Subversive Orthodoxy

Image used with permission by the artist. 

Mural by Kirollos Kilada in the St. Pope Kyrillos VI Chapel at St. Paul American Coptic Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA. 

Artist’s Website: https://kkilada.com/

Church’s Website: https://www.stpauloc.org/about/chapel

Modern Martyrs

We correct a claim about martyrdom by telling the story of the 21 Coptic workers executed in Libya, a witness captured on video that terrorists meant as propaganda. 

We follow how their calm, their prayer, and their families’ response reshape what we mean by freedom, courage, and unity across centuries of division.

• visiting a Coptic Orthodox church and noticing the icon of “the 21”
• the workers’ background in Alwur and why they went to Libya for labor
• how ISIS separated Christians using IDs and cross tattoos
• captivity details and the repeated offer to recite the shahada
• Matthew Ayariga’s choice to die with the others
• the execution video as propaganda that accidentally becomes testimony
• families speaking with pride and refusing revenge
• canonization, recovered bodies, and the shrine church in their village
• Pope Francis, Pope Tawadros II, and the “ecumenism of blood”
• a parallel with Alexei Navalny and interior freedom under coercion

A single sentence could have saved their lives, and they had six weeks to say it. Instead, 21 men knelt on a Mediterranean beach in orange jumpsuits, lips moving in prayer, while their executioners filmed a spectacle meant to terrify the world. We started with a correction and ended with one of the most unsettling stories of modern Christian martyrdom: the 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs of Libya, ordinary Egyptian construction workers whose witness exists not only in ancient texts but in high-definition footage.

We walk through how they were identified and taken in Sirte, Libya, how pressure was applied with the “door open,” and why the offer to recite the shahada matters so much when you’re thinking about faith, coercion, and what freedom really is. Then we linger on the 21st man, Matthew Ayariga of Ghana, who was given a unique chance to step away and reportedly answered, “Their God is my God,” choosing to die alongside men who had become his people.

The story doesn’t end at the beach. It keeps going through the families who speak without revenge, the Coptic Church’s swift canonization, and a historic moment when Pope Francis adds these martyrs to the Roman Martyrology, calling it the “ecumenism of blood.” We also draw a modern parallel to Alexei Navalny and the strange power of interior freedom, the kind no prison, knife, or regime can finally touch.

If this moved you, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with courage, faith, or integrity, and please subscribe and leave a review so more people can find the show. What do you think real freedom costs?

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Freedom is one of those words everyone loves until you ask what it costs and what it’s for. We’re chasing a kind of freedom that doesn’t look like victory in a movie: a freedom that does not fight back, cannot be threatened into compliance, and refuses to let evil pass through the self.

We start with Jesus’ sharp exchange in John 8, where “the truth will set you free” collides with people who are sure they don’t need freeing. From there we move freedom inward, toward the soul and the “unlosable” center an empire can’t reach. Solzhenitsyn’s prison logic makes it plain: power works by leverage, by threatening to take something away, and it panics when it meets a person who can’t be bought or frightened.

Then we look at the martyrs and why their stories keep unsettling the normal scoreboard. Ignatius writes with joy on the road to execution. Perpetua records calm in a Carthage prison cell. We also sit with the haunting image of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, whose stillness in flames raises a question most of us avoid: what kind of interior life could make that possible?

From there we connect the dots to Martin Luther King Jr and the claim beneath nonviolence: absorbing violence without retaliation reveals a deeper freedom than the one swinging the club. Finally, we bring it into the present, where most of us face not an emperor but Kierkegaard’s crowd, carried around in our pockets through social media, AI, headlines, envy, and status.

If this reframes freedom for you, subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with the line that challenged you most.

We follow a line from John 8 to the martyrs and modern public life, arguing that the deepest freedom is interior and cannot be seized by empires, systems, or the crowd. We wrestle with why non-retaliation and surrendering outcomes to God can expose the limits of power and reframe what “winning” even means.  

• Jesus’ freedom claim in John 8 and why confident people miss it  
• Slavery to sin as an internal captivity beneath status and citizenship  
• Adoption and belonging as an unrevokable foundation for freedom  
• Solzhenitsyn’s insight that power depends on leverage and fear  
• Martyr stories that invert the usual picture of defeat and victory  
• Thich Quang Duc and the question of stillness under suffering  
• Ignatius and Perpetua as witnesses to fearlessness before execution  
• Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolence as a claim about real power  
• Kierkegaard’s warning about the crowd and the comfort of compliance  
• Chesterton, Berdyaev, and the role of limits, habits, and inner life  
• Social media and modern pressure to consume, conform, and perform  

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

We go back to Eden and trace a biblical definition of freedom that looks like shalom: wholeness, harmony, and life in proper order with God, others, and creation. We connect that storyline to Exodus, Sabbath, Jesus’ confrontation with the powers, and Luther’s claim that grace frees us from fear-based self-justification.

