There is so much talk just now about the decline of Christianity in this country. But try to listen to the right music on that score. Or rather, the more accurate music! The fact is, young people and young families are flocking to churches where the Gospel is preached. From Charlottesville to Lower Manhattan to Bedford to Waco to Louisville to Winter Park to Rice to Bradford to "Baltimore and D.C. now (Don't forget the Motor City)" (Martha & The Vandellas, 1964)) to ... well, you fill in the...
Nov 14, 2019•23 min
The subject of the cast is inspiration: where it comes from and how to get it. That may sound a little ambitious, but lots of us are looking for it, whether in our family and our marriage or in the pulpit and our ministry or just in the Wee Wee Hours of a stressed-out life. Joe Meek, the odd independent English record producer from the late 1950s and early-mid '60s, is a moving example of an inspired person, a creator whose inspiration came within the context of mediocre performers and lame song...
Oct 23, 2019•19 min
It seems that human nature, or rather, one's understanding of human nature, is the Achilles Heel of theology -- and philosophy, too -- throughout the "Spin-Me-Round" (Dead or Alive, 1985) of cyclical human history and cyclical failed answers to the problem of being human. If you have a high doctrine of human nature, and human potential, you'll generally opt for a low doctrine of God. (You don't need Him.) But if you have a low doctrine of human nature, and human failed expectations, you may well...
Oct 08, 2019•22 min
This is part two of a series on the arithmetic increase, as one grows older, in unchangeability within the human personality and yet the extraordinary palpable power of absolving grace to stop the decline! In the same way that perceived personal rejection, especially at a young age, becomes a kind of iron straitjacket defeating almost all attempts to change oneself -- and certainly defeating attempts by other people to try to change you -- in the same way, personal affirmation and one-way love d...
Sep 24, 2019•23 min
The downhill momentum of inertia and prior woundedness in people begins early but seems to pick up speed the older you get. In other words, the more time elapses since an early rejection or early hurt was sustained, the more impact it seems to have on you as you age. I keep seeing contemporaries of mine, most of them in fact, in whom what was an idiosyncrasy or "slight defect" in youth or early adulthood becomes more pronounced, and finally, quite alienating. This goes for addiction and over-eat...
Sep 24, 2019•22 min
Human nature is extremely vulnerable. I'm thinking of one's inwardness, and the way a seemingly small rejection, loss or blow of some kind can be enough to unravel a person's entire equilibrium. You can compare yourself, even if you're basically a coper -- many people aren't -- to the seemingly impregnable 'Death Star' in "Star Wars". That massive circular spacecraft/world is perfectly defended. Except , yes, there is a vulnerability. It is a tiny one, but it's there just the same. All Luke need...
Sep 06, 2019•17 min
I was dumbfounded, in a good way, when a pastor I respect prayed for God to hold Hurricane Dorian at the Central Florida coastline and not permit the storm to go inland. In 44 years' ordained ministry, I have sedulously prayed never for the weather, "pro" or "con", believing that such a prayer would in all cases be extreme. After all, the Lord said that "it rains on the unjust and the just". Moreover, I had zero faith that such a prayer would ever be answered. On the other hand, He said to the s...
Sep 06, 2019•22 min
An awful lot of truth is coming out just now, on several fronts. As to why exactly this is happening, I can't precisely say. But when the truth about anything, from ill-anchored relationships to cultural captivities to urban blight, comes out, "Some People" (Belois Some,1985) become threatened. And more than threatened. This cast talks about Quentin Tarantino's movie "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" (2019), Baltimore (MD), and romantic beginnings (and new beginnings, or rather, re-beginnings)....
Jul 29, 2019•26 min
Tyrone Davis sort of says it all in the title track to this cast. He's "Running a Losing Race", and it sounds to me a lot like life. As a person ages, they have to watch out not to 'diss' the legitimate aspirations and engagements of people who are still, by necessity shall we say, "in the world". It's way too easy from a retired perspective to pour cold water on the hopes and dreams of younger people. The secret of wisdom, as you get older, would be to bring a perspective that embodies an accur...
Jul 24, 2019•26 min
There are certain subjects that seem verboten in the pulpit. I'm not referring to political issues, or contemporary social themes; but, rather, to pastoral situations/experiences that are so "close to home" that one's listeners literally rise up in fury against the preacher. One of these subjects is suicide, if preached honestly and urgently from the pulpit. Another is a familiar theme of this podcast, the dramatic influence of romantic love -- i.e., the aspiration and almost limitless hunger th...
