The Chivalric Real: On Christian Masculinity

The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere by Julia Margaret Cameron

I have been thinking, in the midst of this confused and confusing cultural moment, about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

I am well aware of what an anachronism such an idea might appear as we increasingly lurch toward a post-gender world, as absurd as such a notion is. But absurdity has never been a hindrance to human stupidity. Indeed, as we can see only too clearly, such is celebrated.

Both masculinity and femininity have been under attack for a good long while. Certainly it has been a constant presence in my life, but it has obviously achieved ludicrous speed over the past few years. Perhaps the anxieties promoted over the course of the pandemic (such as those just coming to light initiated by Britain’s despicable Matt Hancock’s “project fear”) have for some also loosened sexual identity to such a degree that “switching gender” (another absurdity) becomes a form of imagined empowerment (though it’s really enslavement) for some and participation in its Dionysian intoxication becomes a rite of expiation for many. This may, in fact, be an implication of René Girard’s mimetic theory that never would have occurred to the great thinker, though I doubt he would be surprised at the scapegoat mechanisms often triggered when people, for example, oppose sexualizing children through drag shows or indoctrinating them into gender ideology in elementary schools and kindergarten.

At least symbolically or rhetorically, our culture has more or less succeeded in disassociating gender from biology, including the notion of the terms “father” and “mother,” which appear to be on their way out of the postmodern lexicon. In his book, The Sibling Society, published in 1996, the late Robert Bly shares an observation he received from an acquaintance: “Having made it to the one-parent family, we are now on our way to the zero-parent family.” Here it comes. A world without parents is a world without mothers and fathers; and a world without mothers and fathers is a world without women and men.

What we are left with are simulacra of women and men: appearance without a corresponding reality, spiritual, psychological, or biological. It’s a lab leak of cosplay culture, and highly contagious.

This phenomenon has many cultural and societal implications, of which the Anglican Church’s recent proposal to “de-gender” God is but a symptom. As I have written many times before, the Church writ large is at least partially to blame for having omitted the sophianic from divine consideration, and the utterance of Genesis 1 “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...male and female created he them” is better understood if we adopt the perspective that God is here speaking to Sophia, which reinforces a sound gendered typology. Unfortunately, Christian anthropology and epistemology has never removed the spanner of this misinterpretation from the works. And we’re seeing its telos unfold in real time.

But my concern here is primarily with the masculine. We see many caricatures of the masculine, from the machismo of Andrew Tate to the practices among some Eastern Orthodox and Trad Catholic men to turn prayer and fasting into an Iron Man contest—“Yea, they have had already received their reward.” We also see a symptom of the missing father, the missing masculine in the platoons of young men flocking to people like Jordan Peterson or taking up a Norse-themed neopaganism in order to access their inner warrior. I don’t think these are necessarily bad things, but I do often question the authenticity of such gestures.

There is also the polarity to these very butch expressions of masculinity. Bly, whom I met once in 1987 and made me really feel “met” as a man for perhaps the first time in my young life, was wont to call the counter to the butch masculine the “soft male,” a man feminized not by nature but by conditioning. Indeed, boys in many school settings are discouraged from, well, acting like boys. Climbing trees is “too dangerous.” Competition encourages “toxic masculinity.” And so forth. You’ve seen it. This obscene pedagogy is a recipe for neurosis and self-hate. It is no wonder, then, that so many young men are reluctant to enter the work force, or go to college, or leave the adolescent secure fantasy spaces of video games and pornography. They never grow up. Puer aeternus. And no one should be surprised, seeing the indoctrination in self-loathing they’ve been subject to.

In Jungian analysis, we might say that the hyper-butch masculine and its companionate soft male are both evidence of an unintegrated anima. That is, they are exaggerations masking the failure to integrate the feminine into the psyche. I think our culture is doing this at scale right now, and it seems to me that the rise and ready availability of medical services allowing men to “become” women (in no small part encouraged via propaganda) is a cosmetic intervention that ultimately fails to address the inner psychological need to integrate the feminine. I think this is why we see so many absolute caricatures of the feminine arise in this sphere, as if, in far too many cases, a Barbie doll is the essence of what it is to be a woman.

