Protect Your Noggin

This show is dedicated listener question about what to do when you detect that a future pastor is a wolf pup, that is, a potentially dangerous clergy person in the making. How do we nip in the bud potentially abusive behavior without being too intrusive or outrageously in people’s business? We explore the value of asking the question: What are the wrong reasons I’m doing what I’m doing in my vocation?

Topics of Discussion

• Shadow self in Carl Gustav Jung
• Megachurches
• What makes academics tick?
• What makes clergy tick?
• Seminary and psychological evaluations
• Religious vocations
• Jordan Cooper
• The Orange helmet Awards
• Alexander VI
• Jeff’s poem about the Order of the Great Pyrenees
• Lutherans for Racial Justice
• Micah Bournes

Thirty spokes meet at a hub. 

The empty space at the center

is what lets the wheel go ‘round. 

Can you balance your mind and body and grasp the unity of everything? Can you soften your breath and become like a sleeping baby? Can you rinse from your eyes whatever is clouding your vision?

This episode is dedicated to a question from a listener who works in Christian education. They ask: How do I help change the culture of a church so that it's life giving & not authoritarian? In other words, how does one practically apply some of the themes we care about at Protect Your Noggin for the wellbeing of our kids? After minute 30, we give our actual interpretation of the Tower of Babel, & we discuss why non-Christians should want the Bible taught in public schools.

For this episode, Jeff asks Stacie (a death doula, AKA, end of life doula) to take over the episode and offer comfort and wisdom to our whole society the way should would work with an individual who was facing his or her mortality. This comes from our realization that, while we want to promote hope in our times, we also don't want cheap hope, or the sort of shallow positivity that covers over injustice without remedying it.  

taosurfers.com

protectyournoggin.org

Overfill your cup: it will spill.

Over-sharpen your sword: it might shatter,

when it really matters.

Amass wealth: you can’t protect it.

Excessive pride in riches and prestige

will only leave you in disgrace.

A discussion of moral injury, how it shows up in the Bible, & how we might read accounts war and violence in antiquity.
Jeff interviews guest Dr. Brad E. Kelle is professor of Old Testament & Hebrew at Point Loma Nazarene University. His academic work focuses on the OT prophets, warfare in ancient Israel, trauma studies, moral injury, and the history of ancient Israel and Judah. He is author of The Bible and Moral Injury: Reading Scripture alongside War's Unseen Wounds (Abingdon, 2020).

To discover the greatest good flow like water. Water pours life into all creatures without striving. It pools in places men disdain. This is how it’s like the Tao. So make your home in low places. Draw from the deep well of the heart. Offer kindness to others. Let your words be sincere. Govern justly. Let your work be your art. Remain present with everyone you encounter. Live without striving and people won’t try to pull you down.

…the sage puts herself last yet comes out ahead. She dies to her ego yet she finds life. See how this makes her selfless? And this is how she becomes her true self.

Tao Te Ching chapters 3 and 12

We discuss the importance of being presence, attending to bodily needs, and the history of Western Christianity's move toward the idea that we can't do much about injustice so we should just focus on the life to come. At hour 1 or so we share the meaning of life. We end with some cooking tips from Lao Tzu.