Jul 08, 2019•24 min
We all want to know, when we are down -- I mean, when we are really down -- where we can turn for help. It happens to almost everyone, at least once in your life, that circumstances -- outward, inward, or a combination of both -- pull the rug out from under you and you find yourself flat on the ground. I don't write this to upset you, because you probably wouldn't be reading it if you didn't already know this. But "Where Do I Go" ('Hair', 1969), when I have nowhere else to go? Specifically, wher...
Jun 25, 2019•19 min
It's not just Tyrone Davis. It's almost any artist who captures the popular imagination. He or she is talking about real things, personal and individual issues, the things everyone is carrying. As opposed to abstractions and concepts. I was looking at a church news service the other day and noted that every single item featured had to do with a "social-justice" or group-identity concern. And every single item was worthy, in the sense that the concern is real and the possibility of Christian mora...
May 28, 2019•23 min
A little bit of surgery can compose the mind, right? In any event, in my recovery I went back to Nevil Shute's novel The Rainbow and the Rose . It concerns the twilight of a man's life as he lies dying in an overturned airplane in remotest Australia, and the insights he has -- and someone else has -- about himself. These insights concern the inward man, not the outward man; and the reader learns to look at himself in the broadest possible and yet the truest possible strokes. I've tried to say it...
May 16, 2019•18 min
I'm wary of telling a story about myself unless it has potential resonance and carries some possible hope to a listener. Here I am giving a short witness of a counter-intuitive Word received in church the other day; and an even more counter-intuitive "Word" from the world of pop music, which came crashing through my windshield on the way home from church. The initial Word related to chain-breaking and the possibility of a life-cycle completed rather than repeating. Moreover, this first Word came...
May 07, 2019•23 min
Imputation is the prime "agent" within the great dynamic of the Grace of God. As one need never tire of saying, imputation is when you regard someone as better (or finer or prettier or stronger or kinder) than they are. And the effect of imputation is to make the person actually become, in "real time" and real life, the way they are being regarded. Often imputation is understood as a sort of "legal fiction", by which you just put a cloak over a wound and by not actually treating the wound allow ...
Apr 19, 2019•24 min
So I was looking high and low for a little peace the other day. An article I read had upset me, and I thought to myself, "Well, if that's true, then why not just go to sleep for the next ten years, say, and not be conscious." Then suddenly, an hilarious Instagram post came up from a Mockingbird contributor, which sparked an old association: the 1973 single by The Tymes, entitled "You Little Trustmaker". And somehow, like the correct fork in Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", that made all the ...
Apr 01, 2019•21 min
As the human soul makes its trajectory through life, it "lights on" hoped-for objects of connection. From birth to death, the soul is looking for, urgently aspiring to locate, a substitute for the connection with God that it had before it was born. Unfortunately, the soul is almost always disappointed. That is because no created entity and no living being can satisfy what only God can satisfy. No person that's been made can satisfy the longing for direct connection with Immortal Love which fills...
Mar 20, 2019•22 min
It was touching beyond words to attend and witness the Institution of Stu Shelby as Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park, FL. Mary was a Presenter, and I had the chance to just take it all in. Sarah Condon preached the sermon, and it was an absolute home run. The whole affair felt like "Mockingbird Embodied"; and the message of God's Grace in Christ was utterly tangible and fully fleshed. For me and Mary, this was a high point of our life in Florida. So I thought about "seasons" in...
Mar 02, 2019•24 min
Huge -- Yuge -- feedback from the previous two casts, entitled "Surprise Surprise" and "Soul Searchin' Time". So here I am looking at two basics, two core issues I have with current religion -- religion in the David Zahl/"Seculosity" sense, that is, every attempt to solve the problem of being human by conceiving a lever to fix it. I see two core problems with most religion, let alone culture, today. This includes evangelical Christianity, which persistently shows, in the case of fallen pastors, ...
Feb 08, 2019•23 min
The previous cast, "Surprise, Surprise", raised the vexing question of exceptions in the practice of grace to sinners and sufferers. I spoke about the chronic inability of Christians who emphasize grace to embody it in relation to specific sinners and specific sins. One example I chose was from the Reformed world and one was from the Social Progressive world. The context of each was different, but the phenomenon is the same: "talking the talk" re grace and "radical welcome" but exempting certain...
