Hello and welcome to Red Minnis. This is Allison. I am here with Brett, and this lovely December, we are doing a very special episode for you. We discussed what we should do this month and when we were talking about it. We decided we were going to do kind of like a Christmas episode. You know, I was recently at an event in L.A. and I was talking about it. We decided we were going to do kind of like a Christmas episode. You know, I was recently

at an event in L.A. and I was talking to someone who listens to our podcast, and they were saying,

it's really awesome that you all talk about spirituality and religion and like don't back down from

that and are willing to engage in that. And it's one of the things that I think Brett and I always

come back to you as a subject. So

today we want to do a Christmas episode talking broadly about Jesus, our understanding of him,

how we relate to the notion of Jesus. And yeah, Brett will give some context about exactly how we're

approaching that. But hopefully this will be interesting for people. I think it will be building on a lot of ideas that we've thrown around before. I'll definitely talk a little bit about why I think there's like political importance to this as well. But yeah, I'll pass over to Brett, who's going to break down a little bit methodologically, maybe what we're trying to do here. Yeah, and I think we should just say this up front.

We'll add all the caveats and the nuances and the complexities as we go.

But just to state very cleanly and clearly what we're doing in this episode is that if

people that are familiar with our episodes on, I mean, mysticism, we've done many episodes

on mysticism, on Christian mysticism, Sufism, Buddhism, of course.

And we're always Spinoza philosophy even.

And we're always trying to pull out a certain thread from all of these traditions.

And people that are familiar with the show will know that we've do know doven into to these topics so many times

before and so what our project here today is is to interpret i wouldn't even say reinterpret

because that that assumes that there's some baseline true or or mainstream or right way of

interpreting it and this is like an alternative view i think i think the the interpretation

we're going to give it is historically um very much present from the very beginning of christianity

itself and and is historically legitimate but it is basically a interpretation of the jesus

story of the message of christ that is not literalist, that is not

doctrinaire, that is not propositional or belief-oriented, but is rather mystical, experiential.

...