The Pocket Contemplative

So many people dread reading the day's political news. But both Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and longtime Blue Ocean World co-host Val Snekvik can imagine a kind of politics that would encourage them. For Dave, it's a sort of ideal dialogue between conservatism and liberalism. For Val, it's one that values data and problem solving. With that as a starting point, Dave and Val have a freewheeling conversation about topics including Diane Feinstein and machine politics and, in the end, about where to find hope in the political world.

Blue Ocean Faith tries to be things with names like "centered set" and "solus Jesus" and "third way"--all related ideas. Val Snekvik, longtime BOW co-host, rejoins Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer to talk about how she's tried to raise boys who are shame-free, courageous, and connected to Jesus by raising them third way. 

New York Times financial reporter Nathaniel Popper joins Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer and Peter Eavis, who's written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, to talk about Bitcoin and what it means. It's been huge news recently for its astounding rise (one Bitcoin cost $1,000 at the beginning of 2017, rose to $20,000 by the end, and then quickly fell back somewhat). Will it change the world? Does it have some parallels with faith? 

News about North Korea is scary! Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer lives in Los Angeles, one of the cities allegedly threatened by North Korea's nuclear arsenal. MIT historian Hiromu Boschee Nagahara has a grandfather who survived Hiroshima's nuclear attack. He and Dave talk about the key role Christians play in such an anxious time.

After publishing a book about a fresh take on faith, Blue Ocean Faith's Dave Schmelzer fields several calls and emails a week from readers who are concerned that, after questioning their faith, they'll be left with nothing. Dave talks with MIT historian Hiromu Boschee Nagahara about how to deconstruct a faith and discover something even livelier on the other side.

In the last several years, National Geographic has sent Dan Buettner to so-called "Blue Zones"--parts of the world where people either live far longer or are notably happier than the rest of the world. And in the last year it's sent Morgan Freeman to embark on a related project with its TV series "The Story of Us." Longtime Blue Ocean World cohost Val Snekvik joins Dave Schmelzer in exploring what it might look like to dream of a happy life not so much from individual choices as from seeing the context of the life we already have in a whole new way.

Every day seemingly brings a new story of a famous man brought down by long-buried stories of sexual abuse, usually of women. Churches--as in the case of Roy Moore--sometimes get involved in the story. Longtime Blue Ocean World cohost Val Snekvik joins Dave Schmelzer to talk about the implications for women and men, for parenting, for faith communities, and for their own views of how the sexes connect.

Stranger Things, armed by Netflix's marketing might, is a water cooler phenomenon. Some high school kids watched the entire second season between it dropping at midnight and when they went (late) to school the next morning. Dave (sans Tom) talks about why Stranger Things has so captivated the cultural conversation. He's joined by a fascinating roundtable: Sarah Oh (a puppeteer with the JIm Henson Company as well as being a standup comic and actress), Trudy Choi (who publishes the Millennial Hotlist, a monthly trend newsletter) and Dave's high school kids, Claire and Pat, who will give us a view from that world. (A note: The first 20 minutes are spoiler free. After that, you're on your own.)

Our last podcast, about JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis got a big response, perhaps because so many churchgoers--like Tom and Dave--can relate to all of their peers reading and talking about those two Christian icons. But new generations bring new icons to churchgoers, of whom Bono is perhaps the most notable. What is it about us as people and as Christians that creates these sorts of idols? And is "idol," in the theological sense, the perfect word?

JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, close friends and Oxford colleagues, set the terms of the God-infused imagination for the last part of the 20th century--and then were revived in the 21st with blockbuster movies of their works and, in Tolkien's case, with successful imitators like JK Rowling and George RR Martin. Dave and Tom rethink how their initial impressions of Tolkien and Lewis have deepened and changed, and how such imaginative visions function in our current political and cultural moment.