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Death is the one experience we all share, yet it remains the conversation we avoid most. In this episode, I sit down with death doula Britna Savarese to explore what it truly means to accompany someone at the end of life. We talk about why our culture struggles to face grief, how silence around death isolates the dying and their loved ones, and how reclaiming these conversations can bring healing, connection, and even beauty.

Britna I was raised Southern Baptist in a small town best known for its rodeo. As a skateboarding punk, she pushed against the system and questioned the rigid religion I was handed. That same spirit of questioning and reimagining guides her work as a death doula today. Just as Flipping Tables dismantles harmful narratives, she dismantles fear and silence around death—offering space for authentic reflection and intentional closure.

Britna shares powerful stories of walking alongside families in their most vulnerable moments and offers insight into how death work isn’t just about endings—it’s about presence, love, and honoring the whole of a life. Together, we explore the hesitancy many of us feel when confronting mortality, the lessons death has to teach us about living, and the hope that can be found in embracing this natural transition. And these conversations can help us prepare for ourselves and our loved ones for our next great adventure. 

This is a tender, vulnerable, and deeply human conversation. If you’ve ever felt uncertain about how to grieve, how to support a loved one, or how to face your own mortality with more grace and peace, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The role of a death doula and what it means to provide compassionate presence at the end of life

• Why our culture avoids talking about grief and how that avoidance impacts us

• The sacredness and beauty found in the transition from life to death

• How opening ourselves to conversations about death can actually deepen our appreciation for living

This episode is not about fear—it’s about finding courage, tenderness, and even hope in the face of the universal journey we all share.

Please consider supporting my work at patreon.com/montemader

“What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil?” — Heinrich Kramer (Malleus Maleficarum, 1487)Part I, Question VI

Today we travel to Europe's witch trials, the church and government leaders claimed it was to rid the world of women who had made pacts with Satan.

It was really just to remove women from positions of medical and religious power. and to it was to take their wealth and force their obedience. Priestesses, healers, midwives were targeted and the traditional role of women in medicine stripped and given to male doctors. Women who inherited land were targeted so their wealth could be given to powerful men. Women who refused marriage norms, appearance norms... also died in the flame.

The language and history that demonized the sexuality and prowess of women is the same language we hear today in purity and incel culture, with the same motive. The motive of stripping women of power, autonomy, wealth, equality and position,

The woman who refused to give up her power and knowledge, or chose to keep her own wealth, the woman that chose solitude... chose death

Sources

• Boyer, Paul & Nissenbaum, Stephen. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Harvard University Press, 1974.
• Mather, Cotton. Wonders of the Invisible World. 1693.
• Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Vintage, 2003.
• Reis, Elizabeth. Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. Cornell University Press, 1997.
• Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Augustine. City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson, Penguin Classics, 2003.
• Canon Episcopi (c. 906), in Robbins, Rossell Hope. Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology.

• Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica, 13th century.
• Levack, Brian. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 1987.
• Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

• Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Feminist Press, 1973.

• Roper, Lyndal. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. Yale University Press, 2004.

• Karlsen, Carol. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. W.W. Norton, 1987.

• Kramer, Heinrich and Sprenger, Jacob. Malleus Maleficarum. 1487. Trans. Montague Summers, 1928.

• Tertullian. On the Apparel of Women, 2nd century CE.

• Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

• Sharpe, James. Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in Early Modern England. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

• Kassell, Lauren. Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Clarendon Press, 2005.

• Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Oxford University Press, 1999.

• Rowlands, Alison. Witchcraft Narratives in Germany. Manchester University Press, 2003.

• Nissenbaum, Stephen. The Battle for Christmas. Vintage, 1996.
• Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities. Oxford University Press, 2003.
• MacMullen, Ramsay. Christianizing the Roman Empire. Yale University Press, 1984.
• Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• McDougall, Heather. “The Pagan Roots of Easter.” The Guardian, 2010.

• Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford, 1997.

• Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Penguin, 1964.

• Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ. Walker & Company, 2004.

• MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2010.

• Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright, 2020.

• Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright, 2017.

• Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies. Zero Books, 2017.

• Rogers, Nicholas. Witchcraft and the Western Imagination. Routledge, 2020.

• Donovan, Joan. “How QAnon Uses Digital Witch Hunts.” Harvard Kennedy School, 2021.

• Spring, Alexandra. “Inside the Tradwife Movement.” The Guardian, 2020.

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This episode is a bit of a rant. Bit of a verbal demo derby.
As the election heated up in 2024 I came across a Minnesota man walking through a pasture just ranting. I had just encountered @off_jawaggon or Jordan Waggoner. And here was a blue collar country boy giving an educated, intellectual rant when, judging by appearance alone, I would have thought would align more with the rural midwest. After watching his video I thought, I need to speak a lot louder. He was one of the people who "influenced" me.

Because sometimes, even when we don't think people will hear us, we can change the world for someone.
Today we talk about our stories, being Millennials in the political whiplash. The frustration, the anger, the "I just want to take you by the shoulder and shake the nonsense out of you!!!" in the current political climate but also remember that we are all able to do something.
The rock singer in Nashville, the country boy in Minnesota, the teacher in Texas, the Nurse in South Carolina. We, as ordinary everyday people can all make a difference in our circles. We are what make the country, not the wealthy or the politicians looking down on us.

