I don’t have any naked baby photos. Frankly, I don’t have any baby photos. I blame either a house fire or parental indifference. Nonetheless, I wonder if I might not start subtitling my talks as “naked baby photos” not because there are, but because when I overshare, that’s the closest thing I can relate to how I’ll probably make you feel when I share publicly about my life.

Like naked baby photos, they are harmless, but show you a side we don’t always put on display. As a matter of fact, you aren’t supposed to be hearing this talk! the deal was that it was only for those in the room. My wife convinced me to figure out a way to edit it in such a way to take out some detail which might frustrate a minor side story, but not the big picture. So, I took my editing fingers to my LogicPro X (the official editing software of ViW!) and I cut out some proper names.

As I was editing it just now, I was listening to it and thinking, “dang, I shared quite a bit, maybe I should edit out that story that doesn’t make me look that good in retrospect” but I didn’t…. This isn’t the story of my delinquency, that’s just a side avenue where we see God at work shining some grace on me in Jesus. This is a talk about EGBOK (everything is going to be ok) and what it means. It’s the most in depth we’ve ever gone into that thing we say at the end of every show.

If you are so inclined to want me to speak at your event, or you want to hear or read or watch more of me you can go to my website HERE

Check out Jeff HERE (and listen to last week’s show wherein we play his HWSS talk)

Oh. please go HERE too and give, if you’re so inclined.

From Here We Still Stand 2018: This is a talk with Jeff blowing up any ideas of works righteousness and refuses to settle with a message that’s just another doctrine to keep straight or moral code to live up to. Maybe you’re a bear, maybe you’re a butterfly, listen to this talk and it will make sense.

David Zahl leads Mockingbird Ministries and has a forthcoming book about secular religion and self-righteousness in America. We talk virtue signaling, popular music, Bob Dylan's Christian era, and Charlottesville, VA.

Pre-order Dave's book HERE!

virtueinthewasteland.com

So, this show was a long time coming.  Since earlier in this year we had been playing phone and email tag with student filmmaker Jessica van der Wyngaard regarding her new documentary project that chronicles the lives of those influenced by Josh Harris, for good or ill.  

The first interveiw is a conversation with the filkmmaker- an Autralian, living in Canada, making a film about a largely American phenomenon.  van der Wyngaard was engaging and willing to take on the critics of her project.  Meanewhile, Josh Harris seemed reluctant to make, or talk about the film, and in our interveiw today, you may learn why.

Check out the film here: https://www.isurvivedikdg.com

On this weeks episode we welcome back an old guest of the show: Emily Joy.  Since last being on our show, Emily Joy has contributed to Jeff's book Sexy as well as co-founded the #churchtoo movement and has become something of a lightning rod for issues of abuse in the church.  We interviewed Emily Joy while travelling through Nashville, and when she had told us she had "changed since we last me", we weren't sure what to expect.  Turns out she is the same poet, critic and artist just having raised the volume to 11.  We got an opportunity to sit back and listen to her tell her story, and share her perspective amongst the chirping crickets in the warm Nashville evening.  You can prepare to take notes, and challenge, and set the guest straight... wait, not on this show.  We listen, and we would ask that you would do the same.

On this weeks’ episode we take you back to the 2nd Annual Here We Still Stand conference in beautiful, if slightly milquetoast, San Diego (just kidding San Diego, we love you, as we have recorded at least once a year from your confines only to eventually praise your street food, socio-economic diversity and weather).

Think of it as part of the road trip, as we recorded this show almost immediately upon returning from our road trip.  Stay tuned in the next few weeks as we continue releasing those shows.  On this live show we talk with Debi Winrich on her new podcast “the Soul of Christianity” as well as Dr. Russ McCullough from the Gwartney Institute to discuss his work on Christianity and Capitalism.

If you’re still reading, cool. So we can get a little more serious.  Not really serious, but just more familiar.  This is Dan, I write in the third person plural sometimes, but usually it’s me.  So.... hey.  This conference was super rad and you will be hearing our talks (mine in some edited fashion) soon.  But it was also crazy anxiety inducing for me as it could seem like a kind of intellectual fashion show for a specific type of religious speaker.  I had initially thought that we were doing a show that a few people might watch, but not that we were doing an actual live program.  You see, an hour or so of intellectual-and-otherwise chit chat isn’t that hard, but it’s also not a live performance.  At any rate, I had an acting coach once tell me that the last thing you should do is apologize before a performance.  What did she know, anyway?  Enjoy the show.  Even if it sounds rushed and stilted in the beginning because it was a strange new environment and I felt like a caged animal on display.  But it was fun. For reals!

Peace!

Eric Dorman discusses his personal transition from progressivism to classic conservatism despite being a never Trumper, and the pragmatic nature of Tennessee politics. He works for a nonprofit news source that serves the homeless in Nashville, is a frequent contributor to Mockingbird, and runs his own site called Kept Republic.

virtueinthewasteland.com

After five plus years of the podcast, we finally get around to a proper discussion of virtue ethics. We do so with the leading active scholar in America today: Christian Miller of Wake Forest University. (The Roman Catholic Alisdair McIntyre and Lutheran Gilbert Meilaender have both recently retired, so we don't think this claim is hyperbolic.) Miller is the author of several books and articles, but his recent book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? is a gem. And it is both good at handling scholarship--including scholarship from the field of social psychology--and presenting it in an understandable way to a non-technical audience.  If you've been listening for a while and want a good presentation of virtue theory, this is the place to go. 

Miller holds a B.A. in philosophy from Princeton University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. His main areas of research are meta-ethics, moral psychology, moral character, action theory, and philosophy of religion. He is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project (http://www.moralbeacons.org/), funded by the Templeton Religion Trust. He was the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), which was funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 80 papers as well as three books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory(2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), and The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (forthcoming 2017). He is also the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (Oxford University Press), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth-Seeking (Oxford University Press), and The Continuum Companion to Ethics (Continuum Press).

On today's show we travel into the deep south, racecar country, to meet up with Fr. Victor Singingeagle to talk about Potowatomi religion and Christianity, the pre-columbian social world of 15th c. America, and life as an outsider looking in.  

We first met Fr. Victor Singingeagle through our friends the Klembara's and Blake Flattely, who met him when they produced their documentary short on Concorida Selma.  The Rev Dr holds two PhDs, one in anthropology and one in English and He is a former administrator and professor at the now defunct Concordia College, Selma, a historically black college. As part of their road trip throughout the American South, Dan and Jeff met up with the good Reverend Dr., for a lively evening of discussion all things Native American, faith and culture.

The #VIWROADTRIP2018 is underway, and this is our first show from the road.  While we are on the trip to visit a few people and places in the south, we started our RV trip in Orlando at the home of one of Jeff's best childhood friends.

The beginning of the show is a little different than others, as we did this in the RV while driving- Dan opens the show with a bit of the "thesis" of the show and then the guys go into Star Wars, religion, walking away from what we once loved, devotion despite criticism, and other things that swing in both the direction of Star Wars and the Church.  From Sep 28-Oct 10 the guys will br checking in daily from the road and you can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.