CrossCurrent Podcasts

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the "spirit of protestation." Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France's Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself.

Guest Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University; she is currently at work on two projects. The first one, tentatively titled Transnational Theologies — Religious Networks and The Making of French Thought, is centered on the reconfiguration of French thought between the wars, informed by transnational circulations, exchanges of ideas across cultural spaces, and intellectual transfers between the religious and the secular spheres. The second one is a French literary history of the notion of conspiracy, both as form and as imaginary, from Balzac and Marcel Proust to Paul Nizan and Michel Houellebecq.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press.

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In Constructing Christendom: Conquest and Diocese Formation in Medieval Iberia (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026), Dr. Thomas W. Barton examines how church leaders partnered with lay rulers to integrate lands conquered from the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. In tracing the intricate developmental histories of a cluster of competitive neighboring bishoprics, Dr. Barton reveals how rival factions fought over new territory by asserting that it belonged to their foundations according to ancient precedent. Wielding self-interested, manipulated recollections of the organization of the Visigothic church that had predated the eighth-century Muslim conquest did more than further these local territorial battles; it helped promote a shared revisionist Christian historical vision that delegitimized non-Christian rule and emphasized the elemental, divinely ordained centrality of papal authority.

Based on over a decade of research and drawing on documentation from numerous underutilized local archives, Constructing Christendom presents the unwritten histories of these foundations to demonstrate how such local efforts to expand Latin Christendom’s frontiers and establish or enlarge dioceses came to be associated with the reordering of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the solidification of a cohesive European Christian identity. Despite the persistence of some unique features deriving from the formational histories of these frontier bishoprics, the overarching trend, Dr. Barton finds, was toward gradual homogenization, as dioceses on Christendom’s periphery and established ones situated closer to its core increasingly came to resemble one another in terms of their administrative and cultural attributes and relationships to papacy-centric governance.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Western civilization is being challenged in the ongoing riots in France. A new poll reveals younger generations are open to Sharia law. Kalshi has found ways to sidestep gambling laws. And should Christians be celebrating horror movies and books?

Segment 1 – France is Burning; Support for Sharia is Growing

• Need link to Friday BP

• Truth Rising Documentary

• Truth Rising The Study

• Sharia Law Poll

Segment 2 – Kalshi and Betting

• Kalshi and Gambling

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In this episode of the Christian Indie Writers' Podcast, we're talking about how to breathe new life into older books, reach new readers, and generate more sales from the stories you've already published. Instead of constantly focusing on your next release, learn how to make your entire book catalog work for you!

Your LED bulbs, your underwear, and your toast might all be quietly working against your fertility. Harvard-trained epidemiologist Katy Talento is back on our podcast to explain why, and what you can actually do about it.

At Them Before Us, we spend a lot of time on what happens downstream: a culture that tells women to delay, then an industry that sells their fertility back to them with another woman's eggs, another woman's womb, and a lab. In this episode, Katy and Jenn go upstream. We cover what modern life is doing to our bodies, why the "career first, babies later" script fails women, and how the choices you make at 19 shape the family your grandkids will grow up in. Children aren't a product to buy back after the fertile years are gone. This one will change how you think about light, college, and your grocery cart.

About Katy: Katy Talento is a Harvard-trained epidemiologist, naturopathic doctor, and former Trump White House health policy advisor and Special Assistant to the President. She spent two decades inside the DC healthcare machine, then left to help everyday people and employers outsmart it.

Chapters:

0:00 Katy Talento returns

0:57 Scurvy season and the winter slump

3:14 Blue light versus red light

5:08 How light affects sleep and fertility

6:25 Why you should ditch your LED bulbs

7:28 How culture flipped women's fertility upside down

10:37 Egg freezing and the ticking clock

11:47 Why you shouldn't wait once you find the one

12:37 Where you settle shapes future generations

14:00 Rethinking the value of college

20:04 Why the best men are going into the trades

21:50 What government can do about the birth rate

22:48 Microplastics and fertility-killing chemicals

24:31 The administration's step backward on glyphosate

27:05 Why MAHA messaging still matters

29:32 Industry pressure inside the White House

32:31 Where to find Katy

Find Katy:

Substack: https://katytalento.com

Naturopathic practice: https://allbetter.life

Employer health plans: https://allbetter.health

Instagram, X, LinkedIn: @katytalento

Facebook: https://facebook.com/katytalento.nd

Mentioned in this episode:

Katy's first appearance, episode 99: https://youtu.be/41qEL9H-CFU?si=AkUAP-7eEh9rtC8Y

Katy's guest post for Them Before Us, "Infertile":

Them Before Us:

Website: thembeforeus.com

Substack: thembeforeus.substack.com

#fertility #infertility #MAHA

Rob Jackson addresses common questions parents have when their children identify with the LGBT lifestyle. Offering guidance rooted in faith and love, Rob discusses topics such as gender confusion, same-sex attraction, and approaching difficult conversations. He reminds listeners to find hope in God while navigating their child’s journey.

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From Transgendered to Transformed

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The alliance of radical leftism and Islamism will destroy a society even if for conflicting reasons.  

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️ FREE: Kingdom Writers Conference, Write with God edition on Wednesday, October 28. If God gave you a book and you've been stuck on it, join CJ and me for a free online conference where every speaker shares a different way they've learned to partner with God in their writing. Get your free ticket: https://www.trainingauthors.com/conference

Should Christian writers use AI to write a book? Every conversation about AI and writing comes down to one question: who is holding the pen, and who is holding the plan?

CJ and I share where we have landed. We don't recommend writing your book with AI, and I use AI almost every day. Both are true. I tell how I resisted AI until God got my attention through two conversations in the same week, and CJ talks about good ideas versus God ideas, and why AI is a tool, not a compass.

We also walk through what Amazon KDP means by AI generated versus AI assisted, a simple way to let AI interview you when a chapter won't come, where AI goes wrong, and what it looks like when AI serves your calling instead of replacing your voice.

Scripture mentioned: 1 John 2:26-27 and Habakkuk 2:1.

This is the first episode in a three-part series on AI for Kingdom Writers.