In this conversation, I’m joined again by Bob the Baptist to talk about Christianity in the digital age—and the growing gap between discourse and formation.

Online Christian conversations can generate urgency, clarity, and conviction. But they also move faster than people can be formed, stabilized, or responsibly led. Throughout this discussion, we return to a central tension: some people need immediate pastoral triage, while others need long-term structural and liturgical formation—and the internet is optimized for neither.

Bob presses on questions of responsibility, containment, and landing people somewhere real. I press on the limits of online systems, the dangers of premature closure, and the need for slow, embodied reconstruction. We’re not arguing past each other so much as operating on different time horizons.

This episode isn’t a debate. It’s an attempt to name the limits of Christian discourse, the burden placed on leaders in digital spaces, and why one conversation, platform, or “update” can’t do both jobs at once.

Topics include:

– Triage vs formation

– Online discourse and pastoral responsibility

– Why systems shape belief before theology does

– The limits of scale, speed, and visibility

– Why stability can’t be demanded from unstable systems

If you’re trying to think seriously about faith, leadership, and formation after the internet, this conversation is for you.

In this conversation, Christian Baxter sits down with Daniel of @O.G.Rose.Michelle.and.Daniel to explore what happens when Christianity is reduced to ideas, arguments, or online content—and why belief alone is no longer enough to sustain faith in a fragmented, post-institutional age.

The discussion moves through art, beauty, political economy, apologetics, and local community, tracing how modern life has hollowed out shared practices while multiplying opinions. Together, they ask a quietly unsettling question: if Christianity becomes something you mainly consume or debate, what is actually left to participate in?

Rather than offering a program or a culture-war posture, this episode circles a deeper claim: Christianity survives as a lived reality—formed through beauty, ritual, time, and embodied community—not as a set of propositions optimized for the internet. Beauty draws before arguments persuade. Formation precedes explanation. Church is not an information service, but a place you enter and are shaped by.

This conversation will resonate with anyone wrestling with the limits of online discourse, the exhaustion of ideological Christianity, or the longing for something real enough to inhabit. It’s an exploration of why faith must eventually move from the screen into shared life, shared time, and shared ground.

00:00 Introduction & framing the conversation

04:30 Art, faith, and incarnational thinking

11:45 Culture after the “end of history”

19:30 Institutional breakdown and loss of trust

28:10 Politics, economics, and spiritual vacuum

37:20 Christianity reduced to ideas and arguments

46:40 Why apologetics isn’t enough anymore

56:15 Formation vs belief in modern Christianity

1:06:30 The internet, abstraction, and disembodied faith

1:17:00 Beauty as attraction, not decoration

1:28:10 Liturgy, ritual, and lived participation

1:39:30 Why people ask “why bother with church?”

1:50:00 Local community, place, and imagination

2:01:45 Small towns, scale, and human formation

2:13:30 Christianity as a way of life, not content

2:26:00 Closing reflections on reality and participation

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In this episode, I sit down with a fellow seeker who has been navigating Christianity, coherence, and personal responsibility in the midst of the modern “meaning crisis.” Our conversation explores the difference between understanding ideas conceptually and learning how truth is embodied over time—between having a map and actually walking the territory.

We talk about evangelical Christianity, propositional belief, the role of church and tradition, and the challenges of forming a stable life while participating in online conversations about faith and meaning. Rather than aiming for conclusions or quick resolutions, this episode stays with the tension: how coherence is shaped slowly through practice, discipline, community, and lived participation—not just insight or explanation.

This conversation will resonate with anyone wrestling honestly with belief, belonging, formation, and the question of what it means to live faithfully without rushing arrival

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​⁠Ian’s podcast - @insight.incorporated

In this conversation, I’m joined again by Brendan Graham Dempsey to explore one of the deepest questions beneath Christianity, deconstruction, and the meaning crisis:

What does it mean for Christianity to be real?

We talk about why reducing Christianity to either literal historical propositions or “just a story” misses the point—and how story, ritual, participation, and embodiment function as carriers of truth across time. This conversation moves through historical criticism, archetypal meaning, sacramental imagination, developmental faith, and the difference between belief and participation.

Rather than defending Christianity through certainty or abandoning it through reduction, we ask what it looks like to inhabit a tradition honestly after modern skepticism and postmodern critique.

Topics include:

• Why Christianity can’t be reduced to facts alone—or dismissed as mere metaphor

• The difference between belief and participation

• Archetype, story, and reality after deconstruction

• Ritual, sacrament, and transjective meaning

• Developmental faith, doubt, and second naïveté

• Why “saving souls” may not be the same as cultivating a faithful life

This is a conversation for those who still feel the weight of Christianity—but refuse to lie to themselves about history, psychology, or experience.

0:00 Intro & Re-Entering the Conversation

3:30 What’s Changed in the Last Year (Culture & Metamodernism)

11:45 Digital Liminal Spaces & Institutional Drift

22:10 Turning Toward Metamodern Christianity

33:40 Parenting, Formation, and Developmental Faith

50:15 Symbol, Archetype, and What “Real” Means

1:06:20 Liturgy, Sacraments, and Transjectivity

1:22:30 Final Reflections & Mutual Recognition

1:28:54 Closing

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Related conversations:

• Previous episodes with Brendan Graham Dempsey

• Conversations on symbolic theology, liturgy, and the meaning crisis

• Episodes exploring faith after deconstruction

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This channel exists for slow thinking, honest dialogue, and meaning worth inhabiting.

