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My dear friend Ben Bishop, author of The Garden House Substack, joins me to discuss how fiction can help us imagine how people from different times and places experienced the divine, particularly through the novels of Frederick Buechner.
Listeners don't need to have read these works to follow our conversation—there are "no quizzes" here. Rather, Buechner’s function helps us strip away our accumulated religious assumptions. When we read biblical stories today, we're receiving them after thousands of years of theological interpretation, but Buechner helps us imagine what it felt like to be Jacob or Isaac in the moment—not as figures who knew they were part of some grand biblical narrative, but as people experiencing strange, terrifying, and wonderful encounters with the divine in real-time. Through his storytelling, we confront both the "offensiveness and the beauty and wonder of those stories" in ways that theoretical discussions simply cannot achieve, making ancient faith experiences immediate and visceral.
In the Patreon-exclusive second half, Ben and I discuss our shared adolescent experiences with Christian punk rock, its influence on our sociopolitics, social lives, and faith development.
