Why the Constitution Can’t Survive Without Christian Virtue
Nathan (00:00)
Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm your co-host, Nathan Rittenhouse.
Cameron (00:04)
and I'm your co-host, Cameron McAllister. In this episode, we take our cues from John Adams writing a long time ago, telling us essentially that if we lack virtue as a people, we will go off the rails as a society. We've come to a place where I think it's safe to say that has happened. So we talk a little bit about the prescience of the remarks.
And then we talk a little bit about what we can do about it, practically speaking, and where we come in as Christians. This will be helpful to you as you think about the practical undertaking of becoming a virtuous people, as we think about what it means to be an individual, but also a citizen, a family member, and a person who is relational by nature. As always, like, share, and subscribe. And if you'd like to support the work that we do, you can do that by going to www.
www.toltogether.com
Nathan (00:06)
We spend a lot of time as a country, particularly, think, within the Christian conservative side of the thought world, wondering what the Founding Fathers thought about certain ideas and principles as it relates to religion. And I want to give you a quote from John Adams. This is from 1798. So we're a good 22 years after the kind of the founding of the country in that way. And this is about the moral and religious vision as it relates to the boundaries and the limits of what our political system can actually handle. So.
John Adams in a letter in 1798 wrote this sentence, we have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. So if you, let me give that again, cause it's.
A lot to listen to but now that you know, this is what Adams is saying. This is what would break the US Constitution You hear people hollering about constitutional rights and constitutional interpretation. Here's what he said Here's here's the weak point in the US Constitution We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion avarice ambition revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net
Cameron (01:31)
As a whale goes through a net. Yes. It's a striking quote. We rest our case. Yeah. It's interesting. John. So John Adams was not a, what we would recognize as an Orthodox believer. He did believe he did. He wasn't, he would, he would deny the Trinity. I believe, think technically he was a Unitarian.
Nathan (01:36)
All right, the end. That's it. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud.
I mean, he said religion or morality, so he left his window open pretty far there.
Cameron (01:57)
But he recognized,
yeah, so he, yeah, right. So, but he recognized the need for genuine virtue. And I think it's hard to know what to say immediately to a quote like that because it's just so on the nose. And we are, we're living in the aftermath of the collapse of not just religion, but the notion that
Nathan (02:10)
Or wait, so.
Cameron (02:25)
cultivating a virtuous life is a noble or even something that we even is a noble cause or even something that we think of as a normal pursuit.
Nathan (02:35)
Well, I think also we hear the phrase, a rules-based order is collapsing. And quotes like this challenge us to remember there never was such a thing as a rules-based order.
So what we see happening in the world around us, yeah, so, okay, are there rules that we have to have in order to have a structured society of like, here's the speed limit, don't go backwards on a one way street, don't kill your neighbor. Sure. Absolutely. We have to have all of that and the treaties and agreements and you can expand this out to a global scale. All he is saying is that that is the most, like that's the most temporary form.
of constructing order. living in a time Cameron, in which the reason I think we have a hyper focus on legality in our time is that when culture collapses to the point that the only thing that you have in common with the people around you are the laws. Then the only common language that we have or the only point of contact that we have is through the legal system. So it's the only place in which it feels like productive.
Cameron (03:40)
Mm-hmm.
Nathan (03:45)
Conversation is happening because it's the only place where we're still speaking a common language So it's a it's a loss down to it's it's a degradation down to just the legality of a situation and this is what we've kind of been poking at this in previous podcast of saying just because Something is legal doesn't necessarily mean that it's And working that out and so I this is all just like a hey Let's go back to the beginning and recognize what the what the inherent limitations in the system were
from the beginning and then think about what that means for our lives today.
Cameron (04:18)
So I'm going to pilfer one of my talks for some of the thoughts here. So apologies to you if you have to hear this listeners twice. Nathan and I will be speaking at a cultural symposium here pretty soon at a church in my area actually.
Nathan (04:32)
Actually,
it'll be tonight. Too late.
Cameron (04:35)
It's tonight. It's tonight. It's tonight as of the airing of this podcast.
So, hey, won't, you won't, if you're at that symposium, this will sound like brand new thoughts. So you won't hear it. So now I feel a little bit more assured of what I'm going to say. But think about, first of all, I want to start by saying this, Nathan, think about how we have in our movies and in a lot of our stories, a common trope involves a character.
who has to take some sort of a journey into the wilderness in order to discover who they truly are. They have to leave the corporate, you know, the dead end corporate job or whatever it is, and they have to go off on a wild adventure and a journey, secret life of Walter Mitty, Hallmark movies where the, you know, uptight city dweller, you know, girl has to go back to some hometown and then, you know, just out in the more wild, less civilized places and discover who they truly are. So,
Nathan (05:09)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Cameron (05:31)
That's a common trope, but what we don't hear about as much, and this would be the more ancient view, is the view that if you want to discover who you are, you have to go back to the village. Now we do have some exceptions to this. Now if you look at ancient literature, a lot of it does have this theme of trying to, of going home to discover who you really are, to the family, the people who have defined you, all the things that you didn't have a choice in, where you didn't have a choice. think exceptions today.
