True Magic

If modesty is fundamentally about knowing and keeping our place, then certain thorny questions naturally arise. In this episode, we consider five of them:

1. Is upward mobility immodest?

2. Are naked babies immodest?

3. What if you need to wear something immodest?

4. What if you’re biblically modest, but culturally immodest?

5. Must our dress be distinctively gendered?

And here’s the article mentioned in the episode, which may help you to fit modesty into a larger covenantal and cultural context:

https://discipleshipanddominion.substack.com/p/why-life-without-covenant-clown-world

Why is the solar calendar not exactly 365 days? Why did God put a remainder of a day into every year, what does it teach us about the completion of time, and what does he want us to do with it? How can we better take hold of it, and exercise dominion over it, so that we are shaping the forms of our lives to reflect Christ’s rule?

It makes natural sense to celebrate Christmas in the dark of winter, just as the light is returning to the world. But what about the 10% of us in the southern hemisphere? What does it mean to celebrate Christmas in midsummer—and how should we be adjusting our liturgical practices to reflect this meaning? Aaron Renn’s newsletter referenced in the show: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/capturing-institutions

Since we should be celebrating Christmas, the question is how. Are the forms of our celebration good? What spiritual patterns do they embody? In this episode, we talk about how gift-giving, Christmas trees, and nativity scenes are good forms of liturgical practice that involve us in the incarnation of Christ.

Should Christians celebrate Christmas? Contrary to much hand-wringing from a surprising diversity of theological traditions, the church is clearly authorized by the patterns of scripture to institute and observe festivals like Christmas. Indeed, to fail in this is a functional denial of our status as sons of God, of our Great Commission, and ultimately of the lordship of Christ over time as well as over space.

In the first of a two-parter on this topic, we look at the strangely inconsistent history of modesty in Christendom, and suggest that the reason we find modesty so hard is because we think of it as a set of rules about skin coverage—rather than as a spiritual pattern of preserving one’s place in the creation hierarchy.

Bnonn being indisposed, Smokey monologues on weasel phrases which signal that you’re thinking like a materialist, and rants about a bad argument against women in the workforce.

In this landmark episode, Smokey expounds, for the first time, her most notable contribution to the history of symbolic thought. We talk about the continuum between ducks and swans, twisting serpents, squid, alpacas, the Flying Spaghetti Monster…and, of course, noodles.

In this bonus episode, Bnonn builds on the foundation of clothing as corporate identity, and talks specifically about the weird and sinister anti-pattern of mass masking. What does it communicate? How does it affect our identities? And is it actually…magic?

We discuss the connection between identity and appearance—and how clothing has been used in history to direct corporate identity, uniting and separating people from each other.