Maybe twenty years ago, a woman colleague of mine stopped me one day and said, “Michael, you have the most developed feminine side I’ve ever seen in a man.” I was a little taken aback, so I punched her. Just kidding. I don’t know if what she said is or was true, but I suspect it had something to do with my being a man who writes and loves poetry and literature, knows how to take care of flowers, is attracted to the Divine Sophia, and is comfortable talking to women. The first three are often construed as “feminine” qualities (I don’t know why), but my comfort among women has much more to do with growing up with sisters and a strong mother than it does with trying to develop any kind of lotharian skill set. But I also know how to work hard at manual labor, kill and butcher an animal, how to sacrifice, and how to be a husband and father.

I’ve known plenty of men who feign being feminists or “into the goddess” as a way to flatter women they plan on seducing. I’m sure you’ve met the type. I also know plenty that play the macho role to similarly impress women. I swear, sometimes it’s like a hetero Village People.

So, I’ve been thinking about the possibility of a Christian masculinity.

Yesterday, I took to Twitter to canvas people about what or who might be their ideal of a Christian masculinity. I didn’t get a ton of suggestions, but some were interesting. One guy nominated Aragorn, son of Arathorn (a good model), and another suggested Pa Ingalls from the Little House on the Prairie books and television series. A few people pointed to Richard Rohr’s work (which I’m not familiar with) and someone even pointed to Holy Week in the Orthodox Church. I even asked my two youngest sons (ages 12 and 14). The younger one chose Aragorn and his brother picked Kambei Shimada, the leader of the samurai in the classic film Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa (I thought that was a great choice). Only one woman joined the conversation! And she nominated chivalry.

I certainly share her admiration for chivalry, but not in the rather abstract way in which it is often sold. For me, the chivalric ideal gives way to what I might call “the chivalric real.” Its most complete realization is found in the character of Launcelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur.

Launcelot represents the most noble expression of Christian masculinity because he is fully aware of his inadequacy. His love for Guinevere, the wife of his best friend, is not evidence of hamartia, but of his true humanity—and it also serves as an indictment of arranged marriage, the abandonment of which Denys De Rougement in his odious Love in the Western World laments as a great loss.

Indeed, the figure of Launcelot has haunted me since childhood, and then my early twenties, when a few of the young women I knew were convinced I was the reincarnation of Launcelot after they’d read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, in which he is rather a John Donne-like character, crucified between the trees of love and religion. Recently, I wrote this poem about him (from a forthcoming book that is moving along at a very slow pace):

VOCATION

When first I saw him: beautiful, noble of both mien and of bearing,

standing upon sunrise at the lake, the sun behind him and the water

like fire of crimson and gold, the ripples like flame reaching to his feet

the wind in his dark hair and his arms full of rushes for bedclothes.

We always knew him fearless, but more than that he was kind, humble,

feeling himself somehow unworthy of the accolades, embarrassed even

by his contrition, by his weeping when he prayed for the life of young Urry;

even more by our amazement when the lad’s wounds vanished like smoke.

So, after a time, seeing him at enmity with his dearest friend we found ourselves

all at enmity, with ourselves, with the world, and those who died not from despair

in the search for something holy lived in disdain for the abject failure of the Good;

and in our anger at this betrayal all was lost in the lust of blood and fire and ruin.

The failure of this vocation led him to another, but even then he failed to find solace,

forgiveness cruelly eluding him in this broken cosmos where all that lives can only die.

We followed, thinking if we found no comfort, at least we would refrain from harm;

yet the barley and corn grew very thin and the heavens were ever masked in grey.

One night he was bidden in vision to Almesbury, where he found the beloved already dead.

The women wailed and struck up the dirge as he bore the corpse and laid it in the chapel

offering the Mass of Remembrance while wax candles melted under undulant flame.

Even this was a betrayal, for betrayal is as much a property of the world as love.

