How Did Biblical Characters Experience the World? (#325)

Religion on the Mind

Religion, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

My dear friend Ben Bishop, author of The Garden House Substack, joins me to discuss how fiction can help us imagine how people from different times and places experienced the divine, particularly through the novels of Frederick Buechner. Listeners don't need to have read these works to follow our conversation—there are "no quizzes" here. Rather, Buechner’s function helps us strip away our accumulated religious assumptions. When we read biblical stories today, we're receiving them after thousands of years of theological interpretation, but Buechner helps us imagine what it felt like to be Jacob or Isaac in the moment—not as figures who knew they were part of some grand biblical narrative, but as people experiencing strange, terrifying, and wonderful encounters with the divine in real-time. Through his storytelling, we confront both the "offensiveness and the beauty and wonder of those stories" in ways that theoretical discussions simply cannot achieve, making ancient faith experiences immediate and visceral. In the Patreon-exclusive second half, Ben and I discuss our shared adolescent experiences with Christian punk rock, its influence on our sociopolitics, social lives, and faith development. Ben's Substack Ben's pieces mentioned: The Light Shines in the Darkness Straight On Til Morning ___________________________________________ 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

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0:34.1	All right, everybody. Welcome back to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity and the modern world of science and culture very seriously.
0:43.6	I'm Dan Koch, and I would like to welcome back multi-time guest, dear friend of mine, Ben Bishop, author of the Garden House Substack, here today to talk with me about, I would say,
0:58.0	how we talk about God, but in particular, one specific way to talk about God that many people
1:05.6	have done that deeply resonates for both Ben and I. Ben, welcome back. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
1:13.6	So we're going to start, Ben, by talking about this essay of yours, about these historical novels
1:18.3	of Frederick Beechner and all the ways that that helps us think about how people think about God
1:23.4	and how they thought about God in different times and places. But you also had a piece that I'm now
1:28.7	many months late on that came out in the winter about sort of MXPX and Christian punk rock and the way
1:35.4	that both Christian and secular punk interacted with these aspects of your, basically adolescence
1:43.7	and formation into an adult that resonated with me
	...

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