One notable one would be Wendell Berry, in his, I mean, all of his story. I Jabir Crowe would be the biggest one to point to, but all of the stories that take place in Port William. Port William is kind of a village and a community where you have, you you have all of the, it's a self-regulating kind of community.
Nathan (06:15)
So,
are you saying that Barry and the traditional ancient epic, that the climax of the epic was reintegration back into home?
Cameron (06:25)
Yeah. Homer goes home, you know, the huge arc of the journey is that he's going to go home. But of course home is profoundly changed when he goes home and all of that. part of what I'm getting at here, and there are way more things that could be said on that front, but part of what I'm getting at here is we're very hyper individualistic these days, since way more so than when John Adams put those words down. And part of what I think has happened, cause you're describing the way
Nathan (06:35)
Mm.
Cameron (06:56)
sort of we've just an order of just rules and impositions has taken over real genuine virtue. And part of what has happened here, I'm trying to describe a little bit of what's happened. We have, we've come to, people have come to a, think reluctant recognition. Okay, darn it. We are, we are social animals. Pretty hideous term, but it's a sociological term. We're social animals. We can't get away from the fact that
I mean, we want to make, we the best, the highest expression of human freedom is still just our autonomous free will and choosing what we want, but we're still, dang it, we're still formed by people around us. Dang it. The village does kind of define us, but what we've tried to do to deal with that annoying reality as Westerns is we've tried to expand the village to ludicrous proportions. So in 1962, Marshall McLuhan brought out a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy. And this is the book where he coined the term
global village, which was to describe, you know, a connected, essentially the online world. It was an amazingly prophetic statement from him. Well, that's what we've tried to do. We've tried to make a global village. And when you do that, what you do is you try, so think about something like, for instance, the European Union. One of the big, I mean, one of the huge points of tension here,
happens whenever an individual nation, Hungary maybe, tries to hold on to its own laws and customs and its own cultural norms. And that's seen as, hey, you're not cooperating with this top down policy that's mandated for everybody. I think the COVID-19, I think the pandemic was a huge challenge to the notion of the global village. Because...
When you really think about it, global village is a really arresting phrase, but it's also paradoxical at best, but probably really a downright contradiction. Because a village by nature is parochial, it's small, it's a specific people rooted in a specific time and place. So if you live in a town in Australia, you have a sign that says, know, warns of kangaroo crossings. That same sign is going to look ludicrous where I live in Lawrenceville. That's a kind of a picture of what's happened, what happens when you...
Nathan (09:07)
you
Cameron (09:16)
lose a vision of a community where the guiding, yes, you have, of course you have laws, you need them, but the real, the real glue holding you together is a, is a shared sense of narrative, a sense of virtue and a sense of self-governance. I've said enough time to kick it over to Nathan. Yeah.
Nathan (09:31)
So what was James
Davidson Hunter's last book, Democracy, Solidarity and Democracy? So you think of the phrase something like e pluribus unum out of the mini one. How big can the pluribus be and there still be a unum? So which unum and what pluribus?
Cameron (09:37)
Solidarity and democracy.
I mean, we're finding out right now, aren't we?
Nathan (10:01)
it when you because when you make the whole like the kangaroo sign is a phenomenal analogy there but then it gets trickier when you say well can because we've tried this before like hey we'll just import democracy into this other culture
Cameron (10:15)
Exactly. That is the perfect example to give.
Nathan (10:20)
and it's just like a kangaroo crossing sign in Georgia. You're like, what?
Cameron (10:24)
So here's the thing, I'm so glad you brought that up. So yeah, we're just gonna import democracy because everybody wants what we want. No, no they don't. here's, so Adams, his words were, he said the necessary features to hold it all together were what, religion and morality. Okay, well, in the global village, you do not have religion.
Nathan (10:43)
and morality.
Cameron (10:53)
What you have, so there is a guiding value system. So think about how I'm trying to think about how best to say it. So think about the, we always pick on this, the good old coexist bumper sticker. Okay. So all of those different religious systems can be brought into a harmony only if you either undermine their essential differences or, or essential or basically erase them and don't take the.
Nathan (11:03)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (11:20)
Only if you denude them and don't take them seriously. Can you bring-
Nathan (11:23)
Or you try to create
a new thing that's a hybrid of them all.
