In this episode, I reflect on Petra Mundik’s A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy and the way her reading has deeply shaped my understanding of McCarthy’s underlying philosophy and spirituality.

While McCarthy once described himself as a materialist, his fiction never feels flat or reductionistic. It feels charged, haunted, and almost sacramental in its attention to blood, fire, evil, mystery, and the strange persistence of goodness. I explore Mundik’s reading of McCarthy through Gnosticism, mysticism, Buddhism, and the Perennial Philosophy, while also being careful not to collapse McCarthy’s own beliefs into the voices of his fictional characters.

I also share how conversations with my own therapist — who brought together analytic psychology and religious studies — opened me up to a very different understanding of Gnosticism than the one I had received in seminary. Rather than seeing it only as heresy, I began to see it as a powerful imaginative response to suffering, alienation, evil, and the feeling that this world is not quite our home.

This episode is about McCarthy’s darkness, but also about the fire that remains inside it.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s only published nonfiction essay, “The Kekulé Problem,” and his strange, brilliant exploration of dreams, the unconscious, language, and the ancient animal mind beneath our speaking selves.

I share a little about reading McCarthy while I was in therapy and discussing this essay with my own psychotherapist, who approached dreams through a Jungian depth psychological lens. From there, I explore why dreams may matter—not because they give us easy answers or mystical certainty, but because they can sometimes carry emotional realities that ordinary language has not yet found a way to hold.

I also think about this through my work with men in psychotherapy, especially men wrestling with anger, anxiety, depression, disconnection, and the difficulty of naming what hurts. Sometimes a dream becomes a doorway. Sometimes an image arrives before the words do. And sometimes the unconscious may be trying to reconnect us with parts of ourselves we have lost contact with: joy, freedom, grief, longing, vitality, and the deeper life beneath our explanations.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy’s dark and haunting vision of the world through the lens of a recent Substack essay on his “gnostic conservatism.” Rather than treating McCarthy as a political writer in any simple sense, I explore his deeper existential concerns: violence, fate, evil, tenderness, and the fragile mystery of goodness in a fallen world.

I think about Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road as works that refuse easy optimism while still leaving room for something like hope. McCarthy’s world is often brutal, cold, and morally terrifying, but again and again there is also the image of fire: something fragile, humane, and sacred that must be carried even when there is no guarantee it will prevail.

This episode is about darkness without despair, hope without sentimentality, and what it means to keep carrying the fire.

In this episode, I reflect on Cormac McCarthy, masculinity, therapy, and the fragile work of carrying the fire. I begin with a personal memory of my own therapist, who loved McCarthy’s novels and encouraged me to read them during my own therapy process, and then I explore why those books continue to matter to me now as a therapist working with men who are trying to deconstruct machismo, emotional repression, and inherited versions of masculinity that have cut them off from tenderness, grief, intimacy, and their own inner lives.

Through No Country for Old Men and The Road, I think about masculinity not simply as something to condemn or defend, but as something that can mature or fail to mature. McCarthy gives us men who are brave, capable, haunted, violent, loving, terrified, and often unable to speak directly about what is destroying them. And in that world, “carrying the fire” becomes a powerful image for a different kind of strength: not domination, not invulnerability, not control, but the ability to protect something vulnerable without destroying it.

This episode is about fathers and sons, old myths and new possibilities, therapy as a different kind of initiation, and the hope that even in the dark, men can learn to become more fully human.

In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology.

At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that conference cracked something open in me. I heard reflections on Johann Baptist Metz’s idea of memoria passionis, the memory of suffering, and encountered John Caputo’s emerging work on the weakness of God, which later became deeply important to me.

I reflect on how Caputo’s vision of weakness, vulnerability, compassion, and responsibility helped begin a long process of deconstruction—not as destruction, but as a way of becoming more honest, more human, and more open to the suffering of others.

I also share a story that has stayed with me for years: hearing Caputo’s former female support staff talk about how he actually lived his philosophy, including taking a pay cut so they could be paid more fairly. That testimony still moves me because it raises the deeper question: do our beliefs make us more compassionate, more generous, and more responsible, or do they simply make us more sophisticated?

This episode is about political theology, weakness, memory, vulnerability, and the strange grace of those moments that quietly begin to change us.

In this episode, I reflect on theopoetics as a way of returning to Christian theology without returning to literalism, dogmatism, or the need to win theological arguments.

As I’ve been rereading Christian theology, I’ve found myself drawn again to the strange, wounded, imaginative heart of religious language. I don’t take these ideas literally in the way I once did, but I do still find myself moved by them as metaphors, symbols, wounds, and invitations.

I explore Stanley Romaine Hopper, Death of God theology, and John Caputo’s weak theology as different ways of thinking about what happens to God-language after certainty.

This episode is not about debating belief or unbelief. It is about asking what theology can still do when it becomes poetic, imaginative, weak, ethical, and open to the future.

In this episode, I reflect on René Girard’s I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, especially the chapter entitled “Satan,” and explore how Girard’s understanding of mimetic desire opens up a powerful way of thinking about Christianity, violence, scapegoating, and the dangerous comfort of accusation.

Girard helps us see that desire is not as original as we imagine. We learn what to want through others, and the people who shape our desires can quickly become our rivals. From there, rivalry spreads, communities become anxious, and peace is often restored by finding someone to blame. This is where Girard’s reading of Satan becomes so provocative: Satan is not simply a cartoonish figure of evil, but the power of accusation, contagion, and false unity through a victim.

I also bring Girard into conversation with contemporary Christian nationalism, especially the way it often identifies immigrants, outsiders, and those who do not fit a narrow heritage vision of America as threats to Christian civilization. But Girard invites a reversal. The satanic is not found in the vulnerable outsider being accused. The satanic is found in the mechanism of accusation itself.

This episode is an attempt to think with Girard, not as an expert, but as someone newly struck by the force of his vision, and to ask what it might mean if the cross does not bless our accusations, but exposes them.

In this episode, I return to Gianni Vattimo’s After Christianity and his provocative reading of Joachim of Fiore, secularization, and the possibility of a Christianity after metaphysics. Vattimo helps us imagine secularization not as the simple disappearance of faith, but as one of Christianity’s own historical effects — a weakening of domination rooted in the incarnation and the self-emptying of God.

I explore Joachim’s vision of the age of the Spirit, where faith is no longer secured by literalism, fear, or institutional control, but opened through interpretation, freedom, and charity. For Vattimo, the limit of interpretation is not rigid dogma or an outdated metaphysics of nature, but love itself — ama et fac quod vis, love and do what you will.

This episode is about what remains after the death of the metaphysical God: not nihilism, but a more fragile and generous Christianity, one shaped by weakness, hospitality, spiritual reading, and the possibility that the Spirit still breathes where it wants.