Subversive Orthodoxy
Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise
This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world, and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation nor the human soul.
It is also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated, and obsolete may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we are living in, full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide.
The deepest answers have not come from where we expected. Not from ivy league Universities nor theological seminaries nor political ideologies, but from those who suffered and saw—mystics and poets, prisoners and prophets, those who walked through fire and came out with a story to tell. Living faith resonates much deeper than theological theories.
Hosted by:
Travis Mullen and Robert "Larry" Inchausti, Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Subversive Orthodoxy
Episode #9: Laughing into the Abyss, Chesterton on Deconstruction, Nihilism, and Technology: G.K. Chesterton (part two)
Travis Mullen and Professor Robert Inchausti explore G.K. Chesterton's insights on how Christianity transcends cultural collapse and continually renews itself throughout history. They examine Chesterton's paradoxical understanding of orthodoxy as something exciting and revolutionary rather than stale or safe.
• Chesterton identified five historical periods when Christianity supposedly "died" but was actually being rediscovered beyond cultural constraints
• Current religious deconstruction often involves shedding cultural expressions (megachurches, corporate practices) rather than faith itself
• True orthodoxy is not a set of doctrinal checkboxes but a poetic, paradoxical vision that embraces mystery
• Freedom comes through tradition and ritual, not unfettered choice
• Humor serves as a spiritual weapon that opens doors to truth when serious arguments fail
• Chesterton's prophetic vision warned of soulless progress, technocratic control, cultural amnesia, and moral relativism
Join us next time as we continue exploring voices that help us find meaning in a fragmented world. Please leave a five-star review, subscribe, and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation.
How G.K. Chesterton used paradox, playfulness, and holy laughter to dismantle the fashionable despair of his age—and why it still speaks to ours.
In a world where meaning is constantly taken apart and nothing is left standing, G.K. Chesterton didn’t just argue back—he laughed.This episode explores how Chesterton used humor, wit, and joyful defiance to challenge the creeping nihilism of his time—and how his insights prefigure today’s culture of deconstruction.Whether mocking the modern reduction of man to machinery or flipping fashionable philosophies on their heads, Chesterton didn’t retreat into cynicism—he charged into it with a joke and a hymn.For Chesterton, laughter wasn’t escape. It was resistance. It was sanity. And it was sacramental.
What if the death of religion is actually just the death of a particular cultural expression of it? G.K. Chesterton, the witty and profound British writer, observed that Christianity has "died" five times throughout Western history—yet each time, what actually died were just the cultural frameworks containing it.
Travis Mullen and Professor Robert Inchausti delve into Chesterton's remarkable insight that Christianity isn't tied to any particular cultural moment but transcends them all. As our contemporary religious landscape undergoes massive transformation, this perspective offers a refreshing way to understand deconstruction: many who believe they're rejecting Christianity might actually be shedding obsolete cultu
Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com
Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy
Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation
Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.
Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.
Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.
Ah, so we have come to the end again, have we? The end of reason, the end of religion, the end of man, the end, it seems, of endings? Very well, let us begin. You say God is dead. I've heard that obituary five times already. He died with the Caesars, they said. He died with the monks. He died with the cathedrals, he died with the candles and the plagues and the peasant saints. He died again in the shadow of the guillotine and once more in the smoke of your clever little factories.
Speaker 2:And'm your host, Travis Mullen, and I'm excited to have you with us.
Speaker 1:This is a podcast about philosophy and meaning. It is about how we as humans withstand the challenges of our cultures. It is about the general Judeo-Christian revelation of God in the world and how the bloodiest century ever recorded couldn't kill that revelation. It's also about how that revelation, tossed aside as archaic, outdated and obsolete, may be the very life-giving power we need to resist this distracted techno state we're living in full of anxiety, depression and teenage suicide technostate we're living in full up a little bit to the part right before the ending on the last episode where we were talking about reading on page 16 of Subversive Orthodoxy, where he's talking about Chesterton. So it's in the intro of the whole book. It's not in the Chesterton part and obviously Chesterton's so important he made it to the very beginning intro work on the book introducing all 20 of the characters.
