Podcast appearances and mentions of Peter Berger

Matt, hey, my friends, welcome to the off the wire podcast. My name is Matt Wireman, and with over 25 years of coaching experience, I bring to you a an integrated approach to coaching where we look at mind, body and soul. So this being my little corner of the universe, welcome we cover everything from spiritual formation or the interior life all the way to goal setting and how to make your life better with life hacks, and I cover everything in between. So whatever it fits my fancy, I'm going to share with you, and I'm so thankful for your time, and I hope this episode helps you. All right. Well, hey, welcome, welcome to another episode of Off The Wire. This is Matt, still I haven't changed, but I do have with me, my friend. Really proud to call him a friend. And from seminary days, Dr Josh chatro, who is the Billy Graham chair for evangelism and cultural engagement at Beeson. That's a mouthful. Josh, well done. And then he is also, they just launched a concentration in apologetics at Beeson, which is really exciting. They got a conference coming up this summer. Is that also an apologetics Josh,its own preaching and apologetics? Okay? Awesome.And, and largely, you're also, you're also part of the Tim Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, and then also a, they call them fellows at the Center for Pastor theologians as well. That's right, yeah. And you in, you have been at Beeson for a couple years, because prior to that, you were at a you were heading up. And what was it largely an apologetics group, or was it, was it more broad than that in Raleigh?Yeah, it was. It was much more expansive than that. Evangelism and apologetics is part of what we were doing, but it was the Center for Public Christianity, okay? It was also very much in the work and faith movement. And I was also resident theologian at Holy Trinity Anglican in Raleigh. We were there for five years,excellent and and you don't know this because you don't keep tabs on who bought your book, but I've got every one of your books brother, so every every book you put out, and I'm like, I love this guy, and I'm gonna support him and buy his book. So it started all the way back, if you remember, with truth matters, yeah. And I use that book for one of the classes that I built here where I teach. And then then I want to go through the Litany here and embarrass you a little bit. And then it goes to apologetics, at the Cross Cultural Engagement, telling a better story, surprised by doubt. And then one that you just released called the Augustine way, retrieving a vision for the church's apologetic witness. So do you write much on apologetics? Is that kind of your thing?Yeah, I've written a few books on that.So why? Like, what is it about apologetics that has really captured your heart, in your mind and like, as opposed to just teaching theology, yeah, it's a certain it's a certain stream. If folks are first of all, folks are curious, like, What in the world is apologetics? Are you apologizing to folks? Like, are you saying I'm sorry?Well, I do have to do that. I'm sorry a lot. That's a good practice. That's not quite what apologetics is. Okay. Okay, so we, one of the things I would say is, and when I meet, when I meet up with old friends like you, sometimes they say, What have you been doing? Because we didn't see this coming. And when we were in seminary together, it wasn't as if I was, you know, reading a lot of apologetic works. And so one of the things is,and you weren't picking fights on campus too much. You were always a really kind person. And most, most time, people think of like apologists as, like, real feisty. And you're not a feisty friend. I'm not. I actually, unless you start talking about, like, soccer and stuff like that, right? Yeah,yeah, I'm not. Yeah, I don't. I don't love, I don't love, actually, arguments I'd much rather have, which is an odd thing, and so I need to tell how did I get into this thing? I'd much rather have conversations and dialog and kind of a back and forth that keeps open communication and and because, I actually think this ties into apologetics, most people don't make decisions or don't come to they don't come to any kind of belief simply because they were backed into an intellectual corner. And but now maybe I'll come back to that in a second. But I got into this because I was doing my PhD work while I was pastoring. And when you do yourpH was that in in Raleigh, because you did your PhD work at Southeastern, right?That's right, that's right. But I was actually, we were in southern, uh. In Virginia for the first half, we were in a small town called Surrey. It was, if you know anything about Tim Keller, it was he served in Hopewell, Virginia for seven or nine years before he went to Westminster and then to New York. And we were about 45 minutes from that small town. So if you've read Colin Hansen's book, he kind of gives you some background on what is this, these little communities, and it does, does kind of match up the little community I was serving for two years before moving to another little community in South Georgia to finish while I was writing. And so I pastored in both locations. So these aren't particularly urban areas, and yet, people in my church, especially the young people, were asking questions about textual criticism, reliability of the Bible.Those are any topics forfolks like, yeah, something happened called the Internet, yes. All of a sudden now, things that you would, you would get to, maybe in your, you know, thm, your your master's level courses, or even doctoral level courses. Now 1819, year old, 20 year olds or 50 year olds had questions about them because they were reading about some of this stuff on the internet. And because I was working on a PhD, I was actually working on a PhD in biblical theology and their New Testament scholar, people would come to me as if I'm supposed to know everything, or you know. And of course, of course, when you're studying a PhD, you're you're in a pretty narrow kind of world and very narrow kind of lane. And of course, I didn't know a lot of things, but I was, I kind of threw myself into, how do I help people with these common questions. So it wasn't as if, it wasn't as if I was saying, oh, I want to study apologetics. I kind of accidentally got there, just because of really practical things going on in my church context. And and then as I was reading and I started writing in response to Bart Ehrman, who is a is a agnostic Bible scholar. Wrote four or five New York Times bestsellers, uh, critical of the New Testament, critical of the Bible, critical of conservative Christianity. I started writing those first two books. I wrote with some senior scholars. I wrote in response. And then people said, so your apologist? And I said, Well, I guess I am. And so that, yeah, so I'm coming at this I'm coming at this area, not because I just love arguments, but really to help the church really with really practical questions. And then as I began to teach it, I realized, oh, I have some different assumptions coming at this as a pastor, also as a theologian, and trained in biblical theology. So I came with a, maybe a different set of lenses. It's not the only set of lens. It's not the it's not the only compare of lenses that that one might take in this discipline, but that's some of my vocational background and some of my kind of journey that brought me into apologetics, and in some ways, has given me a little bit different perspective than some of the dominant approaches or dominant kind of leaders in the area.That's great. Well, let's go. Let's get after it. Then I'm gonna just throw you some doozies and see how we can rapid fire just prove all of the things that that are in doubt. So here we go. Okay, you ready? How do we know that God exists?Yeah, so that word no can have different connotations. So maybe it would be better to ask the question, why do we believe God exists? Oh,don't you do that? You're you can't, you can't just change my question. I was kidding. Well, I think, I think you bring up a great point, is that one of the key tasks in apologetics is defining of terms and understanding like, Okay, you asked that question. But I think there's a question behind the question that actually is an assumption that we have to tease out and make explicit, right? Because, I mean, that's, that's part of you. So I think sometimes people get into this back and forth with folks, and you're like, Well, you have assumptions in your question. So go ahead, you, you, you go ahead and change my question. So how do we knowthe issue is, is there is that when we say something like, you know, we people begin to imagine that the way Christianity works is that we need to prove Christianity in the way we might prove as Augustine said this in confessions, four plus six equals 10. And Augustine, early church father, and he's writing, and he's writing about his own journey. He said I really had to get to the point where I realized this is not how this works. Yeah, we're not talking about, we do not one plus one, our way to God.Yeah. And when is Augustine writing about When? When? So people are, yeah, 397,at. This point. So he's writing right at the, you know, right right before the fifth century, okay? And, and, of course, Augustine famously said, we have to believe to understand, for most believers, God is intuitive, or what? Blaise Pascal, the 17th century Christian philosopher He called this the logic of the heart. Or I can just cite a more contemporary figure, Alvin planeta, calls this basic belief that. He says that belief in God is a basic belief, and and for So, for for many believers, they would say something like this. And I think there's validity in this so is that God just makes sense, even if, even if they haven't really worked out arguments that they they say, Well, yeah, this God makes sense to me. Now I can kind of begin to explore that. I will in just a second, but I just want to say there's, for most of your listeners, it's something like, I heard the gospel and this and the stories of Jesus, and I knew they were true, right? And as kind of insiders here, we would say that's the Spirit's work. The Holy Spirit is working, and God speaks through creation and his word, and people believe. And so that's that's why we believe now, of course, once we say that people have these kinds of intuitions, or as theologians would put it, this sense of God kind of built into them, I would want to say, as an apologist, or even as a pastor, just a minister, you don't have to be apologist to say this is that we can appeal to those intuitions and make arguments in many different types of ways. Well,hold on one second. Isn't that a little too simplistic, though? Because, I mean, you have the Greeks who believed in all the different gods, and the Romans who adopted those gods and changed their names and like, how do we assimilate that? You know, where, you know Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins famously say, Well, I don't, I don't believe in Zeus. So does that make me an atheist? It would have made me an atheist back in, you know, you know Roman and Latin and Greek times. So, so there's an intuition, but, but how do we delineate that? Well, that's not the right object of that intuition.Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have this intuition, you know, we could say Romans, Romans, one is pointing us to, this is what I would argue, this sense of God, and yet we're, we're fallen, according to the Christian story. And so even though we have this sense of God, we suppress that, and we worship false gods, or we worship the created, rather than the Creator. So the Christian story as a as a Christian, helps make sense of both the kind of why? Well, although we have this sense this, there's this common sense of God, it goes in many different directions and and I would argue that even if you deny kind of transcendence altogether, you're still going to have you're going to still make something kind of a god. You're going to you're going to want to worship something. And I think that's that's part of the point of Romans, one, you end up going to worship the created rather than the Creator. So does that get out what you're asking Matt or Yeah,I think so. I think sometimes the arguments that are real popular, even now is like, well, I just don't, I just don't, I just don't believe that God exists, just like I don't believe that Zeus exists, like, what's, what's the big deal? Why? Why are you so adamant that I believe in that God exists? Like to because I don't, I don't know that God exists because I don't see him. So how would you respond to somebody who says, Well, this Intuit intuition that that you say we all have, and that Romans one says we have, I just don't buy it, you know, because, I mean, I'm, I wouldn't believe that Zeus exists, because there's no empirical evidence to show me otherwise. So how would you respond to somebody that's equivocating or saying that, you know, Yahweh of the Old Testament, the God of the, you know, the God of the Bible is, this is just a tribal deity, just like Zeus is. So, how should we? Iwould, I would say so. So I think we can make kind of arguments for some kind of for transcendence. So there's ways to make arguments against naturalism. That's that's what's being promoted. And there's various different kinds of, you know. So sometimes these kinds of arguments that are in the Christian tradition are used to say, hey, we're going to prove God's existence using these arguments. I think I'm not. Are typically comfortable with the language of prove and how it's used in our context today, again, we get into the math, kind of two plus two equals four. Kind of thinking, yep. But I think a lot of those arguments are appealing to both intuitions and they they work much more effectively as anti naturalistic arguments. Not so much saying, Okay, we know a particular God through, say, the moral argument, okay, that we're but, but it's arguing against simply a naturalistic, materialistic. You know, even Evans, who's a longtime professor at Baylor, makes this argument that those, those types of arguments are really good against pushing back against naturalism. So plan again, has a famous argument that says, if naturalism and evolutionary theory are both true because of how evolution theory works, it's not about right thinking, but right action that you perform certain things to survive. Then, if both of those are true, you have no reason to trust your kind of cognitive faculties.Can you tease that one out a little bit? I kind of lost on that one. He said,What planet is arguing? Is he saying? Look, if, if all of our kind of cognitive faculties are just a product of evolution, okay? And by the way, not only does it's not just a plan. Ago makes this argument, it's actually kind of interesting figures who were like Nietzsche and others made this argument that basically, if, if evolution and naturalism is true that all we are is energy and manner and this product of evolutionary process, then we would have no reason to actually trust kind of our rationality, and that's what rationality is actually mapping onto reality. All of our our brains and our minds are really just producing certain conclusions to help us survive. So it would undercut the very foundations of that position. Now again, yeah, being able to observe, yeah, yeah. So, so with that, again, I think that's an example of an argument that doesn't so much. You know, say this is the Christian God. This supports the belief in Christian God. But what it does is it from within their own thinking. It challenges that. It undercuts their own way of thinking, which is what you're assuming and what you're kind of pushing back on, is a kind of naturalistic world. And I think we can step within that try to understand it and then challenge it on its own terms. And I think that's the real strength of planning this argument. What he's doing now, go ahead.Well, that's it, yeah, in his, in his, like, the the Opus is, uh, warranted. Christian belief is that what you're referencing the the big burgundy book.I can't remember where he makes this argument? Yeah, I can'tremember exactly. But like, if all your cognitive faculties are working, somebody who believes that God exists does not mean that they does not negate all of the other cognitive faculties that they're like if they're in their rational mind, that they have warrants for their belief. But, but that's what I what I think, where I'm tracking with you, and I love this is that even like, it still holds true, right? Like there's not one silver bullet argument to say now we know, like, that's what you were challenging even in the question is, how do you know that you know that you know that God exists? Well, you have to layer these arguments. And so this is one layer of that argument that even the Greeks and the Romans had a sense of transcendence that they were after, and they identified them as gods. But there's this other worldliness that they're trying to attribute to the natural world that they observe, that they can't have answers for, and that we can't observe every occurrence of reality, that there has to be something outside of our box, so to speak, out of our naturalistic tendencies. And so even that can be helpful to say, well, that kind of proves my point that even the Greeks and the Romans and other tribal deities, they're after something outside of our own experience that we can experience in this box. Yeah, that'sright. And there's a, I mean again, this, this argument, isn't intellectually coercive, and I don't think any of these are intellectually coercive. What I mean by that is you can find ways out. And so the approach I would take is actually called an abductive approach, which says, Okay, let's put everything on the table, and what best makes sense, what best makes sense, or what you know, what story best explains all of this? And so that way, there's a lot of different angles you can take depending on who you're talking to, yep, and and so what one of the, one of the ways to look at this and contemporary anthropology? Psycho psychologists have done work on this, to say, the kind of standard, what we might call natural position in all of human history, is that there's there's transcendence. That's, it's just the assumption that there's transcendence. Even today, studies have been shown even people who grow kids, who grew up in a secular society will kind of have these intuitions, like, there is some kind of God, there is some kind of creator, designer. And the argument is that you actually have to have a certain kinds of culture, a particular culture that kind of habituate certain thinking, what, what CS Lewis would call, a certain kind of worldly spell to to so that those intuitions are saying, Oh no, there's not a god. You know, there's not transcendence. And so the kind of common position in all of human history across various different cultures is there is some kind of transcendence. It takes a very particular, what I would say, parochial, kind of culture to say, oh, there's probably no there. There's not. There's, of course, there's not. In fact, Charles Taylor, this is the story he wants to tell of how did we get here, at least in some secular quarters of the West, where it was just assumed, of course, there's, of course, there's a God to 500 years of to now, and at least some quarters of the West, certain, certain elite orsecular? Yeah? Yeah, people. And even then, that's a minority, right? This is not a wholesale thing, yeah.It seems to be. There's something, well, even Jonathan height, uh, he's an atheist, says, has acknowledged that there seems to be something in humans. That's something like what Pascal called a God shaped hole in our heart, and so there's this kind of, there's this deep intuition. And what I'm wanting to do is, I'm wanting in my arguments to kind of say, okay, given this as a Christian, that I believe we have this sense of God and this intuition of God, these intuitions, I want to appeal to those intuitions. And so there's a moral order to the universe that people just sense that there is a right and wrong. There's certain things that are right and certain things are wrong, even if a culture says it is, it is, it is fine to kill this group of people, that there's something above culture, that even there's something above someone's personal preference, that is their moral order to the universe. Now, given that deep seated intuition, what you might call a first principle, what makes best sense of that, or a deep desire, that that, that nothing in the universe seems to satisfy that we have. This is CS Lewis's famous argument. We have these desires, these natural desires for we get thirsty and there's there's water, we get hungry and there's food, and yet there's this basically universal or worldwide phenomenon where people desire something more, that they try to look for satisfaction in this world and they can't find it. Now, what best explains that? And notice what I'm doing there, I'm asking that the question, what best explains it? Doesn't mean there's, there's not multiple explanations for this, but we're saying, What's the best explanation, or profound sense that something doesn't come from nothing, that intelligence doesn't come from non intelligence, that being doesn't come from non being. Yeah, a deep sense that there's meaning and significance in life, that our experience with beauty is not just a leftover from an earlier primitive stage of of evolution. And so we have these deep experiences and intuitions and ideas about the world, and what I'm saying is particularly the Christian story. So I'm not, I'm not at the end, arguing for just transcendence or or kind of a generic theism, but I'm saying particularly the Christian story, best, best answers. Now, I'm not saying that other stories can't incorporate and say something and offer explanations, but it's a, it's a really a matter of, you know, you might say out narrating or or telling the Gospel story that maps on to the ways we're already intuiting about the world, or experiencing or observing the world.Yeah, so, so going along with that, so we don't have, like, a clear cut case, so to speak. We have layers of argument, and we appeal to what people kind of, in their heart of hearts, know, they don't have to like, they have to be taught otherwise. Almost like, if you talk to a child, they can't, they kind of intuit that, oh, there's something outside, like, Who created us? Like, who's our mom? You know, like, going back into the infinite regress. It's like, okay, some something came from nothing. How does that even how is that even possible? So there has to be something outside of our. Experience that caused that to happen. So, so say you, you go there, and then you help people. Say, help people understand. Like, I can't prove God's existence, but I can argue that there are ways of explaining the world that are better than other ways. So then, how do you avoid the charge that, well, you basically are a really proud person that you think your religion is better than other religions. How, how could you dare say that when you can't even prove that you're you know? So how? How would you respond to somebody who would say, like, how do you believe? Why do you believe that Christianity is a one true religion? Yeah, um,well, I would say a couple of things. One is that, in some sense, everyone is staking out some kind of claim. So even if you say you can't say that one religion is true or one one religion is the one true religion, that is a truth claim that you're staking out. And I think it's fine that this for someone to say that they just need to realize. I mean, I think they're wrong, but I think they're they're making a truth claim. I'm making a truth claim. Christians are making truth so we're, we all think we're right, and that's fine. That's fine, but, but then we but then once you realize that, then you're not saying, Well, you think you're right, but I just, I'm not sure, or it's arrogant to say you're right. I think, of course, with some some things, we have more levels of confidence than other things. And I think that's the other thing we can say with Christian with as Christians, it's saying, Hey, I believe, I believe in the resurrection. I believe in the core doctrines of Christianity. It doesn't mean that everything I might believe about everything is right. It doesn't even mean all my arguments are are even 100% always the best arguments, or I could be wrong about a particular argument and and I'm also not saying that you're wrong about everything you're saying. Okay, so, but what we are saying is that, hey, I I believe Jesus is who he said he was, and you're saying he's not okay. Let's have a conversation. But it's not, rather, it's not a matter of somebody being air. You know, you can hold those positions in an arrogant way. But simply saying, I believe this isn't in itself arrogance, at least, I think how arrogance is classically defined, yeah. And what is this saying? I believe this, and I believe, I believe what Jesus said about himself. And I can't go around and start kind of toying with with, if I believe he's Lord, then it's really not up to me to say, okay, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna, kind of take some of what he said, but not all of what he said. If you actually believe he rose from the dead and he is Lord and He is God, then then you take him at his word.What is it, as you think about cultural engagement, cultural apologetics that you've written on like, what is it in our cultural moment right now where people you say that thing, like Jesus said, You know, he, he, he said, I'm God, you know, not those explicit words, right? That's some of the argument. Like, no, but you look at the narrative he did, and that's why he was going to be stoned for blasphemy. That's why all these things. But that's, that's another conversation for another day. But, and then you talk to someone, you're like, Well, I don't believe he was God. I don't believe His claims were. Like, why then do you do we oftentimes find ourselves at a standstill, and people just throw up their hands like, well, that's your truth, and my truth is, I just don't, like, just don't push it on me. Like, why do we find ourselves in this? And it's not new. I mean, this is something that goes back to, you know, hundreds of years ago, where people are making arguments and they're like, Well, I just don't know. So I'm gonna be a transcendentalist, or I'm gonna be a deist, or I'm gonna whatever. So how do we kind of push back on that a little bit to say, No, it's not what we're talking about. Is not just a matter of preference, and it's not just a matter of, hey, my truth for me and your truth for you. But we're actually making it a claim that is true for all people. Like, how do we kind of encourage people to push into that tendency that people have to just throw up their hands and say, whatever? Pass the piece, you know? Well,okay, so I think let me answer that in two ways. One's philosophically, and then two are practically. One philosophically. I do think it's, you know, CS Lewis was on to this, as he often was way ahead of the curve on certain things, but on an abolition of man. When he talked, he's talking about the fact value distinction and how we've separated. You know, you have your facts, and then everything you know, where, classically, you would kind of recognize that courage, you know, is a virtue, and that's, it's a, it's a, it's also a fact that we should pursue courage and rather than just my preference of kind of and so there's actually. Be this, but now we have, well, that's a value, kind of courage, and say you should do something, but it's, it's, that's your value and and so we have this distinction between facts, which is, follow the science, and then values over here. And as that has opened up. You have both a kind of, on one hand, a very, very much, a people saying in a very kind of hard, rationalistic way, you know, science has said, which, that would be another podcast to kind of dive into that more science is good and, yeah, and, but science doesn't say anything. So I'm a fan of science, but it doesn't say anything. We interpret certain things, but, but so you can kind of have a hard rationalism, but you also combine with a kind of relativism, or at least a soft relativism that says, Well, this is my truth, because values become subjective. So that's the philosophical take. But the kind of practical thing, I would say, is they need people. One of the reasons people do that is because, it's because they've seen kind of these to reference what you're talking about earlier this hey, this person's coming in wanting to talk about my worldview, and it just becomes this fierce, awkward encounter, and I don't want anything to do with that type of thing, like I don't, I don't want to go down the dark corners of of the Internet to have these, to have these intellectual just like Charles Taylor says, a lot of the kind of arguments are, I have three reasons why your position is untenable. He says something like untenable, wrong and totally immoral. Now, let's have a conversation. It just and so it's kind of like, no thanks. I don't think I want to have that conversation. You do you. And so there's, there is a part that, culturally, something is going on which needs to be confronted. And Lewis was doing that work, and a lot of philosophers have followed him in that but there's also a side of of maybe where our own worst enemies here, and the way that we try to engage people, and where we start with people, and we think, Okay, let's start in this kind of, you know, apologetic wrestling match with people. And a lot of times, people are just looking to cope. People are just looking to survive. They have mental health issues going on, and they don't want another one to pop up because of the apologist. And so they're just looking to try to skirt that conversation and get to feeding their kids or dealing with their angry neighbor. And so we've got to kind of take stock on kind of where people are at, and then how to engage them with where they're at. Now I'm going to apologize. I think all of those arguments are helpful in a certain context, but a lot of times, we've been our own worst enemy, and how we try to try to engage so what I what I encourage students and ministers to do is is start talking about people's stories, and you know how life is going and where what's hard, and asking really good questions, and kind of having a holy curiosity and and often, I was in an encounter with a guy who came up to me after a kind of a university missions thing, and he was an atheist, and he wanted to talk about the moral argument. And I was happy to do that for a few minutes, but then I just asked him. I said, what you know, what do you love to do? Tell me about yourself, and where do you really find joy in life? And he looked at me, and he started to tear up, and he said, You know, I'm really lonely right now, you know, go figure this moment in our world, the kind of fragmented world we live in. And he said, what's really meaningful to me is my is my pet, because he provides solace. And there's this moment where, of course, I mean, here's an atheist wanting to show up at a Christian event, right? And because Christians were nice to him, and he's deeply lonely, and we got to have a pretty meaningful conversation about, you know, the benefits of following Christ in the community, communion with not only God, but with others, yeah, but if I would have just left it at, let's go to the more we would have never got there. But it took me kind of asking the question, which is, in essence, what I was trying to ask is what, I didn't put it like this, but what are you seeking? What are you really after here? And where are you really getting joy in life, and what's going on? And I if we can learn to go there, I think we'll have much more productive conversations. And then just kind of, I heard chatro talk about the, you know, ontological argument. Now let me throw that out there at somebody. I think that's why apologists and apologetics have sometimes been given a bad name. But if you. Actually look at the tradition, the the larger tradition. There's so many resources, and there's so many people, apologists, doing lots of different things, that I think gives us kind of way to actually engage people where they're at.Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. Well, I It reminds me, I believe it was Schaefer who talked about the the greatest apologetic, at least his time, and I think it stands true even now, is welcoming people and being hospitable towards people, welcoming the questions, not looking at folks as adversaries, but fellow pilgrims. And then you welcome them into that space, into that community. And then they're they see that, quite frankly, the faith works. The Christian ethic actually works, albeit imperfect, by imperfect people in imperfect ways. But you know, as we go through pain and suffering, as we go through, you know, elation and disappointment, like there's still a lot that that we can demonstrate to the world through our testimony that it works. You know, so to speak. So I'd love to hear you kind of help walk us through how the Christian story tells a better story about pain and suffering, because that's that's a fact of every person listening is that there's some modicum of pain and suffering in their life at any moment. And then you look at the grand scale of the world and all these things, but just even we can go down to the individual level of the why is there pain and suffering in my life and in the world and, you know, in general. But I like, like for you to just kind of riff on that for a little bit for us, to helpus, yeah. And in some ways, this question, and the apologetic question is a kind of real, a snapshot into the into what we're talking about with, how do we respond to that? Not just as Okay, an intellectual question, yeah, yeah, but it's also a profoundly experiential question. And there's youmean, you mean, and how, in the moment when you're saying, in the moment when somebody asks you the question, not getting defensive, but being being willing to listen to the question, Is that what you mean by that? And yeah,well, what I mean is, that's certainly true. Matt, what I was really thinking, though, is how this is not just something kind of an abstract, intellectual question. Oh, okay, but it's a profound experiential and there's different angles that we might take into it. But I mean, as a kind of snapshot or a test case in our apologetic is, I think there's ways to answer that question that are sterile, that are overly academic, and I and that also, I would say, rushes in to give an answer. And I would want to argue that Christianity doesn't give an answer to evil and suffering, but it gives a response. And let me make, let me explain that, yeah, is, is an answer. Tries in the way I'm using it, at least tries to say, I'm going to solve this kind of intellectual problem, and the problem of evil and suffering in the world, of why a good God who's all powerful would allow the kind of evil and suffering we see in the world is, is one that we might say, Okay, now there's the problem. Now let me give the solution. And this is often done, and we've you maybe have been in this if you're listening into a certain context where a kind of famous apologist says, Here is the answer, or famous Christian celebrity says, Here is the answer to evil, and this solves all the problems, until you start thinking about it a little bit more, or you go home, or three or four years, and you grow out of that answer and and so I think we need to be real careful here when we say we have the answer, because if you keep pushing that question back in time, or you start asking questions like, well, that that bullet that hit Hitler in World War One and didn't kill him? What if the God of the Bible, who seems to control the wind and everything, would have just blown it over and killed Hitler. It seems like maybe it could have been a better possible world if Hitler, you know, didn't lead the Holocaust. Okay, so, so again, I think, I think pretty quickly you begin to say, Okay, well, maybe some of these theodicies Don't actually solve everything, although I would say that some of the theodicies that are given things like free will, theodicy or or the kind of theodicies that say God uses suffering to to grow us and develop us. And I think there's truth in all of that, and there's but what it does. What none of them do is completely solve the problem. And so I think that there's value in those theodicies in some extent.Hey, did you know that you were created to enjoy abundance? I'm not talking about getting the latest pair of Air Jordans or a jet plane or whatever that this world says that you have to have in order to be happy. Instead, I'm talking about an abundant life where you are rich in relationships, you're rich in your finances, but you are rich in life in general, that you are operating in the calling that God has for you, that He created you for amazing things. Did you know that? And so many times we get caught up in paying our mortgage and running hither and yon, that we forget that in this world of distractions that God has created you for glorious and amazing things and abundant life. If you would like to get a free workbook, I put one together for you, and it's called the my new rich life workbook. If you go to my new rich life.com my new rich life.com. I would be glad to send you that workbook with no strings attached, just my gift to you to help you. But here'sthe thing, here's what I want to go back to with a question. Is that the Odyssey as we know it, or this? And what I'm using theodicy for is this, this responsibility that that we feel like we have to justify the ways of God, is a particularly modern phenomenon. I think this is where history comes and helps us. Charles Taylor talks about this in that the kind of way we see theodicy and understand theodicy was really developed in the middle of the 1700s with figures like Leibniz, and then you have particularly the Lisbon earthquakes in the middle of the 18th century. And that was this kind of 911 for that context. And in this 911 moment, you have philosophers being saying, Okay, how do we justify the ways of God? And are trying to do it in a very kind of this philosophical way to solve the problem. But from for most of human history and history of the West, of course, evil and suffering was a problem, but it wasn't a problem so much to be solved, but it was a problem to to cope with and and and live in light of, in other words, what you don't have in the Bible is Job saying, Okay, well, maybe God doesn't exist. Or the psalmist saying, maybe God doesn't exist because I'm experiencing this. No, they're ticked off about it. They're not happy about it. They're struggling to cope with it. It is, it is a problem, but it's not, then therefore a problem. That says, well, then God doesn't exist. Yeah. And it didn't become a widespread kind of objection against God's very existence, until certain things have happened in the kind of modern psyche, the kind of modern way of imagining the world. And here is what's happened. This is what Charles Taylor says. Is that Taylor says what happened is kind of slowly through through different stages in history, but but in some sorry to be gloved here, but it's, it's a very kind of, you know, long argument. But to get to the point is, he says our view of God became small, and our view of humans became really big. And so God just came became kind of a bigger view of version of ourselves. And then we said, oh, if there is a reason for suffering and evil, we should be able to know it, because God's just a bigger kind of version of us, and he has given us rational capacities. And therefore if we can't solve this, then there must not be a god. That's kind of where the logic goes. And of course, if you step into the biblical world, or what I would say a more profoundly Christian way of looking at it is God. God isn't silent, and God has spoken, has given us ways to cope and live with suffering and ways to understand it. But what he what he doesn't give us, is that we're going to he actually promises that, that we're not going to fully understand His ways that, that we're going to have to trust Him, even though we can't fully understand why he does what he does in history all the time. And so this leads into what, what's actually called. There's, this is a, this is a weird name if you're not in this field, but it's called skeptical theism. I'm a skeptical theist. And what skeptical theists Are you is that we're not skeptical about God, but we're skeptical about being able to neatly answer or solve the problem of evil. But we actually don't think that's as big of a deal, because, simply because. I don't understand why God, God's simply because I don't understand God's reasons. Doesn't mean he doesn't have reasons. Yeah, yeah. Andso just beyond your the your finite, uh, temporo spatial understanding of things, right? Like you don't understand how this horrible situation plays out in a grander narrative,right? So it's Stephen wickstra. He had this famous argument. I'll riff off of it a little bit. I mean, just metaphor. He says, if you have a if you have a tent, and we go camping together, Matt and and I open the tent and say, there's a giant dog in there. And you look in there, there's no dog, you would say, Yeah, you're either crazy or a liar. But if I open the tent and say there's tiny bugs in there, and they're called no see ums, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't be in a position to know. You wouldn't be in an epistemological position to know whether there's a bug in there or not. So you would simply have to decide whether you're going to trust me or not. And then, you know, the claim of the non Christian might be, well, yeah, why would I trust the God given the kind of crap that I see in the world? And I would say, well, a couple reasons. One is most profoundly because God has entered into this world. He has not sat on the sidelines. So even though we don't fully understand it, he has in the person of Jesus Christ, he has suffered with us and for us. So this is a God who says, I haven't given you all the answers, but I have given you myself. And that's I think both has some rational merit to it, and profoundly some intellectual merit to that. I'd also say that the Christian story actually gets at some deep intuitions, kind of underneath this challenge or this problem. It was CS Lewis, who was an atheist in World War One, and and he was very angry at God because of the evil and violence and his his mom dying at an early age, and was an atheist. But then he realized that in his anger against God, that he was assuming a certain standard, a certain kind of moral standard, about how the world should be, that there is evil in the world and that it shouldn't be so, and this deep intuition that it shouldn't be so that certain things aren't right. Actually, you don't have if you do away with God's existence, you just you have your preferences. But in a world of just energy and matter, why would the world not be absurd? Why would you expect things not to be like this. Why would you demand them not to be like this?So a deeply embedded sense of morality that can't be explained by naturalism is what you're getting, yeah?That that we have a certain problem here, or certain challenge with not fully being able to answer the question, yeah, but they have, I would say, a deeper challenge, that they don't have even the kind of categories to make sense of the question. So that's those are some of the directions I would go, and it's first stepping inside and kind of challenging against some of the assumptions. But then I'm as you, as you can tell, then I'm going to say how the Christian story does make sense of these deep intuitions, our moral intuitions, that are underneath the problem, or the challenge of evil and suffering. And then also going to Jesus in the Gospel. And the Gospel story,one of the questions I had on our on the list of questions was, how do we know the Bible is true? But I want to delve into more of this understanding of doubt and how that plays, because you've written a lot on this. But I'd like, could you just direct us to some resources, or some folks, if folks are interested in, how do we know the Bible is true? I'm thinking real popular apologist right now is Wesley. Huff is a great place to go. But are there other like, hey, how do I know that the Bible is true? Because you keep appealing to Christianity, which is in for is the foundation of that is the Bible. So could you give us a few resources so people could chase those down.Peter Williams has written a couple little good books on the Gospels. AndPeter Williams Williams, he's in Cambridge, right, orTyndale house, over there and over the pond. And he's written a book on the Gospels. And I can't think of the name, but if you put it on the internet, it'll show up. And the genius of Jesus as well. Okay, little books, and I think both of those are helpful as far as the Gospels go. Richard, Richard balcom is really good on this, Jesus and the eyewitnesses. As well as a little book that most people haven't heard of. It's a, it's an introduction to the Gospels in that off in an Oxford series, which is, you know, kind of a brief introduction to the Gospels. And he, especially at the very beginning, he gives us John Dixon, who's at Wheaton now, has written a lot of good books on on on this. And it's got this series called skeptics guide to and it does both Old Testament and New Testament kind of stuff. So that little series is, is really helpful. So those are some places I would start. And in my books, I typically have, you know, chapters on this, but I haven't, haven't written, you know, just one book, just on this. The early books, truth matters and truth in a culture of doubt, were, were engaging Bart airman. But really, Bart airman not to pick on on Airmen, but just because he was such a representative of a lot of the the views that that we were hearing, he ended up being a good kind of interlocutor. In those I would just say, I know you didn't. You just asked for books. And let me just say one thing about this is I, I think if you are trying to engage, I think if you take the approach of, let me prove the Bible, let me take everything and just, yeah, I don't think that's the best way. I think you often have to give people some you know, whether it's, you know, the beginning of Luke's Gospel, where he's saying, This is how I went about this. And I actually did my homework to kind of say, this is at least the claim of the gospel writers say, and then, but the real way that you you come to see and know, is you have to step into it and read it. And I think one of the apologetic practices I would want to encourage, or just evangelistic practices, is is offering to read the gospels with people and and working through it. And then certain things come up as you read them, apologetically that you'll, you'll want to chase down and use some of those resources for but I think often it's, it's saying, hey, the claims are, at least that, you know, these guys have done their homework and and some of the work Richard welcome is doing is saying, you know, the Gospel traditions were, were were pinned within the lifetime of eyewitnesses and this. And so that's some of the work that that balcom has helpfully done that kind of help us get off the ground in some of these conversations.Would that be your go to gospel Luke or, like, if you're walking with players, or a go to like,some people say more because of the shortness or John, I I'm happy with them. Allfour should be in the canon. Yeah, no, that's great. And I think a couple other books I'm thinking of Paul Wagner's from text from text to translation, particularly deals with Old Testament translation issues, but then text critical pieces, but then also FF. Bruce's canon of Scripture is a real, solid place to go, if people are interested in those big pieces, but those, I mean, yeah, Richard Bauckham work was really helpful for me when I was like, How do I even know, you know the starting place is a good starting place. So, yeah, thank you for that. Sowhat the challenge is, people have got to make up their mind on Jesus. Yeah. I mean, I think that's where I want to kind of triage conversations and say, Hey, I know the Bible is a big book and there's a lot going on. First things you gotta make a call on. So that's where I'm going to focus on, the Gospels. That'sgreat. No, that's great. Well, you know, a lot of times you, and you've mentioned this earlier, that sometimes in our attempts to give reasons for our faith, we can come to simplistic answers like, Okay, this is, here you go. Here's the manuscript evidence, for example. Or, hey, here's the evidence for the resurrection. Oh, here. You know, this is pain and suffering, Romans, 828, you know, having these quick answers. And I think it stems from a desire to want to have a foundation for what we stand on. But a lot of times, and I think what we're seeing in our culture, and this is not anything new, this topic of deconstruction is not really a new topic is, you know, it's what's been called in the past, apostasy, or just not believing anymore. But now it's gotten a more, you know, kind of sharper edges to it. And and I would love for you to you know how you would respond to someone who is deconstructing from their faith because it didn't allow for doubt or because they were raised in perhaps a really strict Christian home. So how would you respond to somebody who says, I don't I don't like the. Had answers anymore, and I don't, you know, it's just too simplistic, and it doesn't, it's not satisfying. So how would you, because I encounter a lot of folks that are in that vein, the ones who are deconstructing, it's, it's not, you know, there's definitely intellectual arguments, but there's something else in back of that too, I think. So I'd love to hear you just kind of, how would you respond to someone who is deconstructing or has deconstructed in their faith?Yeah, yeah. And of course not. In that situation, my first response it's going to be, tell me more. Let's, let's talk more. I want to hear, I want to hear your story. I want to hear your deconversion story, or where you're at and and to have some real curiosity. Rather than here, let me tell you what your problem is. And let me tellyou, yeah, you just don't want to believe because you got some secret sin or something. Yeah? Oh, goodnessno. I mean, it's right faith, unbelief and doubt is complex, and there's lots of forms of doubt. And we use that word I mean, it has quite the semantic range, and we use in lots of different ways. And of course, the Bible, by no means, is celebrating doubt. The Bible, it's, you know, that we is saying we should have faith. It calls us to faith, not to doubt, but doubt seems to be a couple things to say. We talk about, we talk about ourselves as Christians, as new creations in Christ, but we also recognize that we still sin, we still we still have sinful habits. We're still sinful, and in the same way we we we believe, but we can struggle with doubt, and that's a reality. And it seems to me that that doesn't mean, though, that then we celebrate doubt, as if doubts this great thing, no, but at the same time, we need to be realistic and honest that we do. And there's certain things culturally that have happened, because we now live in a pluralistic world where people seem very sane and rational and and lovely, and they believe radically different things than we do. And just that proximity, Peter Berger, the late sociologist, did a lot of work on this area. This is just it. It creates these kinds of this kind of contestability, because, well, we could imagine even possibly not believing, or kids not believing, in a way that, again, 500 years ago, you know you Luther was wrestling with whether the Roman Catholic Church had everything right, but he wasn't wrestling and doubting the whole the whole thing, yeah, God. So that creates certain pressures that I think we need to be honest about, and but, but with, and part of that honesty, I think, in that kind of conversation to say, Hey, you're not alone and you're not just simply crazy because you're you're raising some of these things because, I mean, that's in many ways, understandable. Yeah, okay, yeah. I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying it's understandable. And I hear what you're saying, and I'm, let's talk about it now. The the kind of metaphor that that I use is to think about Christianity as a house. Of course, that's not my metaphor. I'm I'm borrowing from CS Lewis, who talked about Christianity as a house and in Mere Christianity, Lewis said he wanted to get people through non Christians into the hallway, and so he wanted to get them into the door so that they would and then they could pick up a particular tradition, they could enter a room. But his approach in Mere Christianity was to represent kind of the whole house. And what I think is happening in many cases is that people, now, I'm riffing off of his metaphor, people in the church. People have raised in the church, so they've grew up their whole life in the house, but it's actually in the what I would call the attic. And the attic as as I talk about it is, is in the house. It's, it's a Christian community, but it was, it was many times they're built out of a kind of reactionary posture against culture, without a deep connection to the rest of the house. It's kind of like, Hey, we're scared, and understandably so, the kind of decadent morality, certain shifts happening in the west with Can you giveus a couple examples of what you're thinking like? What would a person living in the attic like? What would their tradition kind of. Look like,yeah. So a couple of things. One in response to, in some cases, in response to the kind of intellectual movements, the kind of sex, secular and, you know, thinking they would say, you know, intellectualism is bad, that would be one response from the attic, like, don't worry about, you know, thinking. Just believe your problem is you're just thinking too much. So that would be one response, a kind of anti intellectualism. The other response is what I would call a kind of, depending on what kind of mood I'm in, I would call it a kind of quasi intellectual that, and that sounds harsh that I say what kind of mood I'm in, but a kind of quasi intellectual response, which is like, Oh, you want arguments. You want evidence. We'll give you two plus two equals equals God, and we'll kind of match, you know, fire with fire, and we can prove God's existence. And oftentimes, those kinds of apologetic reactions, I would call them, sometimes they're kind of quasi intellectual, because I don't think that's how the kind of bit we come to the big decisions. I don't think it's rational enough about a rationality about kind of what type of humans we are, and how we come to the big decisions and the big truths and and so I think that's one response, and that's why you have a kind of industry of apologetics sometimes. And the way they do it, I'm not saying in some ways it can be helpful, but in other ways, it can cause problems down down the road, and we've seen that at least, like, for instance, with the evil and suffering kind of conversation we were having before. If people say, actually, those arguments actually don't make, don't fully do what they were. We you claim too much for your arguments. Let's just say, like that. Okay, so that's one kind of, so there's a there's a kinds of, well, Christianity, in that side can kind of become this kind of intellectual, sterile work where you're just kind of trying to prove God, rather than this, than this way of life, where does worship come in? Where does devotion come in? What is And so very quickly it becomes, you know, this intellectual game, rather than communion with the living God. And so the emphasis understandably goes a certain way, but I would say understandably wrong goes a certain way, and that argument should be part of this deeper life of faith that we live and so we again, I'm wanting to say the motives aren't necessarily, aren't wrong, but where we get off because we're too reactionary, can go off. Let me give you one other ones. And I would say, like the purity culture would be another kind of side of this where we see a morally decadent culture of sexuality, and we want to respond to that we we don't want our kids to grow up believing those lies. Yeah, as as a friend of mine says, you know that the sexual revolution was actually and is actually bad for women, and we need to say that. We need to say that to people in the church, absolutely. But in response to that, then we create what, what has been called a purity culture, which, which has, has kind of poured a lot of guilt and have made have over promised again, if you just do this, you'll have a wonderful life and a wonderful marriage if you just do this, and then if you mess up, oh, you've, you've committed this unpardonable sin, almost. And so there's a lot of pressure being put on, particularly young women and then, and then over promising and so all of this,can people see that the House of Cards is coming down because they're like, Yeah, my marriage is horrible.It creates this pressure, right where you have to. You have to think a certain way. You have to behave this very kind of way. It's reaction to want to protect them. So again, I'm saying, Yes, I understand the reactions, yeah, and, but, but, and this is, I think, a key part of this, because it's not connected well to the rest of the house. It often reacts, rather than reflected deeply on the tradition and helps fit your way, the centrality of the Gospel, the centrality of what's always been, Christian teaching and coming back to the main things, rather than kind of reacting to culture because we're nervous, and doing it in such a way that, you know, well, people will begin to say, That's what Christianity is about. Christianity is really about, you know, your politics, because that's all my pastor is talking about, interesting, you know, and this is all they're talking about. So that becomes the center,even though the ethic is is, is, becomes the. Center, as opposed to the the philosophy and theology guiding the ethic, is that, would that be another way to put it, like how you live, become, becomes preeminent to, you know, wrestling with doubt and and trying to bring God into the space of your doubt and that kind of stuff is, that, is that?Yeah, I mean, so that, I think one of the things that the the early creeds help us to do is it helps us to keep the main thing. The main thing, it helps us to keep, rather than saying, well, because culture is talking about this, we're going to, you know, kind of in our churches, this becomes the main thing, is reacting or responding, maybe, whether it's with the culture and certain movements or against the culture, yeah. But if you're anchored to the kind of the ancient wisdom of the past you're you do have, you are at times, of course, going to respond to what's going on culturally, yeah, but it's always grounded to the center, and what's always been the center, yeah? And I think so when you're in a community like this, like this, the pressure of, I've gotta think rightly. I've gotta check every box here, yes, and oh, and I've, I've been told that there is proofs, and I just need to think harder. I just, you know, even believe more, even Yeah, if I just, if I just think harder, then I'll eliminate my doubt, but my doubts not being eliminated. So either I'm stupid or maybe there's a problem with the evidence, because it's not eliminating all my doubt, but this creates this kind of melting pot of anxiety for a lot of people as their own Reddit threads and their Oh, and then this, trying to figure all this out, and they're Googling all these answers, and then the slow drip, oh, well, to be honest, sometimes the massive outpouring of church scandal is poured into this, yeah. And it just creates a lot of anxiety amongst young people, and eventually they say, I'm just going to jump out of the attic, you know, because it looks pretty freeing and it looks like a pretty good way of life out there. And what, what I say to people is two things. Number one, rather than simply jumping out, first look what you're about to jump into, because you have to live somewhere, and outside the attic, you're not just jumping into kind of neutrality, you're jumping into cultural spaces and assumptions and belief. And so let's, let's just be just as critical as, yeah, the attic or house as you are will be mean, be just as critical with those spaces as you have been with the attic. So you need to explore those. But also, I'm wanting to give them a framework to understand that actually a lot of the ways that you've kind of grown up is actually been in this attic. Why don't you come downstairs, and if you're going to leave the house, explore the main floor first.And what would be the main floor? What would you say? The main floor?Yeah. I would say themain orthodox historic Christianity, like, yeah. Orthodox historic Christianity, Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, just kind of go into the Yeah. And whatI would say is, for instance, the apostle creed gives us kind of what I would call load bearing walls in the house. So it gives us the places where you don't mess like load bearing walls. You don't you don't knock those down if you're going to do a remodel, and, and, and. So you would recognize the difference between load bearing walls, walls that are central versus actual different rooms in the house, and how? Well, these aren't load bearing walls, but they're, they're, they're, they're how certain people in Christian communities, churches at particular times, have articulated it and and some of these, you could deny certain things, but you could, but those are more denominational battle lines, rather than the kind of load bearing things that you if you pull out the resurrection of Jesus, if you pull out the the deity of Christ and the full humanity of Christ, If you pull out the Trinity. So let's go back to the core. And if you're going to reject, if you're going to leave, leave on the basis of those core things, not okay. I've had these bad experiences in the church now, yeah, what I think this to kind of wrap this up on this is what often happens, or what can happen if someone says, Well, yeah, I've done that, and I still don't, I don't believe Okay, yep, that's going to happen. Yep. But one of the things I suggest, in at least some cases, is that the addict has screwed people up more than they realize, and that the way that they approach. Approach the foundation and the the main floor, it's still in attic categories, as in, to go back to our first question, well, I can't prove this, yeah. And I was always told that I should be able to prove it. Well, that's not how this works, yeah. And so they they reject Christianity on certain enlightenment terms, but they don't reject Christianity as Christianity really is. So people are going to interact with Christianity, I would say sometimes your people are investigating, say the resurrection, and reflecting more on on these central claims, but they're still doing it as if, if it doesn't reach kind of 100% certainty that I can't believe. And that's just not how this works.Yeah, that's, that's food for thought, because there, there's so many people that I interact with that I try to encourage. Like, yeah, your experience was really bad, like I'm affirming that, and that was messed up. That's not That's not Christianity, that is a branch on this massive tree trunk that stinks and that needs to be lamented and grieved and also called out as wrong. So I'm using another metaphor of a tree instead. But I love the because the house metaphor is something that you use in the telling a better story. Isn't that surprised bydoubt? Surprised by doubt? Yes, that's that's what we use, and we march through things, and we use that as, really our guiding metaphor through all the chapters. And that's what I would encourage if you're if you have somebody who's struggling with this, or you're struggling with this yourself, that's That's why a friend of mine, Jack Carson, that's why we wrote the book together, because obviously this is a we had a lot of friends and acquaintances and people who were coming to us and we weren't fully satisfied with all of the kind of works, yeah, that were responding and so this, this was our attempt to try to helppeople. Well, the book right after that was, is telling a better story. And one of the things I've really appreciated in your emphasis over the last few years has been, I would call a more humane apology, apologetic in that, you know, not giving into, okay, we're gonna give you want evidence. We're gonna give you evidence, as opposed to like, okay, let's just talk about being a huma

