Subversive Orthodoxy

The Story of "the 21" — What Is Freedom? Part Five (Field Notes #25)

Image used with permission by the artist.  Mural by Kirollos Kilada in the St. Pope Kyrillos VI Chapel at St. Paul American Coptic Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA.  Artis

The Disarming Witness — What Is Freedom? Part Four (Field Notes #24)

Freedom is one of those words everyone loves until you ask what it costs and what it’s for. We’re chasing a kind of freedom that doesn’t look like victory in a movie: a f

Biblical Freedom — What Is Freedom? Part Three (Field Notes #23)

We go back to Eden and trace a biblical definition of freedom that looks like shalom: wholeness, harmony, and life in proper order with God, others, and creation. We conn

Episode #22: Ask Me About My Vow of Silence: Thomas Merton, the True Self, and a Faith Without Easy Answers

Episode Synopsis Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery seeking a life of prayer, contemplation, and silence. He somehow became one of the most widely read spiritual

Our Cultural Concepts of Freedom - What is Freedom? Part One - (Field Notes #20)

We start a four-part set of field notes by admitting the word freedom still surprises us when we hear it from Solzhenitsyn, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Chesterton. We trac

Freedom According to Various Disciplines - What is Freedom? Part Two - (Field Notes #21)

We pick apart why “freedom” causes so many arguments by comparing the major definitions that shape politics, psychology, and moral philosophy. We end by naming what nearl

Episode #19: The Most Radical Thing She Did Was Stay — Dorothy Day (part two) on Presence, Personal Conversion, and Why Holiness Might Be What You Actually Want

“True worship is to work for justice and care for the poor and oppressed” sounds inspiring until you remember what that work actually feels like at 2 a.m. when you are ti

Episode #18: Don't Call Me a Saint — Dorothy Day (part one), the Woman Who Defied Categories

Dorothy Day is the kind of person everyone tries to claim and nobody can fully control. One side calls her a socialist. Another side calls her a saint. She answered both

Episode #17: The Diagnosis You Didn't Know You Needed: Walker Percy on the Malaise, the Moviegoer, and the Art of Being Actually Alive

WALKER PERCY:  EPISODE SUMMARY You can be comfortable, busy, and entertained and still be in despair. That’s the Kierkegaard line Walker Percy puts at the front of The M

Episode #16: The Saint of Holy Groveling: Jack Kerouac, Catholic Mystic, and the God He Could Never Outrun

The Saint of Holy Groveling, the Hungover Mystic, and a deep, aching longing for God Jack Kerouac is remembered as the voice of the open road, speed, freedom, and excess

Episode #15: Field Notes #1: What Existentialism Gets Right — and What It Costs You

We trace existentialism from Kierkegaard’s pivot to the single individual before God to the secular push for meaning without God, then test what still helps in a noisy, a

Episode #14: The Silent Kiss That Answers Everything: Dostoevsky, the Grand Inquisitor, and Why Freedom Terrifies Us — Part Three

We trace Dostoevsky’s polyphonic craft through the Karamazov brothers, probe Ivan’s moral revolt, and unpack the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that people prefer miracle, myst

Episode #13: The Man Responsible for Everyone: Dostoevsky on Goodness, the Underground, and the Love That Won't Collapse — Part Two

In Part Two of our Dostoevsky series we move from diagnosing the underground to exploring the way out. Dostoevsky shows us that the true hero is not the exceptional man b

Episode #12: The Psychology of the Underground: How Dostoevsky Mapped the War Between Mind and Heart — Part One

Fyodor Dostoevsky revolutionized literature by creating battlegrounds of the mind and heart where faith and darkness constantly struggle for dominance. His concept of "th

Episode #11: Avoiding Spiritual Nihilism: How to Deconstruct Every System and Still Keep Your Soul — Nikolai Berdyaev (Part Two)

Episode #11: Life After Deconstruction, How to Be Free Without Losing Your Soul: Nikolai Berdyaev (part two) Send us Fan Mail Support the show Contact: subversiveortho

Episode #10: No System Can Contain the Soul: On Freedom, the Creative Act, and the Person — Nikolai Berdyaev

Nikolai Berdyaev challenges both Marxism and bourgeois liberalism with his prophetic vision of freedom rooted in Orthodox Christianity, not in political centrism. • Exil

Episode #9: Joy as an Act of War: Chesterton on Nihilism, Technology, and the Orthodoxy That Refuses to Stop Laughing — Part Two

Travis Mullen and Professor Robert Inchausti explore G.K. Chesterton's insights on how Christianity transcends cultural collapse and continually renews itself throug

Episode #8: The Most Joyful Apologist Christianity Ever Produced: Chesterton, Wonder as Rebellion, and the Wit That Outlasts Despair — Part One

Wonder as rebellion. That's the surprising path Gilbert Keith Chesterton blazed through the intellectual landscape of early 20th century England—and precisely why hi

Episode #7: The Patron Saint of Deconstruction, The Apostle of Paradox & Radical Faith — Soren Kierkegaard

This episode dives deep into the restless brilliance of Søren Kierkegaard — the 19th-century philosopher, outsider theologian, and reluctant father of both existentialism

Episode #6: Grace Finds the Man Who Never Earned It: Goethe's Faust, Restless Striving, and the God Who Saves Anyway

What if grace isn’t something you deserve, or even understand—but something that finds you in the middle of your restless, stumbling search for meaning? Did Faust accide