Whiplash with Maxwell Kuzma

In this episode of Whiplash, we unpack the concept of “scandal” in the Catholic Church — what it means in the tradition, and how it often functions in practice. With Chris Damian and Justin from Empty Chairs, we focus especially on the uneven way scandal gets applied to queer Catholics — and with Max’s perspective, to trans people in particular — where identity itself is often treated as suspect, even when someone is living in line with the church’s stated expectations. At the same time, we examine how Catholic institutions sometimes respond when credible allegations surface within their own ranks, and why the instinct is so often defensiveness rather than accountability.

Find Chris online @cdamianwrites

Find Justin online @emptychairshome

Find Max online @maxwellkuzma 

Content statement: Please be aware that this episode includes discussion of clergy sexual abuse, grooming, and institutional misconduct. While we do not go into graphic detail, these topics may be difficult for some listeners. Please take care while listening.

Millennials have been blamed for everything from killing napkins to buying too much avocado toast, so naturally we decided to talk about the economy. In this episode, I’m joined by my former Franciscan University classmate Shannon Kaschak to unpack why “just budget better” isn’t a serious economic policy, what a $3-per-meal proposal says about how poverty gets framed, and how culture wars keep working people fighting each other while wealth quietly concentrates at the top. We laugh. We cringe. We side-eye late-stage-capitalism lunchables.

But underneath the memes and millennial slander, we’re getting into something real: what Catholic social teaching actually says about money, power, and who the economy is for. From for-profit detention centers to speculative tech bubbles to the way marginalized people become political distractions, we’re asking what it would look like to build systems where nobody gets left behind. It’s avocado toast with a preferential option for the poor — and yes, we mean that.

Centering yourself in a world that profits from your fragmentation is a quiet act of resistance. In this episode of Whiplash, Max sits down with Cassidy Hall to explore how contemplation can become an embodied, grounded practice — especially for queer and trans people navigating spiritual burnout, political chaos, and inherited religious tension. Drawing from Cassidy’s powerful book, Queering Contemplation, the conversation moves beyond rigid either/or thinking and into integration: body and spirit, identity and mystery, action and stillness. For Max, reading this book as a transgender Catholic opened up new language for embodiment as holy — not something to transcend, but something to inhabit.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your body, wary of silence, or unsure whether Christian contemplation belongs to you, this episode offers a grounded and accessible entry point. ✨ Book Giveaway: Max is giving away copies of Queering Contemplation to subscribers. To enter, make sure you’re subscribed and fill out the Google Form here: https://forms.gle/k87VJM8pjFmugs3P9 Winners will be contacted by email and asked to provide a mailing address.

Power and exploitation often feel unstoppable, but much of what we perceive as power is actually empty. Those who dominate and extract — whether in governments, corporations, or cultural institutions — survive by feeding off the labor, energy, and lives of others. They cannot create, nurture, or love. Recognizing this emptiness reveals an important truth: the real power lies in those who build, care, create, and share. Small acts of generosity, solidarity, and love have the capacity to transform communities and challenge even the most entrenched systems.

The Gospel, together with Catholic Social Teaching, offers guidance through these storms. Human dignity, solidarity, care for the vulnerable, and the moral responsibility to use our gifts for the common good provide a framework for resisting exploitation and fostering liberation. By centering compassion, creativity, and community, we become the light in a world often shadowed by greed and violence. Even seemingly small acts — listening, mentoring, sharing resources, or protecting someone’s dignity — are meaningful forms of resistance that reveal the enduring strength of love over extraction.

This episode is another informal, more reflective offering. Rather than an investigation or a philosophical / theological argument, it’s a meditation on what it feels like to move through ordinary life under authoritarian conditions — when even small, domestic tasks take on emotional and political weight. I reflect on the feeling of “doing laundry under authoritarian conditions,” and the thoughts and feelings that surfaced while navigating cold weather and exhaustion.

From there, the episode opens into a reflection on queer and trans survival, liberation, and the spiritual depth of the transgender journey. It considers how small rituals, endurance, and attention to the body can become sites of resistance and meaning — and how trans life, even in its quietest moments, carries a sacred power that refuses erasure.

