a conjunction of opposites in the justice and mercy of God incarnate as Jesus Christ.
May 06, 2021•53 min
In this episode, Christopher and Riley welcome back Jana Spangler to discuss stages of faith development as touched on in Episode 20: Navigating a Faith Crisis. For decades, theologians and philosophers like James Fowler, Brian McLaren, and Ken Wilbur have attempted to classify and put a name to the stages of the human faith journey. Jana, Riley, and Christopher discuss the value of these models in helping listeners to understand where they are on the faith development continuum so that they mig...
Apr 30, 2021•1 hr 9 min
What is sin? Is it the violation of an unchangeable God-given standard? If so, then why has what is considered sin and its attendant consequences changed so drastically from antiquity to today? What role do social institutions, traditions, and cultures play in framing what is considered sin? In this episode Christopher and Riley tackle this complex and fraught subject, in an attempt to come to a constructive, contemplative understanding of sin. First, they attempt to define sin. Next they approa...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Riley and Christopher contemplate the question of Heaven and Hell. Is there a Hell? Where is it? Is it the underworld called “Sheol” in Hebrew or “Hades” in Greek in the Old Testament translated “hell” in the King James Version of the Bible? Or is it in the Valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) in the New Testament, also translated “hell” in the King James Version of the Bible. Is it a place where the wicked go after dying or is there such a thing as a living hell on Earth? What about Heaven? Is it above? ...
Apr 15, 2021•54 min
Christopher, Riley, and guest, Jana Spangler, a seasoned faith transitions coach, talk about healthy ways of dealing with doubt, difficult questions, and supporting those in a faith crisis. They talk about opening a space for those in doubt to express their doubts and be heard without judgment or attempts to fix them. If we are not to “rehearse [our] doubts with doubters,” where can we turn for validation? Jana explains the mindset of those in a faith crisis. They don’t choose their crisis and w...
Apr 08, 2021•1 hr 15 min
Riley and Christopher address doubting your doubts as a dogma as dubious as the sin of certainty. Both dogmas miss the mark. Spiritual progress isn’t possible without questions and doubts. If you have no questions or doubts, you’re closed off to revelation. It is questions and doubts that have brought about revelation, and revelation brings about questions and doubts. Questions and doubts are essential to faith as knowledge negates the need for faith.
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Christopher is joined again with his guest co-host, Shiloh Logan, to talk about the fifth Beatitude. After the last episode’s conversation concerning meekness, there is a better foundation for understanding and experiencing, at least in part, what it means to “hunger and thirst after righteousness.” What is this hungering? How do we experience this in our daily lives, and are we–in our actual lived experiences–truly feeling “filled.” We may say with confidence that we feel the “peace” of the gos...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 23 min
Christopher and guest co-host, Shiloh Logan, talk about the third Beatitude on meekness. When we read of Jesus’ temptations after 40 days of fasting and when Satan showed him the whole earth, our typical interpretation is that Jesus recognized and rejected the temptation–from a rather contemporary Lockean standpoint–because the world was already His (because He had already mixed his time and labor in creating the world). Why would Jesus worship Satan to receive something that was already His? Ye...
Mar 18, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Christopher and Riley have guest Travis Patten back on the podcast to discuss the soul’s descent from, and ascent to, God in light of Dante Alighieri’s journey from that “point midway on our path in life,” when we find ourselves in “a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost,” unable to commence our ascent to Paradise, to the presence of God, the “love that moves the sun and other stars.” Only through our descent into the Inferno God created to reveal to us our false selves can we reach the poi...
Mar 14, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Riley and Christopher and guest, Travis Patten, go all the way back to Classical Antiquity to explore contemplation from the incubation practices of Presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles—something like today’s sensory deprivation tanks—to the influence of the Late Antique philosopher Plotinus on the mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Plotinus’s invitation is to “withdraw into yourself and look” to see that “we are not separated from spirit, we are in it” since ...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Christopher and Riley explore the spiritual exercises of cosmic consciousness and cosmopolitanism as practiced by the Roman Epicureans and Stoics, and the early Christians. These spiritual exercises were taught by Roman philosophers Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. They were also taught by Jesus of Nazareth, who was Seneca’s contemporary, as recorded in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas as well as in canonical Scripture. Cosmic consciousness and cosmopolitanism are a way past che...
Feb 25, 2021•58 min
Riley and Christopher answer one of the most frequently asked questions they get from listeners of this podcast in this episode: What is contemplation? While a definition of “contemplation” is easy enough to come by, the range of contemplative practices is vast, and the depth of experience they provide is unfathomable. Riley and Christopher give an extensive, if not exhaustive, list of contemplative practices, including more and less familiar ones, from among those they have practiced, and those...
Feb 12, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Christopher and Riley have guest Morgan Aldous back on the podcast this week to explore correspondences between the alchemist’s ascent of the Mountain of the Adepts through seven stages of alchemical transformation and our own ascension of the eight rungs of the ladder of the Beatitudes to personal transformation as taught by Christ in His Sermon on the Mount. The correspondences they find between the widespread idea of the eight beatitudes as rungs on a ladder, ultimately leading us upward to t...