In today's episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned: Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019). Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022). Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021). Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973). Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010). The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993). Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025). Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In today's episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned: Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019). Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022). Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021). Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973). Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010). The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993). Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025). Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/buddhist-studies

In today's episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned: Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019). Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022). Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021). Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973). Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010). The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993). Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025). Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychology

In today's episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned: Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019). Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022). Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021). Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973). Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010). The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993). Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025). Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

In today's episode, Dr. Pierce Salguero sits down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show! Resources mentioned: Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019). Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022). Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021). Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973). Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010). The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993). Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025). Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com: Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University's Abington College, located near Philadelphia. www.piercesalguero.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/spiritual-practice-and-mindfulness

Today I sit down with Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist and researcher of religion, spirituality, and cognition. Together we try to get to the bottom of whether meditation is actually good for you through a comparison of Miguel's research on the adverse effects of meditation with my research on Asian notions of meditation sickness. Along the way, we discuss the limitations of modern Western understandings of consciousness, and explore whether we can develop a more expansive, multifaceted understanding of altered states both pleasant and unpleasant.If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in deep conversations about the dark side of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Beryl wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out our members-only benefits on blackberyl.substack.com. Enjoy the show!Resources mentioned:Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2019).Miguel Farias, Oxford Handbook of Meditation (2022).Miguel Farias et al, “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-based Therapies: A Systematic Review” (2021).Pierce Salguero, “‘Meditation Sickness' in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” (2023). Peter Berger, The Homeless Mind (1973).Joseph Henrich et al. article on the Müller-Lyer illusion (2010).The source for the term “monophasic bias” is apparently Charles Laughlin's chapter “Transpersonal Anthropology” in Roger Walsh's book Paths Beyond Ego (1993).Pierce Salguero, A Lamp Unto Yourself (2025).Resources provided by the interviewee on blackberyl.substack.com:Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Meditation

In hour two, Hoch and Crowder discuss words that don't rhyme but flow together, and Flo Rida has a strange way of trying to rhyme Wisconsin. In Cat Talk Hoch reads the prop bet for the USA vs Canada in the 4 Nations Finals tomorrow night in Boston. Also, have you ever ordered something with double ginger or somebody that deconstructs their food? We find out Jimmy has been to a hibachi restaurant and what he orders there. Tyler Herro of the future with the Heat without Jimmy Butler and if there is growth. Hoch tells us about his trip to Bud's Chicken & Seafood. Peter Berger a Miami firefighter with COPD who has been honored by the American Lung Association joins the show to talk about his charity event Fight For Air Climb Miami on March 9 at Loan Depot Park to donate go to climbmiami.org.

"The absolute key thing which God needs from the Church is a commitment to the Word of God."—Rev Phill Sacre We are joined once again by Rev Phill Sacre—an ordained minister (Church of England), housechurch leader, and blogger on Substack—for a conversation on "Plausibility Structures and the Church." Our conversation grows out of a podcast series that Phill produced late last year called "How the church was sabotaged", in which he reflected upon a 1980s book by the famous Christian thinker and writer Os Guinness. Though published over 40 years ago, Guinness's "The Gravedigger File: Papers on the Subversion of the Modern Church" caught Phill's attention because of its apparent prescience on a number of important cultural issues facing the church today. So, please join us as I "get in on the conversation", and we discuss what's happened to so many modern churches, and think about ways in which we might "push back" in the culture to reveal the Gospel's "plausibility structure" to church and world alike. (Phill is a Christian minister. Ordained in the Church of England, he formerly served in a parish on the Essex coast, but now leads an independent housechurch. He also runs the online ministries "Understand the Bible" and "Sacred Musings : Thinking Christianly about the World" on Substack.) [For show notes please visit https://themindrenewed.com]

Australský režisér Barrie Kosky si dnes převezme Cenu Antonína Dvořáka. Slavnostní večer, na kterém vystoupí také orchestr Prague Philharmonia pod taktovkou dirigenta Marca Albrechta a sólisté Kateřina Kněžíková, Katharine Mehrling, Jarmila Vantuchová a Peter Berger, se uskuteční ve Španělském sále Pražského hradu.

Australský režisér Barrie Kosky si dnes převezme Cenu Antonína Dvořáka. Slavnostní večer, na kterém vystoupí také orchestr Prague Philharmonia pod taktovkou dirigenta Marca Albrechta a sólisté Kateřina Kněžíková, Katharine Mehrling, Jarmila Vantuchová a Peter Berger, se uskuteční ve Španělském sále Pražského hradu.Všechny díly podcastu Mozaika můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

Leitura bíblica do dia: Mateus 6:9-13 Plano de leitura anual: Cântico dos Cânticos 1-3; Gálatas 2; Quando a série britânica Line of Duty (Linha do dever) terminou, milhares a assistiram para ver como terminaria a luta contra o crime organizado. Muitos se desapontaram porque o final subtendeu que o mal venceria. “Queria que os bandidos fossem levados à justiça. Nós precisávamos de uma ‘lição de moral' no final”, disse um fã. O sociólogo Peter Berger observou certa vez que somos famintos por esperança e justiça: esperamos que o mal seja um dia superado e seus causadores respondam por seus crimes. Um mundo onde vencem os bandidos vai contra a maneira que o mundo deve funcionar. Sem perceberem, os fãs decepcionados expressavam o profundo desejo da humanidade de que o mundo fosse novamente corrigido. Na oração do Senhor, Jesus é realista sobre o mal que existe não apenas entre nós, exigindo perdão (Mateus 6:12), mas também em grande escala, exigindo libertação (v.13). Esse realismo, no entanto, é acompanhado da esperança. No Céu não existe o mal e esse reino celestial está vindo à Terra (v.10). A justiça de Deus será completa, a “lição de moral” virá e banirá o mal para sempre (Apocalipse 21:4). Portanto, quando os maus da vida real vencem e a decepção se instala, lembremo-nos de que até que a vontade de Deus se cumpra na “terra como no céu”, sempre haverá esperança, porque a história não terminou. Por: Sheridan Voysey

In der aktuellen Episode des IGEL-Podcasts (Inklusion Ganz Einfach Leben) vom 10. Oktober 2024 beleuchten wir den oft wenig beachteten Beruf der BerufsbetreuerInnen. Zu Gast ist Peter Berger, Vorstandsmitglied des Bundesverbands der BerufsbetreuerInnen, der spannende Einblicke in die Arbeit und Herausforderungen des Berufs bietet. Die rechtliche Betreuung hilft Menschen mit Behinderungen, ihre rechtlichen Angelegenheiten zu regeln und selbstbestimmt am gesellschaftlichen Leben teilzunehmen. Doch auch rechtliche Hürden und unzureichende Vergütung stellen die BetreuerInnen vor große Herausforderungen. Im Gespräch erfahren wir, wie BerufsbetreuerInnen nicht nur rechtliche Unterstützung leisten, sondern auch dabei helfen, Leistungen zur Teilhabe zu sichern und bürokratische Barrieren zu überwinden. Peter Berger erläutert, warum eine bessere Qualifizierung und angemessene Bezahlung notwendig sind, um die Qualität der Betreuung zu gewährleisten.Wir gehen der Frage nach, Wie Berufsbetreuer die Inklusion der Menschen mit Behinderung fördern und begleiten können.Mehr Infos zum Verband gibt es unter:https://www.berufsbetreuung.de/

Nur zwei Prozent der Menschheit haben einen IQ von mehr als 130. Im "Club der Cleveren" fragen wir daher nach: Wie ticken diese zwei Prozent? Wie erkennt man Hochbegabung und wie fördert man sie bei Kindern?

Leitura bíblica do dia: Mateus 6:9-13 Plano de leitura anual: Cântico dos Cânticos 1-3; Gálatas 2; Já fez seu devocional hoje? Aproveite e marque um amigo para fazer junto com você! Confira: Quando a série britânica Line of Duty (Linha do dever) terminou, milhares a assistiram para ver como terminaria a luta contra o crime organizado. Muitos se desapontaram porque o final subtendeu que o mal venceria. “Queria que os bandidos fossem levados à justiça. Nós precisávamos de uma ‘lição de moral' no final”, disse um fã. O sociólogo Peter Berger observou certa vez que somos famintos por esperança e justiça: esperamos que o mal seja um dia superado e seus causadores respondam por seus crimes. Um mundo onde vencem os bandidos vai contra a maneira que o mundo deve funcionar. Sem perceberem, os fãs decepcionados expressavam o profundo desejo da humanidade de que o mundo fosse novamente corrigido. Na oração do Senhor, Jesus é realista sobre o mal que existe não apenas entre nós, exigindo perdão (Mateus 6:12), mas também em grande escala, exigindo libertação (v.13). Esse realismo, no entanto, é acompanhado da esperança. No Céu não existe o mal e esse reino celestial está vindo à Terra (v.10). A justiça de Deus será completa, a “lição de moral” virá e banirá o mal para sempre (Apocalipse 21:4). Portanto, quando os maus da vida real vencem e a decepção se instala, lembremo-nos de que até que a vontade de Deus se cumpra na “terra como no céu”, sempre haverá esperança, porque a história não terminou. Por: Sheridan Voysey

Come let us reason together, says the Lord—Isaiah 1:18 I. The Imperative to Do Apologetics A. Defend Christianity as objective true, compellingly rational, and existentially pertinent to all of life (1 Peter 3:15) B. Consider apologetic method, but don't fixate on it. Know your epistemology! C. Fideism: defense by not engaging in the battle 1. Cannot dispense with logic and keep your head 2. Scripture challenges us to engage apologetically (chapter 2) 3. History is replete with good apologists: Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, etc. D. Take it to the streets: apologetics without works is dead (James 2) II. The Laws of Logic A. God and logic (John 1:1-2) B. Noncontradiction: A cannot be non-A 1. To deny it, is to affirm it: “The law is false.” 2. Light-particle duality (physics) does not break it 3. Existential conflict is not a violation of the law C. Excluded middle: Either A or non-A 1. Jesus is Lord or not 2. Buddha was enlightened or not 3. Things being “gray” does not refute excluded middle D. Bivalence: statements are true or false; not neither, not bothWhat if sentences have many meanings? That is a matter of interpretation (epistemology), not truth or falsity E. Identity: A=A 1. Used to refute physicalism about mind and brain (more in chapter 17) 2. “I'm not myself today” does not break it F. Forms of argument: induction, deduction, abduction (best explanation); logical fallacies (ad hominem, circular reasoning, false dichotomy, etc.) III. Worldview Hypothesis Evaluation A. Christianity as a hypothesis or worldview B. Build a cumulative case using many lines of argument 1. Biblical basis for apologetics2. Objective truth is real and knowable3. Explain the Christian worldview4. Theistic arguments: cosmological, design, moral, ontological, religious experience5. Reliability of the Bible6. Identity of Jesus Christ: claims, credentials, achievements C. Present the case carefully, point by point 1. Know the Christian worldview (chapter 4) 2. Know what the worldview rivals are: live hypotheses 3. Know the plausibility structure of your culture (Peter Berger, A Rumor of Angels) 4. Present Christian worldview as intellectually superior to other by testing it according to rational, objective criteria 5. Do not make the criteria internal to Christianity; if so, no apologetics is possible, because you can have no common ground. D. Constructive or positive apologetics: Arguments in support of Christian theism E. Two kinds of negative apologetics 1. Rebut, defeat attacks on Christianity 2. Show the rational weaknesses in other worldviews IV. Criteria for Worldview Evaluation: Play Fair, Play Smart A. This is epistemology: our philosophy of knowledge 1. Truth: correspondence view 2. Knowledge: justified true belief (internalism) B. Criteria are applied in other areas of life and are intuitively credible C. The eight criteria for worldview assessment (pages 53-60) 1. Should explain things adequately without excessive opacity 2. Internal logical consistency 3. Coherence: the web of beliefs is consistent4. Factual adequacy: history, science, human experience 5. Existential viability (not pragmatic theory of truth; see chapter 6) 6. Intellectual, cultural fecundity (fruitfulness) 7. No radical ad hoc adjustment of the worldview 8. Simpler explanations are preferred to complex ones, all things being equal V. The Limits of Apologetics A. Bible itself can be difficult to explain and defend; be patient; study well Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction—2 Peter 3:15-16 B. Our weaknesses as sinners: we may hold the truth poorly Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers—1 Timothy 4:16. C. God's providence may convert people with or without the kind of apologetics we can offer Resources 1. Kenneth Boa, Robert Bowman, Faith Has it's Reasons, 2nd ed. (InterVarsity Press, 2006).2. Steven Cowan, ed., Five Views of Apologetics (Zondervan, 2000).3. Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2011). Also translated into Korean, 2015 by Christian Literature Center, Seoul, Korea.4. Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenge of Postmodernism (InterVarsity Press, 2000).5. Os Guinness, Fool's Talk: Recovering the Christian Art of Persuasion (InterVarsity Press, 2015).6. Gordon Lewis, Testing Christianity's Truth Claims (orig. pub., 1976; University Press of America).7. Brian Morely, Mapping Apologetics (InterVarsity Press, 2015).   Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

On June 24th, 1947, a private pilot and fire suppression equipment manufacturer named Kenneth Arnold was flying south of Mount Rainier, bound for Yakima, Washington. At about 3 PM he saw a flash of light in the air to the north of the mountain, and subsequently he saw a long chain of flying objects passing in front of the mountain. He described them as having convex shapes, and this was soon changed to the term “flying saucer". Arnold's was in fact not the first UFO sighting following the Second World War; nor was it even part of the first wave of sightings of strange things in the sky. Yet something unprecedented did happen after 1947, not only in the United States, but around the world–not necessarily involving aliens, but very much involving humans. As Greg Egighian observes in his new book After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon, UFO sightings “have made people wonder, fret, question, probe, and argue. In that regard, they have revealed more about human beings than about alien worlds. And that is a story worth investigating.” Greg Eghigian is a Professor of History and Bioethics at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth Century Germany and the editor of The Routledge History of Madness and Mental Health, among other works. For Further Investigation Greg Egighian suggests the following books for your UFO history reading list: Matthew Bowman, The Abduction of Betty and Barney Hill David Clarke, How UFOs Conquered the World: The History of a Modern Myth D.W. Pasulka, American Cosmic Sarah Scoles, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers Garrett M. Graff, UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here – and Out There Brenda Denzler, The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs From the HT archives, if you haven't heard them, then give a listen to somewhat related episodes: Iwan Rhys Morus on "How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon," and Tom Misa on the "History of Technology, from Leonardo to the Internet" D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous? Peter Berger on Secularism and Relativism; and a full-length video of the same lecture

In this continued introduction to World Religions and Cultures a review of the work of Rene Girard as it folds into Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger helps define the interactive roles of culture and religion as modes of orientation in identity, and as completed in Christ and the Church.  Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

Jim, David, Tim, Brian and Paul discuss the possible relationships between Christ and culture, particularly in a secular age, and discuss the opposed positions of Mircea Eliade and Peter Berger and the resolution posed by David Bentley Hart and Sergius Bulgakov. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.  

In this new series on world cultures and religions, Tim, Jon, Brian, David, Simon, and Paul discuss the impact of the secular on religion, creating a distinct category "religion" separate from culture in which faith and practice become visibly distinct. The obscuring role of religion in Peter Berger and Rene Girard are examples. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

In hour two, Hoch trolls Crowder for taking has family on skiing trips to Minnesota every year. It leads to a conversation about eating frozen foods - Solana reveals his guilty pleasure is frozen corn dogs leaving Hoch and Crowder disgusted. Then, Hoch and Crowder are joined by the Chairman of the Fight For Air Climb, Peter Berger, for information about tomorrow's 20th annual Fight For Air Climb event happening at loanDepot Park. 

What exactly is spirituality? How does it relate to religion? Are both misunderstood? And what stands beyond and behind the idea that it has all simply been commodified to be about wellness, big business and celebrity? Andrew Singleton joins Uncommon Sense to reflect on this and more, including his experience researching young people's spiritual practices in Australia, and time spent in Papua New Guinea.Andrew describes how what has been called the “spiritual turn” emerged through the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and led to today's “spiritual marketplace”. We ask whether the young people of today's Generation Z are more open-minded than their elders – and whether, across the Global North and Global South, people are meeting a need for betterment in the “here and now” through spirituality, but also religion.Plus: what did Marx really mean when he described religion as the “opium of the people” – and how has that quote taken on a (rather cynical) life of its own? Also, from reactions to the bestselling Eat, Pray, Love to the historical condemnation of female fortune tellers, why do our definitions and dismissals of spirituality seem to be so deeply gendered?Guest: Andrew SingletonHosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu TruongExecutive Producer: Alice BlochSound Engineer: David CracklesMusic: Joe GardnerArtwork: Erin AnikerFind more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.Episode ResourcesFrom The Sociological ReviewThe spiritual turn and the disenchantment of the world: Max Weber, Peter Berger and the religion–science conflict – Galen Watts, Dick HoutmanThe “Belief” issue of The Sociological Review Magazine (May 2022)Capitalising on faith? An intergenerational study of social and religious capital among Baby Boomers and Millennials in Britain – Stuart Fox, et al.By Andrew SingletonFreedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity (co-authored with M.L. Rasmussen, A. Halafoff, G. Bouma)Religion, Culture and Society: A Global ApproachThe Spirit of Generation Y: Young People's Spirituality in a Changing Australia (co-authored with M. Mason, R. Webber)Further reading and listening“Selling Yoga” and “Peace Love Yoga” – Andrea Jain“Selling Spirituality” – Jeremy Carrette, Richard King“Selling (Con)spirituality and COVID-19 in Australia” – Anna Halafoff, et al.“Women's Work: The Professionalisation and Policing of Fortune-Telling in Australia” – Alana Piper“Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World” – Alexandra Roginski“The Dream” podcast – Jane MarieRead more on the life and work of Gary Bauma, as well as about Karl Marx and Michel Foucault.

