Becoming Human

Being a singer-songwriter and creating music, poetry, videos, and stories is a complicated role. Jon Torrence is a creator — but not just of art. He is a creator of meaningful experiences and seeks to put life into words and sounds. 

This episode is a listening room for Jon Torrence of The Native Heart with live performances of four original songs and a host of conversations exploring the background of each song and ideas on creativity, the importance of music history, using stories to create art, and the balance of creating for popularity and creating for meaning. 

Featured songs by Jon Torrence and The Native Heart:

• Pass the Time
• The Fallows
• Fingerprints
• David’s Song

Achieving the ideal of ecological ethics is not realistic. The first suggestion is to accept the impossibility. Living ecologically is not a test to pass but a journey to improve. Our goal should not be to fix something but to live in the best way possible.

Once we've accepted that our life and society are rife with compromises, we can begin asking questions to inform the daily decisions for how we will do everything.

Food is the most practical dimension of ecological ethics. So, how should we eat? What are the effects of our food decisions? Should we take this more seriously? And, what should our relationship to food look like?

This episode explores three general guidelines that might help capture the philosophy of ecological entanglement when it comes to food.

Why don’t movements work? History tends to repeat itself and we’re still wrestling with the same issues that have been plaguing society for millennia. Ecological ethics, then, can’t be a movement. But what other options are there?

This episode takes the philosophy of ecological ethics and offers a practice called Place Economy; which is really about community and belonging within the finite limitations of human beings. In order to make good ecological sense for the planet, we must make good ecological sense where we are.

Is there a philosophical and practical premise for ecological ethics?

Despite technological advancement, there is still a mystery to being alive and a mystery to the natural world we are a part of. Why should that matter and how should we live with the natural world?

This episode explores four premises:

1. Contingency - the nature of existence and the givenness of life.
2. Inherent Value - the perception of existence and its potential goodness.
3. Inherent Process - the mechanics of existence for how living things are in process.
4. Teleology - the ethic of existence and how our actions can be determined by the goal of existence: Universal Flourishing

Are there moral principles and philosophical perspectives relating to the natural world? Should we care about the earth? Should it be confined to political or religious ideologies?

This episode explores ecological entanglement, depoliticizing environmentalism, and the central principle for why human beings should prioritize their relationship to the earth; which has nothing to do with the environment.

We continue our conversation on community with Dr. Ashley Pryor-Geiger and Amie Brodie. How should community work? What is required for a community to function healthily, especially with relational conflict that is bound to happen?

We explore the roadblocks to community and observational practices for how to approach the difficult yet necessary experience of relationships that hold a common life well.

A philosophical, sociological, and pragmatic survey of community.

How has community been understood and how shouldn't community be understood in conversation with Dr. Ashley Pryor-Geiger of the University of Toledo and Amie Brodie of The Farmhouse. Community is something that we talk about a lot, but do we actually understand it?

Community is the common life of a person's experience with other people together that transcends the individual. While there's no single definition, there are some ingredients necessary for community to occur.

What causes a person to sign up for an Ironman? For Morgan Hudik, it was a major surgery as a result of her family’s genetics. Not having a BRCA gene forced Morgan to make a huge decision that came with major changes, major loss, and deep pain. 

But Morgan’s story is an example of taking deep pain and turning it into deep love. She’s an extrovert, but she has created a wise, welcoming presence that holds the deepest wounds of the human condition. Her life has become a medium for creating belonging, healing, hope, connection, and beauty in the world around her. 

She makes the world feel more at home — but first, she had to learn to be at home with herself. 

How did Morgan come to embody such a presence? What does a real kind of life look like? And how can we — in a dark, difficult, and painful world — learn to do the same?

Existential Death

Grief is not just for the loss of a person. Anything lost requires the grieving process. This episode explores why that is so necessary with an example of an existential death and how it was grieved.

Music composed by Jon Torrence from The Native Heart.

Reading from the memoir: "A Lost Home, A Lost Family, and a Tequila Bottle Full of Dirt."