The cloister is also a fellowship, but the dangers here are within and not in the wolds

or on the fields of blood. His loves and friends had vanished, but his vocation yet held

him in thralldom to sorrow. And he slept and did not waken. Then angels, they say, bore him away to a lake of rippling waters with waves the colors of crimson and gold.

What I think is important about the chivalric real is something many might miss: its ability to contain and positively direct the potentially violent drives that are intrinsic to male biology. Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz describe this both beautifully and accurately in their book The Grail Legend:

“The knight represents—at least as a concept—a higher, more differentiated form of the warrior, even though the individual knight might in fact have been undifferentiated enough. What the ideal of chivalry meant to that age has been given expression by poets through the figures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. It is clear that a higher, nobler and more disciplined human being was indicated by the term knight. The virtues demanded of him—strength and skill in arms, valour, courage and loyalty, to the feudal lord in particular but also to the friend and even vis-à-vis the foe—were no small requirements. In the profoundest sense a religious idea was concealed behind all this. Arthur’s Round Table might therefore be looked upon as a symbol in which is mirrored the developing consciousness of Christian man in the first millennium.In those days the spread of Christianity was linked with the great civilizing task of subduing the aboriginal brutality and unconsciousness of the heathen peoples. This lent a higher meaning to the Christian knight’s aggressive masculinity, which was put to the service of a nobler ideal and a higher state of consciousness.”

This certainly seems a quality lacking in contemporary conversations about gender, where discipline of desires and urges is virtually non-existent and notions of loyalty and fidelity are all but invisible. And the lack of these things no doubt attracts mostly fatherless young men to the more severe forms of Eastern Orthodoxy and Latin Catholicism as well as to neopaganism, Freemasonry, or Jordan Peterson. Completely understandable.

Of course, I don’t expect Christian men to start buying swords or joining militias, though I do think acknowledging the violence beneath the surface is a healthy way to keep it in check, as a potential energy one might use at one’s disposal rather than be a victim of its unconscious psychic eruptions. I had to figure out what to do with this in my own biography. Though I do feel an attraction to an absolute Christian non-violence, I also know that if anyone came into my house intending to hurt my wife or children they would not succeed without a fight. I know people who would allow violence upon their own families rather than commit violence, but I know now that I am not of their number. And I am at peace with that, though it took a long time to arrive there.

Finally, I think it best to take the advice of one of the singing masters of my soul, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, certainly one of wisest of men, who offers this advice in his poem, “The Godlike”:

Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Distinguisheth him From all the beings Unto us known.

One thing I do know is that a world without men is a world without women. And that’s not a world worth inhabiting.

Friendship, loyalty, forgiveness, stuff like that.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

An Epistle of Comfort

The 21st of February this year will mark 528 years since the martyrdom of St. Robert Southwell upon the scaffold at Tyburn upon charges of treason, though his only crime was in ministering and providing spiritual comfort to a small number of Catholics, then persecuted by Royal decree, in underground Elizabethan England.

On the morning of Friday, 21 February 1595 by Julian reckoning, Southwell was drawn by a cart from Newgate to be hanged, drawn, and quartered as his fellow Jesuit Edmund Campion had been a little more than thirteen years earlier. Despite the government’s clumsy ruse of hanging a famous criminal at the same time at a place remote from Tyburn in order to divert the attention of the populace, a great throng had gathered to watch the priest meet his end. Eyewitness accounts, both Catholic and Protestant, are unanimous in describing Southwell as both gracious and prayerful in his final moments. When cut loose from the halter that tied him to the cart, he wiped his brow with a handkerchief and tossed the sudarium into the crowd, the first of what would become his relics. When asked if he would like to speak, Southwell crossed himself and first spoke in Latin, quoting Romans 14:8:“Sive vivimus, Domino vivimus, sive morimur, Domino morimur, ergo vivimus, sive morimur, Domini sumus.” If we live, we live in the Lord. If we die, we die in the Lord. Therefore, whether we live or we die, we are in the Lord. He then addressed himself to the crowd, saying he died a Catholic and a Jesuit, offenses for which he was not sorry to die. He spoke respectfully of the Queen, and asked her forgiveness if she had found any offense in him. Then, after the hangman stripped him down to his shirt and tightened the noose around his neck, Robert Southwell spoke his last words, echoing those of Christ found in the twenty-third chapter of Luke. Three times he prayed, “In manus tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum. Redemisti me, Domine Deus veritatis,” (Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. You have redeemed me, Lord God of truth) while repeatedly making the sign of the cross. At the third utterance of these words, the cart rolled away and Southwell hung from his neck. Those present forbade the hangman cutting him down to further the cruelties of drawing and quartering commencing before Southwell was dead. Yet, despite their efforts, according to one account, he was still breathing when cut down. When the executioner lifted Southwell’s head up before the crowd, no one cried “Traitor,” as was the custom. Even a pursuivant present admitted he had never seen a man die better. Southwell had been in England on his mission from 1586, when he would have been around twenty-five years old. He was never old.

