Let’s begin with a question: Where are you? That’s the question we all ask, isn’t it? Whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not. Where are we? In 1968, a TV show called The Prisoner aired in the United States on CBS. The protagonist, known only as Number Six, wakes up one morning to find himself trapped in a place called The Village. The Village is a seemingly idyllic place, where every need is met and every comfort is provided. But every person is stripped of their true iden...
Aug 07, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Civil Disobedience We’re taught that obedience is virtue. But what happens when the laws no longer guard the land, the people, or the soul. What happens when they only serve profit, machines, and the men who write the rules to feed themselves? They’ve built a world where you need permission to milk your own cow. Where the law protects what poisons the field and punishes the one who plants without asking. Where your neighbor is a customer, a tree is just lumber, and childhood is a market. But the...
Aug 01, 2025•2 hr 6 min
In this episode, I read about fishermen, ecology, and the question: where do we belong, and where do we choose to live?
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 19 min
In this episode, a poem about the first words and the story of Cormac mac Airt.
Jul 10, 2025•1 hr 37 min
St Kevin and the Blackbird (1996) And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a crossbeam , when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked Into the network of eternal life, Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand Like a branch out in the ...
Jul 02, 2025•1 hr 2 min
There’s a hunger in the world now, not just for bread, but for meaning. A hunger not of the belly, but of the bones. A thirst nothing sweet can quench. No flag can feed it. No slogan can soothe it. And if you’ve felt it, that ache behind the ribs, that long pull in the chest, you are not alone. The world we’ve inherited is wired, clever, and slick with answers. It can mimic beauty. It can parrot truth. It can fake kindness with the grin of a fox. But it cannot bleed for you. It cannot carry your...
Jun 05, 2025•1 hr 14 min
A starving child is a judgment on the world. Agus sin í an fhírinne ghlan —And that is the plain truth. And that judgment begins with us. As a man, I am sickened. The older I get, the more I understand what strength is for. And it is not for conquest. It is not for domination. It is for standing in the breach. For using your body and your words to protect the weak. To be silent now, when children are being choked slowly by hunger, is to surrender manhood itself. As a father, I am undone. I’ve se...
May 28, 2025•59 min
In this episode, I discuss sitting with sadness, conforming our lives to the big “T” truth, the importance of using story to cover our everyday experiences with higher meaning and purpose, and why it’s worthwhile to comtemplate the size of our souls.
May 23, 2025•1 hr 29 min
The truth is, modern man — "scientific man,” as he likes to call himself — has disarmed himself. He traded his old strength, his old faith, his old stories, for a spreadsheet and a dopamine hit. He threw out the saints and the warriors and enthroned the technocrats. In doing so, he cast off not just God, but his own courage, his own soul. He fashioned himself into a cold machine, a calculator with shoes. And now he wonders why he no longer knows how to love with fire or stand with honor. He’s fo...
May 14, 2025•1 hr 31 min
A Thiarna, i mo thuirse, ná tréig mé. (O Lord, in my weariness, do not forsake me.) Tuirse is not only the sag of limbs at the end of a long day. It is deeper than that. It is the hush that gathers behind the eyes when hope has gone too far ahead and no longer waits for you. It is the weight in the chest, like a stone settling, when the sea gives no reply to your longing, and the hills echo back only the sound of your name, and nothing more. Tuirse does not arrive only at nightfall. It can come ...
May 02, 2025•1 hr 32 min
In the modern West, the hearth has gone cold. The fires that once knit family and village together have been replaced with a different flame—the flickering blue light of the screen. John Michell warned of this in his strange, luminous writings. He saw how the displacement of the hearth led to the displacement of meaning. No longer do we gather around a living fire, telling the old stories, hearing the wisdom passed down in hushed voices. No—we huddle instead around the electric glow of mass-prod...
Apr 25, 2025•1 hr 15 min
But the truth is quieter than that. It moves without slogans. It walks without a flag. It looks like this: a deaf and blind man named Tim, finding his way onto a flight in Boston, one hand stretched out into the dark. And a stranger gives up his seat, and flight attendants allow their faces to be touched so he can know they are there, so he can feel the kindness in the lines of their cheeks. It looks like a fifteen-year-old girl named Clara, spelling words into the palm of a man she’s just met—l...
Apr 18, 2025•1 hr 22 min
...when we say, “I am depressed,” we start to believe the sorrow is the whole of us. That it's etched into the skin, like a birthmark. That it's our name now. But when we say, “The sorrow is on me,” we leave room. Room for the truth that this thing might lift. That it might pass. That we are more than what presses us down. There’s a similar pattern in Scots Gaelic, in older English, in Hiberno-English still found in country places. You’ll hear it in the way people used to talk: “The fear came ov...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 12 min
What happened to you is not your identity. The wound you carry, the abuse you suffered, doesn’t get to have the final word. It’s part of your story, yes. It has shaped you, but it cannot define you, because Someone greater has stepped into your pain and claimed you as His own. Jesus knows exactly how it feels to be betrayed, violated, and wounded—He knows it in His flesh and blood. He knows it on a cross. He knows it in the scars He carries still. And what He says to you, right now, is that you ...
Mar 26, 2025•45 min
We live in an age of collapse. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, even physically, we are coming undone. The signs are everywhere. The old symbols no longer hold meaning. The words spoken in sacred places ring hollow. Our stories, once full of weight, have been traded for distractions that pass like dust in the air. We were given something rich, something rooted, something deep—and we have spent the last century peeling it away, layer by layer, as if we believed we could stand without the thing...