Video for this episode available on patreon. Thank you to all my supporters www.patreon.com/montemader

The book "The Color of Compromise" is an heartbreaking historical journey through the history of America specifically around faith and the racial divide.

In this episode we sit with the author of "The Color of Compromise" and "The Spirit of Justice" Jemar Tisby. He is an author, historian, speaker and Christian who calls on his readers to faith history honestly, to step out of the bounds of complacency into real activism and real change.

Today we talk about head-shaking history, the development of "white is right" and the ideal that began to associate Christianity with European descent. We discuss "hereditary heathenism" and the key role the white church has played in injustice, both by her actions, and by her silence.

We get to choose in this moment how the story of our lives will be written. When it comes to our response to injustice, "What will it say?"

Sorry this came out late, for some reason it did not publish.

"History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes"- Mark Twain

It seems to be a common ideology that anyone who identifies as "left" or "liberal" or "progressive" or audible gasp "democratic socialist" is "a f*cking commie"!!!! And that of course is bad.... but why? Why is that rhetoric so ingrained in American vernacular?

In the wake of World War II, the tenuous "alliance" between the USSR and the USA disintegrated. With the entrance of nuclear arms, the ideological enemies and political superpowers fell immediately into the decades long Cold War. Fear of nuclear fallout, another devastating world war, was perfect political fodder for those who wanted to use fear to generate power, privilege and wealth for themselves.
Senator Joseph R McCarthy was a super power in his own right. From his speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, viciously clasping a piece of paper he claimed had over 200 names of employees in the state department who were communist spies. He levied unfounded accusations, ruined careers and lied his way into infamy. He, and his right hand man and future mafia and Trump lawyer Roy Cohn, made it a point to paint all their opposition as communist enemies of state. And it worked.. until it didn't.
We explore not just the life and movements of Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn, the Red Scare, the Lavender Scare and the thread of manipulation that leads us all the way to now.

Sources:

1. Richard H. Rovere – Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt Brace, 1959)

2. Ellen Schrecker – Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University Press, 1998)

3. David M. Oshinsky – A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (Oxford University Press, 1983)

4. Richard M. Fried – Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1990)

5. Howard Zinn – A People's History of the United States

6. John Lewis Gaddis – The Cold War: A New History (Penguin Press, 2005)

7. Arthur Herman – Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator

Government & Legal Documents

1. Army–McCarthy Hearings Transcript (1954)
   Available through the U.S. Senate Historical Office and National Archives.
   Excerpts are commonly found in collections like:
   📁 National Archives – Army-McCarthy Hearings

2. U.S. Senate Resolution 301 (1954) – Censure of Senator McCarthy.

   • Congressional Record

3. FBI Vault – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Files

• FBI Records: The Vault – Rosenberg Case

1. Venona Project Decrypts (NSA) – Declassified Soviet espionage cables.

• NSA.gov Venona Files

Journalism & Documentary Archives

1. Edward R. Murrow – “See It Now” Broadcast on McCarthy (March 9, 1954)

• CBS News Archives & YouTube

1. New York Times Archive – Coverage of McCarthy, the Rosenbergs, and the Army hearings.

2. Vanity Fair – “The Power and Poison of Roy Cohn” (2019)

• Vanity Fair – Roy Cohn

1. The New Yorker – “Roy Cohn and the Making of a Winner-Take-All America”

• New Yorker – Roy Cohn

1. The Guardian – “Trump's Roy Cohn Obsession” and Cohn’s legacy in GOP tactics.

• The Guardian – Roy Cohn

Video & Archival Footage

1. Army–McCarthy Hearings (C-SPAN Archive)

• C-SPAN: Army–McCarthy Hearings

1. “Have You No Sense of Decency?” – Joseph Welch Confronts McCarthy (June 9, 1954)

• YouTube Clip

1. PBS American Experience: “McCarthy”

• PBS – American Experience

1. “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” (2019 Documentary) – Directed by Matt Tyrnauer

• Available on various streaming platforms (Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube).
  

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What would happen if representatives from every religion sat in a room and talked? How long would a conversation take before the atheist and the christian realized, they love the same hobbies, care about their kids having the best chance of success and LOVE Marvel movies? How long before the Muslim mother and the gay couple share their favorite recipes because cooking for their families brings them so much joy?

Today is just a conversation, with one of the orphans from Stuart Little, the winner of TV show wipeout, recovered addict, fiance to his gorgeous partner Jennaca and satanic atheist. Kyle and I couldn't have grown up further apart in life and what we were taught to believe. And Kyle and I talk about.....
How did we get here???
Talking about what its like to be a creator who feels like you HAVE to start using our voice to help??
How do we heal together and make something better for the future for EVERYONE, how do we create healing and hope and belonging for everyone??
How do we help pull young men back from the jaws of the manosphere??
This and more and I hope it intrigues and challenges you as much as it did me.
Thank you for your continued patience, I have limited wifi access where we are and I'm having to produce the entire shows and content solo for another week. But update: Lucy is doing better and almost ready for her second surgery

If you grew up in Church in the 90s and early 2000s you remember the CRAZE that was the book "I kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris. Purity culture was rampant in the church, preaching to young girls their worth was their virginity and that their bodies belonged to their fathers until they were given to their future husbands. YIKES.