In 1587, Southwell started writing a series of letters to Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, who was then imprisoned in the Tower for plotting against the Queen in defense of his Catholic faith. The letters, later published clandestinely as An Epistle of Comfort, are spiritual counsel for a church and its faithful under extreme duress. The first lines of the book articulate as much:

“It hath been always a laudable custom in God’s Church for such as were afflicted in time of persecution to comfort one another, not only by continual prayer and good works but also by letters and books.”

It certainly has seemed like a period of persecution for the past few years, though even longer if I am honest. We live in a world now characterized by demonic parody at scale, parody of the human being, of the beauty of biblical gendered typology, of Christ, of Sophia. What we have is not a persecution in the sense of outright imprisonment and torture, but of their more subtle deployments of isolation, compulsion, and depression. But make no mistake: this is still persecution.

To be sure, Southwell’s Catholicism is profoundly masochistic to a degree, with his preoccupation with suffering and martyrdom. Or so it may seem to us. I get it. But, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer told us not all that long ago, we have become too accustomed to “cheap grace.” This is also a theme of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In that important novel, Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, tries to explain to John the Savage why the world no longer needs religion, or suffering, or God (very much in the manner of a Noah Yuval Harari) because soma (a kind of combination anti-depressant and psychedelic) is “religion without tears.” But John isn’t buying what Mond is selling. He knows madness when he sees it. “What you need,” the Savage tells him, “is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.”

Nothing costs enough here. I often think of those words when I speak to students, particularly young women who have grown up in a culture where young men (boys, really) have been so pornified and compromised morally that they expect sex for the most minor of services—like a hamburger—and that love has very little to do with it. I tell them that when I was a young man, I still carried the idea that I had to earn a girl’s love before expecting so much as a kiss. They think this idea very quaint—and naive, I suppose. But they also lament that such is no longer the case, or at least that is what they have been conditioned to believe. My youthful assumption was also John the Savage’s—and it is likewise ridiculed and dismissed by the citizens of the brave new world Huxley describes, as well as the brave new world surrounding us. He clearly saw where things were headed.

I have certainly been in need of an epistle of comfort of my own these days. I’m sure I’m not alone. And these things come when and how they are needed. For one, I have found tremendous solace in reading children’s literature, both with my youngest two sons and on my own. My youngest is now twelve, and I had stopped reading to him and his brother in the evenings about a year ago when we were making our way through The Silmarillion. They could read on their own, after all. But one of their big brothers gave them a satchel of classic children’s lit books for Christmas, which prompted my youngest to say to me a couple weeks ago, “Remember when you used to read to us?” As if I could forget! So, at his insistence, we started reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (which I had never read, despite having been a Waldorf teacher and father of nine children—and I have been reading to children at night for over thirty years!). On my own time, before bed I have been reading George MacDonald’s Fairy Tales. They’re such a balm for the soul.

