My name is Dan Koch. Like many of you, I've been on a complicated faith journey for a number of years now.

And while I tend to find myself on the progressive side of Christianity, my goal is not to make liberal converts.

I want this show to be a resource for Christians to my right and to my left, as well as

former Christians and non-religious folks, anyone who finds themselves asking difficult questions

about God, science, prayer, fate, suffering, evangelism, and more. So many of us have been given bad answers to those good questions, often by people

with pure intentions.

I want to say that you have permission to take both Christianity and the modern world

very seriously.

And I hope to facilitate that by introducing you to people seeking God across

the Christian spectrum, engaging hard questions in a multitude of ways. Thanks for listening.

Although there is limited crossover between interest in this podcast and my music podcast,

pretty good vibrations, despite, I think, a very good title for that music podcast.

I'm fine with that, limited overlap. However, some topics just are perfect to cover on both, and I think that

this is one of them. We're going to hear a lot of music clips today, but I'm also going to do

quite a bit of sociology, and we're going to talk about psychology, plausibility structures,

all this kind of thing, as well as sort of the sociopolitical

development of white evangelical Protestantism. If you really dig this episode and you like

hearing the clips and the sort of musical analysis being included as well, then you might head

over to pretty good vibrations and check out some more of those episodes.

But if not, no big deal.

This podcast is still my primary work, public work, and will continue to be.

But it's really fun doing the music stuff as well and interesting and creative.

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