Speaker 1:So I have thoroughly enjoyed Chesterton. He's extremely fun and funny and witty and it just lightens the mood. It's really fun. So hope you're enjoying Chesterton and I hope this makes you want to read some of his books if you haven't already. I currently am in the middle of what's Wrong with the world and I did start orthodoxy a while back and I'm going to get back to it as well. So here we go. Okay, so this is on page 16 of Subversive Orthodoxy Professor's book, where he's this is not the chapter. If any of you are following along with the book, this isn't in the chapter on Chesterton. This is actually in the original intro of the whole book. So I believe yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's on like page two of the whole book, page 16 of the intro, yeah, which is page two of the actual book, of the text, okay, as it starts to talk. So I'm going to read two paragraphs here, cause I feel I feel like I underlined them all, I had all these notes and how much it related to current deconstruction in our, in our culture. So, in other words, the history of faith is really the story of how the soul out distances its own culture, bound rituals, refurbishing itself from the inside out through the examples of its prophets and saints, zen koans. Is that the right way to say that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, for example, are not epistemological riddles, as our enlightenment philosophers might describe them, but exemplary forms of poetic revivification, like the Sermon on the Mount. They preserved the spiritual content of a tradition by challenging convention on the invisible wings of metaphor. In his book the Everlasting man, GK Chesterton describes the power of orthodoxy to renew itself in a chapter titled Five Deaths of the Faith. Christianity, he tells us, was never really reborn because it never really died. The cultures it lived in died. So Christianity was rediscovered five times in the history of the West, as one cultural epoch was superseded by another. This happened after the fall of Rome, then in the 12th century, at the end of the feudal era, again when the medieval synthesis gave way to the secular energies of the Renaissance. Again when the Renaissance fell to the new rationalism of the Enlightenment. And yet again as Enlightenment values have begun to dissolve with the arrival of our post-industrial age.
Speaker 1:In each instance, the end of civilization and death of God were proclaimed. But what was really dying was a complex set of institutional arrangements wedded to particular cultural premises. In each case, a new cultural age emerged, when Christianity was rediscovered as something above and beyond the culture that claimed to embody it, above and beyond the culture that claimed to embody it. And so in my notes I had said current deconstruction is actually the death of just a form the megachurch, the satellite church, the corporate practices of the church. So these are the things people are shedding, thinking, they're shedding Christianity, but they will find that it did not die. Only those forms died which yeah, and chesterton's pointing to a thread.
Speaker 2:You know that this is, and since chesterton's probably happened five more times yeah in different contexts, you know yeah, I, I think somewhere, somewhere, chesterton says the corpse turned out to be the coroner, the person burying Christianity and seeing it as a relic was really burying their old understanding of Christianity, born of a previous set of institutional arrangements that no longer make any sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, the words like constructs and theological infrastructure come to mind.
Speaker 2:Yes, and back when fundamentalists were living in a culture where literal truth was the only truth, you know, a culture where there weren't things like electricity, that went in two, that had positive and negative poles and went in two directions at the same time, these scientific developments enlarged the human imagination. So why wouldn't it enlarge your understanding of your Bible and your faith? Why would the faith then become the old world critique of the new, when it's really your faith is bigger than the world you lived in? That's all it means. It doesn't mean that the world changed and is no longer believing what your literalism taught you. It's that literalism is now exposed as just being one tool that was limited and not inclusive enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that means that it isn't that the fashions of the day are more inclusive than what they replace. It's like the fashions of the day are just insufficient to the transcendental truth of the faith in a different way than the fundamentals Right. So it's like it's the understanding of the faith I think we talked about it I think it was with Kierkegaard that the idea that the truth was absolutely paradoxically teleologically placed. And what did it mean to be absolutely paradoxically teleologically placed? It meant to be placed outside the absolutes of your cultural era and culture and time, yeah, where all the constants are way bigger than 100 years.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, you could live within your cultural framework and all of those constants, assumptions, premises, premises, mental, theological, worldview, infrastructure could all be 40 years old yeah exactly, but there is a there, there are. There are not constructs.
Speaker 1:There's actual constants that are 3 000 years old yes, yes, that's what he's saying, yeah uh, one thing, one thing chesterton said that relates to what you're saying is uh, on progress, he says and and relate this to church or theology or anything. Yeah, he says progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, but instead we're always changing the vision to fit the world yeah, yeah. So we're adapting to the world's cultural movements rather than changing our world to fit the real vision.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The long constants of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you just have to live long enough to see a few cultures rise and fall.