With national attention focused on ICE actions and events in Minneapolis—and amid a moment when many people’s emotional and intellectual bandwidth is stretched thin—this episode takes a simpler, more informal format. Recorded solo and without a guest, it slows the pace while remaining grounded in research and analysis, making space to think carefully about how language, power, and morality intersect in times of crisis.

The episode centers on bothsidesism, with particular attention to how appeals to balance, civility, and “religious liberty” are used to construct false equivalence in contexts of state violence. Drawing on recent media coverage and Catholic leadership responses, it examines how unequal actors and harms are rhetorically flattened into narratives about “division on all sides,” obscuring responsibility and legitimizing existing power structures. Titled Bothsidesism Is a Moral Failure, the episode offers not a provocation but a diagnosis: when neutrality ignores power, refusing false equivalence becomes an act of discernment rather than extremism.

Learn more about my work at: https://maxwellkuzma.substack.com/

In this episode, we take a historical and theological dive into the idea of Christian persecution—where it comes from, how it was formed, and why it still holds so much emotional power today. Drawing from early Christian martyrdom, the development of moral frameworks around suffering and faithfulness, and the long arc of Christianity’s relationship to power, we explore how a story meant to sustain people under real violence became something very different once Christianity moved to the center of cultural and political life. When a faith that once survived on the margins becomes dominant, the meaning of opposition changes—and not always in ways we’re prepared to recognize.

From there, we look at how this inherited story plays out in contemporary American Christianity, especially when long-standing cultural authority begins to weaken. We talk about how claims of persecution often emerge not from oppression, but from the loss of being unquestioned; how accusation can function as a kind of confession, revealing what people fear losing; and how everyday moments—classrooms, institutions, public disagreement—get transformed into moral crises. Speaking as two people who grew up in high-control Catholic spaces, we approach this conversation with honesty, care, and clarity, not to attack belief, but to ask what kind of faith becomes possible when we stop mistaking the end of dominance for the beginning of suffering.

For more of our work, check out Max’s substack: https://maxwellkuzma.substack.com/

In a moment shaped by state violence, fear-based politics, and the misuse of religious language, this conversation turns toward a different Christian tradition—one rooted in solidarity rather than hierarchy. We explore the history of liberation theology, how queer liberation theology flows from it, and why Catholic social teaching’s preferential option for the poor matters right now. From the killing of Renée Nicole Macklin Good in Minneapolis to recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela, we talk through how state violence is justified, how nationalism reshapes Christianity, and why queer lives are so often treated as expendable. We also trace how liberation theology emerged in response to empire and why queer liberation theology belongs fully within that tradition—not as an add-on, but as a continuation. If you want to keep digging into these themes, you can find more writing and podcast work on high-control Catholicism, Christian and Catholic nationalism, fighting fascism, and online radicalization on the Maxwell Kuzma substack: https://maxwellkuzma.substack.com/

The fight for LGBTQ dignity in the Catholic Church didn’t begin in our lifetime—and this episode traces one priest who proved that publicly and without apology. Fr. Tom Oddo was a Catholic priest living in 1944-1989 who openly advocated for gay rights while also defending a rigorous, human vision of Catholic education, reminding us that courage and reform have always existed within the Church.

On Whiplash, Max Kuzma is joined by author Tyler Bieber, whose new book Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic chronicles Fr. Tom’s life and legacy, alongside co-host Madeline Marlett. Together, they reflect on what it means to inherit a tradition of public advocacy—and how remembering our elders can sustain the ongoing work of building a more honest, diverse, and faithful Church.Buy Tyler’s book here: https://unencumberedpress.com/product/against-the-current/

Purity culture is often framed as a story about sex and shame, but it’s also a political system shaping whose bodies are protected, disciplined, or cast as threats. In this episode of Whiplash, Emma talks with Sara Moslener, scholar of American religion, race, and gender, and author of After Purity. Sara helps us see how purity culture is deeply entwined with whiteness, Cold War politics, and American nationalism, showing how fears about “unruly bodies” continue to shape public life—especially for queer and trans people.

This episode isn’t easy listening, but it’s clarifying. Sara and Emma explore the long afterlife of purity culture in our bodies and communities, helping name the forces behind innocence myths, racialized vulnerability, and the policing of desire.

Sara's book, After Purity, is available now: https://www.beacon.org/After-Purity-P2238.aspx