Hi, everyone. This is Curtis, and I am excited to tell you about a new feature of the GoodFaith podcast and it's called Campfire Stories.

Now, in a great campfire, everyone has the opportunity to share their stories. And so, in Campfire Stories, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear a story about what you are doing along the themes of the GoodFaith podcast, perhaps it's something about how you're living out your relationships with political polarization, how you are trying to reflect the image of God in your institution and organization, or what you're doing with your money or your vocation, anything that has been sparked by the themes that we've covered here in the GoodFaith podcast is fear game.

It doesn't matter if it's a big story, a small story, or something in between, as long as it's a story about what you are doing in your life.

We're not so much interested in hearing just thoughts. We want to hear stories of doing. So, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can just click on it and then supply us the basic outlines of your story of doing of living out the themes of GoodFaith podcast.

And we'll look at it and we may invite you to share that story on a GoodFaith blog, a social media, or perhaps even invite you to come on the GoodFaith show yourself and talk to me and share your story.

Like, how cool would that be? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk with you. So, please consider joining the campfire by actually joining actively and sharing your story with others gathered around the campfire. Thanks.

Welcome to the GoodFaith podcast. I'm David French with Kurdish Chang and we've got a couple of topics today. Topic number one is going to be, I don't know, the best way to describe it, something along the lines of the temptation of contrarianism.

It's going to be based on something I wrote for the Atlantic last week that I got a lot of traction about the difference between critical thinking and contrarianism and the temptation, the dangers of the temptation of contrarianism. And then Kurdish is going to raise a really interesting question with me earlier this week after another newsletter I wrote where I, at the very end of it, put a video of a Ukrainian ambush of a Russian tank column.

And the really complex moral feelings that it generated, not just in me, also in Kurdish and also in an awful lot of my readers, what that incident sort of creep, what that, what feelings and moral quandaries that created in an awful lot of folks. And we're going to dive into that in some detail.

But first, Curtis, I want to talk about contrarianism in our present age and I want to begin with a confession.

What is that confession? Wait, can I begin by just saying you're wrong?

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

So what's your confession?

So my confession is I am highly tempted by contrarianism.

So do you remember how we had a podcast several weeks ago about, should I stay or should I go?

Yep.

And there was, we both had this sort of inclination that we were both stares.

Right.

And I think a lot of us have inclinations, personality inclinations towards, say, conformity, right, going along, or contrarianism, contradicting sort of the mainstream point of view.

And I have spent a lot of my life struggling with contrarianism.

In other words, if I have a sense that a peer group is wanting me to do something, or if a, if the quote unquote, elite, or the establishment, or you name it, want me to do something.

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