Speaker 1:A few cycles.
Speaker 2:A few civilizations rise and fall, things that seem sort of you know that would last forever. I guess the Roman Empire, you know was one that people thought would never die. And then they had the Great Death, which they thought was, you know, the end of the end of civilization. But it turned out that it was a cyclical change into a new civilization that the people who were raised in the old couldn't see until much later, or, if at all, never in their lifetime.
Speaker 1:Much later or, if at all, never in their lifetime. Yeah, and this also, I think, triggers the best quote of Chesterton which I've known in my life was from my college pastor, brett, who likes our podcast. Yeah, he said Brett taught me that Chesterton and said the Christian ideal has not been been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. Yeah, and that's from.
Speaker 2:What's wrong with the world yeah, that's good because again, it's that, it's that humility, you know it. It isn't. People haven't tried, you know they, uh, my ancestors probably tried, they just weren't very good at it and I'm not very good at it, and who am I to sort of say they had the wrong religion?
Speaker 2:or they had the wrong ideology. No, it wasn't about that. It was about they worked with what they had and they weren't all that great at it, and that should make us more grateful for what we have and what they were able to do, not bitter or nihilistic that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. You know, there have been great mysteries and graces in everybody's lives and they haven't been accidents. They're part of creation and grace.
Speaker 2:And that's why Chesterton said, you know, he went from a cynic to a believer because he moved from looking at the dark side to looking at the joy and the grace as a story that he hadn't paid attention to right. And so he thought that his age was particularly overly rational and underappreciate, had not enough gratitude for existence, but very intelligent and rational in terms of critique, and that's okay. But it isn't healthy for societies, both economically and psychologically from his point of view. So Christianity and plus he thought that Christianity had the other virtue of being true and that its truth was confirmed in its survival from all these different epics that died. And then Christianity reappeared in a new guise, where all things are made new again, and that means that all the old explanations go but the faith and God and the eternal are back.
Speaker 2:You know, they never left. They just became obscured there for a while because we thought AI was the answer to no. It was a replacement for having a soul and being human. It's going to save us from ourselves and for Chesterton, that artificial intelligence is really real. Stupidity is basically what it is Not seeing yourself in your context, thinking your context is absolute.
Speaker 1:And Kierkegaard was very good.
Speaker 2:That was the existential insight. Very good, that was the existential insight. You know, context is very determinative of human thought and understanding and experience. But context is not absolute and that gives room for faith and also for spirituality. That puts them in. I think the Buddhists talk about the two truths, the eternal and the relative. And the worldly and the fashionable is the relative. But where's the eternal? Well, maybe universal scientific laws, but they get turned over every 10 years. So where's the eternal? That becomes the question uh, that, uh, faith answered that, um, rationality didn't so, um, we're coming into about the last bit of our podcast.
Speaker 1:We're going to focus in on a couple of his books and some of his themes now from the professor here. So one is let's talk about orthodoxy because that to you it meant a lot to you in the definition of orthodoxy for your book Subversive Orthodoxy, and also it's a type of orthodoxy that he's talking about in his book that really appeals to you and also sets kind of a generous table. We're not talking about Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox specifically, or we're not in context of the book Subversive Orthodoxy or our podcast. We're not talking about specifically technical Christian Orthodoxy theological statements, but rather, as we said in the intro of the podcast, like a general revelation kind of aspect. But there's more to it that he talked about and that you resonated with. So let's talk about that.
Speaker 1:I'll first read two of his quotes from the book. Number one is from chapter eight, the romance of orthodoxy. He says this is a thrilling romance of orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum and safe. But there was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy, and that was something we had read in a previous episode as well. That quote, and then elsewhere he says orthodoxy chapter uh six. In the paradoxes of christianity chapter he says um, the church is a lion tamer. It has kept the wild animals of the cosmos at bay by refusing to be swallowed by any of them. It has been the only thing that has.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, the slaves to fashion which are really for him. The aristocratic classes are the ones that are more slaves to contemporary fashions, both in dress and in ideas, than even the working class, and that orthodoxy is a kind of escape from the orthodoxy. Well, let's say it's escaped from the tribal faiths and cults and values of the age that you were just sort of born into, like the trends of the day.