Peter Berger

Josh Chatraw joins the podcast to discuss two recent books: The Augustine Way and Surprised by Doubt. Josh talks about how questions from church members led him towards apologetics as a pastor and explains why the pastor theologian Augustine of Hippo provides a helpful model for reframing and pursuing the apologetic task today. Listen now to hear a discussion about such questions as:  How does narrative and story help frame apologetics? Why is a robust theological anthropology important for the apologetic task? What do Charles Taylor, Peter Berger, Augustine, and Herman Bavinck have in common? How can an Augustinian apologetic help people navigate deconstruction?

Jonathan, Matt, Brian, Brent, and Paul discuss Ephesians 4-5 and the singular lie exposed by Christ creating entry into love. The function of a hostile lie in the reification of culture and religion, as in the work of Peter Berger and Rene Girard, and the necessity of this lies exposure so as to be "rooted and grounded in love" is discussed. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work.

Show notes and Transcript For years Dr Steve Turley has been bringing an optimistic and upbeat analysis of current events.  His Turley Talks are some of the most popular social commentaries in the Conservative sphere.   He joins Hearts of Oak to ask if we are seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization and a new Conservative age?  We look at the political shockwaves happening across Europe with the rise of populist conservative political parties in many countries.  And we end off looking at the rise of the parallel economy as a bulwark against the increasing woke economic wave that is sweeping through many large corporations. Steve Turley (PhD, Durham University) is an internationally recognized scholar, speaker, and author who is widely considered one of the most exciting voices in today's growing patriot movement. Dr. Steve's popular YouTube channel has over 1 million subscribers and daily showcases his expertise in the rise of nationalism, populism, and traditionalism throughout the world. His videos, podcasts and writings on civilization, society, culture, education, and the arts are widely renowned. Connect with Dr Steve and join the movement of Courageous Patriots... WEBSITE:         https://turleytalks.com/ TWITTER:         https://twitter.com/DrTurleyTalks YOUTUBE:        https://www.youtube.com/@DrSteveTurleyTV PODCASTS:      https://podcasts.apple.com/am/podcast/turley-talks/id1520478046 Interview recorded 17.7.23 Audio Podcast version available on Podbean and all major podcast directories...  ⁣https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ Transcript available on our Substack... https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more...  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ Please subscribe, like and share! Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Dr Steve Turley. You'll have seen his Turley Talks, and I've loved watching these over the last few years, bringing an optimistic and hopeful message, looking at world events, looking at the political side, and often quite at odds with a more dour, conservative message, which we sometimes see in the media. But we look at, are we seeing the revitalization of Christian civilization? A new conservative age is rising. And we look at the political winds, the political conservative winds blowing across Europe and how they're changing also in the US. Why is that? We look at a search for spiritual meaning in the midst of the moral vacuum decay collapse of society when there is no right and wrong. People are searching for meaning and often people are looking to faith and to Christianity for that. And then we finish off on parallel economies. This is a pushback on the woke corporation, the woke agenda, the progressive wave that is coming through commerce and we are seeing a new set of companies that don't want to force that upon our throats and want to cater for a more traditional conservative market.  Dr Steve Turley, it is wonderful to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time. (Dr Steve Turley) It's my honour, Peter. Thank you so much. It's wonderful to be here with you. Oh, thank you. And you can find @DrTurleyTalks on Twitter, @SteveTurleyTV, obviously on YouTube. All the links are in the description, but turleytalks.com and the many podcasts at Turley Talks, but all the links are there in the description. And Dr. Steve Turley is internationally recognized, best-selling author. I didn't actually realize one of the books, touching on C.S. Lewis. Anyone who writes anything on C.S. Lewis is wonderful to have on. So from my home town back in Belfast.  Yeah, of course. Yeah, that's right. But you're a scholar, speaker, obviously, Turley Talks. I think you've been putting stuff up since, what, 2016, 2017, something like that?  That's right. Yeah, we started on November 1st, 2016, just seven days leading up to November 8th, which was what I like to call Brexit Part Two, which was the election of Donald Trump. And so I started there. I made one video per day analysing the current political situation. I made the argument, the extended argument, that Trump was going to win against all odds, as it were. And of course, I spent the next few weeks gloating and we just kept going. Yeah, give us a little bit of your background. Probably 80%, well, 75% of our viewers are UK, 15% US, and then the rest all over. So, Dr. Steve, could you just take a moment and introduce yourself to our UK audience who may not be as familiar with you as others? Yeah, well, I'm Dr. Steve Turley. Technically, I'm an internationally recognized scholar, speaker and author, that's part of the elevator pitch. But I've spent most of my life either in the world of music, my first degree was in classical guitar, or in theology. My other degrees are in theological studies, the last one being a PhD from Durham University in the UK. Which we were just talking about. And as a result, I was in academia for a number of years, both at the university level as well as classical schools. Classical schools are going through a bit of a renaissance here in the States and as well as in Europe where we're going back to the great books tradition, Latin, Greek, the importance of theology as the queen of the sciences and so on. So I spent about 20 years, 18 years in that world and then a friend of mine suggested I start doing some YouTube videos to analyse the political and cultural scene going on back in 2016. It was obviously very exciting. Brexit had just passed in June, which I mean, I didn't think it stood a chance and I was, of course, hoping for it, but when I saw it actually happening, that's when I I realized a lot of the scholarship that I had encountered at Durham University, which we can develop a bit, called post-secular studies. That's when I started to see some of the ramifications of those studies actually in real time. So my friend suggested I do something akin to that kind of analysis for people with the upcoming Trump-Clinton election, which I did. And the channel turned out to be a hit, as it were, over time. And so I ended up leaving academia and going into broadcasting full-time. And I've since written 20 books on various subjects, and we now have over a million subscribers to the YouTube channel. And really in the end, my daily analysis is one of looking at current events in light of, of what I would call very real conservative trends. And so my analysis tends to be very optimistic for the conservative, which is fair, which cuts against the grain and rightly so, fully noted. We've lived for the last 300 years in what's called the modern world and the modern world's inherently leftist, liberal, anti-traditionalists, you know, it's... Keep science and religion worlds apart, they have nothing to do with each other, and on and on and on. So rightly so, we've been rightly frustrated, but that modern age is coming to an end and a new world is rising. And so what I try to do is provide hope for courageous patriots with daily optimistic broadcasting of news and events. Can I start with your tagline on your YouTube, it's the secular world is at its brink and a new conservative age is rising. Tell us about, because bad news sells better than good news, which you mentioned in the conservative circles. Tell us why you use that, I guess that tagline, that message. Yeah. Well, I, you know, I have you guys over on the other side of the pond to blame for that, I would say a little bit of it when I was doing my doctoral studies at Durham University. It was while I was there that I came across a field of study that's broadly known as post-secular studies, and it's a huge field of study. I mean, it deals with, philosophy and law and fashion and media and politics, you name it, and involves all kinds of scholars like Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist, he's really the one who kind of coined the phrase decades ago, Peter Berger's another one, Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, they're all united in their assessment that what's known as the secularization thesis is for all practical purposes dead in the social sciences. So secularization thesis is this notion, it was very popular in the early 20th century. It's this notion that the more educated and technological society becomes, the less religious it will be. So sociologists like Max Weber, Emil Durkheim, they all saw secularity and progressivism and so forth, as just basically baked into the cake of this progressive, evolutionary movement of history. And what these post-secular scholars were arguing is that thesis, for all practical purposes, is dead. And they made the argument that very few contemporary sociologists will take the secularization thesis seriously today. And that's because, as it turns out, religion is more prevalent in our world today. It's actually, well, I should say it's just as prevalent in our world today as it's always been. And in fact as Rodney Stark at Baylor University would put it, we're actually going through the single greatest religious renewal the world has ever seen. But the key here is that what all of these different scholars are noticing in their own way, in their own bent, and their own degree of, you know, strength or certitude, is that this return of religion that's going on all over the world, because of this extraordinary religious renewal, the world's political order is changing. So these aren't just personal private sentiments that people are just having new religious experiences of. No, this is changing the balance of power. This is something that's enacting a kind of paradigm shift we haven't seen probably in 300 years. In other words, we're increasingly shifting away from the world order that began in Europe with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that was founded on the fundamental tenets of scientific rationalism as a one-size-fits-all vision of reality for everyone, that became universalized through colonization and industrialization and globalization and westernization. And what we're seeing here now is more and more populations rejecting that modern world, and embracing what's commonly called a more post-modern or post-secular world. That's ultimately working itself out with populations going back, going back to nation, culture, custom, tradition, most particularly religious traditions, to quite literally, ironically, pre-modern beliefs and practices, while at the same time maintaining modern technology. So this is something akin to what Guillaume Fay argued, or what he called archaeo-futurism. Some have called it techno-primitivism, but it's the notion that the antithesis between science and religion and church and state, you know, technology and tradition, that's at the heart of the modern age, that antithesis has collapsed. And now the two are joining forces, like we're seeing with the rise of neo-Orthodox Russia or neo-Confucian China, Shinto Japan, Hindu nationalist India with the BJP party there, the neo-Ottoman vision of Erdogan in Turkey. Of course, we saw it in 1979 with the rise of theocratic Iran. Now we've got theocratic Afghanistan, now we've got neo-traditionalism absolutely on fire all throughout the African continent and on and on and on and on. And I think it's taken Western powers by surprise. I mean, it doesn't matter if you're dealing with the Dolts in D.C. or the bullies in Brussels or the demons of Davos, my comic book names for them. But Western elites just don't really know what to do with this new, far more traditionalist, conservative world. Or that's how I use the term conservatives, ultimately is a traditionalist. That's what, that's what unites a Texas conservative with a with a Hindu conservative in, you know, in India. Because they don't know what to do with this world order because it doesn't respond to the political and economic manipulative pressures that the West has learned to rely on over the last several decades and sort of closed the loop here to make things even worse for them. The same dynamics are manifesting themselves in the West. But obviously from a different vantage point, because we were really the centre, the epicentre of this industrialism, of this globalism, of this enlightenment, sort of ideology that has morphed into a very bizarre wokeness. But we're seeing comparable nationalist, populist, traditionalist trends on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Brexit and Trump earthquakes happening literally within days of each other, what, 90 days or so, just a few months of each other, more than that. But Trump actually campaign back in 2016. There was a time in the mid-summer when he said, call me Mr. Brexit. I mean, he was a huge supporter of Brexit, a huge supporter of dismantling the liberal world order and the globalist institutions that make up that order. So while there's all kinds of hiccups and and there's all kinds of oppressions and all kinds of roadblocks and frustrations and setbacks. There's really nothing the Dolts in DC or the Bullies in Brussels can do to stop this tectonic shift that's happening underneath their feet. No political paralysis in the palace of Westminster, can stop it because again it's a foundational paradigm shift from secular to post-secular, from modern to post-modern, and so secular modernist sentiments and structures are indeed withering away.  You talk about kind of religion, spirituality, and certainly it's strange because we have this search for meaning in an age of chaos where there is no order, no right and wrong, no truth, and people are looking at spirituality. Certainly I have seen it here in the UK, people once again opening their Bibles, trying to understand what it is all about. So you have that rise of inquisitiveness, of curiosity, and at the same time, certainly from a Christian point of view, you've got a very weak church that seems to have bought into that lie, the progressive lie. What are your thoughts on that, and how does that work out in the U.S.? Oh yeah, in terms of the mainline churches, we're seeing very much the same thing. I mean, what happened, of course, is in the modern experiment, the church got privatized. I mean, even in the UK in many respects, even though you have a national church there. And we get to see it and we're actually enamoured by it whenever there's a coronation or a royal wedding or a funeral, a monarchical funeral, whatever.  You can have the Church of England any day, Steve. Please take it.  I went to school with some of the clergy in Durham and I was shocked by some of the interaction I had with them. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. And again, we're facing it here to the extent that the Episcopal Church manifests our wing of the Anglican Church or the United Methodist Church. Mainline denominations have basically gone the way of modernity, and it's because they got privatized. And we have to just remember that, you know, if you just compare the way, like we were just talking about the beauties of Durham, medieval cities, where the church was in the urban planning of the medieval city, of course, it was right at the very centre. I mean, you've got a map of the Christian image, a Christian cosmos in every medieval city here in the states the New England commonwealth drew from similar frames of reference, the church steeple, the highest building in the commonwealth there with it with a town green and Edenic green in its front and like you look at modern urban planning today, where's the church? if it's even there it's been it's been pushed into the place of consumerism you know, it's right next to pizzerias and dry cleaners and it's and what's happened as a result is the truth has been privatized because public life and private life operate by very different dynamics. Public deals with the obligatory, whereas private is more optional, right? Public is objective, private is subjective, public applies to all, private applies to only some. So when you privatize the church, what you do is you basically wither, you hollow out its truth and its moral claims because truth is public, it's not private. Truth is objective, it's not subjective. Truth applies to all by definition, not to only some. And so when you're pushed into the social equivalent of a Weight Watchers program or the YMCA or like a pizzeria or whatever. If you're pushed into that equivalent, you can know more proclaimed truth than they can. That's what got hollowed out of the gospel. So the gospel no longer weighs on us, like it would have, say, just in the 18th century. So the clergy, I mean, they're more interested in all these gimmicks and church marketing programs and the like. I'm broad brushing, but you know where I'm coming from. In the states, we do, since church and state are so separated here, in one sense, right, the church can be actually pretty vibrant here at local levels. And so many leftists think we live in a default theocracy in all the red states, or even more specifically, sort of the red counties where the church exercises, very conservative church exercises, so much inordinate influence and the like, but there are very, very heavy barriers placed on that, where it's not allowed to rise to more national levels. They do everything they can to quell that. But it does seem to be, for all kinds of reasons, particularly demographic reasons, it does seem to be rising in a way that they just can't clamp down on anymore. And Christian faith still seems to be something that's seemed positive, certainly in, generally in politics. I mean, when you look at the front bench of, in parliament, of any MP, the last thing they would ever want to say is they'd go to a church or they may be a Christian. That's just not on the radar. In the US, it still seems that that is part of, kind of, the identity, and even Joe Biden claims he's a Christian, and I'll let him take that up with God personally, but how does that, because you still seem to have that as a central tenant, as an anchor, certainly in the political sphere. Yeah, right. Exactly. It's still very, very strong here. It's right. I mean, I guess we would be more akin to the Irish side of the UK, where religion is just a stronger part in the United States. Yeah, it's no coincidence that secularization thesis was actually formulated in Europe because that's what they were seeing. They were seeing these radical secularizing forces as liberalism, and the liberal project began to take over in Europe. And yeah, it just, it took over here in the States to a certain extent, particularly among our elite, but that never really made it into the heartland. We, for whatever reason, we just were able to keep, I guess maybe it's just the frontier sort of culture that we have here, but in our rural and in ex-urban areas, Christianity's just been able to flourish. I think largely also because of the demographic revolution that's happening today, where liberalism more or less destroyed the family, they stopped having kids. And so with all these alternative lifestyles or just with very secularized conceptions of the family, woke liberals, while busying themselves trying to take over every cultural institution in the nation and being very successful in doing so. They forgot to procreate. So for whatever reason they omitted replacing themselves from the cultural takeover plan. So we have a number of studies, Ed Dutton actually has an excellent studies, he's in the UK, Durham fellow as well, on the extraordinary fertility differences between atheists and religionists and liberals and conservatives. And in all kinds of demographic studies all over the world, but particularly in North America and Europe, we're seeing a very clear and direct relationship between, for lack of better term, you know, how right-wing you are, particularly how religiously conservative you are, and how many children you have. And the demographic discrepancy is extraordinary, and that seems with the United States and with its concentrated population, that's having some pretty profound effects. So yeah, it'd be very hard to win an election here nationally and be hostile, overtly hostile to faith in your expressions. Like you said, I think Joe Biden's incredibly hostile to faith. Just ask any Christian baker, for example. But he will never admit to that. He'll always try to say, oh, I'm a good churchgoing, Catholic and blah, blah, blah. Obama did the same thing. Yeah. Clinton, you know, scenes of him singing in his church choir. You just, there's no way around it. You have to, you have to do this. If anything, Trump, Trump may have been probably the least overtly Christian fellow we had, but I mean, his pod, they were, it was so woven into his policies that it just, it didn't matter. No, absolutely. Can I ask you, obviously the message you bring, a hopeful message, and I've seen you on numerous, I think I saw you on Seb Gorka the other day. The only person kind of I come across with that, kind of more positive outlook possibly is Steve Bannon. But yours, I mean, do you, are you told, come on Steve, it's really, look, we've got this against, we've got that against, just come on, it's and you're living in a fairy world. How do you kind of cope with that pushback that just fit into the this is a fight and it's a dark fight and we may win in the end? How do you kind of cope against that? The choice to tune that positivity down? Yeah, yeah. They I've been accused of pushing copious copium on. Oh, no, absolutely. And again, well, the irony to it all is when I first came across post-secular scholarship, I didn't believe it. I thought it was applicable to the Middle East, Africa, particularly Sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe I noticed Russia being in the orthodox tradition. I noticed Russia was doing quite well. But outside of that, I mean, I came across this during the Obama era, right after the Obama era started in 2009. And I just, I didn't buy it. I thought the West was shot. The West was done. So I share, ironically, I have shared in that kind of pessimism. But the more I studied, the more I was confronted with the data and the more I'm seeing the political outworking's happening that data just is is playing itself out it's just getting confirmed and I think too one of the ways of thinking about the current climate we're in particularly spiritual climate analytically helpful way of seeing it it is through the prism of post secularism sort of a counter reading of it, we have to recognize how frustrated and disconcerted our secular left is. Remember, secular progressivism lived by the notion that religion was on its way out. Conservatism was on its way out. Traditionalism was on its way out. It was an evolutionary throwback that had no relevance to us today. And so you have the likes of like a Sam Harris who's repeatedly and openly expressed his utter dismay as to the stubbornness of particularly American Christianity but also Islam, not just its persistence but its actual growth and flourishing. And so to these people who've admittedly captured all the cultural levers of power, to these people, we're not supposed to be around, Peter. So a lot of the persecution that we're facing here, political, cultural, economic, the de-banking, the latest trend of de-banking that Nigel Farage has had to deal with, these persecutions are happening precisely because we're not supposed to be here. We're not supposed to persist. So I see a lot of the the obstacles and the frustrations that we face as an ironic confirmation. That the jokes on them. We're winning. We're not going away. They can clamp down as hard as they want on us. We've got all the demographic back winds behind us blowing in our direction. One of the fascinating statistics is that in just three decades, they predict there will be one liberal woman here in the United States for every so-called, for every four far-right women. And it's just because when all is said and done, right-wingers are having families and in many ways, bigger than ever, because you take in consideration child mortality rates having imploded. So we're having more kids than ever, and we have the data on whether or not those kids retain that conservatism into adulthood. And the answer is yes, because the more conservative, the more you tend to rely on parallel structures, like Bible colleges or home-schooling or what have you. And the United States and Britain are number one and number two in terms of home-schooling populations. Populations. Interestingly enough, Russia is number three, which is also fascinating. But so what we're seeing is we're seeing 70%, 80% retention rates among young people. We've studied particularly with the Amish, the Amish population. And the Amish retention rates have actually been going up over the last 30 years. Eric Kaufman, who's a Canadian expat at University of London, has done a lot of writing on this. And back in the 70s and 80s, if I recall, they had about a 70% retention level. About 30% of their kids would go through Rundspringe, this kind of, you get to flirt a little bit with the outside world. About 30% of them said, no, I like this. I'm going to stay in the outside world. And they basically become Mennonite, so they stay close to their families, but they have more freedom with modern technology and so forth. Those numbers have hit upwards of 80% or 90% retention of late. So the more woke and crazy our society gets, ironically, the more traditionals hang on to their kids. So there's just no way around it. They're disappearing. We're growing. And there's nothing they can do to stop that. And so as long as those dynamics are in place, Kauffman says by 2030, the United States culture war should tip dramatically in favour of the right permanently, or at least for the foreseeable future. We're estimated to have upwards of 300 million Mormons in our country just by the end of the century, 300 million Amish by the end of next century. So we're basically evangelicals, Mormons, Amish. I know there's a joke in there somewhere. I haven't quite figured it out yet. It can't be walking into a bar, Mormons don't drink, but three guys walked into a bar. But Europe is the same thing. Now it's slower because you don't have the density of the population and the Bible Belt per se, but you look at what Viktor Orban's doing in Hungary. Can I ask, because you've written and one of the things that I've enjoyed about, what you put out is that you cover what's happening in Europe and I wouldn't want to criticize the wonderful U.S. commentators and maybe not looking at Europe. We certainly in Europe look to the U.S. for kind of...  Terrible. No, you could criticize, they completely ignore you and it makes me upset, because at least Eastern Europe particularly they're ahead of us. You know, we're all honouring Viktor Orban but we were talking about Viktor Orban six years ago before anybody knew his name around here. So yes, no, go ahead, beat them up all you want, Peter. He's an absolute rock, but it's not, I mean, two of the, uh, two podcasts you put out recently, France's right-wing party surge and first persons riots. In other words, WEF, Dutch government collapses, and that's going to be phenomenal to watch that with the new farming party. But all across, I mean, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, Italy, uh, Austria, Germany, it's, it's happening all over and how, I guess, as an American commentator, do you view what's happening? Because I think a lot of us maybe in Europe had thought, you know, we're post-Christian in Europe and conservatism is very much out of fashion and this liberal way of this, the EU just knitting everyone together, throwing off the nation-state and suddenly you've got a push back on nearly every single country across Europe. How do you see that from the States? Absolutely, yeah. I think again, well, getting my doctorate in the UK helped, no question, to kind of broaden my horizons to what was going on in the world. But also, when I encountered the post-secular studies, a lot of it was on Europe and the trends that were happening, particularly starting in Eastern Europe, going into Central Europe, talking a lot about Hungary and Poland. We were just seeing the rise of the Law and Justice Party Poland back around that time. And I really thought, and again, you have to remember this was during our Obama era. I really saw the so-called far right. They're not far right. They're just, you know, the apostles of common sense, I think you would call it, but I was noticing that we were already seeing the 300% surge in so-called far right parties, these nationalist populist parties. And I really thought, wow, something's going to happen in Europe before we know it. And then again, this is before Brexit sentiments came in. The Cornell sociologist Mabel Berezin has written about what she calls post-security politics. And it's very interesting because she argues that the nation state historically promised to provide three things, secure borders, a stable economy, and a space for the celebration and perpetuation of a population's customs, traditions, and religion. And what Berezin argued is that, of course, over the last three, four decades, we've seen all those securities just erode as a result of globalization, so border security eroding as a result of mass unfettered immigration, economic security eroding through what's called a global division of labour, where manufacturing and industrial factory jobs are shipped out to third world nations, while capital and finance are relocated in urban centres, leaving rural populations highly disenfranchised. So that's where you got the Yellow Vest uprising in France, where there were no jobs, where rural folk were living. They had to commute to the big cities to work. But they couldn't work there because the gentrification of those cities through finance had jacked up the real estate prices. So there was no work where they lived, and they couldn't live where there was work. And then they're commuting an hour and a half each way. And then Macron slaps a fuel tax on them to pay for some green initiative. And that just blew up into the Yellow Vest uprising. So we saw that kind of post-security politics there. And then the cultural security has eroded through progressive political correctness, redefining our traditions as racist and bigoted and all kinds of phobic. At the same time, we're seeing this mass influx of migrants coming in with a different culture, different language and so forth. So it goes right back to the border security. So it's a closed loop, as it were, a self-enforcing loop. And so post-security politics was manifesting itself very clearly in the rise of bootleg parties. That's a neat phrase. again, I think goes back to Eric Kaufman, where the centre-right, centre-left were in their political paralysis. They refused to deal with any of those issues, any border security, any economic security, any cultural security. And so you ended up seeing the rise of these so-called, we call them third parties here in the parliamentary system, and they started to win. Nigel being one of the most extraordinary examples of that. I mean, back in 2019, one in three Brits voted for a party for the European Parliament elections before Brexit was finally instituted. And even then, you know, we know we got the issues, but they voted for the Brexit party and it was only what, six weeks old, five or six weeks old. The Tories collapsed. It was absolutely astonishing and the Tories only had their best election ever months later with Nigel basically bowing out and giving his blessing that if you want Brexit, put Boris back in. So you're seeing these, if you've got border security, economic, I'm sorry, yeah, border security, economic security, and cultural security as the new main issues of European populations, then you inevitably see nationalism, populism, and traditionalism emerging as the political forces that are changing politics in the continent. Now again, bullies in Brussels are doing everything they can to stop it. You'll hear them talk that way, as you well know, where you just hear them say, well, we have instruments that we can use to force compliance and things like that. But increasingly, it's just not working. Finland, you mentioned, the Sweden Democrats, the rise of the AFD in Germany. They're doing everything they can to try to prevent the AFD from running in their next national election because it looks like right at this point they're going to come in second only to, formally, Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. So the Vox party in Spain, keep an eye on that next week. They have their, socialist government collapsed and they're going to probably boot out Sanchez and they're going to probably get into a coalition government with the Podemos party, the centre-right party, so you have something very much like what we're having in Finland, in Sweden, in Greece where the left just collapsed, and on and on and on. I think France is next. I think National Rally is poised to win a very impressive national election. And then if they begin to coalition with the centre-right Republicans and a couple of the others, Eric Zemmour's party and so forth. Now suddenly France is going to be a, the France that was supposed to be the globalist space par excellence for Europe's new emperor, Emmanuel Macron, now they're going to have a government more on par with Viktor Orban. It's incredible. It is and we could have the AFD arrive second in Germany, could have a freedom party first in Austria next year and Le Pen leading France. I mean that would just be the most beautiful scenario...  And it's happening, that's the thing, what we try to do, every day on my channel and what you're doing is we're tapping into the trends that are moving, in this direction. So a lot of people are late to the party. A lot of people are like, what's going on in Europe? This is amazing stuff. Well, it's Nigel Farage first came on the scene in the 1990s. This is stuff that's been happening. I mean, remember the European union sanctioned Austria when the when the freedom party first got a certain amount of the vote. And if I recall, that was back in the 1990s as well, well before the 2008 global financial crisis. These are seeds that have been germinating for a while, and they've already been sown, and now we're just going to witness how big the harvest is. Another part of the jigsaw, and we'll finish up on this area, but is the economic side. And one of your phrases from your website is, now is the time to build a parallel economy, to live out our God-given freedoms and leave a legacy of faith, family and freedom for our children and grandchildren. And that idea of a parallel economy intrigues me, especially when you see corporations bound to wokeness and being severely damaged because of it, happily. Tell us more about that parallel economy because we've talked about kind of the spiritual and the political side but, you also need to have a juggernaut, an economic juggernaut, taking that on and people need an alternative and this is what a lot of the conversation has been about a parallel economy. Absolutely, and again it's a term or it's a concept that's also European as well. I mean just in terms of the way it was formalized and written about, I'm thinking in particular of Václav Havel, Václav Benda, and the Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 80s. They wrote a lot about what they called a parallel polis, and they actually pointed to churches and the concept of the churches in Jerusalem as this notion of being able to create an alternative society where citizens can live out truth in the midst of a society dominated by lies, like in the Soviet period, and the more we live out truth, the more we reveal those lies to be what they actually are, fabrications and the like. So, obviously, Václav Havel was a brilliant fellow, ended up becoming president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. And the Berlin Wall fell within just a decade or so of those writings. So we're taking a lot of inspiration from that as we live in a kind of, well, what scholars actually call a refeudalization. I've heard the term refeudalization for the United States, and I've heard the term neo-medievalism when applied to Europe because of the EU functioning very similarly to, say, the Holy Roman Emperor or something, or the Roman Catholic Church, working in that way, having sort of ultimate control over districts and emerging sovereign nations and the like. But refeudalization refers, it's a very helpful model to see what's going on today, because it refers to ways in which the structure of society is increasingly reflecting the, this kind of caste system. So for example, today, like say in the medieval period, you have an astonishing concentration of wealth and power in the hands of very, very few. So five years ago, 400 billionaires owned half the world's assets. Today, that number's dropped to a hundred. Now, thank God one of them is on our side. Elon Musk is, and that, and he's just, he's been one of the biggest boosts to this parallel economy that's trying to provide a different kind of space from this neo-feudalism or refeudalization. But it's not just the billionaires and the bureaucrats that are that are teaming up. There's also a new kind of radicalized fundamentalism involving all things woke, the environment, gender and race. And again, that's where bureaucrats and billionaires, you can really see them teaming up where you have corporations now enforcing ESG and DEI. And this is where the demons and Davos come in. They're enforcing stuff that none of us would ever vote for, right, from our politicians, but because bureaucrats and billionaires are hooking up here with this bizarre kind of ideological fundamentalism. Where there's no room for dissent whatsoever, dissenters are heretics, but instead of a clerical class, now it's a clerisy class, a class of pseudo-intellectuals from the universities, the professional class, the credential class that are imposing an ideological inquisition on the whole of the population. But again, the good news is what we're seeing is something akin to a Protestant revolt that we saw coming out of that feudalized period, and the Protestant revolt in many ways was a populist revolt where the people had the right to the scriptures and so on and so forth and to pray and to have a direct relationship to God, And so what we're seeing, I think, is we're seeing a new kind of Protestant revolt in the form of a parallel economy where more and more people are with money and investment opportunities and seeing extraordinary business opportunities are starting to pump lots and lots of money into an economy that is the only requirement of being a part of it is you must disown all things woke. Anything woke is not allowed. Anything else, you're come on in. You're going to love it. So we're seeing the Sound of Freedom movie. It's number one at the box office. It's about to hit a hundred million dollars in revenue. This is all as the Disney's new Indiana Jones has just bombed and as a matter of fact, Disney. I just came across a stat the other day, Disney has lost nearly 1 billion dollars in its last eight releases. Nobody's going to see it anymore, So they're going to alternative movies. Um, they're going to alternative stores. They're boycotting, well, I would say they're going to alternative beer, but I don't think bud light is beer quite frankly. I'm partial to British beer myself, but you see Bud Light's sales on the tank, Target, you know, they had their pride section for children in their clothing store. Target is a department store here in the States. They're falling apart because of a boy, actually Boycott Target was a song and it hit number one on iTunes. It's just amazing stuff going on. And it's happening at the same time, even within the Democratic Party. There are constituencies like Muslims who are pushing back against the LGBT agenda. So in Hamtramck, Michigan, which is a Detroit district, it votes 70% Democrat, but they have the first all Muslim city council there. They were the first city council to vote unanimously to officially ban the rainbow LGBT pride flag from flying on any and all city public property. And these were all Democrats. And Democrats and the woke just don't know what to do with this, because they're seeing all of their cultural products basically going bankrupt. And now they're even seeing what was up until now very loyal voting constituents rebelling against them as well. It does really look like it's starting to implode. And this parallel economy may indeed be the mainstream economy within the next five to 10 years. Dr. Steve Turley, I appreciate you coming on and sharing that optimism and upbeat message, which I think is often missing in commentary. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Peter. It's been my honour.

