“Is It True?” vs. “Does It Work?” (#305)

Religion on the Mind

Religion & Spirituality, Religion, Spirituality

4.7 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Turn your brains on for a fascinating conversation with scholar and author Tara Isabella Burton (Self Made, Strange Rites, Social Creature) about one of the core tensions in modern spirituality: does it matter more if a religious or spiritual practice works, or if it's true? Drawing from my experience as a therapist and Tara's background in theology, we explore how this plays out in everything from manifesting culture to ancient religious practices. I share my more pragmatic perspective, focused on what actually helps people in therapeutic settings, while Tara makes a compelling case for why we can't separate spiritual practices from their truth claims. We dig into the placebo effect, positive thinking, the limits of pure pragmatism, and whether spiritual practices might "work" precisely because they align with deeper truths about reality. It's a nuanced discussion that challenges both pure pragmatism and rigid orthodoxy, suggesting these seemingly opposing views might actually complement each other in surprising ways. Tara's New Book | Here in Avalon Tara's Website | Taraisabellaburton.com Highlights 12:10 Modern Spirituality and Individualism 21:05 The Intersection of Faith and Truth 30:12 Pragmatism in Therapy and Spirituality 45:03 The Pursuit of Happiness and Material Success 01:07:10 Exploring the Tension Between Ancient and Modern Wisdom ___________________________________________ 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

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0:00.0	Welcome back to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity and the modern world of science and culture very seriously.
0:11.5	My name's Dan Koch. I'm a licensed therapist and a liberal Christian trying to make my way through this world, understand where I came from and what we're all looking at.
0:20.0	And I have a very,
0:21.5	very fun guest with me today to help me explore those questions. It's Tara Isabella Burton,
0:28.4	author, essayist, I suppose, journalist sometimes, probably best known for her books, both fiction
0:36.4	and nonfiction.
0:40.9	We've got items like social creature.
0:42.8	That's your first novel.
0:49.7	And strange rights and self-made are the more recent nonfiction entrance.
1:00.3	And we're probably mostly going to talk about the nonfiction stuff because of the way that you weave in your theological education with this, I don't know, I would describe it as like a extreme anthropological curiosity. Does that sound fair? It's very kind. I'll take it.
1:09.9	And yeah, and I mean that in the best way. And you're kind of your real
1:13.7	unique approach to nonfiction storytelling and weaving together what might seem to be disparate
1:21.3	concepts to other people. So I guess let's start a little bit though, because this podcast is
1:27.3	focused so much on
1:28.7	religion and Christianity. You have a proper theological education, which for someone who's
1:34.0	writing in the kind of, you know, Atlantic New York Times, Vox, Public Square is very rare.
1:41.6	What was that education like? What led you to it? Just some real Cliffs notes.
1:46.8	Sure. So, yeah, I'm a trained academic theologian. I spent nine years at Oxford. I did my
1:52.2	bachelor's, my master's, and my doctorate there in the theology faculty and dreamed for a long
1:58.7	time of being a full-time theologian within the academy.
2:02.8	I loved, I did the most, and the Oxford curriculum has changed now, unfortunately.
2:08.0	But when I was there, it was very old school.
	...

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