For another, as ever in my life, I have turned to music. Now this happened by a very serendipitous path. In a course I teach on persuasive writing, I forbid the students to write “college papers.” Because I CAN’T EVEN. Instead, I expect them to find other methods, other genres for persuading their readers. This week, my topic was “mash-ups,” the combining of different genres to create something new and exciting. For such an enterprise, I chose, quelle horreur!, Taylor Swift. First of all, we look at Jared Smith’s “Taylor Swift: A Socratic Dialogue” from McSweeney’s, certainly one of the cleverest and funniest pieces of writing on the internet, mashing up Plato’s style with Swift’s. I know. I also throw in Swift’s collaboration (while still a teenager) with, of all people, Def Leppard, performing their metal megahit “Photograph.” It’s mind-blowing. I do this to show how combining things one would never put together can come up with surprising results. It’s one of the oldest tricks in the creative-process book.

Finally, I show them Swift’s collaboration with the, alas, now defunct Civil Wars on “Safe and Sound,” the song they wrote together for the first Hunger Games film, based on the book of the same name (talk about timely children’s literature!). It is a superb modern folk song, and the version below, under T-Bone Burnett’s visionary musical production, is sublime.

I always tell my students that I’d love to see Swift do an entire album like this and prove that she has gravitas when she wants to and is not really as superficial as her music may sometimes suggest. Of course, this was a little easier before she started (as all of her profession do) weighing in on politics, religion, and culture. But that’s how it goes. I’m so glad nobody ever asked for my opinions when I was 23.

Anyway, I told you that story to tell you this one. After showing “Safe and Sound” to my students, I decided it was time I learned how to play it on the guitar. It didn’t take but a couple listens, and it is a lovely progression courtesy of the wonderfully talented John Paul White. But that led me to searching for White’s Civil Wars partner Joy William’s version of their “From This Valley,” a folk-gospel barn-burner if ever you heard one. I bet I listened to it 20 times on one day, learned how to play it on the guitar, and played along with the video. The lyrics are poetic, uplifting, and grounded in Jesus. You can’t ask for more.

Oh, the caged bird dreams of a strong wind That will flow beneath her wings Like a voice longs for a melody Oh, Jesus carry me

Won’t you take me from this valley To that mountain high above? I will pray, pray, pray ‘Til I see your smiling face I will pray, pray, pray To the one I love

There is something downright miraculous about seeing a woman, a genuine female and pregnant woman at that, lifting up her voice in song and rejoicing in the glory of the Lord. In our perverse times, it is nothing short of salvific, a fresh draft of cool spring water in the desert of the technocracy.

So this was my epistle of comfort this week, albeit it arrived by a circuitous route. But that’s how grace works, isn’t it? You think you’re doing one thing, following one trace, going about your daily tasks, and it brings you where you need to be. That’s the world I want to live in. I don’t want to live in a world without religion or suffering or God. So I will pray, pray, pray until I see his smiling face.

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_

The Ecclesial State of Exception

It started, as many things do, with an observation I dropped on social media:

Hypothetical: imagine you belonged to a Church that not only failed to condemn the greatest evil of our times but actively supported it. What would be the proper response?

I have a gift for controversy (I know, BIG SURPRISE), so the comments that followed were as telling as they were predictable: everything from the CatholicCon citation of “the Magisterium” (whatever that really is) to the defense of the “Church founded by Jesus Christ” (claimed, predictably, by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants without exception—though often excepting each other in that designation, at least provisionally). Surprisingly, to me anyway, most people seemed to think that I was indicting only the Catholic Church, to which I more or less belong, in this statement. But, hey, I’m an ecumenical guy: I was including all the churches. But I did not have the average believer in mind; I was thinking about the institutional churches, meaning the guys who run things. And, before you get on your Christian feminist high horse, just know that I hold women bishops—and even that one non-binary Anglican dude—as responsible as their male counterparts. Because they have all failed to condemn the greatest evil of our times. Full stop.