Dr. Zurlo is the Co-Director of the at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (South Hamilton, MA) as well as Visiting Research Fellow at Boston University's Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, founded by sociologist Peter Berger. She's a is a scholar of the history of mission and of world Christianity. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with Dr. Zurlo about the nature of the Church Universal; the differences, the commonalities, things that are hindrances, and things to celebrate. Find more about Dr. Zurlo: ginazurlo.com globalchristianity.org https://www.facebook.com/centerforglobalchristianity Books: World Christian Encyclopedia, Global Christianity: A Guide to the World's Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, Portraits of Global Christianity, and Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement facebookcom.thehonesttheologypodcast

Hank Hanegraaff, the host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast and the Hank Unplugged podcast, is joined by Nathan Jacobs and Metropolitan K.P. Yohannan for the first in a series of wide-ranging roundtable discussions. A professor, artist, author, philosopher, and filmmaker—Nathan Jacobs is Scholar in Residence of Philosophy and Religion in the Religion in the Arts in Contemporary Culture Program based in Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Metropolitan K.P. Yohannan is the author of dozens of books and the founder/president of GFA World—formerly Gospel for Asia—one of the largest outreach organizations in the world that focuses primarily on the 10-40 window in India and Asia. Metropolitan Yohannan is also the head of Believers Eastern Church. In this episode, they discuss such topics as: losing Western Civilization, secular Christians, the crisis of belief found in cognitive minorities, what Christians can learn from Mormons, the importance of missions and more. For further information see Hank's most recent book Truth Matters, Life Matters More.Topics discussed include: Are we losing Western Civilization? (:30); have Christians become too secular? on Peter Berger and the crisis of belief when people find themselves in a cognitive minority (3:15); revitalizing the Christian faith through missions (11:15); the Book of Acts as a blueprint for Pentecost today (29:40); what we can learn from the Parable of the rich man and Lazarus (36:30); what can Christians learn from Mormons? (41:10); how should Christians live their lives? Devoting your life to the Lord looks different for everyone (46:15); we will never know the extent to which the Lord is using our lives for His glory this side of eternity (52:40). Listen to Hank's podcast and follow Hank off the grid where he is joined by some of the brightest minds discussing topics you care about. Get equipped to be a cultural change agent.Archived episodes are on our Website and available at the additional channels listed below.You can help spread the word about Hank Unplugged by giving us a rating and review from the other channels we are listed on.

You are in for a super special treat today as Stephanie welcomes back her all-time favorite guest and friend, Os Guinness, to discuss his latest book, which you do not want to miss, and also to celebrate 50 years since the publication of his first book. The book they are discussing today is going to go down in history as one of the most influential books for our generation, Stephanie is absolutely sure of it. It is simple yet so powerful. You will read it quickly, yet you will find yourself pondering it for months. You will want to gift it to every spiritual seeker you know, as well as every serious believer, because it has something to tell each one of us about the meaning of life. Stephanie read right through it the first time and could not put it down. Then she went back and reread it slowly, savoring its stories and discovering deeper meaning. She is currently enjoying her third read through, and is even more inspired than before. Oh, please make sure to enjoy this absolute treat. Through the course of our conversation, Os gives us his take on what has been happening in Asbury, and what we need from there. Os calls us to pray for a true spiritual awakening and challenges our culture's understanding of “legacy” and they discuss the meaning of a truly successful life. Os even reveals what he thinks is his favorite book among his many! You can watch the whole conversation on video at youtube.com/gospelspice - make sure to subscribe so you never miss another exciting Gospel Spice episode! SUPER SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT! WE WOULD LOVE TO FEATURE YOU ON GOSPEL SPICE! For our 200th episode, Stephanie will compile a handful of stories from our beloved listeners. How has the Lord met you recently, and has Gospel Spice played a role? Email us at contact@gospelspice.com today to apply! Deadline is March 25, 2023. Thank you! EXCLUSIVE OFFER FOR ALL GOSPEL SPICE LISTENERS! Go to IVPRESS.COM and enter the coupon code SPICE to receive 30% off all of Os' books until March 24, 2023! WIN ALL OF OS GUINNESS' BOOKS WITH IVPRESS THROUGH GOSPELSPICE at gospelspice.com/giveaway  Gospel Spice and IVPress are celebrating 50 years of Os' books by giving away an entire LIBRARY of all of Os Guinness' books published by IVPress, and a beautiful organic canvas Gospel Spice tote to carry them all! The tote features the Gospel Spice motto that Stephanie and Os discuss in the interview: “God's glory, our delight.” Go to gospelspice.com/giveaway to enter for a chance to win the bundle. Giveaway is open until March 24, 2023. Winner will be picked among all the valid entries. Let us tell you a bit more…  This year, 2023, marks fifty years since Os Guinness published his first book back in 1973, “The Dust of Death.” It started what has become a prolific writing career for the well-known social critic. Today in our time with Os, we hope to introduce (or reintroduce) you to Os Guinness, and his profound contributions to discussions about freedom, culture, faith, and the quest for meaning and purpose. Stephanie and Os start by discussing Os' latest book, a truly brilliant, magnificent little gem for all of us to be inspired by, and titled, Signals of Transcendence. The modern world is a place of great distraction, and it can be difficult to make sense of our human existence. But at some point in our lives, we may experience particular moments that prompt us to search for something deeper. Sociologist Peter Berger described these hints and clues as “signals of transcendence” that awaken us to unseen realities. In Signals of Transcendence: Listening to the Promptings of Life, Os Guinness tells stories of people who experienced signals of transcendence and followed them to find new meaning and purpose in life. Notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis as well as lesser-known individuals experienced a variety of promptings that signaled to them that life could not continue as they had thought. Through unsatisfied longings or disillusionments or glimpses of beauty or joy, these moments drew people toward epiphanies of transformation. And the same can be true for us, should we have the courage to follow the signals wherever they may lead. BONUS! READ A SAMPLE OF SIGNALS OF TRANSCENDENCE “I'm at a point in my life where I realize that there has to be more to life. Something must be missing.” This remark, made to me by a business leader in Silicon Valley, expresses what countless people come to see in their own way and say in their own words. Previously, they were mostly contented in some season of life; some were wealthy, successful, and even highly celebrated in one field or another. But they reached a point where they knew in their heart of hearts that none of it quite satisfied as they hoped. Who am I? Why am I here? What is life all about? Life raises such questions to all of us at some point, and certain experiences break into our lives that spur us to question whether our answers are deep enough, prompting a search for what we sense is missing—an unnamable something more. Life itself is extraordinary, and somehow, we all want to know what it is to live a worthy life, one that fulfills the promise of life. Peter Berger, the eminent social scientist, described the experiences that trigger such longings as “signals of transcendence”— arresting and intriguing experiences that both capture our attention and call for further explanation. The thrust of these signals points to some meaning beyond themselves, and they won't let us off the hook until we stir ourselves to find what it is. Such experiences puncture one's satisfaction with the status quo and push one to search for something beyond. The signals stir in us a sense that there must be something more to life, but what is that often unnamable something? In stirring us, signals of transcendence are a prompting by life itself, as it were. They trigger both a contradiction and a desire, and call into question the past, the present, and the future. They challenge the present and the past by contradicting the temptation to settle down and be satisfied. They challenge the future by spurring a desire to search for the something that is missing, that toward which the experience is hinting. In so doing, the signals lay bare some aspect of our human existence that we have forgotten or suppressed, at least partially— including things lost and left behind. Such aspects of a fuller and more complete reality must be rediscovered if life is to be lived to the full. Equally, an understanding of those aspects has to be grounded solidly if it is to be truly fulfilling. Hence the quest for faith and meaning triggered by the signals—the quest for meaning that is adequate and faith that is true. Follow the signals and discover more of the reality of who we are and what the universe and life are about; then our lives will be better aligned and more able to be free and fulfilled. Freedom, after all, is simply the ability to be who we are, to think freely, to speak freely, and to act freely. But who in truth are we, why are we here, and what is life about? The signal is power packed with the thrust of such questions.” (Taken from the introduction to Signals of Transcendence) MEET OS GUINNESS OS GUINNESS (DPhil, Oxford) has had a lifelong passion to make sense of our extraordinary modern world and to stand between the worlds of scholarship and ordinary life, helping each to understand the other—particularly when advanced modern life touches on the profound issues of faith. As a frequent speaker and prominent social critic Guinness has addressed audiences worldwide, from the British House of Commons to the US Congress to the St. Petersburg Parliament. He is a senior fellow at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and was the founder of the Trinity Forum. Born in China to missionary parents, Guinness is the great-great-great-grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin brewer. After witnessing the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, he was expelled with many other foreigners in 1951 and returned to England where he was educated and served as a freelance reporter with the BBC. Since coming to the United States in 1984, he has been a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. He was the lead drafter of the Williamsburg Charter, celebrating the First Amendment, and has also been senior fellow at the EastWest Institute in New York, where he drafted the Charter for Religious Freedom. He also coauthored the public-school curriculum Living with Our Deepest Differences. Guinness is the author or editor of more than thirty books, including The Call, Time for Truth, Unspeakable, The Magna Carta of Humanity, The Great Quest, Zero Hour America, and others. We invite you to check out the first episode of each of our series, and decide which one you will want to start with. Or, of course, you can start at the beginning with episode 1.  Season 1: the gospel of Matthew like you've never experienced it https://www.podcastics.com/episode/3280/link/ Season 2: Experience Jesus through the Psalms https://www.podcastics.com/episode/33755/link/ Season 3: the gospel of Luke, faith in action https://www.podcastics.com/episode/40838/link/ Season 4: Proverbs spiced with wisdom https://www.podcastics.com/episode/68112/link/ Season 5: Identity in the battle | Ephesians https://www.podcastics.com/episode/74762/link/ Season 6: Centering on Christ | The Tabernacle experience https://www.podcastics.com/episode/94182/link/ Season 7: Shades of Red | Against human oppression https://www.podcastics.com/episode/115017/link/ Season 8: God's glory, our delight |  https://www.podcastics.com/episode/126051/link/   Support us!

#witchcraft #occult #esotericism Why did the world stop believing in magic? Max Weber and Myth of Disenchantment, Peter Berger and Secularism, Storm and Aprem on Re-enchantment. 00:00 INTRO (low volume, apologies) 04:15 LECTURE 41:14 QUESTIONS & ANSWERS CONNECT & SUPPORT

Hoch and Crowder are joined by the chairperson for the American Lung Association's fight for air climb event coming to loanDepot Park on March 4th. 

In hour two, we question Subway's new direction of adding meat slicing machines to all of their store locations later this year - just stay in your lane Subway. Lee Sterling joins the show with XFL weekend picks. Then, local firefighter, Peter Berger, joins the show for info on the American Lung Associations Fight for Air climb event coming in March. 

We all have a hole in our soul. And we look around at the universe for something to fill it. Youthfulness doesn't last, money doesn't heal all wounds, and every technological advancement only makes the problem worse.  For some, even religion hasn't given them the satisfaction they seek. As every day goes by, and we march closer and closer to death, our soul cries out, “is that all there is?”What if I told you that the God I serve—the God I found in Jesus Christ—provides the answer to the deepest longings of your heart? He can fill that hole in your soul that money, relationships, and even religion can't fill. And what he offers is no pie in the sky; it will resonate with you.The sermon today is titled "A Faith Worthy Of Our Longings." It is the second installment in our "Worthy Faith" Series. The Scripture reading is from John 14:6. Originally preached at the West Side Church of Christ (Searcy, AR) on October 30, 2022. All lessons fit under one of 5 broad categories: Begin, Discover, Grow, Learn, and Serve. This sermon is filed under Begin: A Satisfying Faith.Click here if you would like to watch the sermon or read a transcript.Footnotes (Sources and References Used In Today's Podcast):I am indebted to Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God, for the reference to Peggy Lee's song, the story about the nursing home, and for reminding me of Thomas Nagel's philosophy and J. L. Mackie's ethics textbooks.For more on Nozick's experience machine and survey results, see this article by Joachim Krueger in Psychology Today.To watch the Warren-Flew debate, click here.Much of the material in the "Truth" section is taken from Os Guinness's speech "True Truth" (including comments about Peter Berger and G. K. Chesterton's illustration of how freedom requires truth).I'd love to connect with you!Watch sermons and find transcripts at nathanguy.com.Follow along each Sunday through YouTube livestream and find a study guide and even kids notes on the sermon notes page.Subscribe to my email newsletter on substack.