• Eden as a picture of freedom grounded in shalom, ordered goodness, and meaningful work
• The fall as a turn toward autonomy that makes fear the organizing force
• Exodus as liberation that includes covenant, law, worship, communal responsibility, and rest
• Sabbath as resistance to Pharaoh’s production logic and modern productivity culture
• Modern “pharaohs” selling endless output as virtue and calling it freedom
• Jesus, the cross, and resurrection as exposure and defeat of powers and authorities
• Inner freedom as release from fear that drives preemptive compliance
• Luther on freedom before God and love-motivated service in the world
• Freedom operating inside the soul, between people, and across systems

Freedom is a word we throw around like it’s obvious, but our defaults are often thin: more options, fewer limits, higher status, better control. We wanted to test that instinct by going back to the Bible’s deep storyline and asking what freedom looks like before empires, before modern ideologies, and before hustle culture told us who we’re allowed to be.

We start in the garden, where freedom feels like shalom: harmony, wholeness, and life unfolding in a world that’s “very good.” Work is participation in meaning, not a frantic attempt to prove worth. Then Genesis 3 reframes the problem as a grasp for autonomy that displaces God and lets fear become the new operating system. That fear doesn’t stay personal, it grows into patterns and systems that enslave, which is why the story keeps moving toward Exodus. There, freedom comes with formation: covenant, law, worship, shared responsibility, and the scandal of Sabbath rest.

From there we name today’s “pharaohs” and their brick quotas: the productivity gospel that treats exhaustion like holiness. Finally, we widen the lens to Jesus and the New Testament language of powers and authorities, and we bring in Luther’s insight that grace frees us from self-justification so love can drive our actions. If you’ve ever wondered why rest feels impossible or why fear keeps making your choices, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review with your definition: what would real freedom look like in your life?

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Episode Synopsis

Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery seeking a life of prayer, contemplation, and silence. He somehow became one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

In this episode of Subversive Orthodoxy, Travis and Professor Robert Inchausti explore the life and spiritual imagination of Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain. The conversation becomes deeply personal as Inchausti recounts discovering Merton as a young man searching for a Christianity intellectually and spiritually capable of confronting the world as he actually experienced it.

Merton offered a faith willing to live with difficult questions. His Christianity had passed through literature, modernism, war, suffering, doubt, and the search for an authentic interior life. For Inchausti, reading Merton felt less like encountering a religious spokesman and more like discovering someone who had “read your mail.”

That story leads into Inchausti’s own journey toward Catholicism, Dostoevsky’s influence on his conversion, late-night conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s with his friend Gary, a Vietnam veteran who introduced him to more of Merton’s writings, and eventually a confrontation at Gary’s funeral over whether serious questioning strengthens or threatens religious faith.

Through Merton’s life and Inchausti’s own story, the conversation asks what happens when Christianity takes suffering, doubt, literature, history, and the life of the mind seriously—and whether an honest search for truth can itself become a path toward faith.

Key themes in the episode

•  Thomas Merton’s restless path from writer and intellectual seeker to Trappist monk 
• The Seven Storey Mountain and why it became a spiritual phenomenon 
•  Merton’s refusal to offer easy religious certainty 
•  Professor Inchausti discovering Merton at twenty years old 
•  Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and Inchausti’s movement toward Christianity 
•  Why Merton made Catholicism intellectually possible for him 
•  Merton’s unusual honesty about his own spiritual development 
•  The difference between receiving religious answers and learning how to ask serious questions 
•  Gary, a Vietnam veteran whose experience of war demanded a faith capable of facing suffering 
•  Late-night Catholic conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s 
•  Literature as a way of confronting tragedy, ambiguity, evil, and faith 
•  The intellectual life as part of spiritual formation 
•  Why serious Christian faith has room for doubt, difficulty, and unresolved questions 
•  Inchausti’s confrontation at Gary’s funeral over the value of books and intellectual inquiry 
•  Merton as a lifelong spiritual companion rather than simply an author Inchausti once read 
•  The kind of Christianity at the heart of Subversive Orthodoxy: a faith capable of looking directly at reality

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

We pick apart why “freedom” causes so many arguments by comparing the major definitions that shape politics, psychology, and moral philosophy. We end by naming what nearly all of them miss and why that gap pushes us toward a bigger story in part three. 