Speaker 2:The trends of the day, and I think I mentioned that quote before that he said there's nothing more demeaning than being a slave to the trends of your day. Well, how do you get out of the trends of your day? How do you get into freedom of thought? Well, for him, there was one place you can go, and that was Christianity, and especially Orthodox Christianity, not some sort of cult of extreme ideas.
Speaker 1:The.
Speaker 2:Orthodoxy, the Christian Orthodoxy he's talking about, isn't a set of doctrinal checkboxes that you check off and that makes you a member of the cult. It's more of a paradoxical vision of reality that's poetic and that seizes upon the mystery of human experience, which is not. That experience is a mystery because it's unknown. It's because experience is kind of a daily mystic experience where you can fall into your love for your wife or your child, and it has an infinite space. It doesn't stop, and so it's a mystery because you're wondering how you could be inside this experience. Nature is the same way. The ocean they're mysteries, but they're not unknowns, whereas for science and rationality, mystery is an unknown and the idea is to solve it. So, like star trek, you know their. Their greatest vision is to go where no man has gone before and to seek the unknown, not to appreciate it, but to come to know it. So it's no longer a mystery to conquer it, to conquer it.
Speaker 1:So, in a sense, in a sense, what he's part of, how he's saying that christianity is, um, it's a, it's a, it's a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world. That is different is that he's saying that you're familiar with mystery. Yes, rather than trying to solve everything in a way that maddens you and makes you insane.
Speaker 2:Yes, it's the joyful humility that allows you to live comfortably and joyfully in mystery.
Speaker 1:In an infinite world.
Speaker 2:In an infinite world, and it's not and it isn't your job to predict things and control things. In fact, it's your job not to be center stage and not to predict and control things. God does that. Your job is to feel the grace and the love and pass on the vision of daily mystic living in Christ, and that is a whole joyful thing that he found. And so then, when he gets into these public arguments with George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, these powerful intellectuals, many of whom were troubled human beings who were carrying the world on their shoulders, Because, if the socialist revolution fails, I will have failed England, but that is not the life I'm living or the world that I'm living as a
Speaker 2:human being, following my faith in the God that Christ revealed to me, which is open to joyful humility and peace of mind, and that becomes his counter story to the heroic, the new version of the heroic quest, which is whatever that generation finds epic, like mountain climbing or cross-country racing or whatever.
Speaker 2:Whatever becomes the uh, the uh heroic story.
Speaker 2:Um, and then there's the, there's the counter story of the, there's the christian story, which is well, the, the, the hero is the guy who gave himself, and the poor are the inheritors of the earth, and the poor in spirit are the ones who live closest to the mystery and those kinds of Christian paradoxes that turn out to also teach you how to live with social paradoxes.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that we didn't talk about, which, well, probably we'll talk about it in a second, with orthodoxy, is this, this way of living, this embrace of mystery is, you know, I don't know if it's for us the best word, you know, because we think of mystery as things that should be revealed, revealed, and the truth is the revealing behind a mystery. But for, for chesterton, truth is really the reality of the mystery, um, and living in it and with it in, not in intellectual freedom where there are no rules, uh, but in in terms of a dance, a relationship to things that have a structure, and a set of relationships and conventions that help you find your place in the scheme of things, without immediately reaching out for certainty, power or some sort of absolute um, I think I think I just made a connection of what you're saying as far as a differentiation between a mystery, the way we might think of it, and the mystery of what he means.
Speaker 1:like in a scientific or empiricist mindset you might think mystery, well that's just, that's just unknown, that's just unknown.
Speaker 2:So like blank you're looking at something blank yeah.
Speaker 1:But what we mean is, or what orthodoxy would mean, according to Chesterton, is you know, give an example of like the Trinity, so you have the. The scientists go. Well, that's meaningless, that doesn't make sense. But what he's saying is no, it's the truth. Now, live in the mystery of it, cause you don't get to, you don't get to solve for zero, like you don't get to, you don't get to, you are not infinite enough to make this equation work for your brain. And that's not to say that. It's not that it doesn't have a math equation, it may, but it's to say you get to humble human, you get to live in this equation. That's called mystery. That is a truth that you don't get to fully understand, rather than you thinking, oh, that doesn't make sense, so it's not true.