Regular listeners to the weekly Breakpoint This Week podcast know that my co-host Maria and I are fans of the reality competition show Alone. Ten wilderness experts are dropped in the middle of nowhere, usually a place that is cold and full of bears, forced to fend for themselves. Whoever stays the longest wins.   In the latest season, a military veteran with strong survival skills and extensive experience overseas seemed poised to win. Instead, he called it quits just a few weeks in. In an interview afterwards, he explained, “When I was in the military and separated from family, I didn't have a choice. Out here... I had that opportunity to get on the radio or the phone and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to go back to where I'm comfortable.'” In other words, having the choice to go home made staying much harder.  According to conventional wisdom, at least the kind accepted in this cultural moment, the opposite should have been true. More control and more choices are supposed to bring easier and more satisfying lives.  That misconception is, in fact, a feature of life since modernism. For most of human history, humans held no illusions of being masters of their own fate. Writing back in 1976, American sociologist Peter Berger identified what changed, especially for Westerners. Because of the dramatic progress brought by science and technology, humans in the modern period began to believe that the world would eventually be fully understood. And if understood, it could also be mastered, as well.  “What previously was experienced as fate now becomes an arena of choices,” Berger wrote. “In principle, there is the assumption that all human problems can be converted into technical problems… the world becomes ever more ‘makeable.'”  A mark of our late postmodern era is the obsession with having choices. The higher the stakes, the more acute is the illusion of freedom. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy described this impulse in his now overturned Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, when he wrote that “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” In his view, the “freedom of choice” extends to even choosing what is real. Is it any wonder that people now believe that choice extends beyond sexual behavior to sexual identity?  However, if happiness truly comes from the control made possible through infinite choices and the ability to “make the world,” why did the military officer competing on Alone find the opposite to be true? Why did his freedom of choice turn out to be too much of a burden? Why do so many studies show that we are less happy than ever?  The postmodern assertion that we can “make the world” exploits a weakness inherent to our fallen humanness and especially acute today. We struggle to delay gratification. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we can, in fact, define our existence or choose our gender. We may think our decision about whether to stay married or whether to bring an unborn child to birth is based on deep reflections. However, because we can, we tend to choose comfort now at the expense of flourishing later. If we have the option, we call the producers and tap out.   Justice Kennedy was wrong. No matter how many choices we have, we cannot remake the world. Everywhere we turn, we butt up against the limits of creation. According to a Christian worldview, this is actually good news. God created the world with limits: physical and moral laws, bodies, certain geographic locations and times in history, and not other ones. He gives us specific parents and siblings and children, whose specific needs constantly impose limits on our choices.   Even if, in modernity and postmodernity, such limits are anathema, to be resisted and fought against with all the science and technology we can muster, true freedom is found by recognizing and resting in God's good limits, both physical and moral. If God is good, then the limits He imposes are not burdens. They're blessings.

No one can resist peer pressure.Such is the judgment of Peter Berger, sociologist of knowledge. To this generalization, I am no exception. For that reason perhaps, peer pressure interests me.Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York.  She is the author of A Good Look at Evil, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, now appearing in an expanded second edition and as audiobooks.  Dr. Rosenthal writes a weekly column for “Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column,”  where she explores the situation of women. She thinks women's lives are highly interesting. She's the editor of The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, Henry M. Rosenthal.  She's written numerous articles that can be accessed at Academia.edu .

In the first episode in our inquiry to knowledge, we will take a look at a classic work by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman: The social construction of reality.  This work gave us the concept of social construct which has been one the most influential theoretical approaches ever since. In this episode we will dive into the concept and answer critical questions, such as: what is a social construct and how is it created?

William Kaiser is a sociologist, a pupil of Peter Berger, a student of the philosophy of Wittgenstein, and an autodidact in all things Freud, Nietzsche & Kaufmann. His dissertation on the topic of Wittgenstein was entitled, "A Wittgensteinian Critique of Realism in Social Science Methodology", and to this day, Kaiser maintains his skepticism towards what he characterizes as "naive realism". He expresses the common thread he sees in many philosophers, from Nietzsche, to Rorty, to Wittgenstein himself: rejection of the idea of obtaining some sort of objective knowledge and the re-centering of our philosophical orientation on the human psyche. All these figures cut through abstruse confusions to reach concrete insights about history and the human condition. Central to this project for Wittgenstein (especially Later Wittgenstein, aka "Wittgenstein II", who was Kaiser's focus in his work) is the way in which language shapes human thought. Through this conversation, we discuss the commonality between Nietzsche's ideas and Wittgensteins, on the issues of language, on memory and forgetting, self-identity, and what it means to learn and live an enriching life. We also spend some time discussing Freud and the influence Nietzsche had on the famous Viennese psychoanalyst. 

Hello! Welcome to Into the Pray and thank you for listening along. You can also watch along here. Today's midweek session with Dave Brennan of Brephos begins to lift our thinking above the realm of the natural and normal into the transcendent and eternal. “A world without windows” is how sociologist Peter Berger describes the secularized view of the world.  He also calls it the “prison of modernity.”  Bultmann the theologian, as much as Sagan the scientist, is an inmate of this prison.  Both agree that a modern scientific view of the cosmos requires reality to be interpreted as a closed system of natural cause and effect—a system without signs of transcendence.The renewal of Christian witness and mission requires constant examination of the assumptions shaping the Church's life. Today an apparent loss of a sense of the transcendent is undermining the Church's ability to address with clarity and courage the urgent tasks to which God calls it in the world.Grab a brew and listen or watch Nick, Mairi and Dave read Psalm 139 and begin the sometimes foreign process for all of us of lifting our thinking. Paul said it like this, "Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." (Colossians 3:2).Thank you very much for your prayers for healing as we have sought to return to full capacity this week. We share more on our Patreon page for those of you who would like to walk this journey more closely with us. If you would like to support our work, you can do so here and/or here. Please also consider sharing this podcast to your networks for us. Here's a short review of “Paul - Apostle of Christ.”Come, Lord Jesus!Love,Nick & Mairi xx

In this episode Elizaveta Lepikhova, a second year MA student, teaching assistant, and supplemental instructor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, discusses the work of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.  Elizaveta discusses their contributions to the sociology of everyday life, introduces her schema of explaining their ideas (see here), and reflects on first reading the […]

Diesmal diskutieren wir im Soziopod das Buch "Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit" von den beiden Soziologen Peter Berger und Thomas Luckmann. Es gilt als Wegbereiter der folgenden Systemtheorien. Wir sprechen u. a. über das soziale Ein- und Ausatmen einer Gesellschaft und wie wirkmächtig dabei unsere Sprache, aber auch alle anderen Zeichen, Symbole und Interaktionen sind.

Peter Berger and David Ngu both work for global consulting firm Protiviti in the Netherlands, helping clients figure out how to integrate governance, risk management, and compliance technology into their workplace. In this episode of GRC & Me, Peter and David provide some of their valuable insights about how to incorporate agile GRC technology to make sure it’s actually doing its job to help manage the risks in your company and ensure your business is aligned so successful risk governance can take place and nothing slips through the cracks.We all face risks in our daily lives, now more than ever. Peter and David are here to help companies handle them with agility and flexibility, and stay tuned: they’re even offering listeners a complimentary consulting session to talk about GRC technology and agile risk governance. Reach out to Peter and David directly: peter.berger@protiviti.nl & david.ngu@protiviti.nl

Elliott Morgan, comedian and PhD candidate in depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, joins us to explore humor and psyche. Elliott grew up a fundamentalist Christian in central Florida, and has gone from practicing holy laughter to creating HOLY SH*T, his comedy special on Amazon (also featuring Jung’s debut on the comedic stage). Elliott’s college major, zoology, prepared him to play Goofy at Disney World and Big Bird on Hollywood Blvd. A recovering Nice Person, Elliott draws on life experiences, relentlessly engages shadow, and uses laughter to turn suffering into soul making. Hitting rock bottom led to the choice not to fall back into old patterns but to fall forward; Elliott’s new life features avocado toast and other radical practices. Jung, quoting Schopenhauer, said, “A sense of humor is the only divine quality of man,” and Elliott’s storytelling and self-disclosure define the alchemy of fellowship, insight, and human spirit. Elliott’s podcasts, The Valleycast and The Fundamentalists, are additional paths to laughter and transcendence (see  YouTube.com/ElliottMorgan). Elliott will perform live in Washington State at the Spokane Comedy Club on June 23 and at the Tacoma Comedy Club on June 24.     Dream I am taking a ballet class in a room in a famous building in NYC. The room is shaped like my old apartment in Brooklyn. The building is by the water and there are windows but no good views. It’s dark, rainy and storming outside. The class becomes full and crowded, too crowded to really dance. I feel content, I feel like I’m home. The room is dark. I can’t make out anyone’s faces, including my ballet teacher’s face. Soon the rain starts to seep into the room. The floors are getting wet. It seems like the room is caving in and I am scared that the old building is falling over from the rain. I worry that the floors are getting ruined with the rain but my ballet teacher doesn’t seem worried. We all leave the room. I am worried we are running out of time and the building will collapse. No one else seems scared. There are two exits: the elevator or the stairs. The elevator looks dangerous because the rain is seeping in and the elevator runs on electricity. The stairwell shows that we are on the 43 or 44th floor of the building. The stairs are flooded and look slippery. But I think the stairs are safer than taking the elevator.   References: Lionel Corbett. The Soul in Anguish: https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Anguish-Psychotherapeutic-Approaches-Suffering/dp/1630512354/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=Lionel+Corbett&qid=1615307691&s=books&sr=1-4 Marie Louise von Franz. The Way of the Dream: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Dream-Conversations-Interpretation-Marie-Louise/dp/1570620369/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3F5CZQDKTYDOQ&dchild=1&keywords=the+way+of+the+dream+von+franz&qid=1615308096&sprefix=The+Way+of+the+Dream%2Caps%2C168&sr=8-1 Edward Edinger. Anatomy of the Psyche. https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Psyche-Alchemical-Symbolism-Psychotherapy/dp/B07NYBGGNT/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=Edward+Edinger&qid=1615307612&sr=8-6 Peter Berger. A Rumor of Angels Peter Rollins. Divine Magician, Insurrection

Just as for Peter Berger the sociological structures of modern society generated the heretical imperative, so, too, I would like to propose, the technological structures of digital media generate the hermeneutical imperative.  Get full access to The Convivial Society at theconvivialsociety.substack.com/subscribe

Soft Skills? Jurist/innen brauchen doch ausschließlich materielles Wissen – oder nicht? Der momentane Studiendekan der juristischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln Professor Klaus Peter Berger gründet schon 1998 DIE Institution für Soft Skills und Schlüsselqualifikationen, das CENTRAL. Während man damals den Wert von Soft Skills noch belächelte, sind diese heutzutage ein für eine erfolgreiche Karriere kaum mehr wegzudenken. Selbst in der Prüfungsordnung sind Schlüsselqualifikationen mittlerweile explizit aufgeführt. Heute berichtet Professor Berger davon, wie man seine Fähigkeiten selbst verbessern kann, wieso man sich dabei häufig selbst im Weg steht und welche Bedeutung Soft Skills im Beruf haben. Inhalt: 1:35 Min – welchen Stellenwert hatten Soft Skills vor 30 Jahren 4:55 Min – Schlüsselqualifikationen/Soft Skills – was sind das überhaupt? 8:05 Min – Wieso werden Soft Skills häufig nicht gelehrt und wie kann man diese selbst trainieren? 11:45 Min – Wieso man sich häufig selbst im Weg steht 14:48 Min – Die eigene Komfortzone verlassen 22:30 Min – Soft Skills sind mehr als eigene Selbstdarstellung 24:40 Min – Die tatsächliche Bedeutung im späteren Beruf 30:55 Min – Frühere Antipathie gegenüber Soft Skills 34:20 Min – Persönliche Interaktion als essenzieller Faktor Wenn euch der Podcast gefällt und ihr uns unterstützen wollt, vergesst nicht den Podcast – bei Instagram. Facebook (jeweils @juraunddieweltdadraussen) und dem Streamingdienst eurer Wahl – zu abonnieren, ihn euren Freunden zu zeigen und eine Bewertung bei Apple Podcasts abzugeben – das alles ist schnell erledigt, absolut kostenlos und hilft uns sehr weiter! Bei Lob, Anmerkungen oder Fragen könnt ihr uns gerne eine Nachricht per Instagram oder Facebook oder eine E-Mail an folgende Adresse schicken: juraunddieweltdadraussen@gmx.de

Healthcare is undeniably one of the most demanding career fields, and high levels of burnout and stress add to the already complex nature workers face, which is why it is so important to find out how others keep their passion for healthcare burning.  That's one of the topics that we cover in the continuation of our interview with Peter Berger. In the first episode of our interview, we talked about Peter's successes. He shared with us how he helped his practice successfully move from paper to electronic records. We also covered the value of sheer determination, and how we communicate to our team really matters. In this episode, Peter shares how he stays motivated. He also talks about facing and managing failures, choosing to make the best decisions and living with them, the challenge of relearning new skills and making emotional investments, and more. So please tune in! For the full transcript, show notes, and resources to help you level up your practice, visit us at medman.com 

Getting healthcare to rural areas can be a challenge sometimes, especially when it comes to keeping medical records. Our guest for today is someone that has made a great impact on underserved people's lives by providing the health access they cannot get while living in secluded areas. Peter Berger is a retired Administrator from MedMan who began working with NGOs and found his purpose in changing people's lives. He talks about how new opportunities opened up when he went back in the 1990s from paper records back to EMRs. He also emphasizes how determination and having a clear sight of things to come is an important attribute to medical practice. He shares here his beliefs on leadership, communication issues within medical groups, and how consistency is an important aspect when it comes to both understanding and expressing expectations. Make sure you tune in to get plenty of nuggets from this interview! For the full transcript, show notes, and resources to help you level up your practice, visit us at medman.com 

What is the moral imagination? Why is it important? In this episode, I discuss the concept of the moral imagination and 15 ways to develop it. I discuss the origin of the term in Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution and his worry that the reductionist Enlightenment view of reason would lead to what C.S. Lewis called "the abolition of man." It would diminish our fundamental human experiences--love, joy, hope, friendship, justice, compassion, mercy, grief, and forgiveness--and undermine the dignity of the person. I discuss a number of thinkers, including Gertrude Himmelfarb on tradition, Russell Kirk, Joseph Pieper, Mary Douglas on condensed symbols, Joseph Ratzinger on reason and beauty, Iain Mc Gilchrist on neuroscience, Peter Berger on plausibility structures, and more. Visit https://www.themoralimagination.com/episodes/michael-matheson-miller-1 for show notes and resources.

In this lecture Paul Axton examines the insights and problems with the three reigning understandings of religion. Become a Patron! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

What’s changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic? What’s likely to come back? And when? Innovation Leader’s What the Future Looks Like report seeks to answer that question. Kaitlin Milliken, Multimedia Editor at the publication, shares data from the report. Stephan Chase, a futurist and founder of the consultancy Chase Intel, discusses how the pandemic has affected life downtown and the hospitality space. Peter Berger, Director of Innovation for the aircraft manufacturer EmbraerX, explains why drastic innovation cuts are short-sighted. 

