Henri Nouwen said, "Keep returning to the road to freedom." That little phrase has been a big help to me the times I've run off the road and felt like giving up and making my home in the ditch. Failure, rebellion, and sin are "empirically verifiable" realities, and this week I want to spend a little time remembering the even bigger reality of Jesus's wild and tender welcome toward us.

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A very special welcome to my friend Erin Turner, our guest host this week! In a world of commodification and utility, it's easy to lose our humanity. Erin will be talking about how she's come to discover the riches of being called to a kind of work than can feel 'unuseful', and she'll share with us some of the treasures of a George Herbert poem, "The Forerunners".

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I visited my parents last week, and spent a good bit of time out at our farm. So, this week, I'll share some reflections on place, memory, planting and hope. When you talk about that stuff you have to end with a Wendell Berry poem, so we shall.

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There are so many ways we, as hurting humans, try to put the broken pieces of life back together, but we never can quite pull it off. Still, even though our ways of coping don't ultimately work, maybe they are our best effort at simulating the healing that Jesus's work on the cross supplies in reality? This is an idea that fascinates me, and this week, I'll feel my way around it some.

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"Story" has been a buzzword the last few years, maybe, in part, because our sense of being in God's story has been lost and we're looking for a way to contextualize our lives meaningfully. This week, I'll be thinking about the stories we believe, as well as, how, as humans, we are called to be storytellers/artists, and co-storytellers with God. I'll close with a favorite passage from good ole G.K. Chesterton for good measure.

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Lewis said anxiety is an affliction and a way to feel with Jesus his pain, not a sin. This week, I'm thinking a little about that idea, and closing the episode with a reading of and Oliver Wendell Holmes hymn "O Love Divine, that stooped to share."

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Welcome to Season Two! This week we'll look at how good words help us participate more truly in reality. And I'm very happy to have Poet/Priest Malcolm Guite close this episode with a reading of his poem "Spell" from his book "The Singing Bowl".

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Wendell Berry says that every day we should "do something that won’t compute". In this episode, I'll talk about how certain practices help us keep a hold on what Josef Pieper calls "true riches" in a world that tends to reduce life to mere utility, valuing only usefulness, and I'll end by reading a Wendell Berry poem.

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