Sacred Tension

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Timothy and I discuss the new Daily Wire movie Lady Ballers, which is about a men’s basketball team who decide to become trans women to compete in women’s sports. It is obviously terrible and unfunny, but there are deeper issues worth discussing.

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Sacred Tension is a reader-supp…

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This episode of Sacred Tension is a cross-over with The Deep Dive podcast with Shawn C. Fettig. Shawn interviews me about my experience growing up as a deeply religious gay person, my thoughts on group solidarity vs. individual autonomy, and whether religion offers anything positive to society.

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Read my piece in Persuasion Magazine.

I love hearing back from my audience. Did you agree with us in this conversation? Disagree? Let us know in the comments. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sacredtension.substack.com/subscribe

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Take advantage of my Black Friday Sale! You will get 40% off a 12-month subscription and join a growing community of like-minded and curious people. You will also get access to the rest of this podcast, as well as a ton of other paid content. Use this link to get the discount. It expires on Sunday 25th. https://sacredtension.substack.com/2023blackfriday

In this episode of House of Heretics, Timothy and I…

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by philosophers Subrena Smith and David Livingstone Smith to discuss the challenge and necessity of abolishing race. Subrena tells her story of moving from Jamaica to the deeply racialized culture of the USA and explains why she is Race Queer instead of Black. We discuss the many ways the ideology of race obscures actual human diversity, the difference between race and ethnicity, the similarities between race and witchcraft, and much more.

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Subrena E. Smith is associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. Her research is focused on philosophy of biology, in particular how biological thinking is misappropriated both in science and in popular culture.

David Livingstone Smith is a professor of philosophy who has been studying dehumanization for almost twenty years. He has written three books on this subject. The first, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others (St. Martin’s Press, 2011), received the Anisfield-Wolf award for non-fiction. It was followed by On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (Oxford University Press, 2020), and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (Harvard University Press, 2021).

They both write at Dehumanization Matters on Substack:

Read their article The Trouble With Race and Its Many Shades of Deceit in New Lines Magazine.

Email David at [email protected] and Subrena at [email protected].

I love hearing back from my audience. Did you agree with us in this conversation? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sacredtension.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sacredtension.substack.com

Subscribe on Substack: https://sacredtension.substack.com/

Timothy and I discuss my recent interview with David Gushee and his book Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies. We talk about the deep resentment over culture war losses in conservative Christianity and the concept of “thin democracy.”

Become a paying subscriber: https://sacredtension.substack.com/In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by ethicist and Christian dissident David Gushee to discuss his new book Defending Democracy From Its Christian Enemies. We discuss why some Christians are turning on liberal democracy, and why we should all defend democracy despite its flaws. We also discuss “thin democracy” and why it is not sufficient for a cohesive society.

Find David Gushee on Substack.

Read Defending Democracy From its Christian Enemies.

I love hearing back from my audience. Did you agree with us in this conversation? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below. If your comment is excellent, I might feature it in an upcoming post.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sacredtension.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sacredtension.substack.com

Become a paying subscriber to get full access: https://sacredtension.substack.com/Timothy is out this week, so my sister Elizabeth Schultz joins me to discuss how I may or may not be getting radicalized by the (admittedly not unanimous) leftist response to the Hamas terror attack. We also discuss the importance of thinking slowly, waiting for more evidence, Orwell’s analysis of words that obscure atrocities, and more.

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In this episode of Sacred Tension, I'm joined by author, musician, occultist, and professional weirdo Logan Albright to talk about his new book Libertarian Paganism. We discuss what drew him to the pagan path, the cross-over between Paganism and Libertarianism, the role that meditation plays in his life, the problems with utopianism, and much more.

Find Logan Albright at https://loganalbright.com

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sacredtension.substack.com/subscribe

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In this episode of House of Heretics, Timothy and I discuss the recent Atlantic article about the schisms in The Satanic Temple, whether Satanists have orgies, and why I found the article so mortifying.

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In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by Yascha Mounk to discuss his new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. We discuss why the progressive fixation on identity categories undermines the goals of progressive movements, my own experience as a gay man, the dangers of binary political thinking, and much more.

Yascha Mounk is an expert on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism. The author of five books that have been translated into over ten languages, he is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Moynihan Public Scholar at City College. He is the Founder of Persuasion, the host of "The Good Fight" podcast and serves as a publisher (Herausgeber) of Die Zeit.

Read The Identity Trap: https://a.co/d/3Oc9guH

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sacredtension.substack.com/subscribe