Living Uncommon Podcast

The holiday season is all about food, family, and celebrating the birth of Christ. With Christmas just around the corner, we sat down to share some of our favorite holiday treats with each other while we combed back through the second season and remembered bits of our favorite conversations. Join us for some reminiscing—both of the memories associated with the dishes we brought in and the themes that stood out over the past few months.

How does theatre help audiences discover something true about themselves? How does theatre reveal humanity's reaching for the divine? How are actors, writers and directors changed by inhabiting new personas? As part of our ongoing engagement with Christianity and the arts we sit down with two people who are shaping Milwaukee's theatre scene in important ways.

Is one economic system inherently better than all others? What’s the responsibility of such a system? What about the consequences of it? And how ought Christians to interact with it all? We’re sitting down with a professor of economics and a professor of history to chat about capitalism, the free market, how we got here, and where we should go next.

Turn on the television or open social media and the news of violence is everywhere. In today’s episode, we’re exploring violence, particularly gun violence, with two justice and public policy professors from our Ann Arbor campus. Tune in to hear their thoughts on where this violence originated, what’s perpetuating it today, and the role that guns play (or don’t play) in the midst of it all.

Music has always been a medium that brings people together. With all of its varieties and genres, music offers something for everyone. Today, in our first ever mini-episode, we’re talking with musician, entrepreneur, and conductor Allison Schweitzer on how she’s bringing people together through her new project Wisconsin Music Ventures.

Suicide rates are on the rise, and in almost every age group, researchers are seeing an increase of individuals struggling with mental health issues. How should we, as Christians, respond to the mental health crisis in our country? Today we chat with a professional counselor and a psychiatrist to get a bird’s eye view of mental health, understand how the two fields of psychology and psychiatry interact, and what we can do to move forward and help ourselves and those around us heal.

When we talk about immigration, gun violence, marginalized people groups, or any other hot topic, we often deal primarily in numbers. It’s easy to forget that behind each statistic is a person and a story. Today we chat with Paul Calhoun, a photographer passionate about restoring humanity to the issues of our day through the use of photography. What happens when we live out of curiosity, when we start really listening and paying attention to the stories all around us?

The history books don’t tell the story of Native people well or accurately; they often skip over the horrors and injustices inflicted on them in the name of God, government, or both. In this episode, we sit down with Tim Young Eagle, executive director of Lutheran Indian Ministries, to grapple with the Church’s role in perpetuating and even leading the colonization of Native people and the generational trauma that resulted from it. Stay with us to hear how LIM is helping to reconcile Native people with God by offering a different kind of Gospel message—one of true hope, healing, and belonging.

We’re grateful for all the guests who took time out of their schedule to spend a few hours sharing their stories, experiences, and expertise with us. In the final episode of the first season, we take a look back over the past nine episodes to rehash some of the conversations that stood out to us. 

We’re joined by Rev. Dr. John Nunes for a talk about theology at the margins—in particular what it looks like to re-think reformation Christian theology from the perspective of marginalized people. As a jumping off point we’ll be looking at the 2017 book Wittenberg Meets the World: Reimagining the Reformation at the Margins. This book is a kind of commemoration of the 500-year anniversary of Martin Luther’s protest against the Roman church, with a critique of where the church in America has become complacent and even complicit in ignoring and silencing voices at the margin.