Of course this begs the question, What is the greatest evil of our times, Mr. Sophiologist? I think it’s obvious, don’t you? We have been witnessing and, for the most part, to my absolute dumbfoundedness, ignoring what can only be called crimes against humanity and which have resulted in perhaps millions of excess deaths across the world. Millions. In addition, we have seen a shocking rise in miscarriages, fetal abnormalities, stillbirths, and infants born with heart problems; not to mention the untold number of healthy young people “dying mysteriously” from heart ailments and stroke. And this is early days: we still don’t know how many young people will be rendered sterile from playing pharmaceutical Russian roulette. The outlook is bleak, indeed. We’re heading for Children of Men territory, but, I fear, unlike the book, this is all by design.

And the Churches are silent.

This was really driven home to me when the Vatican ruled that only the fully-v@xxed would be allowed access to its churches and museums—and mandated the shots for all employees. The game was over for me, however, when Pope Francis proclaimed that getting vaccinated is “an act of love.” That was it. Even though I still consider myself Catholic (in a very small-is-beautiful, medieval or 17th c. rural Anglican kind of way), I don’t know if I can ever step foot in a Catholic church again. This is painful for me.

And, no, the Orthodox have been no better, just less organized. So don’t even start with me.

Such acquiescence to State power can only be assumed, I assume (as various Orthodox bodies, for example, do vis a vis Russia and Ukraine). Indeed, the history of all the Churches screams this in the highest register. Yet, we, the faithful, are addicted to Church power and authority as much as the Churches are addicted to that of the State. Church history is the history of capitulation. And this, need I remind anyone?, is antithetical to the very mission of the Church. I was just reading as much in one of my most trustworthy guides, H.J. Massingham’s The Tree of Life:

“Newman wrote in The Arians of the Fourth Century, ‘The Church was formed for the express purpose of interfering with the world.’ ‘Compromise,’ wrote Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, ‘is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.”…. [The Church’s] spiritual impotence and inertia were indeed so complete (with the partial exception of the campaign against negro slavery) that it is to be wondered that Huxley ever bothered himself to flog the prostrate form of the dormant donkey. A conventional pietism, a set of moral precepts, or, what Tawney called the inculcation of ‘such personal virtues as did not conflict’ with plutocracy, were its alternative to it where it did not, as in the Enclosures, actually co-operate with it.’”

Ouch.

I could have done with some ecclesial interfering with the world over the past few years. We got just the opposite: the world interfering with the Church (remember when Christmas and Easter—not to mention services altogether—were canceled by State decree?). But, really, this is longstanding practice, despite pious gestures and holy-sounding press releases. (You can read more about the uneasy relationship of Church and State power in my comrade Guido Preparata’s forthcoming book, Church and Empire).

It is no secret that billions upon billions—maybe even trillions—of dollars have changed hands (from bottom to top) over the past three years. Yet, I haven’t heard a peep about the “preferential option for the poor”—from any ecclesial bodies—even once in regards to this wholesale theft. For shame. For absolute shame.

I find it telling that academia has been almost unanimous with the Churches in its worship of State and corporate power. Talk about strange bedfellows! It’s not really a surprise to me—I’ve been inside academia for decades and know what a cowardly and sniveling citizenry it embodies on the whole. Case in point is the excoriation various academic “thought leaders” unleashed on Giorgio Agamben when, get this, in February 2020 he warned about the coming “state of exception” that would accompany the various v@x passports, lockdowns, and loss of civil liberties then being proposed under threat of the “pandemic.” As he then wrote, “We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.” Well, he was right and all the sniveling cowards (never his equals) who tried to take him down were wrong. Dead. Wrong. But, like Church leaders, they never apologize. They know how the game is played.

In the face of such corruption and complicity, as I have mentioned before in this blog, the only recourse I have found is to have house church, complete with the Eucharist. I’m sure this excommunicates me from the Catholic fold, but—I’m sure you know the phrase—“Here I stand. I can do no other.” Some will say this will condemn me to hell. But, really, who needs a god who would do that to a suffering servant? Only the god of very small men would command such a thing.

I still believe in a Universal (Catholic) Church, but more and more I feel it has to be an underground, invisible Church, disseminated throughout the world like an enlivening enzyme or agent, transformative, transfigurative, sophianic.

Church and State 1.0

Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: Flesh & Spirit and The Regeneration Podcast. Twitter: @Sophiologist_