Speaker 2:Right, right, that is nothing, you know.
Speaker 2:That is nothing you know. Well, you know, it's those paradoxes that our language, our culture and our brain evolution isn't prepared yet to reveal to us. Like you know, we know that sometimes our best friend is also our best enemy, our frenemy. But how is that so? What does that mean? Am I just someone who flips? Well, it's part of the mystery of friendship that makes friendship a source of contemplation and revelation. That's what it is Like looking at the ocean and trying to figure out you know why that back and forth movement is so reassuring and at the same time so mysterious beauty and possibility in things that a scientist or rationalist might reduce to a complex set of relationships to allow for prediction and control. But that's just part of the human experience. That's not all of it, nor is it even the best of it.
Speaker 2:And Chesterton found that in Christianity and became probably the most popular apologist of 20th century, far more popular and probably far more longer lasting I mean I think he still has contemporary significance than somebody like Billy Graham who saw it as partly a, you know, crowd control and numbers game and PR Not that he was entirely that, but a lot of it ended up being that, whereas with Chesterton it's sort of like his faith and his belief in the power of paradox to transcend the human pride keeps him in the game, in the conversation, in a way that and kirkagard in the game and in the conversation regarding human condition uh far longer than some of those uh cold war apologetics yeah, um one one quote about him is that he was a prophet who saw the modern world coming before it arrived.
Speaker 1:Um, he warned of soulless progress, technocratic control, cultural amnesia, moral relativism. He predicted the rise of big government and big business and the breakdown of the family, and the dangers of a society that forgets beauty and wonder yeah um. Did you see that in um? Did you feel that in each of his books, or is that coming through in certain books? Do you think?
Speaker 2:well, um, the uh, I. I love that book, orthodoxy, um, and, and there are some chapters in there I forget what chapter it is where he describes pragmatism and it's a rationalist. To undo rationalism it's sort of like, well, I'm not going to get to the absolute because everything is tied to practical ends in the real world. So if I could just say that these ideas work and that's what makes them true, then I'm both being a realist and a rationalist at the same time. And Chesterton sort of says, well, that's very clever, but it doesn't really work.
Speaker 2:There's a more inclusive understanding of life, that of all classes and intellects and times and places. And if it doesn't show up in your time and space, well, it isn't necessarily because it's not true, it's because the world you live in doesn't have the capacity to register it. Because you're, you're a pragmatist. Now you're not. You're not a person with a soul, and and the soul, that that's the other thing. Yeah, you said that the absolute of having a soul, you know, uh, has become problematic for modern people. You'll say you know, my soul tells me that this is not good. And they'll say, well, what do you mean?
Speaker 1:soul Can you define a soul.
Speaker 2:And then you say well, I think the first person to talk about soul is Heraclitus, and he never defined it.
Speaker 1:But in his world.
Speaker 2:It helped him live in harmony with a changing reality. What does your negation of the idea of the soul do for you? Make it clearer that you can be a pragmatist or a scientist without self-doubt. That's a dubious achievement, right yeah, the Esquire magazine used to every year have the dubious achievement, right yeah, the Esquire magazine used to every year have the dubious achievement awards and they would give out, like you know, there'd be like 50 different people that they would give the dubious achievement award and they were always things kind of like that, you know, like proving that God didn't exist by counting the number of I don't know hamburgers in a restaurant, or something. Or these world records, you know, that are just these silly things that nobody had ever thought to do before and so now make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, that nobody had ever thought to do before, and so now make it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
Speaker 2:And the fun of that little satire was to show, you know, looking back in history, you know there were a lot of dubious achievements.
Speaker 2:And looking back in our own lives, we have a lot of dubious achievements, and it isn't because we're bad people or that we're pursuing, we're doing the best we can at pursuing the justice that we seek. It's just as Chesterton said you know we're born limited. You know, call it original sin, call it the human limitation that we're just not very good at being our own gods. And it's better to just own up to that and quit trying to be God and let God be God and find a way to talk to God and what you conceive him to be, or distrust your oversimplification either way. And that just heightens the mystery. It doesn't do away with it, which is doing away with the mystery of the human condition is a dubious achievement. Is a dubious achievement Even if the AI answers the question of what it means to be a human being. We'd have to put it back in the box because we want joy, we don't want to be right, and that's different than wanting to be famous or in control of things. That'd be the worst.