Jan 28, 2021•1 hr 16 min
Riley, Christopher, and guest Morgan Aldous take you back to the true inner meaning of alchemy. That’s right, alchemy! If you are among those who think alchemy is just misguided proto-chemistry, you’re in for a big surprise! As Morgan put it, “While we tend to see alchemy as a primitive, mistaken form of chemistry that was redeemed by the Scientific Revolution, in reality, alchemy lost its sacred meaning and became mundane science.” While it’s true the Scientific Revolution took the exoteric (i....
Jan 22, 2021•1 hr 25 min
Christopher and Riley talk about the esoteric (inner) and exoteric (outer) experience of religion and finding a balance between the two. On the one hand, there’s holding so tightly to the letter of the word of God that’s the iron rod that we can’t let go long enough to take a step forward in the darkness in faith to walk the path the iron rod is meant to lead us down to the presence of God. On the other hand, there’s failing to hold to the rod at all and getting lost in the mists of darkness tha...
Jan 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Shiloh, Riley, and Christopher Hurtado all open up space for a conversation about the healing power of mourning. A part of the baptismal covenant is to “mourn with those who mourn” (Mosiah 18:9), but do we really comprehend the incredibly healing power that mourning has on our fellow man? What does “mourning” here even mean? In the Beatitudes, after we empty ourselves and are poor in spirit, we experience a mourning from letting go of those false identities and ego. This personal step allows us ...
Jan 08, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Riley and Shiloh open up a space to talk about the subject of prayer. We have all been taught the standard posture of praying with our eyes closed, head bowed, arms folded, and kneeling, all while using the proper formula by addressing Heavenly Father by name, expressing gratitude, asking for what we need, and closing in the name of Jesus Christ — all while using the proper “honorific” pronouns. But is this the only way to pray? Are there other postures and forms of praying that also connect us ...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 24 min
Shiloh and Riley open up on a topic that they have both been thinking and sitting with for a while: worthiness. The scriptures talk about "worthiness" quite a bit, but how do we reconcile a truth that we are "always already being worthy" with the scriptural concept of "unworthiness"? Is "worthiness" a description of our being? Is it a description of what we do? If we can be inherently unworthy of beings, then why would Jesus Christ atone for an unworthy being? Can it be that we have infinite and...
Oct 13, 2020•1 hr 17 min
Riley and Shiloh open up a conversation about what Thomas Merton calls the True Self and the False Self . The LDS Bible Dictionary defines repentance as "a change of mind, i.e., a fresh view about God, about oneself, and about the world." Merton observed that so much depends on our idea of God, and what we initially believe about and how we view God says more about our own projection and less about how God really is. This is the same message that we get in the Doctrine and Covenants where Jesus ...
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 19 min
Shiloh and Riley talk on various themes of peace. What part does myth play in both forming our identities and in bringing about peace? Riley and Shiloh use this discussion of myth to dive deeper into an understanding of how the Garden of Eden story is an example of the human journey, as it defines and develops our human experiences that lead us back to experiencing peace through partaking of the love of God. The Savior taught that we must empty ourselves of our natural man through being "poor in...
Sep 03, 2020•1 hr 37 min
Riley and Shiloh talk about the various ways that we, and others, have experienced God. They explore how the preparation for experiencing God is, in itself, an amazing divine experience, as there are multiple ways that each of us partake of the divine gift of sitting with God. While we often talk in terms of "feeling" the Spirit or God, sometimes we experience God in completely unique ways that aren't within the realms of "feeling," aren't commonly recognized or spoken of, and that sometimes we ...
Jul 26, 2020•1 hr 13 min
Riley and Shiloh talk about being born again as an emptying that is necessary to being filled with all that God has waiting for us to experience. What is waiting for us when we're able to empty ourselves every day? Is there a way to start over, even emptying our very concepts of God to allow the divine to work within us into something new and wondrous every day? The LDS Bible Dictionary's definition of repentance is "a change of mind, a fresh view about God, about oneself, and about the world." ...
Jul 09, 2020•1 hr 20 min
Shiloh and Riley talk about the Sermon on the Mount from a variety of perspectives. When we take a primary or solely rationalist approach to scripture, we often unintentionally end up "rationalizing away" the most difficult parts of the Sermon on the Mount that don't seem possible to follow. By taking a more contemplative approach to scripture, is there a way of allowing the scriptures to open up to us in a new way in giving us access to being with God? Riley and Shiloh express some initial thou...
Jun 26, 2020•1 hr 33 min
Shiloh Logan and Riley Risto open up about their experiences and what led them to starting down a path of Christian contemplation. They talk about their interests in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount and in how the Savior’s teachings have brought them peace in their lives.
Jun 11, 2020•1 hr 5 min