Do you know that Joshua Harris has now denounced both the book and his stance?

Today Jubilee Dawns joins me on a deep dive about purity culture in the church, the damage it wreaked on ours and other women's lives and share our first "Youth Pastors Gone Wild" segment.

Purity culture emerged in American evangelical Christianity in the 1990s and early 2000s, emphasizing abstinence from sex before marriage as a moral and spiritual ideal, particularly for girls and women. It promoted the idea that a woman's worth was intrinsically tied to her sexual behavior, often using metaphors like "chewed gum" or "used tape" to describe those who had engaged in premarital sex. Movements like True Love Waits and purity balls encouraged young girls to make vows of chastity, often symbolized by rings and ceremonies involving their fathers.

This culture disproportionately harmed young women by instilling shame, fear, and a deep sense of guilt around their bodies and natural sexual development. Many were taught to suppress their desires, avoid close relationships with boys, and take responsibility for male lust by dressing modestly and remaining “pure.” As a result, countless women have reported long-term effects including sexual dysfunction, body shame, difficulty forming healthy relationships, and trauma from victim-blaming in cases of sexual abuse or assault. Rather than empowering young women, purity culture often silenced and controlled them, framing obedience and modesty as the only path to spiritual value.

This week on the podcast I scratched my original plan. The passage of the Big UGLY monstrous bill the day before July 4th and my recording being that day, it inspired me to change the topic.

I didn't celebrate July 4th the way that I have growing up. But I spent a lot of time thinking about what revolution means, especially at this moment in history. In this episode, I re-read the Declaration of independence and the crimes the crown committed that made the colonists revolt. Then I talk about the American Revolution but focus on the revolution it inspired... the French Revolution.
The French Revolution was inspired largely by wealth disparity. By the late 1780s, France was deeply in debt from wars, including the American Revolution. Food prices got so high that bread took up 80% of a poor family's income. Unemployment and starvation were widespread and while the people starved, the monarchy led by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette spent like the countries coffers never ended. The top 1-2% controlled over 20% of the land and all the political power while 98% of the company could barely survive. The bottom 98% paid all the taxes, including tithes to the church, feudal dues and royal taxes.

Compare that to the US Today, 1% of Americans hold 34% of the nations wealth. The top 10% of the US hold almost 70% of the nations wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans? 2.5% of the wealth.
2.5% OF THE WEALTH.

Half the country has 2.5% of the wealth.

The current wealth gap in the US is the widest its been since the 1920s which led us to the Great Depression. And now we just passed a bill that is the largest upward transfer of wealth from the lowest 10% to the top 10%. And this wealth gap is always predictive of an incoming Revolution.
The world changes when people do. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffer who gave up everything to fight against in justice when he had everything to gain by staying quiet. But his work, his example and his writings would inspire Martin Luther King Jr. the US Civil Rights movement, Desmond Tutu and the fight against apartheid.
Empires always fall. Regimes do not last.
WE, the people, get the final say.
Fight on and Viva La Revolution!

54% of Gen Z individuals who disaffiliated from their childhood religion were women. For millennial women- 34%. For the first time in US History, men and young men are converting more to religion and filling the pews than women. Why? Women site gender inequality, systemic abuse, teaching limited roles for women, and lack of female church leadership as reasons for leaving.

My opinion is that women are realizing that organized religion run by men, led by men, collaborated on by men, interpreted by men, translated by men, taught by men... might be a system built to CONVENIENTLY benefit men. How convenient that the interpretations of scripture taught from the pulpit JUST SO HAPPEN to give men all the power, resources, decision making, a partner who can't say no and has to serve them as a house slave. Did God say that? Or did these men make God in their own image?

I think women are leaving because we see through the dogma right to the lies.

I am so deeply honored to call Irene a friend. I've been following her on social media for a couple years, when I discovered her rage-y music and that she had also deconstructed as well.
Irene and I left different branches of faith, evangelical fundamentalism for me, and mormonism for her.
This episode we talk about those journey's, how art was part of that healing process, how we found ourselves after growing up in a worldview that diminished us as women and told us that who we were was defective... sinful... and less than.
May this be your weekly reminder that YOU ARE WORTHY.

If you're familiar with the online deconstruction space, you've probably encountered Brian Recker or @brecker on Instagram. As a former evangelical pastor, he's been very vocal about his deconstruction and transformation.
In this episode, Brian and I talk about our growing up years, our faith and how thats evolved from narrow and rigid mindsets into who we became today.
I wasn't going to release this podcast for a few more weeks but I felt that some people needed reminded today that people can change. I was an open and passionate Christian Nationalist. Brian was raised in the IFB (think EXTRA fundamentalist). We were able to find our way and if people like us can change, anyone can.
Even on a dark day the sun is sitting behind the clouds.

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