Drums recorded in shipping containers. Jonathan Haidt says we're 90% chimps and 10% bees. Laws and rules as weaponized disgust responses. Being a different person with an entirely different set of values, priorities and ethics when part of a group, as opposed to as a private individual. The Doctrine of Separation. Taught overtly or only by example, does your group live as if other Christians are in no way connected to them? Barber Shop Quartet mentors. Eating chocolate, reading murder mysteries and staying up all night.

George Turcotte: drums

In the penultimate episode: People like blaming young people for stuff, and young people sometimes blame themselves. (For parents divorcing, family vehicles needing repair, and church splits.) Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition, and The New King James Revised Standard Amplified Message Version. Geoff literally causes a division before age 20. Church communities as great buckets for hiding candles under. Does this song sound like the theme to TV's The Facts of Life?

Evan Sauve: drums

In this antepenultimate episode: "Canada Bill" Jones and why he played a poker game he knew was crooked. Have you ever attended a church that openly preached that their group was the only right one, or at least the rightest one by far in the area? (Or did they just live like this was the case?) In Brethren circles, non-membership has its privileges. Sports and poker metaphors. Teaching people they can't simply go to another church intensifies the fighting over everything in the group you've made the only game in town. How many drummers does one man need? A lot of painstaking technical trickery, trying to make a blast from the past blast rather than crash. Closing in prayer as a way of forestalling an open discussion.

Troy Tuttle: guitars

This week, the Wikkid Podcast gets NSFW (Not Safe For A Worship Service). Kristian Kitsch. Kristian Krap so crappy you can't decide whether you're too Christian or too cool to own it. Heathen spatulas. Should there be Christian Archie comics? What would a Christian version of The Archies band play like, Sugar, Sugar? Growing up with that sacred/secular line. A discussion of two paintings, on an audio-only podcast. Are The Carpenters too wholesome to comfortably sit on the shelf next to Neil Young and Tom Waits? A juvenile British sense of humour about sex and the body. Obscenity? It's all in your polka dot undies.

Evan Sauve: drums

Sometimes, in a lot of church flocks, certain sheep just... vanish, never to be seen again. And sometimes people are kind of glad, especially if they are boring, annoying or discontented sheep. And sometimes that sheep is you.

George Turcotte: drums

Trying to get to know the Unknowable a bit without claiming to know all the right answers. Growing up with an all-inclusive Universal Belief Package, you tend to walk around acting like you have all of the right thinking about anything much that matters much. Especially eternal stuff. Some of us were champions at that. This is about the process of repenting of unearned certainty of this kind.

Evan Sauve: drums

Reaching some conclusions about worship. Realizing that, given how different various people's preferences are as to worship styles, and how opinionated they are as to what they like, I had no idea what God might or might not like. If worship is for his benefit rather than our own, then surely everything's not equally good? (He didn't much like Cain's bloodless, vegan sacrifice, did he?) Can worship be so much about us and our tribe and providing a curated emotional experience that we've left God out of his own party almost entirely?

Evan Sauve: drums

Why can't we just get along? Ecclesiastical war. Is all the dividedness actually worse than putting up with some guy you believe is wrong about something? Did the apostles foresee streets lined with unaffiliated churches that have little or nothing to do with one another?

George Turcotte: drums

A song presenting the unpopular idea that perhaps, all too often, church attendance is more about making much of Christians rather than much of God. Working on mixing a drum kit without it blasting the whole mix full of low midrange mud. All the different musical approaches to a single religious song. Should the worship team try to outdo Lady Gaga? The vegan, bloodless sacrifice of Cain. The idea that there are basic moods trying to be achieved in modern evangelical churches: feelbad or feelgood services. Happy clappy, or smells 'n bells. That some services are about quiet, inner, meditative silence, and ones that are about jubilant, group exhuberation. And that people argue over how much their church services succeed or fail at helping them feel the way they want to be helped to feel.

George Turcotte: drums

The pre-episode for the upcoming Season 5, which will deal primarily with troubles connecting to church and worship services, and also with church splits/divisions. A bunch of backlogged thought and life updates.