Cameron (11:26)
Right. So what's the value behind that? The value behind that is not a religious one. It's the neoliberal order, which sees personal freedom and autonomy as the highest ideal and the highest good. So where we've come in the years, and it's been a long, hard road since Adams wrote those words, is that we have come to a place as a culture and as a society where we think individual freedom and hyper individualism, that these are the highest goods.
And we often, like you just pointed out, Nathan, blithely assume that everybody else wants this as well, regardless of their own cultural background. But.
Nathan (12:03)
But here's
where it gets interesting in that Adams doesn't list Islam as a threat. I mean, he probably wasn't even really on his radar as a category at that point. But he says avarice, so we're talking about greed, ambition, revenge. He's talking about conditions of the human heart that are pretty close to universal. So it's not global, it's human.
Cameron (12:25)
Absolutely.
we're tearing ourselves apart right now in North America, not because of the threat of Islam, but because of those very things, because we have lost any vision of virtue, of self-governance. There's no self-control. And when you do that, you know, my dad pointed this out to me many years ago, and I think I was a teenager saying, you know, the sad thing is, Cameron, the more personal freedom we demand,
You see that the more and more we have to give control, we have to cede control to the government because we increasingly can't manage ourselves anymore. So now you have surveillance equipment everywhere. All the windows on the school buses are tinted and we just, we have to be constantly managed because we can't manage ourselves.
Nathan (13:17)
Well, so this is so my dad as a fifth grade school teacher for 30 years or whatever kind of Fascinatingly track this like it used to be like you did something wrong and there was a consequence to it Now we've moved into the if you do the right thing will give you a reward And he's like this is gonna be wild. He's like in 20 years We're gonna have to pay police officers to stand at red lights and give gummy bears to people who's followed basic traffic patterns Like I mean, there's a little bit of hyperbole there, but but it's a sense of like it's not that I would stop at the red light
Cameron (13:42)
Yeah. ⁓
Nathan (13:46)
So don't crash into the person coming through on the green light. It's because I need my little gummy bear. Pat on the head like, good job. Here's the reward for doing the right thing. That is just sort of a humorous twist in all of this of doing the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing. Largely isn't on our. But so before we get too sideways on this, I've been asking this question. You and I have been discussing this. We both have school age kids in public schools and we look at the ideas list of virtues.
Where in your normal K-12 education do you learn?
the virtues that are necessary for good citizenship. And let's like, okay, we'll kick on the public schools. Okay, your church.
You're filling a blank your dinner table the the film that you're watching with your kids the YouTube videos that you show them the Stuff that what's forming and shaping you it's just we don't really have a structure based around the production or at least the awareness of the categories that the founders thought were necessary in order to maintain The political system that we find ourselves in
Cameron (14:58)
Yeah, there were no, there are no real civics courses or just, just a lot of, mean, it's hard to think of.
Nathan (15:04)
I mean, let's be honest,
do you really remember a whole lot from your sophomore year of high school?
Cameron (15:08)
Of course not.
Nathan (15:10)
So that civics
class you took back then, I'm sure that really changed the way that you... ⁓
Cameron (15:14)
Nathan, that changed my trajectory forever and now I'm a responsible
citizen as a regu- no, yeah, right. We're under no delusions there, but it did used to be civics courses and lots of training both in the home and outside the home was a part of the life of North Americans. I mean, training to be a good citizen.
Nathan (15:36)
Interestingly, all of our heroes, so let's go with we learn our virtue and our morality and our ethics from our heroes. Your average action movie are all heroes that break the law for a higher purpose.
Cameron (15:52)
Yep, they're all.
Nathan (15:54)
Who's your law-abiding citizen who is an interesting hero?
Cameron (16:00)
I, so I think in your right, you're absolutely right. Most, most heroes fit that hyper individualistic frame. mean, think about the cowboy. The cowboy is almost always in those classic tales, almost always some sort of a vigilante. And in America, we gobble up vigilante justice. think one, all right. Well, I mean, superheroes are just variations on the cowboy theme, but yeah.
Nathan (16:21)
Well, no, let's modernize it. Superheroes.
Cameron (16:29)
Now, and I will say to the, defense of some of these superhero films and comics, they do, they do behind the scenes wrestle with the complexity of visual anti-justice. think, yes. But you're right, your point holds, your point holds. The only, one of the only recent counter examples I can think of, Nathan, and this fits, is Atticus Finch.
Nathan (16:38)
Yeah, and show consequences for... that's true.
Hmm. Yeah, but, who reads that other than who reads that other than your teacher assigned it to you.
Cameron (16:53)
but he's such a striking right.