• inheriting words without checking what we mean by them 
• Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty as non-interference 
• Berlin’s positive liberty as self-governance and formation 
• Carl Rogers on integration, self-awareness, and internal unfreedom 
• Viktor Frankl on choosing your attitude under extreme constraint 
• B.F. Skinner’s challenge that choice may be conditioning 
• Sartre’s claim that we cannot stop choosing 
• Aquinas on virtue, the good, and a will with direction 
• Sen and Nussbaum on capabilities, poverty, and structural unfreedom 
• Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms as a political synthesis 
• the missing questions about God, purpose, and a larger story 

So stay tuned for part three.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

We start a four-part set of field notes by admitting the word freedom still surprises us when we hear it from Solzhenitsyn, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Chesterton. We trace the “freedom we inherited” through American politics and pop culture, then question whether external rights, endless choice, and economic survival can leave the inner life unfree. 
• why the word freedom suddenly feels unfamiliar in classic writers 
• the four-part structure from inherited freedom to biblical roots to embodied courage 
• how Braveheart and American patriotism shape instinctive ideas of liberty 
• political freedom as rights and protections that can stay external 
• conservative and liberal frameworks that miss the formed inner person 
• cultural freedom reduced to desire, authenticity, and consumer choice 
• what happens when freedom detaches from responsibility and moral accountability 
• modern economic pressure as quiet captivity despite legal freedom 
• Office Space as a parable of cubicles, compliance, and despair 
Stay tuned for part two 

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

“True worship is to work for justice and care for the poor and oppressed” sounds inspiring until you remember what that work actually feels like at 2 a.m. when you are tired, irritable, and out of patience. We sit with Dorothy Day long enough to let the romance burn off and the real questions show up: what do the poor really need to live with dignity, and what do the comfortable need to unlearn to see them clearly?

We also challenge the modern impulse to turn every moral question into a left versus right loyalty test. Both sides can become a binary machine that pins groups against each other, simplifies reality, and sells us a team identity in place of truth. Dorothy Day refuses that trap by taking responsibility seriously, insisting on personal conversion, and treating the works of mercy as the actual substance of justice. That mix confronts progressives who want programs without transformation and conservatives who want talking points without costly love.

Along the way we talk distributism, local ownership, and why centralized systems and monopoly capitalism can quietly make communities dependent on forces they do not know or control. We connect Day’s stubborn local fidelity to Wendell Berry’s “membership,” and we ask what it would mean to build smaller economies and deeper neighborhoods in a distracted techno state marked by anxiety and performance.

We end with the power of confession and why Dorothy Day’s credibility comes from owning her wreckage rather than curating a clean image, then we land on a hard possibility: holiness might be more beautiful than happiness. Subscribe, share this with a friend who is tired of the culture war script, and leave a five-star review if this conversation helps you choose the concrete over the abstract.

We wrestle with Dorothy Day’s unsettling claim that worship becomes real when it turns into justice and care for the poor, especially when the work feels unglamorous and lonely. We also push back on the left right binary by asking what changes when we stop performing concern and start serving the person right in front of us.
• Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker vision of dignity, community, and voluntary poverty
• Why poverty debates miss the human need for attention, belonging, and self-expression
• How right and left politics collapse into a binary trap that insults our intelligence
• What an “anti-political politics” looks like in prayer, reflection, and concrete responsibility
• Dorothy Day’s rhetorical edge on war, nuclear weapons, and moral hypocrisy
• Distributism as a check on monopoly capitalism and the centralized state
• Local ownership, small economies, and why dependence erodes happiness
• The spiritual cost of long fidelity, loneliness, and staying put
• Personal conversion as the seedbed of social transformation
• Works of mercy as the substance of justice rather than commentary
• Confession and truth-telling as the source of credibility and freedom
• What Dorothy Day’s past raises for churches that curate respectability
• Holiness as a deeper aim than comfort-based happiness
Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. Please follow us on Instagram at Subversive Orthodoxy. You can email us at subversivorthodoxy at gmail.com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Dorothy Day is the kind of person everyone tries to claim and nobody can fully control. One side calls her a socialist. Another side calls her a saint. She answered both with the same refusal: don’t use a label to dismiss the demand her life puts on you.

We walk through her story from early bohemian politics and labor activism to her Catholic conversion, then the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin. Along the way, we dig into her most important writings, including The Long Loneliness, and why her journals may be the clearest window into her spiritual life. What emerges is not a superhero, but a painfully honest Christian trying to live the works of mercy in public, year after year, without institutional power or ideological shortcuts.

