A Difficult Relationship with Christianity (#266)

Religion on the Mind

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Religion

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s episode is a thoughtful conversation with my friend Josh Patterson of the (Re)Thinking Faith Podcast about his evolving relationship with Christianity. No longer a pastor, he sometimes struggles to articulate theological concepts that once came easily. Practices that used to nourish his soul now give him pause, and he wonders if his reduced engagement with Christian community and spiritual disciplines has contributed to this sense of distance. Despite this, Josh still experiences spontaneous moments of prayer, gratitude, and spiritual connection. He values embodied spiritual experiences over mere intellectual agreement with doctrines. The theological issues that once consumed him, such as Hell and atonement theories, have been overshadowed by more fundamental metaphysical and philosophical questions. He resonates with poetic and metaphorical approaches to theology (AKA “theopoetics”) that allow religious language to gesture toward profound truths and experiences without collapsing into rigid literalism. Watch this Episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/BuySOBvUOhY Josh's Podcast "Rethinking Faith": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rethinking-faith/id1438696524 ___________________________________________ Get Tickets for Theology Beer Camp 2024 Use Code ReturnofYHP for $50 off your ticket! ___________________________________________ Follow Dan on IG: www.instagram.com/dancoke/ Or Twitter: twitter.com/DanKoch Faith deconstruction resources: www.soyouredeconstructing.com/ Edited by Josh Gilbert (joshgilbertmedia.com -- he is accepting more work!) 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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Josh Patterson, thanks for being here.
0:07.3	Yeah, man.
0:07.8	Thanks for giving in to my...
0:10.6	Offering yourself up to the listeners.
0:13.3	Yeah, arrogantly offering my services.
0:16.2	No, well, I'm going to get to that.
0:17.7	So we've been friends for four years in change.
0:20.8	I've been a guest on your
0:22.0	podcast, Rethinking Faith, a number of times. You are heavily involved in theology beer camp,
0:28.0	which I've been to the last two years with you have permission. So people might have heard your
0:32.2	name, kind of seen your show around, but specifically you wanted to be here today. So I started
0:37.0	doing these still Christian episodes where I, you wanted to be here today. So I started doing these still Christian
0:38.9	episodes where I, you know, I do a lot of stuff about people having left the faith, you know,
0:43.7	for those, I don't believe in that God episodes, you know, that's often people who no longer
0:48.9	identify as Christian. And then I do the worries about progressive, progressive Christianity and stuff like that episodes, which are people to my right who are definitely Christian. And then I do the worries about progressive, progressive Christianity and stuff like
0:54.9	that episodes, which are people to my right who are definitely Christian. But I've been kind of
1:00.4	throwing in this third one more recently of like people who have remained Christian, despite a lot of
1:06.7	their friends and people in their circles having left it behind. And that's true of me. It's true
1:12.2	of a good number of my personal friends. And once I started doing these, you reached out and said,
1:17.1	hey, I want to do, I want to do one of those. I want to do one of the still Christians. So,
1:20.3	tell us why. I was excited when I saw that you started doing that idea. And I mean, really,
1:26.5	part of my motivation was selfish. Not selfish in the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Religion on the Mind, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Religion on the Mind and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.