Imagination Redeemed

How do you live like a saint on an ordinary Thursday morning? A paralyzed bishop and a monk in a tomb show us what we might be missing.

You know the Thursday-morning version of your life. The back hurts, the brain is foggy, the people you love are driving you crazy, and that's before the real losses hit. The saints in the stories seem to operate in a different reality. What do they see that we don’t?

This Allhallowtide episode opens in Tokyo in 1901, with a bishop who spent twenty-five years in a chair, typing a Bible translation with one finger and no promise that anyone would print it. Then it follows a farmer's son into the Egyptian desert, where Antony walks into a tomb painted with the old gods and waits for them to come out. It ends at Dothan, where a terrified servant wakes to an army around the city and a prophet who answers calmly: "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them."

"More are with us than are with them" is a fact about the room you're standing in. The saints felt no braver than you do. They had learned to count differently.

In this episode

• What Schereschewsky's life looked like from inside the chair, with no reassurance and no way to know

• Antony's night in the tomb, and what the desert became afterward

• The cosmic nature of our reality

• How to take the unseen world seriously without seeing a demon behind every flat tire

• The one thing about All Saints Day we'd love Christians to recover

Stories in this episode: Samuel Schereschewsky; and Antony, from Athanasius's Life of Antony.

Resources

• Related: our earlier episode on Halloween, death, and tradition: https://anselmsociety.substack.com/p/on-the-podcast-on-halloween-death 

• Athanasius, Life of Antony (New Advent): https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm

• Schereschewsky, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity: https://www.bdcconline.net/en/stories/samuel-isaac-joseph-schereschewsky 

• Schereschewsky, Mission St. Clare: https://www.missionstclare.com/english/people/oct14.html 

• Schereschewsky, Lent Madness: https://www.lentmadness.org/2014/03/joseph-schereschewsky-vs-harriet-bedell/ 

About

Imagination Redeemed is a production of the Anselm Society. The Anselm Society is a place where you can come in and experience beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom, and go out renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, home, and church. To support the show, go to AnselmSociety.org/fall2026 and make a donation.

Originally aired on October 23, 2025

Should we be afraid of Halloween? What about death? What about just…the past? Whether it's our own trauma, fears of the occult, family history, or that big scary word tradition, many of us feel caught between two extremes: either cutting ourselves off from it all, or feeling so surrounded by it that we feel trapped.

In this episode, we journey back to medieval England to discover what Hallowtide—the three-day feast that became Halloween—actually looked like, and why it might hold keys to a healthier relationship with all of it–death, tradition, and the past.

Along the way, we'll mythbust everything you think you know about Halloween, explore the meaning of “honor your father and mother,” and discover practical ways to connect our own stories to the Great Story.

Sarah Howell is joined by Brian Brown and Caroline Williams to explore the story of Sister Constance, who stayed in Memphis during the devastating 1878 yellow fever epidemic while much of the city fled. What could make someone walk toward danger when everyone else is running the other way? And what does her story have to do with the choices we make in much quieter moments?

Along the way, they uncover a surprising connection between Constance and another Christian who, years earlier and an ocean away, stood firm when his convictions made him an outsider.

Sarah, Brian, and Caroline consider how fear, attention, mentors, stories, and small choices shape us long before the moment when everything is suddenly at stake. Drawing on C. S. Lewis, Augustine, the story of Esther, and the lives of the saints, they ask what it means to keep turning toward what is good, true, and beautiful—even when the world around you is telling you to look away.

Hosts: Brian Brown, Sarah Howell, Caroline Williams

What is a man actually for at home — past "protect and provide"?

Brian Brown is joined by Sarah Howell, Jeremiah England, and Matthew Clark to build a theology of domestic masculinity anchored in St. Joseph, the only man in Scripture who never speaks and whose entire vocation is guardianship of an ordinary household.

Using Julie Canlis's four movements of Christ's re-creation (Born, Baptized, Crucified, Ascended) and Dante's Cacciaguida — who remembers, commissions, and blesses his descendant in the Paradiso — this episode names two failure modes (the controlling tyrant and the checked-out buddy-dad) and finds a third way rooted in self-gift rather than dominance or absence.

Part two of a two-part conversation on the theology of the ordinary, from the Anselm Society's Imagination Redeemed podcast.

"What If Your Tuesday Is Already Holy?"

Most of us have quietly absorbed the idea that real spiritual life is happening somewhere else — the dramatic calling, the mountaintop moment, someone else's story.

In this episode, Brian Brown, Sarah Howell, Matthew Clark, and Jeremiah England use Julie Canlis's "seven days" of Christ's ordinary life — born, grew, baptized, tempted, crucified, resurrected, ascended — to ask a simpler question: is God actually present in your commute and your kitchen?

Drawn from a month-long reading group on Canlis's A Theology of the Ordinary, the episode also previews the Anselm Society's own month-long staff sabbath, starting July 15.

Part one of a two-part series — part two turns this same question toward what it means to be a man in the middle of ordinary, unglamorous, holy life.

Hosts: Brian Brown, Sarah Howell, Jeremiah England, and Matthew Clark 

Why does great art so often come from broken people? And what does that mean for Christians who want to make something true—something that actually holds hope without being sentimental?

This episode opens the Summer 2026 season on subcreation with a story from Camelot. Not the glory of it—the kitchen of it.

Sir Gareth of Orkney arrives at Arthur's court as a servant, earns his knighthood in anonymity, and becomes a figure for every maker who's ever wondered whether they have the right to create beautiful things given what they know about themselves.

We follow his road and ask: what does honest Christian subcreation actually look like? And why do the artists who move us most seem to carry their wounds right in the work?

Hosts: Sarah Howell, Amy Lee, Yongwon Lee, and Matthew Clark 

Your life probably doesn't feel like a great story. It feels like a series of days — some meaningful, most just busy — without a clear arc or destination. That's what happens when the frame is too small.

The Venerable Bede spent his entire life in a single monastery in Northumbria. He almost never left. And from that cell, he told a story so large it made a nation. This episode asks what Bede knew that we've forgotten: the imagination isn't decoration. It's formation. The story you're living inside shapes everything you see, everything you endure, and everything you make. And it can be widened.

This is the season finale of our Spring 2026 series on eucatastrophe. It's also a beginning.

Have you ever looked around and felt like the last person on earth who still believes this stuff?

Athanasius did. The young deacon at Nicaea spent the next forty-five years in exile, fighting a battle he couldn't win against a church that had largely caved. He wrote from the desert. He outlived four emperors. He didn't see the tide turn.

He kept fighting anyway.

In this episode, Brian, Amy, and Christina explore what faithful endurance looks like when you've lost the room—and why the Long Defeat is not the same thing as failure.

How do we love earthly things in a way that honors God? Where do our longings fit in that equation? And...should we hug a tree after all?

Andrew Roycroft and Lancia Smith rejoin the podcast for a discussion of themes from George MacDonald's "The Light Princess."

What if the resurrection isn’t about escaping the physical world, but redeeming it? Join Brian, Sarah, and special Guests Andrew Roycroft and Lancia Smith as they consider the resurrected Christ as fully embodied -- and what that means for us, and all of creation!