Speaker 1:Along those, oh sorry.
Speaker 2:No, I was just saying I can't think of anything worse than being in control of the universe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'd be the last thing I'd want there's a movie about that yeah, bruce, bruce, almighty jim carrey yeah, that's right, but jim carrey is a good person so yeah, on um, one of the one of the topics you said, he has kind of his own take on freedom. You know, how would you build that out or where? You know, is it coming from orthodoxy or everlasting man?
Speaker 2:I think everlasting man has the most stuff on freedom and it comes up in his debates with HG Wells. Because in HG Wells, in those debates, hg Wells is saying that science is an instrument of human freedom because it brings personal autonomy and unfettered choice.
Speaker 1:and Chesterton's view was oh, so he's saying unfettered choice is freedom.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And science gives us that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, unfettered choice. We can choose. We have more choices because science enables us to intervene in illness and illnesses and solve problems we couldn't solve before. Same engineering and technology go to planets, do all of that stuff, and it improves our personal autonomy that we're not subject to the limitations of nature as much, and Chesterton's view was not that personal autonomy shouldn't be sought, but not necessarily in terms of unfettered choice or control what we really is.
Speaker 1:The true and happiest expression of freedom is through tradition and ritual and forms and love that we can fill with our freedom and cooperation with others, regardless of a tradition, is a form of freedom.
Speaker 2:When our culture is like I'm going to get married at the justice of the peace because I don't care about those traditions, I want my freedom to do it the way I want to do it, it seems like opposite license at the uh at the um city hall, which is where my, my, uh, my son, got married at city hall in santa barbara, and we had to go and invent a ritual afterwards to go get dinner and and, uh, you know, do all of these things and and weddings are just sort of forms within which you can. You can solve a lot of questions and and involve a lot of different people and have, like roles for for grandma and roles for grandpa and roles for the, the husband, their mother and the daughter's dad. These rituals are not meant to be these. Well, I don't know what they're meant to be, but they don't. People that don't want to do it don't want to be compelled by a form, but you're only compelled by a form if you take it more seriously than it was intended.
Speaker 2:I mean if you realize that this is an excuse for getting together and spending a lot of money and having fun and enjoying one another and giving it a ritual structure in order to bring people together, that has traditionally had a kind of payoff in terms of relationships, we might find we don't do that anymore because the social institutions have turned them into obligations. So we might want to get rid of those obligations and you can do that. But that doesn't mean that tradition itself is bad. It's just that there's this process order. How does it work? Order, disorder and reorder, and that's kind the the three-part steps of human cultural development, and so the order works for a hundred years. And then we decide we don't want to have to go to church anymore because everybody's living in robot bodies. So we can watch it. We can go to church in our heads with our artificial intelligence beacons or whatever, and then that that'll be adapted. But the content of it, you know, is you know, are you using that to become more alienated from your experience, or are you using that?
Speaker 2:in order to become more joyful and in love with life and and the truth of the human condition, um, and and its greater ends in love and relationships? Or are you using it to solve problems that were big deals, maybe 200 years before that, but are no longer even a?
Speaker 1:problem at all.
Speaker 2:So Chesterton had that kind of imagination that would allow him to think about, you know, sci-fi versions of his own faith as a way of demonstrating its perennial value, even if its rituals were relative to one's time and place and situation. So I mean, that's sort of the way I read it and so it's not. Those things are not sort of the way I read it and so it's not. Those things are not those, like, the rituals are not things to have wars over, or, you know, civil wars over. You know, whether or not the Eucharist is wine or punch or whatever, the although I'm sure there have been wars fought over that very thing, doctor absolutes that that become, you know, sources of wars and conflicts.
Speaker 1:Now I think we're almost coming in for a landing here. The things I get from Chesterton that seem really unique are his own political and economic vision that he pushed forward a lot more than it already had as just tributism that he pushed forward a lot more than it already had, as just tributism, His views on family and society and culture and community being. I don't know if they influenced Wendell Berry or anybody, but probably it sounds like they share a lot of that fabric.
Speaker 2:I don't know if Wendell Berry actually read Chester. I'm sure he probably read at least one of the books.