Mar 19, 2025•54 min
Somewhere along the way, we lost the old way of seeing, the deep sense that a pattern lies beneath all things. Scientific materialists insist we’re nothing more than arrangements of dirt, that our griefs and joys are sparks in a gray swirl of neurons. The Gnostics preach the world is a wicked trap, that matter is a cage for the spirit. But both stray from the bedrock truth. When God spoke the world into being, He called it good. Not flawed, not worthless—good. Yet, wandering in the world we see ...
Feb 19, 2025•1 hr 21 min
The Weight of Gold, the Lightness of Grace Poverty of spirit—what a strange, thin phrase it’s become, brittle in the mouths of modern men who’ve never walked barefoot on cold earth, never felt the raw ache of want, not just in the belly but in the soul. To be poor in spirit isn’t a matter of meek nods and saintly sighs. It’s not weakness, not a bowed head for show. It’s an emptiness carved out deep enough for something greater to fill. Like the hollow in the earth where the seed falls, dark and ...
Feb 08, 2025•56 min
First, credit to Paul Kingsnorth and Mary Harrington for the topic. They are a wellspring of thought-provoking inspiration. Now… The great post-Enlightenment revolution that promised to unshackle the mind from superstition and lead us into an age of reason has, in its end, given us a world gripped by its own decadence. We've spent centuries in a brave, frenetic race to divorce ourselves from a truth deeper than the mind's ability to comprehend, all the while building false towers of science and ...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Steel, Cloth & Waging the Hidden War I saw a read a missive on Substack recently by Matthew Herman Hudson that critiqued the claim that Christianity needs “less passive monks and more active knights.” To think the monk’s labor is passive, a withdrawal from the struggle that defines this world, is to see with dim sight and hear with a stopped ear. Such a view shrinks the spiritual into a shallow mirror of the material. For even at the surface—the realm of flesh, stone, and letters—monks have ...
Jan 25, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Apocalypse speaks not only of fire and destruction; it pulls back the veil, it bares what has always been lying underneath. Beneath the floodwaters, beneath the inferno’s roar, lies a revelation. They are stories of uncovering—not chaos—but the unlit truths buried under the veneers of our comfort, truths we kept at arm’s length for as long as the years would let us. - Donavon L Riley Link to full text: https://thewarriorpriestpodcast.wordpress.com/2025/01/15/0221-midweek-debrief-signs-of-collaps...
Jan 15, 2025•1 hr 10 min
In these times, when the world is hungrier than ever for quick fixes, we must ask ourselves: what if the trouble isn’t something to be solved at all, but something to be faced with a turn back to the heart of what’s real? — D.
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 13 min
It gets sacred in the places where you have been torn open, where you’ve bled and felt abandoned. This is the quiet power of Christmas: not that it erases the ache, but that it enters into it with a tenderness fierce enough to hold what’s broken. You are held, not despite the pain, but because of it. The grace that comes is not the smooth salve, but the living wound itself, kissed by the presence of God who never runs from the darkness but embraces it, calling it holy.
Dec 26, 2024•1 hr 8 min
Dec 12, 2024•56 min
What's up with the talk about re-enchantment lately? Why are people interested in “re-enchanting the world”? What’s at stake in the question and what is expected by those who pursue it? What good are old stories and are we prepared to risk our lives to find meaning and purpose?
Dec 04, 2024•1 hr 21 min
Perhaps God does not want us to be modern because modernity too often blinds us to the eternal. In our rush to build, invent, and achieve, we forget to behold, to wonder, to worship. We lose the ability to see the sacred in the ordinary: the bread on the table, the sun rising over a field, the child laughing in a garden. These are not obstacles to progress; they are reminders of a deeper reality, a reality that modernity often seeks to obscure.
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Season 5Ep. 216
What was once called “woke” has splintered into an anarchic patchwork of terms that don’t make sense unless you’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid and been dumped into a pit of postmodern nonsense. “Critical social justice,” “identity politics,” “gender studies,” “fourth-wave feminism”—the list grows like a mutant vine, changing shape faster than a bad acid trip. Every new label that’s thrown into the mix isn’t here to clarify; it’s here to disarm you, to scramble your mind, to keep the truth from ever g...
Nov 14, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Season 5Ep. 215
History is dead. Or, so I was told. For a long time, I believed it. Not because I wanted to, but I could see the world around me. It was plain as day that I did not live in the world of my heroes. Myth and legend had ended, history had marched to its lackluster end, and we were all fated to live out our days in a lethargic, decaying, neo-liberal hellscape. Consume product. Work for corporation. Vote. Die. The banal reality of the modern west seems almost designed to crush the very souls of its p...
Nov 07, 2024•1 hr 16 min
Today on the show, ruminations on Irish poets, winters-bane, and mythic tales that lead to heavenly truth.
Oct 31, 2024•1 hr 31 min
When, because of their fear, they do away secretly with such men, who is left for them to use save the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish? The unjust are trusted because they are afraid, just as the tyrants are, that someday the cities, becoming free, will become their masters. The incontinent are trusted because they are at liberty for the present, and the slavish because not even they deem themselves worthy to be free. This affliction, then, seems harsh to me: to think some are good men,...
Oct 09, 2024•1 hr 36 min
Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is...
Oct 03, 2024•1 hr 24 min
