What if Acts 15 wasn’t a theology debate at all—but a battle over identity, belonging, and who gets a seat at the table?

In this episode of Conversation Craft, Christian Baxter sits down with Dutch theologian Bas Van Os to explore the deep currents running beneath the early Christian story. Bas grew up inside Dutch Christianity and lived long enough to watch it collapse. Christian grew up in the American South and walked through his own collapse and reconstruction. Their lives meet in Acts 15—where ethnicity, class, land, law, and honor collide in the early church.

Bas’s online project

https://www.followers-of-jesus.org/

Together they explore:

• Why Paul, Peter, and James weren’t debating doctrine in a vacuum

• The shame–honor explosion in Antioch and why the table was the battleground

• Jesus as brother in the flesh—hungry, sick, learning, arguing

• Why story-participation (not propositions) is how real spiritual change happens

• How Christianity functions after collapse—in the Netherlands and in the American South

• The Apostles’ Creed as drama, not dogma

• The parallels between Christian’s Abraham-dagger moment and Paul’s Damascus rupture

• Why belonging, not ideology, is the real crisis of modern faith

Bas brings decades of work in early Christianity, Gnosticism, New Testament interpretation, and symbolic theology—combined with a life spent navigating post-Christian Europe, reconstruction, and the spiritual hunger of a secular culture.

This is not an academic interview.

This is two stories colliding inside a larger Story—identity, collapse, reconstruction, and the ancient question:

Who belongs?

PROMINENT NAMES MENTIONED

Jordan Peterson

Paul VanderKlay

P.F. Jung

Brendan Graham Dempsey

Cathy Newman

Richard Rohr

Robert Sapolsky

John Vervaeke

C.S. Lewis

Justin Brierley

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The Yours Truly Podcast is a place we practice 'Conversation Craft'. It is a place to think out loud about the fractures shaping our world — identity, trust, belief, culture, and the search for meaning.

I host longform, honest conversations with thinkers, creators, and everyday people who are wrestling with the same questions:

Who are we becoming? What do we believe? And how do we rebuild trust in an age where the “we” is breaking?

From cultural commentary and symbolic theology to personal stories and the deep work of living truthfully, this channel explores the space between faith and doubt, tradition and innovation, community and exile.

If you’re looking for a place that’s thoughtful, relational, curious, and unafraid of complexity — welcome.

ep-based longform • symbolic thinking • cultural exploration • real conversations

Hosted by me Christian Baxter, Yours Truly (CB_YT).

In this conversation, PF Jung and I trace the line from the 2016 Jordan Peterson explosion to the strange moment we’re in now — a moment where many young men look at Peterson’s “Daily Wire era” and feel the shock of a cultural father who seems to be collapsing under the weight of his own contradictions.

We talk about what it means to laugh at the fallen father versus what it means to cover his shame — a theme that emerges right at the start of the episode when we discuss the shift from the playful, truth-oriented Peterson of the early lectures to the embittered, hyper-political version many see today.

From there, the episode moves into the deeper symbolic and psychological machinery underneath:

• Dark Centrism — PF’s own model, a circle of dots “all equidistant from the center but all out on the extremes,” an attempt to honor the good ideas on the fringes without becoming captured by any single tribe.

• Identity cycling — the pattern of moving from evangelical → atheist → woke → reactionary → centrist without ever crossing the “wall” that stops the protest-loop.

• Why intelligent, high-openness people struggle to form a stable identity — the temptation to “try on” new isms, new selves, new aesthetics, without integrating them into a personhood that can endure.

• Liberalism’s limits — using Peterson’s own lectures to show how hyper-individualism fails without nested identities and social structure.

• The covenantal stack — Adam, marriage, house, tribe, nation, kingdom, church — as a counter-vision to individualist liberal anthropology.

• The “memetic feudal hierarchy” — why ideas don’t spread virally but travel through respected leaders, pastors, and digital figures who act as vassal-lords in a medieval-like ecosystem.

• The digital-medieval return — the idea that podcasting and online discourse have reintroduced testimonial culture, digital pastors, and new forms of communal authority.

• Peterson as catalyst for religious re-entry — and why young people are turning to various Christian traditions but hitting the barrier of intra-Christian disagreement.

The father theme returns when PF describes using Peterson’s own early principles — the Geppetto/Osiris archetype, the need to rejuvenate the father — to critique Peterson’s current persona.

This isn’t a takedown of Peterson.

It isn’t hero worship either.

It’s an honest look at what happens when a generation builds its first symbolic structure around a father who later falters — and what it takes to separate the wheat from the chaff without losing the truth that changed you.

If you’ve lived anywhere in the wake of the Peterson phenomenon — fascinated, helped, burned, confused, or still searching — this episode sits directly inside that experience.

OUT Now on Streaming!