Speaker 1:But yeah, you can see it certainly in his thought is similar in so many ways to that, yeah, a fabric of actual local community and stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, community and stuff, um, the, the, the joy and humor as a weapon, as a spiritual weapon, is new to me. That was pretty awesome to, to, to see that and and to see how it resonates. You know you just, you're gonna listen to a guy like chesterton 10 times more than you're gonna listen to a guy who's all serious and doesn't have any sense of humor. It's like. It's like humor opens the door, and and so does creativity and art. So, um, they open doors that are closed typically like people are not, you know, people are not like just wanting to hear every serious person's thoughts, but a funny person starts talking and gets them laughing. Then they're like oh, tell me more.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and who was it saying that? Maybe it was some sitcom I was watching on TV and one of the characters was saying that they wanted their friend to go out on this blind date or something Maybe it was a Seinfeld episode or something. And he said the test is if you can make her laugh, that you're going to have a better shot with her. It's an indication that she might like you. And the other character said well, why is that? And he says well, when you laugh, if someone laughs at your joke, that means that they identify with your sense of humor, which means that they find you intelligent. That humor is an indicator of intelligence, even though we don't consciously register that.
Speaker 2:But if someone is funny, um, they're usually self-deprecating and they're usually showing that they see two sides of something, or three sides of something. And in that, in that epiphany, that funny epany, you come to an appreciation of their capacity for imagination and daily mysticism. You know, not right or wrong, not good or bad, not absolute and relative, but all those things at the same time, and that's really reassuring. You know that that's really a good person to be around and a good, a good reality to experience, more so than somebody browbeating you into joining the cult or making this radical change that doesn't begin with you and your experience, but them and their need uh, yeah and and that's what?
Speaker 2:what friendship? That's how friendship and love, and uh and all those things bloom, uh, because we start living in a beautiful world together rather than in a contested world. So that's what chesterton brings to the table, man, and that's, uh, you know, the big cigar.
Speaker 1:That's part of the program yeah, now on on on ending this podcast. I'm tempted.
Speaker 2:I'm tempted to read this monologue that we had, that you had chat gpt, chat, gpt, create, because it's really good well, if you want, I mean we we have to give credit to chat gpt for for doing it, because I, I, uh, I just thought it would be a clever way of trying to do research on what Chesterton might, how he might view contemporary cultural conflicts using one of the tools of contemporary cultural conflict.
Speaker 1:And it even critiques AI within his own thoughts, ai critiquing AI's thoughts. Here's the prompt, a poetic summary of his arc, perhaps a dramatic monologue in his voice. Imagining him speaking to a 21st century audience about the coming age. That's why I think it's powerful imagining him speaking to a crowd and capturing century audience about the coming age. That's why I think it's powerful imagining him speaking um to a crowd and capturing his thought in the ark and how, how his voice would speak to this generation. Um, so I'm gonna just read it and um, take it for what it's worth. You can definitely, you can definitely hear a very, uh, a poetic synthesis of his thoughts. I think here so poetic synthesis of his thoughts. I think here so a monologue for the end of the age from the voice of GK Chesterton. Ah, so we have come to the end again, have we? The end of reason, the end of religion, the end of man, the end, it seems, of endings? Very well, let us begin.
Speaker 1:You say God is dead. I've heard that obituary five times already. He died with the Caesars, they said. He died with the monks. He died with the cathedrals, he died with the candles and the plagues and the peasant saints. He died again in the shadow of the guillotine, and once more in the smoke of your clever little factories. And now you tell me, breathless, blinking at your own glowing screens, that he has died again, that we have outgrown him at last, that your machines have learned to think and your children have forgotten how to pray. Forgive me if I do not attend the funeral. I have found it rather repetitive, for it is never God who dies, it is only man's imagination of him that grows thin and brittle, like old parchment burned by the fever of each new age. You mistake the ash of your failed empires for the dust of the divine. What perishes is not the cross, but the crooked little scaffolds you've built around it.
