If we look at our landscapes, our cities, our churches, and our homes, we can tell what we value.  Indeed, we can determine who our real gods are.  From cathedrals to bank buildings, we have, as a race, shifted our allegiances (sometimes from God to mammon).  Dan and Jeff banter about Mirecea Eliade, the layout of a home, and though we only use the term once: cultural Feng Shui.  

Commencement speaches tend to be salads of platitudes and cliches.  But one great one was offered by David Foster Wallace ("This is Water").  We share our advice to students who graduate this year, but also to anyone who wants to reset, wake up, and live well.

Fighting, our fights, and the Crusades.  This is part of our recent theme: "The Wrong Side of History." Historian and scholar of Islam, Adam Francisco (a Faithful Mask Fellow) joins us to reset our understanding of the history and legacy of the crusades.  

We bring Rev. Dr. C. J. Armstrong back to help unpack the ways in which religious communities and other groups maintain their identity, struggle with welcoming outsiders and maintaining identity, and appear to the outside world.  We go into the concept of taboos in Freud and Alasdair MacInytre, and spend some time giving a brief history of the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod, as a case study for this topic.

This is a brief show that we hope to elaborate on later. (Dan's edit: a show on which we wish to elaborate later).  In some ways it was occasioned by a comment by Jesse Nigro, posted to a 1517 Legacy blog post by Jeff. How is it that two guys in a conservative and sometimes prickly denomination are simultaneously irenic.  We ultimately argue that by being confident in our confession, we can be in dialog with people from radically different perspectives.  It's not that we jump on the fad of the hour, but rather that because of our anchor, we need not fret when strange winds blow.  

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Narrative, fiction, stories, and myth. Why do stories matter? What do they say about society and ideology.  Come find out. 

We mention Casey Abrams, George Washington, Cato, Into the Woods, John Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy, postliberalism, Turretin, ACTC, Stephen Jay Gould, and Enlightenment.

How should we talk to our children about dating?  How should we date ourselves? Dr. C. J. Armstrong comes along for the mellow ride, as a chapperone. Courtship, love, romance, sex, adolescence, and flirtation.

Onanism is an old word for masturbation. Why?  What is the historical background to the ways in which the church has understood sexuality, the body, what is normal, and how to talk to young people about sexuality.  We discuss the origins of the Graham cracker, grain based cereal, and 19th century health fads.

This is the first in a series of shows dedicated to evaluating whether the church has been on the wrong side of history and learning how we can apply lessons from the past to our cultural engagement today.

Don't listen to this one first, if you've never heard the show before.  We've been busy, so this show checks in and answers some mail that's been piling up.  Is Dan really a Republican?  What have we been reading?  Why are we in LA?

Hear what some sharp students and Faithful Masks Fellow Dr. Kristen Koenig have to say about hearing President Obama at the 50th anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  Martin Luther King Jr., Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, Rosa Young, Concordia Alabama, and more.  

This is episode 114.

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