🎬 Watch Jim vs The Future: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/jim-vs-the-future/umc.cmc.187cheh4z8wtul85jdjtwam14

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https://a.co/d/e1NmjYQ

Trailer: https://youtu.be/FGAXBYhex74?si=_LpsKFonNgbhGYKF

Writer–director Joseph Holmes joins Yours Truly Podcast to talk about his new film Jim vs The Future — a story about free will, destiny, and meaning in a multiverse world.

We explore:

• How C.S. Lewis and Jordan Peterson influenced his storytelling

• Why the Christian imagination still has power in modern cinema

• The tension between meta-modern sincerity and Hollywood cynicism

• Why ordinary faithfulness is a cosmic act

Holmes is a critic and filmmaker who’s written for The New York Times, Forbes, Law & Liberty, and more. His film Jim vs The Future releases November 11.

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🪞 People Mentioned

C.S. Lewis, Jordan Peterson, Tim Keller, Jonathan Pageau, Justin Wells, Matt Crotts

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🔗 Links

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In this episode of Conversation Craft, I sit down with Rick Walker, author of 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning, to explore what it takes to live with purpose in a post-collapse world.

Rick represents the last serious generation before the cultural and institutional unraveling, while I speak from the first serious generation after it. Together, we examine the tension between those worlds — between duty and meaning, virtue and vision, building and believing.

This is a conversation about meaning that refuses to hide behind “nice.” It’s raw, thoughtful, and rooted in both action and transcendence.

📘 Rick’s book: 9 Steps to Build a Life of Meaning – @rickwalkertx https://us.amazon.com/Steps-Build-Life-Meaning-Happiness-ebook/dp/B0F4LS82GP/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ojfCZdFhGeSonfwXSf3xF94oZBATbc5ZRWAXdBAv4oZP4Ta63Idwzja-XlBPG5aT48gLr56hF8riaUz_kEx2wJDuWN_lxjZu_Xq0RksPayiD_yQBNpJ7Kl7ZKgqA5FjgupYT3AadNpvINnEdr019HwU_sCMh-CIzTNvocHCcQyZbxxwZOusCtf5ad9F8BoaQFR79l8P-VEe7iQjWb96Hf4g6UxVx0qkKAaDgW51KmcY.J_luIXHIpVGZzLlfWazMhVF4P9AOSRN6_XRzJlJf9KM&dib_tag=se&qid=1761784668&refinements=p_27%3ARick+Walker&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

Rick's Podcast

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro – Why meaning requires struggle

5:30 The lore of Rick Walker and “This Little Corner”

14:00 The Peterson–Pageau lineage and the meaning crisis

27:10 Step 1: Choose a Worthy Enemy

45:50 Men Without Chests – Love, strength, and moral courage

1:03:00 Aim High – The cost of mediocrity

1:19:20 Identity, failure, and faith

1:36:00 Meaning after the collapse

Mentioned:

Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Pageau, Paul VanderKlay, John Vervaeke, C.S. Lewis, Alexander the Great, Chesterton, Charlie Kirk,

James Taylor Foreman returns to the Yours Truly Podcast to talk about faith, homecoming, and the New Renaissance he calls Techno-Rural. After years in Los Angeles, he and his wife left Hollywood for Louisiana—choosing marriage, meaning, and decay over abstraction, ambition, and illusion.

We talk about his viral essays “Choosing Penelope” and “The New Renaissance Will Be Techno-Rural”, the symbolic act of rebuilding his father’s house, why the local reverses entropy, and how marriage and place can become the new frontier for spiritual renewal.

It’s a conversation about re-enchantment, modern exile, and the beauty that still lives in small towns.

⏱ Chapters

00:00 - Intro – Why James Left LA

02:17 - Moving From Los Angeles to Louisiana

06:28 - The Myth of Penelope and Choosing Decay

13:45 - Marriage as Metaphor and the Meaning of Home

21:34 - The Techno-Rural Vision

33:02 - Entropy, Beauty, and the Local

47:50 - Cleaning Your Father’s House

56:15 - The South, History, and Re-enchantment

1:08:03 - Church Buildings, Decay, and Renewal

1:19:45 - The Machine and Our Relationship With Technology

1:33:10 - Embodiment, Faith, and Wisdom

1:42:26 - The Future of “The Metaphor”

1:47:55 - Closing Reflections & Outro

Mentioned & Referenced

Jonathan Pageau (@JonathanPageau )

Paul VanderKlay (@PaulVanderKlay )

Jordan Hall (@JordanGreenhall )

Paul Kingsnorth, “The Machine” @PKingsnorth

Jordan Peterson @JordanBPeterson

The Metaphor (Substack by James Taylor Foreman)

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Substack: https://themetaphor.substack.com

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In this episode of Yours Truly I sit down with Adam and Wambui for some Conversation Craft, — two people who met across continents and found Christ through the ruins of modern spirituality, the chaos of academia, and the burnout of Silicon Valley optimization.

Wambui’s story begins in Nairobi and winds through NYU and the self-designed religion of postmodern life — yoga, myth, therapy, and self-curation — until everything collapsed.

Adam’s story runs through the hyper-productivity of startup culture — quantified self, meditation-as-performance, the endless search for “flow.”