Symbol, Tradition, and the Fracturing West — and the Limits of Modern Dialogue

In this episode of the Yours Truly Podcast, I’m joined by Yosef, a Jewish participant in This Little Corner of the Internet, for a careful conversation on Judaism, Christianity, and the crisis of trust shaping the modern West.

We explore how symbol, tradition, and religious memory function in an age of fragmentation—where dialogue is demanded, yet trust is increasingly fragile. Drawing from Jewish thought, Christian theology, cognitive science, and lived digital experience, Yosef offers a perspective rarely heard in contemporary religious and cultural debate.

Our conversation touches on:

• how modernity fractures shared symbolic worlds

• why trust—not just belief—has become the central cultural problem

• the limits of liberal dialogue and “view-from-nowhere” neutrality

• Judaism’s encounter with modernity and its parallels with Christian crises

• why Jewish voices are often spoken about rather than with

We also reflect on the broader cultural moment—where figures like Benjamin Boyce and Nick Fuentes have surfaced difficult questions about identity, power, and influence—often without sustained engagement across traditions.

This is not a debate or a polemic. It’s an attempt to think carefully in public, to hold difference without dissolving it, and to ask whether meaningful dialogue is still possible when our symbolic foundations no longer align.

If you’re interested in religion beyond slogans, culture beyond outrage, and conversation beyond tribes, this episode is for you.

00:00 – Opening: Trust as the Real Crisis

Why belief isn’t the core problem anymore

04:50 – Finding “This Little Corner of the Internet”

Cognitive science, meaning crisis, and unexpected dialogue

11:30 – The Four Ways of Knowing

Participatory, propositional, perspectival—and the poetic

18:40 – Jewish Thought and Symbolic Continuity

Why Judaism never fully abandoned symbol

26:30 – Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Judaism

How Judaism encountered modernity before Christianity

38:40 – The Protestant Reformation’s Echo in Judaism

Parallel crises of abstraction and disenchantment

47:30 – Symbol vs Rationalization

What breaks when religion becomes purely conceptual

55:40 – Midrash and the New Testament

Why Christians often miss Jewish interpretive worlds

1:05:10 – Trust, Liberal Neutrality, and Power

The limits of “view-from-nowhere” dialogue

1:14:40 – Identity, Ethnicity, and the Fracturing West

Why categories are collapsing—and re-forming

1:24:10 – Nick Fuentes, Benjamin Boyce, and Dialogue at the Edge

Black-pilling, boundaries, and whether conversation can survive

1:33:10 – The Limits of Dialogue

Zones of trust and where conversation breaks down

1:36:40 – Final Reflections

Why trust—not consensus—is the future task

How Meaning Forms at the Estuary | @rigelwindsongthurston

This conversation with Rigel Thurston explores how people actually form—not through debate or certainty, but through trust, presence, and gradual participation. We talk about the internet as an estuary, where structure and openness meet, and why meaningful conversation happens when we stop trying to arrive and learn how to enter.

A deep conversation with Cadell Last about Hegel, Christianity, digital culture, and why truth may only reveal itself when our stories - and our world - break apart.

In this conversation, Cadell Last returns to explore one of the most unsettling and clarifying questions of our time:

Does truth emerge through collapse?

We trace a lineage that has shaped the modern West:

Dawkins → Harris → Peterson → the Break.

Cadell interprets these figures through a Hegelian lens — Reason, Spirit, and Religion — pulling them into a single unfolding story that is now shattering under its own contradictions. What comes next is not a return to old forms, nor a clean secular future, but a moment where truth reveals itself in rupture.

Across the episode, we examine how Christianity, atheism, liberalism, science, digital culture, and political identity all collide inside this break. Cadell argues that Christianity’s power is not found in its pristine origins, but in the cuts — the Reformation, the Enlightenment, secularization, and even the digital fragmentation of the present. You argue from a symbolic-theological frame that the truth of faith is not an escape from collapse but a passage through it, with the Cross — literally and metaphysically — standing inside the fracture.

Together, we look at:

• How the Dawkins/Harris era failed to critique its own liberal metaphysics

• Why Peterson marked a return of religious seriousness to the public square

• Cadell’s claim that Christianity unveils itself through contradiction

• The fracture of the “We” in modern culture and the disintegration of shared identity

• Your Covenantal Identity Stack (person → marriage → household → tribe → nation → kingdom → church) as a symbolic map for reintegration

• How digital creators now carry religious and cultural authority once held by institutions

• Why AI, grief, embodiment, and synthetic resurrection reveal our spiritual disorientation

• Fuentes, ethnos, liberalism, and why both left and right struggle to sublate difference

• The invisible Church, the profane priesthood of podcasters, and emergent theopolitics

• The possibility that collapse is not the end of meaning but the beginning of recognition

This is an episode about faith, philosophy, collapse, and the possibility of renewal — not through nostalgia or easy solutions, but through confronting the break itself.

If truth emerges in the fracture, what kind of people — and what kind of Church — can stand inside it?

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A Hegelian, symbolic, and theological exploration of whether truth reveals itself only when our culture — and our stories — finally break.

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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Podcast: Yours Truly Podcast

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-yours-truly-podcast/id1751129283

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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.