Audio Transcript:Good morning. Welcome to Mosaic Church. My name's Jan, I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic. And if you're new, if you're visiting, welcome. We're so glad you're here.By the way, congratulations for making it out. Whenever it rains, I already know the Navy SEALS are going to show up. It's like that meme, I don't know if you saw this meme going around, where the lady is screaming and then there's the white cat. And the screaming lady goes, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!" And then the cat says, "Well, you can't even show up to church when it rains." And the cat is spot on. So, congratulations. The Lord sees your sacrifice.We'd love to connect with you if you're new, we do that through the Connection Crowd, the worship guide, if you fill it out legibly, you can either toss it in the offering basket after or redeem it at the Welcome Center for a gift, or you can download the app, the Mosaic Boston app in the App Store or Google Play.All the announcements are in the worship guide. There's a type in one of the announcements that the members meeting, it's not December 7th, which is a Sunday, it's actually December 6th. So, if you are a member or if you've been notified that you are becoming a member, please plan to come.With that said, will you please pray with me over the preaching of God's Word? Heavenly Father, we confess that you are a good Father, and that you have given us your Word for our good, for our flourishing, for our shalom, for our peace. And your Word, often, is in the affirmative, yes, you want us to live lives that are glorifying to you and then also beneficial to ourselves and the people around us. And in order to keep shalom, you often tell us no. And Lord, I pray that you, through the power of the Holy Spirit and by the Gospel, show us that our hearts are rebellious to your authority naturally. We viscerally reject your authority, and we repent of that, and we turn to you, and I pray that you give us tender hearts to your loving authority, tender hearts to even tough truth.And as we submit to your truths, as we submit to your authority, I pray that you show us that your authority, kingdom authority, Godly authority is an upside down authority, that you give authority not for us to be served by those under us, but to serve them. You call us to be servant leaders, sacrificial leaders to mirror you, to image you. And I pray you give us strength to do that. Lord, if anyone is not yet a Christian, if anyone has not yet submitted their lives to you, if someone has not yielded control of their lives to you, I pray today show Jesus how much you've sacrificed, how much you've done in order to redeem them, and I pray, draw their hearts to you. And I pray all this in the beautiful name of Jesus Christ. Amen.So, we're in a sermon series that we are calling Tough and Tender, Developing a Resilience for Life. This is week 10. Next week we're finishing it with a sermon on living in a way that we leave a Godly legacy. So, that's next week. And after that, we roll into advent. Today, we are talking about tough and tender authority, lion and lamb authority. The Holy Scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is the Lion of Judah who submits like a lamb to the will of God, and he shows us that truth and that authority are upside down, that God gives us authority, gives us truth, in order to transform us, in order to get us to serve others because one of the greatest blessings in the world is to give rather than to receive.So, as we talk about authority and as we talk about truth, I understand how counter-cultural this topic is, how counter-cultural this idea is. We are a [people who don't like sermons on authority, we don't like authority in general. Fight the power, stick it to the man, it's the Land of the Free. The last time we had a king was King George III, didn't work out for him. And not only do we live in the United States, the Land of the Free, we're also in Boston, Massachusetts. You going to tax us? We're going to get rid of all your tea. We do not like ... Live Free or Die, that's the motto of New England.So, with that to say, I know you want to hear a sermon on authority like you want to hear a sermon on a root canal. But it's important. Scripture talks about the authority of God, and talks about the authority of God's Word. One of the texts that's really important to understand both authority and truth was Jesus subjugated to the authority to Pilate, standing before Pilate. And Pilate says, "Why are you answering me? Don't you understand that I have authority either to execute you or to release you?" And Jesus says, "You would have no authority over me at all if it were not given to you from above." And then Pilate scoffs at this, and Jesus says, "Those who are of the truth hear my truth." And then Pilate scoffs at it and says, "What is truth?"And that sentiment is the milieu of our culture. This is the ethos of our culture. What is truth? Presupposition, "Truth is not knowable." Or we can't known truth. And obviously, that is a truth statement that crumbles under its own weight. There is no such thing as absolute truth. Are you absolutely sure? That is a truth statement. We can't know about God. How do you know that? Or, when people like Peter Berger say things like, "Truth isn't objective, it's culturally conditioned. You believe what people around you believe. In particular, when it comes to faith."Well, that itself is a culturally conditioned truth statement. Agnosticism, we can't know about God. How do you know that you can't know about God? No one should proselytize. At the very moment that you say no one should proselytize, no one should convert, no one should recruit people to their religion, you're actually doing proselytizing. You're converting people to your position of non-proselytization. So you can't get around truth statements. Everyone is making truth statements. What we need to understand is what is truth in order to understand authority.The other problem that we have in our culture, when people talk about truth, they think it's proud or arrogant to say, "No, this is true." It seems proud and arrogant to say, "This is true." And it seems humble to say there is no truth. We can't know truth. But actually, that's reversed. To say there is no truth, you're putting yourself in a position of arrogance over all truth. On the flip side, Jesus comes in and said, "I am truth, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." It's a tough truth when we tenderly submit to it, that truth frees us to be the people that God has called us to be.The other problem that we have with authority is that it has been abused so much. So, we talk about getting rid of authority. You can't get rid of authority. As soon as you start talking about getting rid of authority, be very ... Question anyone who says get rid of authority because those people then want to ... They get into authority. This was the historical lesson of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, the Communists, come to power and they said, "Let's get rid of the king." And everyone is like, "Yes! The workers of the world unite." And as soon as they get rid of the king, who comes into power? It's the communists. That vacuum was always going to be filled so you can't just get rid of authority. We need to redeem authority. And that's what Jesus Christ has come to do.Today, we're going to look at Matthew 20:20-27, in which Jesus tells his disciples, "You have a worldly understanding of authority. You have a flipped understanding of authority." And Jesus Christ came not just to give us the upside kingdom, but the right side up kingdom, and he wants to turn our understanding of authority right side up.So, this is Matthew 20:20, "Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came up to him with her sons, and kneeling before him she asked him for something. And he said to her, 'What do you want?' She said to him, 'Say that these two sons of mine are to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.' And Jesus answered, 'You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?' And they said to him, 'We are able.' He said to them, 'You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.'""And when the ten heard it, they were indignant at the two brothers. But Jesus called them to him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, and even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.'" This is the reading of God's Holy, inerrant, infallible authoritative Word. May He write these eternal truths upon our hearts.Four points to frame up our time so you know where we're going. First, authority rejected, then authority corrupted, authority redeemed, and finally authority exercised. First of all, authority rejected. What is authority? It's rightful power. A power that is used rightly and only God has ultimate authority, only God uses authority rightly. He is the rightful owner of authority. He created everything so authority belongs ultimately to the Creator.And the story of Holy Scripture begins in Genesis, the Book of Beginnings, that God, in authority, creates everything. And His authority is good. It's a blessed authority. It's for our benefit, for our flourishing, for our prosperity. And He gives it to us generously. He gives it to everything, for life, and for spiritual life. And submission to His authority is the place in which we are free to be the people we've been designed to be. We're free to prosper. God has intrinsic authority and He creates us and delegates authority to us. And He tells us, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, create civilization, create culture and have dominion over all things." He creates Adam, puts him in the Garden, to work it and to keep it. There's authority. Work it, there's authority over the world. And then keep it, protect it from the evil and authority over Satan.God entrusts them with everything, including His Word. He gives His Word to Adam and He says, "Keep it. This is my authority over you, ensconced in my Word. It's within my Word." And then in Genesis 3, Satan comes. And Satan has a conversation with Eve, and the very first thing that he attacks in an attempt to attack God's authority, what does he do? He attacks God's Word. He attacks God's truth. And he says, "Did God really say?"And Eve says, "God said we can eat of every tree except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." And he says, "No, no, no. You will not die. You will become like Gods, knowing good and evil." And Eve looks at the tree, looks at the forbidden fruit, and says that it was the light to her eyes, the desire to make her wise. She rejects God's authority. Adam rejects God's authority. Because Satan had planted a lie in their minds that God's authority was bad, that God was keeping us from something good. And they eat.They trust in their feelings over God's Word. Adam doesn't exercise authority in protecting the Garden from evil, and he doesn't exercise authority to protect his wife from the lies, and he doesn't serve by leading and protecting.Fast forward to today. What is our stance in culture at authority? We live in a culture averse to authority. There's no respect to authority because we have long ago gotten rid of even the idea of truth. Even to talk about objective truth about God is so counter-cultural that we even have a hard time even grasping the idea that when we talk about God, we're talking about facts. We're not talking about preference. We're talking about facts about God, truths about God as true as gravity, as true as life, as death, as the laws of thermodynamics. And we live in a culture where it's we who create truth. The things that we believe become truths instead of taking truths and believing in them.Scripture begins with the unapologetic truth that God is sovereign, that God rules over the universe. Psalm 115:3 says, "Our God is in the Heavens. He does all that He pleases." Ultimate authority. He's like a potter, we are like the clay. All authority among humans is derived, and it's all from God. Romans 13:1, "For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God."So, Adam and Even reject God's authority and, in place, they get a corrupted authority under the authority of the enemy. So, when we reject God's authority, we don't destroy authority, we corrupt it. And even the disciples of Jesus Christ, before the Gospel, have this corrupted understanding of authority. It's in their heart. On this point too, authority corrupted, we see in our text that John and James, part of Jesus' inner circle, Jesus had the 12 disciples, then he had the three disciples: John, James, and Peter, Jesus' closest friends.Now, one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that James and John, they're brothers, but they're actually Jesus' cousins. They're the sons of Zebedee's. Zebedee is married to Salome. Salome is the sister of Mary, Jesus' mom. So, these are his cousins. So, his cousins, what are they doing? In Matthew 19, Jesus promised that he would give them authority. They will sit on 12 thrones to rule over Israel. And so, they're jockeying for position. They send their mom to Jesus in order for her to ask that they get the thrones closest to Jesus. And they think that Jesus will listen to his aunt, so she comes, she kneels, she asks.Why are they doing all this? Why are they jockeying? This is politics. Why are they politicking? The reason is because they think in their mind, the closer I am to Jesus on the throne, the higher rank I have, the more authority I have, to rule over people. And that's why Jesus, to correct their thinking, where does he go? This is verse 25, Matthew 20: "Jesus called them to him and said, 'You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.'" What's he doing? He's canceling their wrong presupposition. Wrong presupposition, get as much power as you can, as much control, as much authority so that people serve you. You rule over, they serve you. Jesus says, "No, that's false." That's an ungodly mentality and that's rooted in selfish ambition. And this is our culture, get as much power as you can. Get the highest rank in your organization. Why? So that people serve you.And that's why we have abuse of authority in our culture because authority has a corrupting over every single one of us. You've heard that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, we know this. And that's why in scripture, as people reject God, God then has to come in and control our abuse of power. And you see examples in scripture where employers abuse employees. So, you have texts like Leviticus 25:43, where God says, "You shall not rule over them ruthlessly, but shall fear your God." Or Deuteronomy 24:14, "You shall not oppress a hired worker who is poor or needy, whether he is one of your brothers or one of the sojourners who are in your land within your town."Why does God have to give this Word? Because of our corrupt understanding of authority. There's fathers who abuse their authority over children. Ephesians 6:4 tells us, "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." There's abuse of power of authority with husbands over wives, that's why Colossians 3:19 says, "Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them." There's abuse of pastors or elders over churches, that's why 1 Peter 5:2-3 says, "Shepherd the flock of God that is among you, exercising oversight, not under compulsions, but willingly, as God would have you; not for shameful gain, but eagerly; not domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock."You see over and over and over this upside down view of authority, whether it was mistreating foreigners or immigrants. Exodus 23:9, "You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." Those in power, in terms of finances, taking advantage of the helpless or poor. Zechariah 7:10, "Do not oppose the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart."James 2:6, "But you have dishonored the poor man. Are not the rich the ones who oppress you, and the ones who drag you into court?" And then just abuse of power to oppress in general. Jeremiah 22:17, "But you have eyes and heart only for your dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood and for practicing oppression and violence."We have a corrupt understanding of authority. So, we can't just reject authority because it gets replaced with corrupt authority. So, what do we need to do? We need redeemed authority. And this is point three. Jesus Christ comes as the God of the universe. And he comes and he shows us a servant leadership. He shows us authority in order to serve instead of authority to get others to serve you. This is Matthew 20:26-27, he says, "It shall not be so among you." Among Christians. "Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."So, from the beginning we said that God has intrinsic authority, He delegates authority to us. Those are the only two kinds of authority. Jesus has both. Jesus has intrinsic authority as co-equal with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, and he also has intrinsic authority because he's the co-creator with the Father. But he submits to the Father. Though he has his own authority, he submits to the will of God, and then God delegates an authority to Christ. He has both.So, Jesus comes and he holds the office of prophet, priest, and king, and wields that authority well. He serves those underneath his authority. He has the authority to forgive sins. He has the authority to exorcize demons. He has the authority to control nature, to raise the dead. He teaches with authority. He could have demanded submission, he could have commanded submission. Instead, he compels our submission through our hearts by pouring himself out for us.So, how does Jesus lead? How does Jesus wield his authority? By submitting, by suffering, and by serving. By submitting, by suffering, and by serving. I'm going to give you three images right now that show us, that give us a picture of Jesus' authority. It's the yoke. It's the cup and the towel. So, if I lost you somewhere, come back. This is a good part of the sermon. I really enjoyed this part. This is my second time preaching, this is my favorite part. Yoke, cup, towel. Yoke, cup, towel. Submission, suffering, and service.What's the yoke? Jesus submits to the yoke of God the Father, meaning he submits to His will. Co-equal. Father and the Son, they're co-equal. This is the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity. They're equally God. Three persons in the Holy Trinity. Three persons, one essence, they're equally God. Jesus comes and he submits to the yoke of the Father. Where do I see this in particular? Look at Matthew 11:28-30. "Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."A yoke was a harness to attack a plow to farm animals, to oxen or to horses, and Jesus Christ says, "I have submitted myself to the harness of God's will." And he says, "I've done it gently. I've done it tenderly. I tenderly submit to the tough will of God, the Father." And this is the area, the submission, this is the area where true freedom is found. So, Satan's lie in the very beginning was, "Reject God's authority so that you can live lives of freedom." And Jesus says, "No. We reject God's authority ..." You don't get rid of authority ... Or, submit to corrupted authority, the enemy's authority, and then finally enslaved by sin and selfishness.He says, "No, true rest is found in submission to the Word of God, to the truth of God." He says, "Join me under this harness. I'm baring most of the weight. Come and take my yoke upon you. You will find rest for your souls." And by the way, this is what Jesus meant when he said, "You will know the truth and the truth will," what? Set you free. It's not freedom when we reject truth, it's freedom when we submit to God's truth. And it's tough to do, but when we do that, it tenderizes our hearts to God and we begin to understand that his authority is actually the best thing for us.So, Jesus shows us that his authority begins with taking a yoke and then it continues with taking a cup. Yoke and cup. Where did I get the cup? From our text. Jesus answered, "You do not know what you're asking." They asked for influence. He says, "'You don't know what you're asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?' And they said to him, 'We are able.' He said to them, 'You will drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and not my left is not mine to grant but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father."What is this cup? This is the cup of God's wrath. This is the cup of suffering. And Jesus Christ comes and he knows that he has to drink this cup down to the very last drop. Why is this a cup of suffering? Because in order for God to forgive us, he can't just say, "I forgive." Somebody needs to pay the penalty for our sin. There's always sacrifice. There's always suffering when forgiveness is given. If someone has treated you unjustly, committed egregious sin against you and you've been sinned against, for you to forgive that person, it always takes suffering. It's always painful. The greater the level of sin, the greater the level of suffering. Jesus is looking at this cup, he says, this is the only way that people can be redeemed, that we can be restored in a rightful relationship with us, and Jesus knows exactly how much this cup is going to cost, how painful it will be.And Matthew 26:39, this is the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is on his face, sweating blood, the capillaries on his face are bursting, he's under such immense pressure. And he prays to the Father, and he says, "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will." True authority always includes suffering, it always includes a cup. And he tells James and John, do you think you can drink my cup? And they say, "Yeah." And they did. James was the first apostle to be martyred for the faith. We get that in the Book of Acts. John was exiled at the end of his life on Patmos. They suffered partially just because of martyrdom and exile, and then also, because as the closest people in their lives, they were separated in the very beginning of the ministry, they drank the cup. So, when we think about authority it's not getting others to serve and getting others to suffer for me, it's I'm serving people even when I need to suffer to do it.So, there's the yoke, there's the cup, and then there's the towel. Where do I get this? Jesus, on the Last Supper, he gets up from the table, lays aside his outer garments, takes a towel, ties it to his waist, takes a basin, fills it with water and begins to wash the feet of his disciples. Says, "This is true greatness." God, on his knees, God kneeling to get the grime and the gunk off the feet of his own disciples. This is true leadership. This is servant leadership. This is godly authority. It's the towel.And then John 13:12-16, Jesus explains to them, "Do you understand what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example that you also should do just as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him."So, if we are to have a rightful understanding of authority, we'd first go to Christ and repent. And say, "Lord, forgive me for misusing authority. Forgive me for not submitting to your authority. I take that yoke under which I find rest for my soul. Lord, I accept the fact that you suffered for me, you drank that cup. And I accept the foot washing that you give me. I accept the yoke, I accept the cup, and I accept the towel. I accept that Lord. We thank you for grace." That's how we're saved, by grace through faith, and then that begins to redeem and redefine our understanding of authority so now we can begin to exercise authority as designed by God. And that's point four.Exercise authority. Authority exercised with the yoke, the cup and the towel. So, this is Christ-like authority. It shows us that true greatness doesn't come in being served, but in serving, being blessed but in actually blessing. It's not in getting people ministered to, but actually ministering to others. So, it begins with submitting to the yoke of the Gospel. Repent and believe. What's repentant? It's yielding your will to God. Not my will, but yours be done. You accept grace. You accept God's sacrifice. You accept His love and you accept His Word.You cannot accept God without accepting His Word, His truth. The thing that separated Jesus when he came, and people took note of this. They said, "You don't teach like the Rabbis do. You teach as someone who has authority." The Rabbis would say, "This is what the scripture say," or "Thus says the Lord." Jesus Christ doesn't appeal to a higher ... He says, "Truly, truly, I say unto you." He's not appealing to a delegated authority, he's appealing to his own intrinsic authority. So, Jesus has both kinds of authority.You're going to have to use your brain for the next couple minutes. Okay? You with me? This is stake upon stake. Jesus has intrinsic authority and delegated authority. It's in him and it's given to him. Same with the Holy Scriptures. The Holy Scriptures have an intrinsic authority, in and of themselves, an ontological authority, and they're given a delegated authority, a bestowed authority. It's not a borrowed authority, it's a given authority, and it's within, and it's given from without.How do we know? The theology is that God's Word is an extension of Himself, when God speaks, God is in that Word. And this is really important, because this is what separates us from other flavors of so-called Christianity. People ask me all the time, "What kind of church is Mosaic? What kind of Christianity are you?" And I've got a brand new answer, it came to me this week. I used to say, "Historical Orthodox Christianity," just because no one knows what that means and they're like, "Oh, okay." Now I say "What kind of Christianity?" I go, "The original. From the very beginning. That's who we are. The original."We believe what the Church has believed about Christ, about God, about God's Word. And this is where we're different from other historic churches that have accepted a liberal theology of God's Word. This camp rejects the intrinsic power of God, the intrinsic authority of God's Word. And they said, "Yeah, when scripture agrees with me, then I'll accept it. But scripture is relegated to my authority, it's relegated to my reason."And I push back to that and say, "Have you never made any mistakes in your life?" Just look at your high school picture. You are fallible. Every single one is us is fallible. So, you're taking your fallible mind, your fallible reason, and you're standing in judgment over scripture, over God's Word. And then people push back and they say, "Well, how do you know it's God's Word." And then my response is, "God's Word tells me that it's God's Word." And then people are like, "Ha! That's circular reasoning. Got you!" And I always respond and say, "We're all doing circular reasoning." When your reasoning with your mind, how do you know that your mind is being reasonable? That's circular reasoning, number one.Number two, we are not primarily intellectual beings. How many of our decisions are made because of our desires not because of our minds? And our desires override our minds? So, we need a word from outside, we need a truth from outside, a transcendent truth. And where do we get that? We get that from Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came and he taught the way of God. He taught that the Old Testament was God's Word. He lived a perfect life. He's crucified, dies, is buried, and comes back from the dead. That, right there, the resurrection, validates everything else that he taught. Do we believe that Jesus physically came back from the dead? Yes, we've done sermons on that. You can find them online.If you want more evidence for the historicity of the resurrection, a couple great resources: N.T. Wright is probably the best one. N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. I think it's over 1,000 pages. If you're like, "I'm not reading 1,000 pages," go to the very end. You know what he says? "Jesus comes back from the dead." There. Spoiler alert. Geza Vermes wrote a book called The Resurrection, V-E-R-M-E-S. Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus, phenomenal work.But ultimately, we believe in the authority of scripture because we believe in Jesus Christ. How can you accept Jesus Christ as savior if you think you're smarter than him, if you think you're wiser than him? John Stott has this great book called The Authority of the Bible, and he says, "Why should people believe that the Bible is God's Word written, inspired by His Spirit and authoritative over their lives? The overriding reason for accepting the divine inspiration and authority of scripture is plain loyalty to Jesus. Our understanding of everything is conditioned by what Jesus taught, and that includes his teaching about the Bible. We have no liberty to exclude anything from Jesus' teaching and say, 'I believe what he taught about this but not what he taught about that.' What possible right do we have to be selective?"What did Jesus believe about the Bible? Matthew 5:17-18, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." He's talking about the Hebrew scriptures. He's says the smallest details of the Hebrew scriptures would all come to pass. John 10:35, "Scripture cannot be broken."So, Jesus believed in the Old Testament, referred to it as God's Word, then Jesus taught and gives authority, delegated authority, to his apostles who are filled with the Holy Spirit and then the New Testament, the books in the New Testament canon were either written by an apostle or connected to an apostle, every single one of them. And then I get the pushback, "Well, didn't the church give us the New Testament? Didn't they compile the canon? Well, how can we trust them?" And my response is, the church gave us the books of the New Testament as much as Sir Isaac Newton gave us gravity. He did not give us gravity, he recognized gravity.The spirit in them authenticated the spirit in the books, it was a recognition not a giving. It's like Tom Brady. I've been good. All football season, I have no mentioned the GOAT. Why is Tom Brady the GOAT? And this might connect with you, but it's okay. Why is Tom Brady the GOAT? Because a lot of people said that he's the GOAT? No, he's the GOAT and everyone recognizes that he's the GOAT. If you know, you know. You're welcome.And then Proverbs 3:5, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding." Why trust in the Lord with all your heart? Why this combination of trust and the heart? Do you trust the Lord whole-heartedly? Well, if you do, do you let the scriptures override your thoughts and feelings? A lot of people think that God wants you to agree with Him. And we agree with the scriptures when our feelings coincide, when our ideas coincide, and then when our ideas don't coincide with scripture, we just get rid of it.God doesn't say, "Agree with me." God says, "Obey me." Meaning, there are times when God says no. And that, right there, it challenges the most cherished thoughts and feelings that we have. And do you submit to the good will of God, to His good authority? 2 Timothy 3:16, "All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness."Now, scripture talks about different spheres of authority, so I'm going to talk about the different spheres of authority. Authority in the church, authority in marriage, authority with children, and authority with the civil government, and look at every single one of those spheres through the prism of yoke, cup, and towel, and that's how you understand Godly authority. So, authority in the church. Scripture teaches that Jesus is the head of the church and that Jesus rules over the church through his Word, and God sends the Holy Spirit. The Holy Scripture talks about under-shepherds that are given to the church, called by God to teach and care for the flock.So, if you, and here, I'm speaking to myself, I'm speaking to the leaders in the church. If we are to wield this authority rightly, there is a yoke of submission to God's Word, there's a cup of suffering. If you want to lead in the church, if you want to do ministry, there's always suffering. If you want to minister to people on the soul level, there's always suffering. There's always opposition from Satan and the demonic. And then there's the towel, where you care for the practical needs of your brothers and sisters, that's how Godly authority is to be wielded.Hebrews 13:17, "Obey your leaders and submit to them for they are keeping watch over your souls as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you." As a pastor, Pastor Shane Pastor and Andy, we take this seriously. We will stand before God and given an account for how we do ministry. And it's frightening, and that's why we want to do ministry God's way. God's work, God's way.There's authority in marriage and the family. Scripture talks about God's design for family, God's design for marriage, that husbands are an authority over wives, to love, to honor, to serve, to sacrifice. 1 Corinthians 11:3, God grounds this idea of headship and the Trinity. "But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ and the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God." And this is important because St. Paul doesn't ground this in culture, he grounds this in the Trinity, that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are equal in power. They're equal in divinity. And yet, Jesus submits to the headship of God the Father, and we see that pattern that Jesus is the head of the church, and that Jesus is the head of the man, and then the husband is supposed to be in this godly, sacrificial headship over the wife.Ephesians 5:22-25, "Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her." St. Paul grounds it in the Trinity, he grounds it in the church that Jesus is head over the church, and he grounds it in God's created order.1 Corinthians 11:8-9, "For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man." And I say that the Trinity, the church, and creation are the foundation for the doctrine of headship because a lot of people reject this and they say, "It was cultural." It wasn't cultural. St. Paul wasn't wearing cultural goggles as he was writing this. He was pointing to things that are eternal. So, practically, how does this work itself out practically? Sacrifice. Who should be sacrificing most in a marriage? It's the husband. You lead with sacrifice. Just practically, how does this work out? When you're eating a delicious meal together, husbands and wives, who gets the last piece?This week, my wife and I, we buy this delicious salami from Trader Joe's. It's wrapped in paper. It's so good. And my wife and I, we wait until our kids are asleep, and we're just downing this thing. It is so good. And out of nowhere, we're on the last piece. We just demolished this thing, just inhaled it. And the last piece, and my wife is eyeing it, and I'm eyeing it. And I was meditating on this text, and I was like ahh, I was like, "Baby, here you go." And she's like, "No, I don't want it." And I know she's lying. And then she takes it and I'm like ... And I thought she was going to take a bite and give the rest back to me. That's the pattern. No! Gone! Gone! Sacrifice, sacrifice.Parents over children, there's authority to teach, to command, to discipline. Ephesians 6:1-4, "Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and mother, this is the first commandments with a promise, that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land. Fathers, do not provoke your children with anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." So, parents are to be authoritative, not authoritarian. So, not leading in a way that provokes the child, but leading the heart, shepherding the heart. And yes, we are to tell our children yes and no. The fact that he says, "Children obey," means that there is an act of guidance, act of discipleship over our children.This week, my daughter, Ekaterina, she's four. She's number three in the order. Ekaterina, driving home from preschool with my wife. She says, "Mom, there's a boy at school today who stole chocolate and he put it in his pocket." And they're driving home from the store. And my wife is like, "Huh." Come home, and she's like, "Come here. Let me check your pocket." Chocolate bunny in her pocket. Stole it! What do we do? What do we do? You got to discipline, but it's got to be a loving discipline. So, my wife unwraps it, and being the wise, Godly sage she is, broke off the bunny's head and gave it to her. "Don't do this anymore." And then she ate the rest. So, it was just this incredible mix of ... You're welcome. It's got to be both.And authority of the civil government. Scripture talks about the fact that we are to honor and pray for those in authority over us. Romans 13:1-2, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Who's he ... He's writing in a culture where Caesar is the emperor. Unrighteous, ungodly leader, and St. Paul says that there needs to be a respect for authorities, and obviously, not when those authorities contradict the Word of God. So, Acts 5:29, Peter gives the example, "We must obey God rather than men." In 1 Timothy 2:1-2 says, "First of all then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, Godly and dignified in every way."Some Christians sin in their utter disrespect for those in authority. Yet, there's got to be this balance where I don't agree with the person, I don't agree with the policies, but there is a respect for the office, for the authorities. We are told to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's and give unto God what is God's. We will never give to Caesar what is God's, but we are called to honor, to respect, and to pray for.I'll close with this. Philippians 2:5-11, this is the ancient hymn about Christ coming to serve, showing us true Godly authority: "Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Jesus Christ who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."Every single knee will bow. Either we bow in this life, humbly accepting the Grace of God, or we will bow the knee in the next life under judgment and condemnation. So, we call you, if you're not yet a Christian, bow your knee to Jesus Christ in repentance. Submit to his good authority, and on the day that we humble ourselves, he raises us up. Let's pray.Lord, we do start with repenting of the fact that our pride gets in the way of submitting to your authority all too often. We all too often think that our way is the right way, that our truth is the ultimate truth. We repent of all that. And I pray Lord that you give us grace to submit ourselves, to yield ourselves, yield our wills to the will of God the Father. We thank you Jesus that you took the yoke, you took the cup, and you took the towel. And I pray that you give us grace to do the same. And we pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

No episódio de hoje buscamos construir um diálogo com o sociólogo Peter L. Berger e sua concepção sobre a cultura humana e seu papel de criação do mundo dos seres humanos, bem como de suas sociedades. Este episódio foi introdutório, pois falaremos mais sobre a temática em episódios seguintes. Não se esqueça de assinar e compartilhar este Podcaste!

