This episode is all about Christmas, from favorite movies and music to the history of Christmas to the politics and theology of Christmas. We hope you find it interesting, and we hope you're all having a wonderful holiday season.

This episode features a special ending song from i'll be okay, which you can find on Bandcamp. Thanks to them for letting us use their song.

Christian and Hildegard caught up after a hiatus to talk about just some of the many, many major events that have taken place since the early fall, including the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, ICE occupation of Chicago, and much more. 

We were lucky enough to have Breht and Alyson from RevLeft Radio/Red Menace on for a wide-ranging discussion about religion, Marxism, philosophy, and a bunch of other stuff. If you like this podcast, you'll also love theirs: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/ 

Sorry this is a month late! It's Christian's fault, they dragged ass on editing this one. 

In this episode we discuss transgender liberation theology, the state of LGBTQ rights in Amerikkka, and Christian and Hildegard get just a little personal with their own experiences around gender stuff. 

Here's the link we discussed towards the end: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/ 

See you soon for the next one!

Christian is joined by Kalie Hargrove from the Center for Prophetic Imagination for a wide-ranging conversation touching on pacifism, transphobia, and the places that studying scripture can take us.

https://propheticimagination.org/ 

https://propheticimagination.substack.com/ 

https://kaliemay.substack.com/p/where-to-find-my-writings?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web 

https://www.queersolidarity.com/ 

Christian and Hildegard discuss the issue of Christian materialism, using the Red Star essay "On Christian Materialism" as a starting point. 

Minor correction -- At one point, Hildegard stated that the New Economic Policy began in 1922. It actually began in 1921. 

You can read the essay here: https://www.redstarministry.org/on-christian-materialism 

Remember to support us on Patreon! We post 1 episode per month that is exclusive to our Patreon supporters. https://www.patreon.com/c/RedStarMinistry 

Red Star co-founder Christian Chiakulas has a conversation with Charley Earp, a UU/UCC minister and Red Star organizer, to talk broadly about the history of American Christianity and the Left. 

In this very first episode of the Red Star Ministry podcast, Christian and Hildegard discuss one of the foundational Red Star essays, Why Christian Maoism? You can read the essay at https://www.redstarministry.org/post/why-christian-maoism .

Note: We apologize for some weird audio issues with this one. It's the first episode we did and we were still working out the kinks. We've already resolved the issue for future episodes!

Another note: At one point we discuss Friedrich Engels and his use of the term "barbarism" primarily in the work Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Note that we were using the term in Engels's 19th-century context; it is no longer used in anthropology and has since come to have many negative chauvinistic connotations.