For me, as far back as I can remember, doubt and faith have always come as a pair; twin companions in a way, joined at the hip. That always made me feel uneasy— I think I must have been told sometime, somewhere, that the goal of faith was to get rid of doubt.

But what if doubt and faith are not adversarial? What if it is doubt that sometimes carries us to our faith? And what if our doubts are, at least in part, a misunderstanding of our faith?

Doubt and Faith, Doubt as Faith, today on Don’t Hold Me To This

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Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.  Music this week is by Marshall Usinger and C. J. Harris.

I remember as a child imagining a time as an adult when I’d know everything I’d need to know, with nothing left over. I’d have all the answers, delineated in black and white, I would have arrived at peak man.

I don’t know where I got that idea, but I imagine I’m not the only one who had it.

But what if growing as a human being is something other than no longer having anything to learn? What if black and white thinking is not a mark of having arrived? And what do we do when we’ve had that kind of thinking foisted upon us? How do we change? How do we heal?

Finding space in the gray, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This

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A new conclusion seems to have become fixed in our political, cultural, moral, and theological landscape.

An ever-shrinking narrowness, a tightening dogmatic exclusivity demands now that the foundation of our friendships must be lock step agreement in the minutest of details on an endless set of topics…and we’ve all just sort of agreed.

But what if it’s not true? What if our most important conversations and relationships can occur on a level beneath our conclusions? What if can talk freely, creatively, with exploration in our hearts, with improvisation at our core, with human commitment as our catalyst and with friendship as our guide and goal?

Don’t hold me to this is a cultivation of that sort of conversation, and an invitation into the possibility of that kind of friendship.

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Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.

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In much of our religious observance of God we might get the idea that whatever God is, he is out there, big, and distant in the universe.  But during this Christmas observance, we seem to inhabit a very different sort of story.

What does the humanity of the Story of God tell us about God?  And what does that kind of God tell us about us?  Humanity, God, and the Humanity of God, today on Don’t Hold Me to This

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.

One person said that the central friction with the son in the Prodigal story is that he had forgotten where he belonged.  Maybe at our core, to be human is to belong--to belong to a place and with that place, to belong with and for a community.

But why, then, is it so common for us to feel rootless and displaced? Why if belonging is part of what we are made for, do we experience so much exclusion? What is it we are afraid of?

Belonging and Fear, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.

I have a voice in my head (maybe you do, too; maybe we all do) that when faced with some moment of decision, some moment charged with possibility, the voice says “you’ll never make it,” “you will fail,” “who do you think you are to even try?”

Why is that? Who is that? And what does it take move despite that voice?

Shame, Imagination, and a Shared World, on this episode of Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.  You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com

Maybe there’s not a good answer to the question of God’s silence in response to our longing and desperation.  And maybe its a thing that we finally understand by years of experience rather than through some thorough analysis.  But still, what do we do when God’s presence seems like an empty room?

The Silence of God part two, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.  You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com

Someone once described God as a God who can’t stop speaking, and maybe that’s right. But I think for many of us, especially in our most desperate moments and our most desperate prayers, we experience something other than that.

What do we do when, shouting into the ether, or begging for relief up into the sky, the only thing we get back is the echo of our own voices?

The Silence of God, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This.

Most humans spend most of their life mostly working.  One researcher found that over the course of a life a person will spend 90,000 hours at their job, and that doesn’t include all of the other responsibilities we have that don’t count as our job: parenting, neighboring, mowing the lawn, fixing the dishwasher, feeding the dog, having a hobby.

We all have work to do: a set of responsibilities that are ours, everyday, lying on our shoulders.  But what does work mean? And why is it so central to who we are and loom so large on our horizons?  And how do we value it well?  And does it matter ultimately in the final sweep of all things.

Work, today on Don’t Hold Me To This.

Don’t Hold Me To This Podcast is a production of Don’t Hold Me To This. You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com

All of our lives are an improvisation, an effort to live with integrity in a way that is fit to the world and what we ought to make of it, what we ought to make with it, and what we ought to make for it.  And all of that is done into the unknown with real risk and we don’t have certainty about much of anything.  How do we live in such a place?  We improvise

Improvisation on Don’t Hold Me To This

You can find out more, do some more reading, and get in touch at dontholdmetothis.com