In this podcast, Paul Axton compares the work of Mircea Eliade, the father of religious studies, and Peter Berger, the father of the notion of the social construction of reality, so as to arrive at a biblical understanding of religion. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to support our work. Music: Bensound

In this conversation with Peter Berger, Director of Innovation at EmbraerX, we explore not just the future of urban mobility, we also learn how you build up an innovation discipline, how you organize a team, and how you track trends and concepts for technology that might not even exist yet.

In der zweiten Folge meines Podcast mache ich mir Gedanken übers Zweifeln. Warum zweifeln wir so viel wenn wir erwachsen werden? Meine Inspiration stammt dieses Mal aus dem Buch: "Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit" von Peter Berger und Thomas Luckmann

Fuat Keyman Kimdir? Fuat Keyman, İstanbul Politikalar Merkezi Direktörü ve Sabancı Üniversitesi Uluslararası İlişkiler Profesörüdür. Türkiye'nin önde gelen siyaset bilimcilerinden Keyman, demokratikleşme, küreselleşme, uluslararası ilişkiler, Türkiye-AB ilişkileri, Türk dış politikası ve sivil toplumun gelişimi konularında uzmanlaşmıştır. Keyman, Bilim Akademisi üyesidir. 2013 yılında, 7. Tasam Stratejik Vizyon Ödülleri kapsamında Stratejik Vizyon Sahibi Bilim İnsanı Ödülü kazanmıştır. Akil İnsanlar Heyeti üyesi olarak Kürt meselesiyle ilgili çözüm sürecinde çalışmıştır. Prestijli birçok ulusal ve uluslararası kuruluşun danışma kurulu üyeliğini yürüten Keyman, çok sayıda önemli uluslararası akademik derginin yayın kurulunda da görev yapmaktadır. Sabancı Üniversitesi'ndeki görevi öncesinde, 2002-2010 yılları arasında Koç Üniversitesi Uluslararası İlişkiler bölümü ve 1994-2002 yılları arasında Bilkent Üniversitesi Siyaset Bilimi ve Kamu Yönetimi bölümünde ders vermiş, ayrıca 1997 yazında Carleton Üniversitesi'nde Misafir Öğretim Üyesi olarak çalışmıştır. Wellesley College ve Harvard Üniversitesi'nde doktora sonrası çalışmalarını tamamlamıştır. AB Çerçeve Programı ile Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırmalar Türkiye Konseyi'nden birçok prestijli hibe almıştır. Peter Berger ve Samuel Huntington'ın Çoklu Küreselleşmeler, CIVICUS ve Türkiye'de Sivil Toplumun Haritalandırılması gibi çeşitli projelerin araştırma direktörlüğünü yürütmüştür. Keyman, Türkiye'de sosyal ve siyasal eğilimler, Anadolu şehirlerinin kentsel dönüşümü ve birlikte yaşamak üzerine kapsamlı araştırma projesi yürütmüştür. Keyman doktora derecesini Uluslararası İlişkiler ve Karşılaştırmalı Siyaset üzerine Carleton Üniversitesi'nden, lisans ve yüksek lisans derecelerini Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi'nden almıştır.

westlake, church, Lausanne, Geneva, EPFL, UNIL, evangelical, english, speaking, baptist, presbyterian, anglican, bible, Colossians, Colossae, gospel, Jesus, filled, fullness, prayer, knowledge, wisdom, understanding, power, endurance, joy, Peter Berger, Jordan Peterson

In this episode we reflect on a 2008 article by the recently deceased Peter Berger which originally appeared in First Things. In it Berger argues that while modernity pluralizes it doesn't really secularize or make culture anti-religious, whether it tries to or not. The Berger article can be found here: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/02/secularization-falsified. The article from Sean Kelly can be found here: https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/navigating-past-nihilism/. Here's the Halik quote we reference: "Were Christianity to turn its back on modernity it would sink into bigotry and fundamentalist religion; and conversely, were modernity to turnaway completely from Christianity it would itself become an intolerant pseudoreligion." Halík, Tomáš. I Want You to Be: On the God of Love (p. 150). University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.

Several European countries, the EU, and Canada have recently addressed religious freedom in their foreign policies. Given that US policy is already shaped by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by Congress, the potential exists for transatlantic cooperation in promoting religious freedom. However, differences among Western democracies are significant. This dialogue—the first in a year-long series on IRFA policy—aims to identify these differences and find ways to accommodate or overcome them in the urgent task of advancing international religious freedom. This day-long event featured many speakers from academia and the policy world, including one of the world's leading sociologists, Peter Berger of Boston University; New York Times columnist David Brooks; and David Saperstein, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Several European countries, the EU, and Canada have recently addressed religious freedom in their foreign policies. Given that US policy is already shaped by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by Congress, the potential exists for transatlantic cooperation in promoting religious freedom. However, differences among Western democracies are significant. This dialogue—the first in a year-long series on IRFA policy—aims to identify these differences and find ways to accommodate or overcome them in the urgent task of advancing international religious freedom. This day-long event featured many speakers from academia and the policy world, including one of the world's leading sociologists, Peter Berger of Boston University; New York Times columnist David Brooks; and David Saperstein, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Several European countries, the EU, and Canada have recently addressed religious freedom in their foreign policies. Given that US policy is already shaped by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by Congress, the potential exists for transatlantic cooperation in promoting religious freedom. However, differences among Western democracies are significant. This dialogue—the first in a year-long series on IRFA policy—aims to identify these differences and find ways to accommodate or overcome them in the urgent task of advancing international religious freedom. This day-long event featured many speakers from academia and the policy world, including one of the world's leading sociologists, Peter Berger of Boston University; New York Times columnist David Brooks; and David Saperstein, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Several European countries, the EU, and Canada have recently addressed religious freedom in their foreign policies. Given that US policy is already shaped by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by Congress, the potential exists for transatlantic cooperation in promoting religious freedom. However, differences among Western democracies are significant. This dialogue—the first in a year-long series on IRFA policy—aims to identify these differences and find ways to accommodate or overcome them in the urgent task of advancing international religious freedom. This day-long event featured many speakers from academia and the policy world, including one of the world's leading sociologists, Peter Berger of Boston University; New York Times columnist David Brooks; and David Saperstein, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

Several European countries, the EU, and Canada have recently addressed religious freedom in their foreign policies. Given that US policy is already shaped by the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) passed by Congress, the potential exists for transatlantic cooperation in promoting religious freedom. However, differences among Western democracies are significant. This dialogue—the first in a year-long series on IRFA policy—aims to identify these differences and find ways to accommodate or overcome them in the urgent task of advancing international religious freedom. This day-long event featured many speakers from academia and the policy world, including one of the world's leading sociologists, Peter Berger of Boston University; New York Times columnist David Brooks; and David Saperstein, US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.

This is our second episode in our How To Read The Bible Series. At the beginning (0-21:40) Tim and Jon start the episode talking about how the ancient Hebrew practice of reading the Torah aloud spun out into the New Testament. Jesus himself participated in public readings of Hebrew scriptures, and actually announced his public ministry at one. The second part of the show (21:40-34:36 ) the guys have a fascinating discussion on the sociology and group identity formation elements of Christianity. They discuss ideas by famed sociologist Peter Berger about how humans both create environments and are created by environments. Jon wonders if Christianity is just a social construct or if there is something real to gather around. In the final part of the show (34:36-End) Tim shares part of an essay by N.T. Wright called “How is the Bible Authoritative?” Tim and Jon discuss the differences between stories and facts, how stories have a different kind of power than facts, and why it’s more powerful to view the Bible as a story, not as a rulebook. This show is designed to accompany our new video on reading Scripture together in a community. You can check it out on our Youtube page here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO1Y9XyWKTw Show Resources: The Didache - early Christian manual on discipleship. Wikipedia Resource. Desiring The Kingdom. By James Smith. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. By Peter Berger The Sacred Canopy: Elements of A Sociological Theory of Religion. By Peter Berger. Essay: How Is The Bible Authoritative? By N.T. Wright Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. By Yuval Noah Harari Show Music: Defender Instrumental by Rosasharn Music The Size of Grace by Beautiful Eulogy Conquer by Propaganda

This is a Q&A episode of the Theology Nerd podcast, where we answer questions that listeners like you send in. We talk about how not to preach the woman at the well story (John 4), the intersection of musical theater and theology, and what Peter Berger's Sacred Canopy has to say (if anything) about the Trump administration. Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a Q&A episode of the Theology Nerd podcast, where we answer questions that listeners like you send in. We talk about how not to preach the woman at the well story (John 4), the intersection of musical theater and theology, and what Peter Berger’s Sacred Canopy has to say (if anything) about the Trump… Read more about Politics, Musical Theater, and the Woman at the Well

November 15, 2016 at the Boston Athenæum. In his recent book, The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age, Peter Berger argues that, contrary to popular belief, we don’t live in a secular age–we live in a pluralist one. Put differently, our problem is not that God is dead, but that there are many gods. Join us for a consideration of a new paradigm for understanding religion and pluralism in an age of multiple modernities.

Part 2 of Kent's conversation with Peter Berger -- CEO of Contact IQ and former Director of Strategic Development at Tagged.  Peter is also the organizer of the Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group.   -- In the Something Ventured podcast, Silicon Valley insider Kent Lindstrom explores the reality behind the Silicon Valley headlines as he sits down with the people who are shaping the way we view the world online and beyond.

Peter Berger is the CEO of Contact IQ.  He's an entrepreneur who was formerly the Director of Strategic Development at Tagged.  He is the Organizer of the Silicon Valley Semantic Technology Group, which has over 1000 members.  His path to being CEO of Contact IQ -- well, it probably wasn't what you imagine, and it's certainly more interesting.  In this discussion we cover a range of issues in Silicon Valley, and Peter's path to his current success.   -- In the Something Ventured podcast, Silicon Valley insider Kent Lindstrom explores the reality behind the Silicon Valley headlines as he sits down with the people who are shaping the way we view the world online -- and beyond.

"What is truth?"—a rhetorical question famously snarled by Pontius Pilate during his interrogation of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yet the question is a real one, and the answer of monumental significance in every day and age. But especially in ours, an age in which the very concept of truth itself is under merciless attack. Joining us, for the first of a short series of interviews, is the writer and researcher Thomas R. Goehle, author of the important new book America's Post-Christian Apocalypse: How Secular Modernism Marginalized Christianity and The Peril of Leaving God Behind at the End of the Age. Beginning with the thesis of his book—that "secular (post)modernism has increasingly replaced Christianity as the hegemonic authority in our society"—we discuss how some of the negative fruits of the Enlightenment led a spiritually-autonomous humanity into the absurdities of extreme relativism and political correctness, and ask if such a humanity could resist the tyranny of a nascent New World Order. Thomas Goehle earned a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy of Religion (honors) from Denver Seminary. He lives in Williamsville, New York where he is working on his next book tentatively entitled Transhumanism, AI, and the Apocalypse. (For show notes please visit http://themindrenewed.com)

"What is truth?"—a rhetorical question famously snarled by Pontius Pilate during his interrogation of Jesus 2000 years ago. Yet the question is a real one, and the answer of monumental significance in every day and age. But especially in ours, an age in which the very concept of truth itself is under merciless attack. Joining us, for the first of a short series of interviews, is the writer and researcher Thomas R. Goehle, author of the important new book America's Post-Christian Apocalypse: How Secular Modernism Marginalized Christianity and The Peril of Leaving God Behind at the End of the Age. Beginning with the thesis of his book—that "secular (post)modernism has increasingly replaced Christianity as the hegemonic authority in our society"—we discuss how some of the negative fruits of the Enlightenment led a spiritually-autonomous humanity into the absurdities of extreme relativism and political correctness, and ask if such a humanity could resist the tyranny of a nascent New World Order. Thomas Goehle earned a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy of Religion (honors) from Denver Seminary. He lives in Williamsville, New York where he is working on his next book tentatively entitled Transhumanism, AI, and the Apocalypse. (For show notes please visit http://themindrenewed.com)

Our second spooktacular. This is a show about stuff you should be more afraid of than you are.  Dan shares the biggest fears of friends and experts. Jeff shares his recipe for a mini-bug-out-bag, should the apocalypse arise.  Dr. CJ Armstrong joins the wasteland gents at the end to bring a word of comfort in the face of fear and death.  Jeff reads a moving passage from Peter Berger's book A Rumor of Angels.

REFLECTION QUOTES “If our gospel does not inspire thought, and if our theology does not inspire preaching, there is no Christianity in either.” ~James Denney (1856-1917), Scottish theologian and pastor “Secularism doesn't produce secularism; it produces pluralism. The problem is not that God is dead, but that there are too many gods.” ~Peter Berger, famed Austrian-born sociologist “We modern people…believe in no God or no God you can really know because we believe in freedom. If there was a God we could know, who told us how we had to live…, then we wouldn't be free….” ~Albert Camus (1913-1960), French Nobel Prize winning author “[C]onscious autonomy is a charade…. We tend to see ourselves as self-determining, self-conscious agents in all that we decide and do, and we cling to that image. But why? Why do we resist the truth? Why do we wish—strain, strive, against the grain of reality—to be autonomous individuals, and see ourselves as such?” ~“Deluded Individualism” by Firmin DeBrabander in The New York Times 12/16/2012 “Mental health is an on going process of dedication to reality at all costs.” ~M. Scott Peck (1936-2005), American psychiatrist “Divine grace does not trample on human personality. Rather the reverse, for it enables human beings to be truly human. It is sin which imprisons; it is grace which liberates.” ~John Stott (1921-2011), British theologian “The secret to freedom…is worship. You need worship. You need great worship. You need weeping worship. You need glorious worship. You need to sense God's greatness and to be moved by it—moved to tears and moved to laughter—move by who God is and what He has done for you.” ~Tim Keller, pastor in New York City “All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.” ~James Thurber (1894-1961), American cartoonist and writer SERMON PASSAGE Acts 7 – Stephen in Jerusalem 48 …the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says: 49 ‘Heaven is My throne,
And earth is the footstool of My feet;
What kind of house will you build for Me?' says the Lord,
‘Or what place is there for My repose? 50 ‘Was it not My hand which made all these things?' Acts 14 – Paul in Lystra 12 And they began calling Barnabas, Zeus, and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates, and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds. 14 But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their robes and rushed out into the crowd, crying out 15 and saying, “Men, why are you doing these things? We are also men of the same nature as you, and preach the gospel to you that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them. Acts 17 – Paul in Athens 16 Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was being provoked within him as he was observing the city full of idols…. 22 So Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I observe that you are very religious in all respects. 23 For while I was passing through and examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.' Therefore what you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; 25 nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things…. Acts 19 – Paul in Ephesus 23 About that time there occurred no small disturbance concerning the Way. 24 For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis… 25 …gathered together with the workmen of similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that our prosperity depends upon this business. 26 You see and hear that not only in Ephesus, but in almost all of Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable number of people, saying that gods made with hands are no gods at all. 27 Not only is there danger that this trade of ours fall into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis be regarded as worthless and that she whom all of Asia and the world worship will even be dethroned from her magnificence.” 28 When they heard this and were filled with rage, they began crying out, saying, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto has seen it all.  The JFK assassination coverage, the rise of the Nazis, a famous drinking horse in Germany, the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, and of course the Vietnam War.  Uwe talks about getting a doctorate after a not so good high school experience.  We learn why our news media has gone so far away from its original calling or vocation today.  Learn why you should not criticize a German town’s beer. Learn who can drink more beer and not slur: Catholic priests or Lutheran pastors.  Find out how clumsy and immature JFK was, but also how he rose to the occasion when global annihilation loomed.  What should a journalist do when they come across a scandal?  Find out why Uwe wouldn't mind being a horse poop specialist.  By the way, you wish you were as cool as the guy in the picture here.  I suppose you can be.  Just become a journalist in the old school style.  Learn about how Uwe came to study with Peter Berger, thanks to his wife, Gillian's wise sense of Uwe's suitability for the clergy ranks, or lack thereof.  

REFLECTION QUOTES “If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.” ~C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) in The Abolition of Man “Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.” ~Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949), American journalist and author of Gone with the Wind “…[The seeker knows that] he cannot go to God, but that God must go to him in His inconceivable grace.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1909-1945), German pastor-theologian, executed for his opposition to the Nazis “Love that goes upward is worship; love that goes outward is affection; love that stoops is grace.” ~Donald Grey Barnhouse (1895-1960), late pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia “In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.” ~Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990), English journalist “Secularism doesn't produce secularism; it produces pluralism. The challenge is not that God is dead, but that there are too many gods.” ~Peter Berger (1929-present), famed Austrian-born sociologist “For [the book of] Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming…Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted.” ~A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 1963) SERMON PASSAGE Acts 1:1-9 1 The first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach, 2 until the day when He was taken up to heaven, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. 3 To these He also presented Himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. 4 Gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” He said, “you heard of from Me; 5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” 6 So when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; 8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.” 9 And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.

There are lots of introductory books to the study of religion. Craig Martin, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, has added his own contribution to this ever-growing canon, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (Acumen Publishing, 2012). But why? What does this new intro offer? Well, if you are interested in learning how to penetrate the deep true meaning of the sacred or how we can understand the nature of religious belief or experience then keep looking. Martin offers an alternative to most introductions by presenting a socio-functional approach to cultural traditions and generally attempts to demystify religion as a natural category. In A Critical Introduction, Martin offers an explanation of various elements of society by exploring notions of classification, structure, and habitus. He also walks readers through the social components of religious traditions, touching upon the concepts of legitimation, authority, and authenticity. Martin is very much influenced by authors such as Karl Marx, Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruce Lincoln, among many others. Overall, this new introduction presents a critical approach to religious phenomena, which provides methods to determine the historical contexts, material consequences, and beneficiaries of particular cultural practices. In our conversation we discussed functionalism, social boundaries, classification, social constructionism, the relationship between words and things, animism, stereotypes, essentialism, the naturalization of the social order, class difference, the supernaturalization of claims, cultural toolboxes, absent authority, projection, and the difference between religions and other cultural practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are lots of introductory books to the study of religion. Craig Martin, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College, has added his own contribution to this ever-growing canon, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (Acumen Publishing, 2012). But why? What does this new intro offer? Well, if you are interested in learning how to penetrate the deep true meaning of the sacred or how we can understand the nature of religious belief or experience then keep looking. Martin offers an alternative to most introductions by presenting a socio-functional approach to cultural traditions and generally attempts to demystify religion as a natural category. In A Critical Introduction, Martin offers an explanation of various elements of society by exploring notions of classification, structure, and habitus. He also walks readers through the social components of religious traditions, touching upon the concepts of legitimation, authority, and authenticity. Martin is very much influenced by authors such as Karl Marx, Peter Berger, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruce Lincoln, among many others. Overall, this new introduction presents a critical approach to religious phenomena, which provides methods to determine the historical contexts, material consequences, and beneficiaries of particular cultural practices. In our conversation we discussed functionalism, social boundaries, classification, social constructionism, the relationship between words and things, animism, stereotypes, essentialism, the naturalization of the social order, class difference, the supernaturalization of claims, cultural toolboxes, absent authority, projection, and the difference between religions and other cultural practices. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Podcast Transcript... The post Rethinking Secularization: A Conversation with Peter Berger appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

Host: Doug Weaver, MD Guest: Peter Berger, MD It is no longer a question of whether antiplatelet therapy should be used following implantation of a drug-eluting stent, but rather to what extent and to what duration. With this in mind, many new challenges arise, from bleeding risks to drug intolerance and product cost. Host Dr. Doug Weaver welcomes Dr. Peter Berger, associate chief research officer and director of the Center for Clinical Studies at the Geisinger Clinic in central Pennsylvania, to discuss how we’re moving to address these concerns. Dr. Berger also details a series of related procedural circumstances—dental surgery, bronchoscopy, certain orthopaedic procedures and more—in which antiplatelet therapy need not be discontinued.

Host: Doug Weaver, MD Guest: Peter Berger, MD It is no longer a question of whether antiplatelet therapy should be used following implantation of a drug-eluting stent, but rather to what extent and to what duration. With this in mind, many new challenges arise, from bleeding risks to drug intolerance and product cost. Host Dr. Doug Weaver welcomes Dr. Peter Berger, associate chief research officer and director of the Center for Clinical Studies at the Geisinger Clinic in central Pennsylvania, to discuss how we’re moving to address these concerns. Dr. Berger also details a series of related procedural circumstances—dental surgery, bronchoscopy, certain orthopaedic procedures and more—in which antiplatelet therapy need not be discontinued.

Experts once predicted that as the world grew more modern, religion would decline. Precisely the opposite has proven true; religious movements are surging and driving “alternative globalizations” across the world. Two leading thinkers offer a penetrating view of how and why religion of all kinds is shaping the global economy and political order.