A Boyhood Spiritual Experience & Great Religious Films (#336)

Religion on the Mind

Religion, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this special "after hours" episode, I dive deep with my friend Chase Willett into the surprising abundance of religious and spiritual themes running through the New York Times' list of the 100 greatest films of the 21st century. We explore how our relationship with spiritually-charged cinema has transformed over the years—from Chase's evangelical need to connect every movie back to Paul's letters, to my own journey of embracing ambiguity and transcendent moments that don't require tidy theological conclusions. I share one of the most formative spiritual experiences of my life, involving a chance encounter in Stockholm and Richard Linklater's Boyhood, that reshaped how I understand human dignity and God's perspective. We also discuss spiritual technologies, the nature of transcendent experiences, and begin examining the first category of our 23-film analysis: "Mythic, Fairy Tale and Fantasy Spiritual Allegories," setting up what promises to be a rich exploration of how cinema grapples with questions of meaning and faith. In the patron-only second half, we dive deeper into The Lord of the Rings and other films in this category, commit to watching The Tree of Life and Grizzly Man before our next conversation, and hint at how our discussion may inevitably touch on contemporary geopolitical events. NY Times | 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century Episode #307 | Disability, the Beatitudes & “Changing the World” Religious/spiritual movies from the NYT list in no particular order: Interstellar Lord of the Rings: Fellowship Past Lives The Tree of Life O Brother, Where Art Thou? Spotlight The Master Lady Bird A Serious Man A Prophet Arrival Spirited Away No Country for Old Men Children of Men There Will Be Blood Melancholia Pan’s Labyrinth Mulholland Drive Mad Max: Fury Road Grizzly Man Yi Yi Her Zone of Interest ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Join the Patreon for exclusive episodes (and more) every month: patreon.com/dankoch Email about the "sliding scale" for the Patreon: youhavepermissionpodcast@gmail.com YHP Patron-only FB group: tinyurl.com/ycvbbf98 Website: www.dankochwords.com/yhp.html Join Dan's email list: www.dankochwords.com/ Artwork by sprungle.co/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Sherlock Holmes.
0:02.0	It's an unusual name.
0:03.0	Introducing Young Sherlock, a new Guy Ritchie series.
0:07.0	What game are we playing today?
0:09.0	Discover the origins.
0:10.0	It's cleaving. Those days are surely behind me.
0:12.0	Of crime's most iconic mind.
0:14.0	There has been a break-in.
0:17.0	Astoned. You should be a detective.
0:19.0	Starring Hero finds Tiffin, Donald Finn and Colin Firth.
0:22.5	If you start wearing a hat like that, I will no longer be friends with you.
0:25.9	Young Sherlock, new original series. Watch now only on Prime Video.
0:34.2	Welcome back, everybody, to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity
0:38.9	and the modern world of science and culture very seriously. Today, it's the culture, not the science.
0:46.1	Let's start with a little housekeeping. Here's what we're up to for this special after-hours episode
0:52.9	of You Have Permission. I think one time Joy called it after dark.
0:57.9	You have permission after dark. And that felt a little too little harder than we wanted to push,
1:04.0	so to speak. Does that make sense to you, Chase? It sounds a little adult, maybe.
1:09.2	Yeah, I guess we can get a little adult. Not so much what we meant. Yeah. It can get a little adult. I'm okay. I like a little, I like a little rated R as much as the next guy. But I meant after hours as in, you know, a little bit more tired, possibly a bit more loopy, pouring a beer or the equivalent thereof,
1:29.6	which I haven't done yet, but I will at some point in this evening. But also it's just like
1:35.1	the end of the day. We record them in the evening, a little looser. These are Thursday episodes.
1:40.9	So you could listen to them in the morning because maybe someone, they get Thursday morning their weeks kind of dragging a bit. They're dragging a bit. Maybe you don't want that Monday morning, Dan interviewing the world's leading expert on Hebrew participles. I don't really do a lot of that. Maybe you just want a little, you don't want so much science.
	...

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