Speaker 1:You say you are post-Christian. So be it. You were once post-Roman, post-feudal, post-medieval, post-rational, and soon, perhaps, you shall be post-human. You may have been many things, but the church, the true church, has been one thing all along A witness, not a winner, not a tyrant, not a tool. A witness, a voice in the wilderness, mocked, mistaken, sometimes martyred, never mute. You may silence the pulpits, but the stones will sing. You may digitize your doubts, but the child still dreams of glory. And the grave, my friends, is still empty. I tell you, it is not Christianity that evolves to fit the times. It is time that crashes against the rocks of the creed and breaks. Each age has tried to bury it, but the tomb keeps being found vacant.
Speaker 1:You call this the age of artificial intelligence. I call it the age of real stupidity. You have taught your machines to mimic your minds, but you have forgotten how to nourish your souls. You speak of uploading consciousness, but you cannot bear to sit quietly with your own. You trust your algorithms more than your ancestors and your ancestors God help them.
Speaker 1:Trusted in miracles and still I do not despair. For I've seen this before. I've stood at the edge of the empires. I've watched cities fall and creeds collapse and clever men declare their own greatness with the triumphant squeal of a pig discovering fire. And each time, out of the ruin there comes a sound, not a shout but a whisper. Behold, I make all things new. Not new as in novel, but new as in true. Again, the eternal rediscovered in the ruins of the fashionable, the child laughing in the silence after the storm, the cross lifted from the rubble not by kings or corporations, but by beggars, and poets and lovers. So I say do not fear the end of this age, for christianity does not die, it rises, and perhaps if you stop running from wonder, you may see it rise in your own heart. I suggest you leave a little room, not in your schedule, but in your soul.
Speaker 2:Pretty, pretty amazing, isn't it?
Speaker 1:It is amazing how it aggregates all his types of thinking and writing.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, yeah, that it, it did that and you know, the prompts helped some to shape, did that? And the prompts helped some to shape what he was able to express. With that I would go to Chesterton himself, first the Orthodox book and then the Everlasting man. I've also heard that people tell me that they really get a lot out of his essays Because the essays are short. Again, they were written for like newspaper columns, some of them, and they're on all variety of things, some of them, and they're on all variety of things.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, because their turn of the century right around the time when modernity was emerging in culture and the dadaists were doing their thing and and chesterton was doing his, and a man called thursday is about a guy who gets involved in anarchist group. Um, who are I mean for Chesterton these are real data is Dan Arcus. So it's really. Um, that might be a way to go to would be either the essays or or orthodoxy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that's, I was recommended orthodoxy um by my mentor brett and but but he also had trouble. He had trouble recommending which book because he's kind of like it kind of depends what you want to get, because he has books on so many different yeah, yeah, he was, uh, he was really prolific, one of the most prolific writers probably in history.
Speaker 2:Um, and some of it is, you know it's, it's that voice, uh, pre-modern voice before hemingway. You know where, where you're, um, it's almost feels like someone talking to you sometimes, um, but it he so funny and and he's so witty and and the stuff and the stuff he talks about is so contemporarily interesting. You know that, uh, he's well worth the trouble.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I hope we did him justice today. I think we did. He is quite a gem. So thanks for writing about him, thanks for sharing about him, and I really appreciate you, professor, and look forward to the next time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, look forward myself. Thank you very much, travis.
Speaker 1:Thank you, bye. Well, that concludes Episode 9, chesterton, part 2. I want to leave you here with one of Chesterton's greatest quotes the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. A believer or somewhere in between, on your own deconstruction journey, we're going to be exploring what it means to live a life of deep meaning in a world that often feels fragmented and nihilistic, and this revelatory faith doesn't seem to come to us from the expected places. The prophetic voice doesn't seem to come from the pulpits or the seminaries. It's breaking through in novels, poetry, activism, art and the unexpected corners of culture. We hope you'll join us on this ongoing conversation. Until then, thank you for listening to the Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast. If you found this meaningful, please leave a five-star review, subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation Adios. Subscribe and share with anyone who might resonate with this conversation. Adios.
Speaker 2:Spiritually, I want to jump off a cliff.
Speaker 1:This has been a subversive orthodoxy podcast with Travis Mullen and professor in trust. I could drift. Or if I could drift through it, dancing through a moonlight under nighttime skies, forgetting the world's lies. Meanwhile, I'm fine looking through a stained glass. Oh, she and I seem to say hi to human beings with a smile unseen, grabbing wildflowers as I slide down hills after the rain. Thank you,