Feb 04, 2019•23 min
A friend recently surprised me with the observation that Christians he knows who preach a "theology of glory" seem to be more welcoming, and forgiving, of real actual sinners than Christians he knows who preach a "theology of the Cross". In other words, the folk who you'd think would be the most merciful to people who've fallen aren't! And people with whose theology you can't necessarily sign on the dotted line -- such as pentecostals or African-American evangelicals -- are ! I'd have to say tha...
Jan 30, 2019•22 min
Justin Hayward is a sort of archivist for romantic relationships. He is 72 and still going strong. Two 'Live' performances book-end this cast, which is intended as fresh therapy towards a happy marriage. Appeals to grace, forgiveness, and empathy in relating to this impossibly different person with whom you are now living, are good. They are probably the only behaviors that will turn your ship around. That is, if it needs turning around. But when the stresses involved in over-committedness and s...
Jan 07, 2019•27 min
One's Christian life will fail if it is not rooted in the truth of human nature, which we all share, like it or not. Similarly, everyone's life, whether Christian or non-Christian or anti-Christian, will fail if it's not rooted in reality. And reality, the reality of people, includes hidden drives, hidden emotions, hidden disappointments, and hidden resentments. As the Rose Hobart character remarks, almost offhandedly, in "Susan and God" (1940), "No one ever says what they're really thinking." (...
Nov 19, 2018•23 min
When it comes to rules or advice for long-term marriage, I often seem to hear words like "covenant" and "promise-keeping". These conceptions of keeping faith with another person are laudatory and fine -- and even necessary to keep the love going. But "covenant" and "promise", excellent as they are in principle, are insufficient to give you the oomph, the power, to do the thing you both want so much to do. That is because if something comes along that you actually find you want more than the thin...
Nov 19, 2018•23 min
This is a kind of "work-book" question for the listeners to this podcast. The issue of romantic love is to the fore again, but the question is other: Why is there general radio silence on the vital point; or rather, why is there not more active concurrence in relation to it? The point I've been making is this: the dynamic in individual human beings that drives us to want to connect with another human being in a romantic experience of union is the core drive within people. It explains our search ...
Nov 13, 2018•21 min
Experiencing a massive re-think just now concerning world cinema! This has been occasioned in part by watching every disc one can get one's hands on of the recently released catalogue of British "Vintage Classics". Have you ever heard of "Mandy" (1951)? Or "The Captive Heart" (1946)? Or "The Sound Barrier" (1952)? Or "The Maggie" (1954)? Or "The Angry Silence" (1960)? Or "Melody" (1971)? -- which, incidentally, was the source material for "Moonrise Kingdom" (2012) by Wes Anderson. What you find ...
Nov 13, 2018•24 min
We're talking about love today -- wouldn't ya know -- and the relation of divine love to romantic love. It's a familiar, but one that remains very fresh, at least as long as human memory and human loss remain conscious. Here is the key line, from a kind of monologue that occurs towards the end of "Revenge of the Creature" (1955), a sequel that's even better than the original. The young female scientist, played by Lori Nelson, says to her junior-professor colleague, played by John Agar, who is mu...
Nov 07, 2018•24 min
Everyone was young once. Adolescence, which is roughly the period between ages 16 and 25, is THE time in your life when you experience the strongest emotions, emotions contingent on loss but also fulfilment, expression but also suppression. You could almost say that one's adolescence is failed if you haven't felt the strongest degree of pain and also of pleasure that it is possible for a human being to feel. When we attack someone for having fun in college -- I am not talking about sexual assaul...
Oct 03, 2018•23 min
Mrs. Zahl recently used the word "periphery" to describe our attitude, mine and hers, to increasing numbers of institutions, groups, and schools of thought to which we have been attached and for which we have been engaged for a long time. It's not that one has changed one's mind, or believes differently. Rather, it's just that human institutions and associations, over time, tend to disappoint. You begin to see you were attached to something quite malleable and even mercurial -- which you believe...
Sep 17, 2018•23 min
Donovan's odd and brilliant song from 1970 entitled "Atlantis" is a good example of what PZ's Podcast is all about. And what is that?: Well, if you get to the heart of what's really on your mind, what's really bothering you, then you are almost home. Moreover, if you can give it up to God, He always deals with it, and for your good. Making the connection between your reality and God's Reality: that's the presenting problem of life. I like "Atlantis", by Donovan, because underneath the sententiou...
Aug 15, 2018•22 min