The heart of our conversation is “apolitical politics”: politics as practical morality, local responsibility, and learning to love real people in real places. We connect Dorothy Day to Catholic social teaching, subsidiarity, decentralization, and even distributism, asking what it means to build economic autonomy through community, mutual aid, and hospitality instead of outsourcing every need to the state. We also face her hard questions about war, conscience, civil disobedience, nuclear fear, and the daily temptations of a distracted techno state.

If Dorothy Day still unsettles you, that may be the point. Subscribe for part two, share this with a friend who’s tired of tribal politics, and leave a review with the question from this conversation you can’t stop thinking about.

We talk through Dorothy Day’s life as a test case for faith that refuses both right-wing stereotypes and left-wing slogans. Her “apolitical politics” pushes us away from hot takes and toward conscience, local responsibility, and concrete works of mercy.
• Dorothy Day’s biography from early radicalism to Catholic conversion and lifelong Catholic Worker commitment
• Her key books and why the journals reveal the real person
• “Don’t call me a saint” as a warning against dismissal and excuse-making
• Anti-political politics as practical morality and meaningful life together
• Decentralization, subsidiarity, and distributism as alternatives to top-down control
• Conscience, civil disobedience, and the limits of obedience to the state
• The West Virginia farm story and the painful honesty of family responsibility
• The shift from abstract causes to loving the neighbor in front of you
• Thomas Merton correspondence and the temptation to seek “respectable” holiness
• Poverty’s paradox of suffering and joy in beloved community
This concludes part one of Dorothy Day. We will have part two coming out in the next week or two. So stay tuned.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

WALKER PERCY:  EPISODE SUMMARY

You can be comfortable, busy, and entertained and still be in despair. That’s the Kierkegaard line Walker Percy puts at the front of The Moviegoer, and it becomes our doorway into a bigger question: what if the real sickness of modern life is that we don’t even notice what’s missing?

We walk through Percy’s story, from a Southern upbringing marked by repeated suicide, to medical training and a tuberculosis collapse that pushes him toward reading, philosophy, and ultimately writing. Percy is never a simple “religious novelist.” His Roman Catholic faith works more like a diagnostic tool as he studies consumer identity, modern boredom, and the way scientific confidence can leave the inner life unnamed. Along the way we map his major books, from The Moviegoer to Love in the Ruins, and why his satire still lands in an age of anxiety, distraction, and behavioral control.

A big turning point is Percy’s fascination with semiotics, the study of signs. We unpack why language is not just communication but a doorway into selfhood, including the origin of the word “meme” and how imitation spreads meaning through a culture. Then we linger on one of the most moving illustrations Percy uses: Helen Keller at the water pump, where naming becomes something like a new birth. By the end, we return to Percy’s haunting claim that we are “lost in the cosmos” when myth, faith, and shared accounts of the person collapse into thin explanations.

If this conversation hits home, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a five-star review so more people can find it. What part of modern life feels most like hidden despair to you?

We dig into Walker Percy’s strange genius and why his novels diagnose modern life better than most social commentary. We use Kierkegaard’s definition of despair, semiotics, and the Helen Keller story to ask what it means to become a self in a world that keeps flattening people into consumers.

• Walker Percy’s biography, including family tragedy, tuberculosis, and conversion to Catholicism
• The core themes across Percy’s novels and nonfiction, including alienation, boredom, and modern misdiagnosis
• Percy as a bridge between existential Christianity and scientific modernity
• The difference between emotional despair and Kierkegaard’s existential despair
• Why the aesthetic life of comfort can still be a life of despair
• Semiotics as the study of signs and why language changes what a human is
• The origin of the word meme and how imitation spreads meaning
• Percy’s critique of psychology when it reduces the human person to pathology
• The Moviegoer as a lived experiment in Kierkegaard’s stages of life
• Helen Keller at the water pump as the birth of selfhood through naming
• Lost in the cosmos as a diagnosis of life after myth and metaphysical certainty

Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. 

Please follow us on Instagram: @SubversiveOrthodoxy

You can email us at [email protected] and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

The Saint of Holy Groveling, the Hungover Mystic, and a deep, aching longing for God

Jack Kerouac is remembered as the voice of the open road, speed, freedom, and excess, yet beneath the motion lived a deep spiritual loneliness. He carried an intense longing for God that pleasure, travel, and rebellion never resolved. The party always ended in sadness. The road always circled back home. Formed by Catholic prayer, haunted by sin and grace, and bound to his mother in a small house far from the myth, Kerouac lived as a strange solitary mystic, restless for God and unable to escape the ache of faith that followed him everywhere.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

Contact: [email protected]

Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy

Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation

Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.