Our world is built with stories.

Sometimes these stories cause suffering by pulling us apart from ourselves and each other.

The liturgist podcast helps people love more and suffer less by pulling apart the stories that pull us apart.

Hey everybody, my name is Michael Gunger.

In the last few years the term cancel culture has swept through the internet and the collective consciousness in lexicon with surprising speed and of course divisiveness.

I mean even saying the words feel fraught.

Some people blame all of the ills of our society on cancel culture.

Others say that so-called cancel culture is not even a real thing.

And that people's naming an aversion to what they perceive as cancel culture is really just another attempt at ignoring or silencing marginalized voices in order to maintain the status quo of patriarchal white supremacy.

So what is it? Is cancel culture real? Is it a thing? Is what we call cancel culture inherently destructive?

What is what we call cancel culture say about us as a society as individuals?

We're going to dive into all of that and more today on this mega episode of the liturgist podcast calling it a mega episode because it consists of four different conversations.

The first conversation that you'll be hearing was between Jamie Lee Finch and myself.

And this conversation actually happened in the middle of a different podcast, a private weekly podcast that we post every week for the community, the alien in the sex witch.

And which by the way, you can access that full conversation and dozens of other unreleased podcasts and meditations by joining the community at the liturgists.com.

In the second conversation on today's mega episode, another great conversation, William Matthews and Hillary and I talked to Dr. Robin Espinoza, who is an amazing transqueer activist,

Latinx scholar, ethicist and theologian really enjoyed that conversation. And then in the third conversation, Dr. Hillary McBride and I speak with Chloe Valdery, who is this amazing writer, she's been published in the New York Times in the Wall Street Journal and the Atlantic magazine really enjoyed that conversation.

And then if this is a meal round out, our fine meal with a lovely philosophical dessert and a beautiful conversation that I had with our communities beloved Peter Rollins.

And this episode with all of these conversations, it's going to include a lot of perspectives from different places, a lot of different experiences.

And as always, just to let you know, the liturgists as a community doesn't hold to one of these views officially.

The liturgists is sort of the messiness of all of it coming together. We're here for the dance of all of it, the messiness, the vulnerability, the dissonance.

So I do hope that you'll listen to each of these conversations with an open mind and an open heart. And I think that if you do, all of us will have something to learn about ourselves, to learn about how we engage with each other.

...