Alex and Macon are back with more than enough to talk about. In fact, each gets to pick from a list of things each other has been mulling over this summer.

Show Notes

* Macon’s three things he’s been thinking about:

* We need an Epistemology for Regular People.

* Imagination as a truth-bearing medium.

* The power of only of deciding that only a few people’s feelings am I gonna care about. so those are the those are the three, those are my three things.

* Inadequacy and Unhelpfullness of singing “Jesus Love Me” in a worship service

* Alex’s three things he’s been thinking about:

* Sabbath, rest, vacation, play, therapeutic self care culture.

* Cultural engagement (in sermons)

* Stand-up Comedy

* Malcom Guite

* Actually, the seasons are SO different, the books are different, too

* Advent Book of Poetry

* Lent Book of Poetry

* Glahad and the Grail

* Stephen Lawhead

* Taliesin

* A good, far ranging interview of Guite

* "Do you have Galahad and the Grail or are you thinking about reading it? Here are a few pointes I would share that might help you get more out of it.”

* TFT: Karl Barth - Theologian of The Word

* Enneagram 3 Official Music Video

* For those people who like Puzzles

* Nate Bargatze

* The Comic Toolbox

Alex debriefs his first management training gig — parachuting into a Florida nonprofit to coach twenty-something camp supervisors who’d rather be friends than give feedback. Then the tables turn: Macon’s been invited to do a 45-minute leadership talk and hates everything about it. What follows is Macon wrestling in real time with why management training makes him nauseous, landing on a framework he actually believes in: awareness, clarity, and focus — the same underlying muscle whether you’re doing lean on a warehouse floor, having a fierce conversation, or learning to deadlift. Alex pushes back on “focus” as too passive and calls out Macon’s blind spot: moral courage comes easy for an Enneagram 8, but most people are paralyzed by it. Along the way: the OODA loop, why the history of science is nothing like your textbook, survivorship bias in business books, the transferability of practices across domains, and whether rolling in on a skateboard would be the douchiest possible entrance.

Show Notes:

* Parable of the Good Samaritan — “the man wanted to justify himself”

* Getting Things Done by David Allen

* Lean / 5S

* 4DX

* Measure What Matters by John Doerr (OKRs)

* Crucial Conversations

* Radical Candor by Kim Scott

* Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott — “short sentences, strong verbs”

* OODA Loop — observe, orient, decide, act

* Bullet Journaling

* Hedonic adaptation

Alex and Macon debrief the Lenten reading of Torrance’s Atonement: why the judicial metaphor alone is eight-bit theology, how the familial metaphor recenters the whole story on a God who is for you. Then Macon goes full nerd on apprehension vs. comprehension: Polanyi’s tacit dimension, how scientists and warehouse workers alike interact with what’s real, why the Western philosophical tradition severed us from the world, and what Torrance means by critical realism. Along the way: the deposit of faith as not-perfectly-wordable Apostolic knowledge, Scripture as sign pointing beyond itself, repentance as an epistemological mode (not merely a moral mode), and why the incarnation is what makes God apprehensible to creatures.

Show Notes

* One does not simply walk into Mordor

* Gladwellit

* Stereogram

* T.F. Torrance, Atonement

* Julian of Norwich

* Michael Polanyi: tacit dimension

* TFT’s article: The Deposit of Faith

* Critical realism

Alex and Macon are back after a seven-week hiatus. Alex is preparing to fly out for his first corporate management training gig. Macon and Alex trade notes on what actually makes for good management, why most people in every profession are just figuring it out as they go, and (again) whether the word “culture” is even useful. Along the way: Torrance on relationships as constitutive of personhood, the Real Question for genuine management wisdom, Jesus washing feet as a model for authority, and why hiring might be the hardest job on the planet.

Show Notes

* Alex’s life vibes right now

* Eastertide: all the way to Pentecost

* Shane Arthur

* Getting Things Done by David Allen

* The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney et al.

* Holacracy by Brian Robertson

* Lean / 5S

* Gary Deddo shout out for the “no” that serves the “yes”

* John 13

* Boundaries for Leaders by Henry Cloud

* Critical Realism

* What would you say you do here?

Alex and Macon check in on Atonement reading and then discuss what it’s like to preach on money and Jesus’ declaration that you can’t serve both God and Mammon.

Show Notes

Atonement, our Lenten Reading project.

turns out it’s a New Orleans tradition: pinning dollars

Andy Crouch: The Life We’re Looking For

The Affluenza defense

telos

Actually all Firstfruits were all for the Levites. Other sacrifices like Peace offerings or Covenant-Making offerings were partially eaten by those making the offerings. Management regrets the error.

Alex helps Macon think through what are the mechanisms available to Christians who disagree on how to “cling to what is Good” and “abhor what is Evil” when those Christians live in a nation whose decision-making structure is a form of democracy?

Show Notes

TF tells pastoring stories

wreath etymology

Jordan Peterson and the Scriptures

ICYMI: S4E08 on Christian Nationalism

ad hominem

Telos

Whew! Doug Wilson isn’t from Texas, he’s from Idaho. It all makes sense now.

Alex and Macon talk about Buddhist Monks walking through his town and the various reactions from Christians along the way. Is this going to be a good sermon illustration?

Show Notes:

A Way Into Till We Have Faces

My (Still) Messy Beautiful Family Series

Monks Walk for Peace

Baptists and Bootleggers

Dukes of Hazzard

Atonement ← Read this for Lent with Macon! (The Sequel to Incarnation!)

Macon and Alex talk about “Christian Nationalism.” Macon is unimpressed with the coining of the term and the general pearl-clutching. Alex is concerned that there are deep problems when Christianity and Politics combine in bad ways. They talk about it.

Show notes:

Cedar Season

Flying the Missing Man Formation

Shabat Hallelujah

Parallel Play

The Protocol

The Kata

the Dead Marshes

Rickets

Clutching your pearls

et, tu, IVPress?

to fisk

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

It’s the 19th Amendment

Polemicist

AYFKM

I have a pen and I have a phone.

The Nuclear Option is Godwins’ Law

Atonement by T.F. Torrance for Lent!

Alex explains to Macon and Marsh how and why he chose to preach on Matthew 2:13 - the murd3r of the children 2 and under in Bethlehem.

Show Notes:

MST3K

Macon on LinkedIn : 1934 by now

Veriflex Ramp Rat

Powell Peralta Tommy Guerrero

Dinosaur Train

K&W Closing

Lectio Divina

a surd

Evil and the Cross

Kirk Franklin & God’s Property

Pardon the Interruption

Macon and Alex talk through the first couple days of the Incarnation reading, orienting us to what Torrance is up to in the second chapter, which is the first chapter we’re reading.