The Flatpicking Pilgrim's Progress
Stories and tales from a guitar-picking writer, theologian, speaker, blogger and entertainer. From small town quirks to the bizarre realities of family, whacky church life and slightly damaged kinfolk, insights from a reluctant son of the South takes you along. Never know where it’ll end up but it’s sure to be worth the trip.
Episodes
77 episodes
Glimmers of Hope
We are in a profoundly toxic public moment. But I will remind us that down on the ground, there is far more hope and light than you’d think from watching your preferred media. I’d suggest we let our children and teachers remind us again of who ...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 6
•
10:34
Thoughts in Solitude
As Lent begins today, reflections on the life and words of Thomas Merton. Amid the chaos of ultranationalism and disruption, we need to grow deeper, not more distracted. Elton Trueblood told us, "We shall never have a better world until we have...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 5
•
19:04
The Price of Admission
An unforgettable day. But I was most touched by something his daughter said that night. She told us a little-known fact—that part of his childhood was spent in a children’s home. His family was disconnected by life. She said one of the reasons ...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 4
•
13:30
Jimmy Carter's Vision
In other words, unity of heart, spirit and love can exist even though we must have differences that will take longer to resolve. We begin with this willingness to know a fellow Christian’s heart and build upon the possibility of fellowshi...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 3
•
12:35
The Visit of the Magi
I want you to consider this: three astrologers came from Persia, without knowing anything about who they were dealing with in Herod. The salvation of the world lay innocently in the arms of his mother, nothing to protect him from the powe...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 3
•
17:50
Christmas Cards
Cryptic and mysterious messages begin coming through the unlikeliest of messengers: an elderly woman in a nursing home. Crowds flock to see her, and experts try to determine what causes it. The local ministers are perplexed. Is it the medicatio...
•
Season 5
•
Episode 2
•
23:17
The Stories of Christmas
It was a desperate time. You might even say the worst of times. And the story plainly says that while we were still lost in the tragedy called sin,God showed up, as Forrest Gump once said.
•
Season 5
•
Episode 1
•
9:52
When the Vote is Over
Since America is still sorting out the end of yesterday's tribal war, with one group acting like they won the Iron Bowl and the other looking for an immigration application to Canada, maybe it would be better to tell a story about somethi...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 8
•
17:35
Straight Talk
I wish everyone could know, way early on, that they’d have to make that journey one day. That it might be a long way, and your transportation limited, and time running out. I guess then I might have lived some things a little differently. It wa...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 7
•
12:57
Nail-pulling
I spent Labor Day relaxing a bad board on my deck and I'm pulling nails. You know, nails go in easier than they come back out. Eventually, a board gets so bad you have to do something, and there you are,having to repair, pull ‘em out...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 6
•
13:08
Cancer and Faith in the Wilderness
“ONE MOMENT I WAS a regular person with regular problems. And the next, I was someone with cancer. Before my mind could apprehend it, it was there—swelling to take up every space my imagination could touch. A new and unwanted reality. There was...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 5
•
13:57
Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley
Cryptically, Tom said in his last words before dying, that he had never harmed a hair on that girl’s head. So which was it? Here is the essence of great murder mystery—passion, jealousy and betrayal, intrigue, and rivalry of o...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 4
•
16:49
Start Young
When we are wringing our hands, troubled in mind, struggling with hope and anxious to the gills, I can pick up my mandolin our guitar at home, play a tune, and feel something lift out of the room. Wherever that sound came from (and as a man of ...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 3
•
6:58
June 6 1944
It wasn’t a perfect world, and a lot of divisions and pain were yet to come. But they had one shining moment, too young to even understand, when they poured onto those bloody beaches, the fate of the Western World on those shoulders. <...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 2
•
5:34
The Anxious Generation: review
In today's podcast I review Jonathan Haidt's important book on the impact of social media and phones on our children. A powerfully important book and research to know about.Children are learning socially, experimentally, all the t...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 1
•
13:54
Eclipse
“The second before the sun went out, we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow con...
•
Season 3
•
Episode 15
•
12:26
Holy Week: Standing at a Distance
They stood at a distance while the women cried, brokenhearted, devastated, sobbing, and his mother beyond soothing.
•
Season 3
•
Episode 14
•
3:48
Holy Week: Rolling Stones
Poetic reflection. When your hopes are dead and you're going to the tomb with an impossible stone to move, what will you do?
•
Season 3
•
Episode 13
•
7:46
Holy Week: The Harrow
Excerpt from SHADOW PRAYERS. A poetic reflection on the bewildering sentence in the Apostles' Creed that says, "He descended into hell."
•
Season 3
•
Episode 12
•
5:34
Holy Week: Sleepover in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher
On a trip to Israel in 2010 I ended up voluntarily being locked in to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional site of the crucifixion. As the crowds left and a handful of vigil-sitters and contemplators stayed behind, this happened.
•
Season 3
•
Episode 11
•
3:59
Holy Week: By a Charcoal Fire
There are two charcoal fires mentioned in the gospel narrative of Holy Week. One is where people were warming their hands and identified Peter as one of the disciples. The other was on the shores of Galilee.
•
Season 3
•
Episode 10
•
4:10
Holy Week: Good Friday
Three poems about the pivotal day in the Christian story, full of every human failure and treachery and the heroic and inexplicable faithfulness of Jesus, immovable as all around him collapsed. All poems by Gary Furr."Good Friday""P...
•
Season 3
•
Episode 9
•
7:09
Holy Week: Tennebrae
A poem about Tennebrae,f the observance of the deathly silence between crucifixion and Easter Sunday
•
Season 3
•
Episode 8
•
3:53
Holy Week: The Silences of Holy Week
The terrible silences of holy week give spaces for something radically new.. But we anre afraid, so afraid, that we are going to be alone, that we are forsaken, that there is only absence and death and decay. We talk about presence,...
•
Season 3
•
Episode 7
•
15:35