The Central Cast

1/4/26: Life Review: Finding Hope After a Year of Fires and Loss

In this episode the host leads a life review of 2025, reflecting on the Eaton and Palisades fires, political turmoil, community upheaval, and personal stories of trauma and recovery. Guests share how they found strength, faced loss, and began rebuilding their lives.
Key themes include grief and healing, chaplain wisdom that "it won't always feel this way," faith as a source of hope and love, Romans 8, perseverance, and the power of community care as the group looks toward 2026 with a benediction of love and justice.

12/21/25: Jesus the Refugee: Rethinking the Nativity

Aaron reads Matthew’s nativity and argues Jesus began life as a refugee fleeing state violence, linking the story to the Exodus tradition. The episode challenges sanitized readings of scripture and urges Christians to care for migrants and the oppressed. Ultimately it affirms that love — not empire — has the final word.

12/14/25: What Is the Meaning of Life? Four Paths to Purpose

In this episode the host tackles the timeless question: what is the meaning of life?
He outlines four overlapping ways people find meaning — the religious, the metaphysical, the social, and the material — and explores how each can sustain us. Stories and reflections include faith and deconstruction, a mystical view of being the universe experiencing itself, the power of relationships and politics, and finding joy in ordinary pleasures like sports.
The episode emphasizes our ability to create meaning, the importance of community, and offers a hopeful benediction to commit to love, justice, and the courageous embrace of life.

12/7/25: Peter Rollins: Communion of the Broken: Grace, Symptoms, and Shared Lack

Peter Rollins starts with a parable about a mystic, an evangelical pastor, and a fundamentalist who each meet Jesus in the afterlife. From that story Peter explores three kinds of unknowing, the paradox that the divine can share our lack, and how that insight reframes salvation and love.
The conversation contrasts community, the commons, and a deeper communion forged around shared wounds and symptoms, using AA as an example of radical acceptance. The episode closes with a short guided reflection inviting listeners to imagine a circle of people and the burdens they carry.

11/23/25: Beyond Binaries: Luke’s Hidden Image of Male Intimacy

This episode examines a censored detail in Luke’s story of Lazarus and the rich man — the original Greek term kolpon, often translated as "bosom," which evokes male intimacy, nurture, and vulnerability — and explores how gender norms, translation choices, and cultural expectations shape who we are allowed to be.
The conversation expands into personal stories and audience reflections about gender as a social construct, how binaries limit everyone (including men), and how younger generations practice a more inclusive "and" thinking. The episode closes with a benediction inviting listeners toward love, justice, and humility.

11/16/25: Born Different, Loved Anyway: Deconstruction, Brain Science & Holiday Peace

In this episode we talk about navigating tense holiday gatherings with conservative family and friends, exploring recent brain research (Ohio State, 2023) that suggests liberals and conservatives process moral and political issues differently. The host reflects on deconstruction, identity, and how recognizing different brain wiring can foster compassion instead of contempt.
The episode closes with a simple loving-kindness meditation to extend compassion toward difficult relatives and practical perspectives for keeping peace while holding to one’s values.

11/2/25: Ghosts, Guilt, and Grace: Reframing Demons This Halloween

This episode explores how beliefs about demons shaped evangelical childhoods during the Satanic Panic, the harm of fear-based theology, and how deconstruction can feel like deliverance. Through stories, scripture, and audience conversation, the host reframes the demonic as inward fears, oppressive ideologies, and cultural control, ending with a communal benediction.

10-19-25: Swim Between the Canyons: Identity, Faith, and Passing It On

This episode explores lineage—who taught us it was OK to be ourselves—through personal stories: a pilgrimage to Matthew Shepard's murder site in Laramie, reflections on erasure and visibility, and memories of Indigo Girls shows that helped the host reconcile queer identity and faith.
 
Julie also shares a niece's coming-out essay about 'swimming' between faith and identity, and a live audience offers stories of mentors, family, and younger generations who model authenticity. It’s an honest conversation about holding on to original selfhood, resisting erasure, and passing courage to the next generation.

10/12/25: A Spiritual Guide to Resilience in Hard Times

In this episode we wrestle with fear, anger, and despair in today’s political moment, exploring how faith and a broad spiritual sensibility can provide resilience. Drawing on history, philosophy (Gabriel Marcel, Paul Tillich), Indigenous worldview, and personal practices like loving‑kindness meditation, they argue that seeing life as connected and centering ultimate concerns—love, justice, community—sustains resistance.
The conversation balances urgency and nonviolence, honoring diverse roles in collective struggle, and offers a benediction to commit to love, honesty, humility, and justice as the way forward.

10/5/25: Touching the Scars: Why Doubt Leads to Deeper Faith

This episode explores the story of Doubting Thomas and argues that doubt can lead to a deeper, more authentic encounter with the divine.The hosts introduce the idea of the “fidelity of betrayal,” drawing on Jesus’ challenges to religious law and thinkers like Peter Rollins and Meister Eckhart to show how critiquing or leaving institutions can be an act of faith.Conversation moves into modern concerns—politics, moral equivalency, homelessness, and mental health—closing with a call to justice, compassion, and communal care.