Humanize Me

Today's caller was in line at a drive-through coffee place, and decided to pay for the people behind her in line. But she realized that, in the course of doing so, the rewarding feeling she got from the act may have been the reason she did it in the first place. And that led to her question: 'Is there actually an unselfish act? And if there isn't, are we doing it for the right reasons? Can there even be an unselfish act and if there is, would that be good?'

Language really shapes how we think about things. After Jonathan Merritt moved from the South to New York City, he discovered that the words he had always used to describe spiritual life didn’t resonate anymore! The more pluralistic and postmodern the society, he observed, the less language people seem to have for spiritual experience. Jonathan is so sure that this is a problem, he wrote a book about it - Learning to Speak God from Scratch - which he and Bart Campolo chat about in this episode. They talk about the resurgence of the religious right and the desire of many Christians to separate themselves from it, the importance of language to describe good and kind forms of spirituality, Jonathan’s own beliefs, the importance of good questions and our comfort level talking about our spiritual lives.

Let's be honest: Spending time cooped up with family and friends on holidays like Thanksgiving can present some interesting conversational challenges for many of us. With that in mind, our question this week is about the idea of putting a moratorium on political chat over the holidays, and whether Bart - as someone who famously had a very serious ideological conversation with his parents on Thanksgiving - has any advice about which topics work on that kind of occasion.

Jessica Wilbanks grew up in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and then, at 16, walked away from the church. Ever since, she's been haunted by the world she left behind and wrote a book about it, just released: When I Spoke in Tongues (available on Amazon). In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Jessica talks about growing up in her family, the "loss of an assumptive world" with her loss of faith, having a nervous breakdown in college, transcendent experiences and the Holy Spirit, the early days of Pentecostalism, her mother defending her from an angry pastor, her bisexuality and more.

Sometimes, in the face of big problems in the world, doing everything we can reasonably do stills feels inadequate. Consider the question this week, which is about missing prayer, and the helplessness it can provoke. Bart begins a multi-faceted answer, but partway through begins to doubt his own wisdom on this. After some reassurance, he sees it through to the conclusion: we should do whatever we can, and give ourselves a break about what we can't.

Just say no! That's the mantra most of us have picked up from authority figures in our lives about drugs of all sorts, no matter their category. But for our guest Ashley Booth and a growing number of scientists, doctors and thinkers, it's become clear that our culture threw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the usefulness of psychedelics. This particular class of compounds - psilocybin, LSD, DMT and others - is special. They provide strange, unusual forms of consciousness, changing the perspectives of those who take them so much that their experiences can be life-changing.

Some of the things people abandon when they leave the church are rituals. But this week's Q&A features a voicemail by listener Morris Bird, who asks: 'What are your thoughts generally on the role of rituals in secular communities, and what makes a good ritual, and how are good rituals designed and implemented into a community?'

Don't worry; if you've never heard of 'evidism', you're not alone. This is a term coined by the guests in this episode, inventor Jeff Haley and author Dale McGowan, to describe people committed to fact-based, evidence-based thinking. In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Haley and McGowan talk about their book, Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World, and their ideas for how to have better, more evidence-based conversations with people who have different worldviews.

How does one decide who to pick to be friends with? Bart Campolo and John Wright look at this question as a sort of 'Part 2' to the last Q&A about cultivating good friendships: 'I really enjoyed Episode 326 where you guys talked about how being interested in other people is the first step to having good friendships, but my question is, who should I be focusing on? Who should I invest in or try to get closer to when I build a nice friendship? Looking forward to hearing what you have to say.'