Both hit the same wall: the exhaustion of being their own gods.

We talk about:

NYU, wokeness, and the failure of self-made meaning

Silicon Valley spirituality and the religion of optimization

Why “build your own religion” always breaks

Orthodoxy, liturgy, and the beauty of a faith that doesn’t center on the self

The mystery of Communion as healing for a fractured digital world

This isn’t a conversion story as much as it is a mirror — for anyone trying to make sense of their own collapse and renewal in the postmodern world.

From Postmodern Chaos to Communion isn’t just a title — it’s the movement of this whole conversation.

Mentioned in this Episode

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and Modern Collapse

Silicon Valley Eschatology

Orthodox Liturgy and the Beauty of Limits

Jordan Peterson, Paul VanderKlay, and the Estuary conversation

The “Algorithm of Salvation”

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America’s unspoken civil religion — be nice, feel good, God’s chill — has crashed.

In this conversation, Sam Tideman (Transfigured) and I trace the rise and fall of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, the “default faith” of modern America. From Harvard Unitarianism to megachurch moralism, from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Jordan Peterson wave, we explore what happens when the background religion of “nice” stops working — and what comes next.

🎙️ Guest: Sam Tiedeman – Host of Transfigured @transfigured3673

📺 Watch Sam’s MTD series:

• Part 1 – The Forgotten History of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

https://youtu.be/5eHYMzanOvs?si=d_hUAfvIg7LrVc9M

• Part 2 – Does Moralistic Therapeutic Deism Still Exist?

https://youtu.be/XZfOfq6NJ4Y?si=oApWtsIJSjdecLD7

@MarkDParker Live Stream Mentioned with Sam @transfigured3673 link: https://www.youtube.com/live/HNoaLoVLFsQ?si=Cey0iD9HKgau8_DB

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Ross Byrd returns to the Yours Truly Podcast for a heavy but necessary conversation. We wrestle with what it really means when pastors fall — not just “a sinner like the rest of us,” but men entrusted with sacred office, whose failures ripple through families, churches, and communities.

We dig into Ross’s Patient Kingdom essay on the cliché “There but for the grace of God go I” — asking whether that phrase short-circuits deeper honesty about betrayal, shame, and the costly road back to trust. Along the way we examine Carl Lentz’s story, the revolving door of evangelical scandals, and the flattening of pastoral authority into what Ross calls “nihilistic piety.”

This episode is not about gossip or cynicism. It’s about telling the truth: grace is not a hall pass, forgiveness is not the same as restored trust, and sacred office is more than private accountability.

Mentioned

• Ross Byrd – https://substack.com/@rossbyrd?r=433pnb&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile

• Carl Lentz & Lights On podcast: @lightsonwithcarllentz

• Evangelical scandals: Ravi Zacharias, Bill Hybels, Steve Lawson, Robert Morris

• Scripture: 1 Timothy, Acts, Genesis

Key Ideas

• Sacred office isn’t interchangeable with personal piety.

• “Grace” without truth or trust becomes hollow.

• Confession belongs in the light, not just in private.

• Restoration is costly — it takes time, patience, and truth-telling.

👉 If this conversation resonates, please subscribe, share, or consider becoming a channel member to support longform work like this: Join this channel

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Conversation Craft — Ep. 129: The Meyers

Faith, family, and conversation as a craft.

Miles and Rebecca Meyers (of Our View from the Plains) share their journey—from early grief and a rocky start to marriage, to rediscovering a call to ministry and building a household shaped by prayer, table, and church. They talk candidly about repentance, identity, and how to move from one-time “conversion moments” to a way of life rooted in practice and ritual.

Find the Meyers: ​⁠@OurViewFromThePlains (YouTube)

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Support the work

Join channel memberships • Substack • Podcast feed • Social links

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Notes (from the conversation): their channel mission and “table → sacraments” frame; their family story and “where do we go from here?”; cultivation over one-off conversion; the “Friday concert / Saturday conference / Sunday liturgy” hierarchy; and “Sundays are holy.”

🎯 Core Episode Tags

• Miles and Rebecca Meyers

• Our View from the Plains

• Conversation Craft podcast

• Yours Truly Podcast

• Christian Baxter

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🏠 Faith & Family Tags

• Christian parenting

• Marriage and faith

• Homeschooling and theology

• Family discipleship

• Passing down the faith

• Christian family legacy

• Raising kids in faith

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✝️ Theological / Ecclesial Tags

• Eucharist vs communion

• Sacramental Protestantism

• Sunday is holy

• Call and response liturgy

• Christian tradition and submission

• Conversion vs cultivation

• Practicing the faith

• Legacy of the church fathers

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🌐 Digital / Corner Tags

• This Little Corner of the Internet

• Symbolic World community

• Estuary conference

• Digital vs embodied church

• Online Christian community

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📈 Broad SEO Reach Tags

• Faith and culture podcast

• Christian YouTube channels

• Christianity in modern America

• Protestant sacramental theology

• Christian family stories