Right, right. And Atticus Finch is the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird for those who are unfamiliar. And I don't believe that book is assigned in schools anymore. It was certainly when we were students. But I mean, Atticus Finch also, you know, a guy who does the right thing, aims to do the right thing and defend an innocent man within the confines and the constraints of an unjust justice system.
and still has to accept the consequences of the verdict. It's a, it's, you should read the book by the way. mean, guys to kill a mockingbird, know a lot of English teachers maybe killed it for you. I'm sorry. They killed that particular mockingbird, but you need to resurrect that mockingbird. It's a great story. Anyway, and, and rant.
Nathan (17:44)
But that is the purpose of education,
I think, is to force us to wrestle with things like that.
Cameron (17:47)
Yes, absolutely it
is. Learning is all about being uncomfortable, thinking well. I mean, when you're really challenged to think, it's about being uncomfortable and confronting stuff that doesn't sit well with you initially. have to, you get to mull it over. It challenges your prevailing categories. I mean, that's
Nathan (18:04)
So
let's make a distinction here between individualism and individual responsibility. Because I think if you go back and say, all right, I want to have my presuppositions challenged. I want to think deeply about. there's a modern sense of individualism and when it's all about me. Verse and an earlier classical vision of this in which I actually am responsible for the outcome of the world around me. And I'm not saying this as speaking as Christians, I'm not talking about this works based salvation or anything.
But to say that the components of the subculture around me are based on my own responsibility and the actions that I take. Like you do influence the world around you. And you have a responsibility. But most of us aren't thinking in terms of like, know if I was a little less greedy.
If I was a little less, ⁓ if I, if, if, if, you know, Hey, you know, it's a dog eat dog world. If I was able to, you know, just to weaponize my ambition a little bit more, this would be good for me individually, but none of us think.
Cameron (19:09)
Right. Well, one way to look at this is that you're not a discrete individual. You are not some atomistic being. You can't be known apart from your relationship to others, like it or not. And in that is a profound truth. any responsible understanding of individuality and individualism, and individualism has its good expressions as well, of course. mean, when it's turned to the pursuit of seeing people as
endowed with equal dignity and worth, that's a really important thing. But any responsible understanding of individualism has to hold it in proper tension with community because you are a communal creature. And so in that sense, there is no such thing as a purely private act. I've said this before and some people have balked at it. Just meaning, if your individual decisions affect people around you.
Nathan (19:48)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (20:07)
If you watch something or listen to something that puts you in a bad mood, somebody else is going to be on the receiving end of that. If you indulge routinely in a terrible diet, if you don't take your health seriously, that will affect not just you, but other people. You don't just shovel all this stuff into your mouth and say, well, it's my life, who cares what other people, it has nothing to do with anybody else. Of course it does. Because you have bonds with other people.
Nathan (20:34)
even through your insurance premium, much less those
who love you and live and work with you.
Cameron (20:37)
Precisely.
So if we think about the way we're leading our lives and we think about our individuality, our citizenship, the different roles that we play in society, and we recognize our communal or relational nature, relational is the better word, then we need to recognize that our individual decisions are going to affect other people and we need to proceed accordingly. And that has always been taught until recent years. That's been
It was interesting. you look at the history of, we are, we really are. You know, I remember looking around here when all of this was just countryside, but when Nathan lives, it is still countryside. Anyway, look, I digest. Here we come back to the thought though, that if you look at the history of education in North America, if you look at the history of universities, they all had capstone courses. I mentioned this on another podcast.
Nathan (21:07)
Man, we're sounding old Cameron.
Cameron (21:35)
usually taught by the university president on the good life, on cultivating virtue. I mean, that's a remarkable thing. And now if you go to some of those same institutions, usually you're thinking of the Yales, the Harvards, and I think Columbia used to be called King's College when it was initially founded. these schools, if you brought that kind of mentality, well, I'm here to learn.
what it means to be a good person to lead the good life, you'd be laughed out of place. That scene is, come on, we've grown up since then and all that. Well, have we? Look at where we're at culturally. I'm not saying that the education system is the answer to everything. I'm saying that reflected a deeper mindset that was very precious that we have lost.
Nathan (22:19)
We have moved into the category that the purpose of education is economic. And John Adams said that Avarice would be the one thing that destroys the U.S. Constitution.
Cameron (22:23)
Absolutely. Yes, it's. ⁓
And looking at education, which is so important because what is it, I forget the phrase that is used here and I think Oz Guinness talks about it, it the creative minority? You have a small group who exercise an outsized influence, and ideally speaking, positive influence. So not everybody in other words goes to Yale, but the people who ideally speaking do go to Yale or Princeton or Harvard, some of the most influential centers, Oxford University.
Nathan (22:49)
Mm-hmm.
Cameron (22:57)
Ideally speaking, if they get a good education, can emphasize on good, then they come out as responsible leaders who are altruistic in their pursuits and want to help others. Now the vision is, no, you've got an edge, an economic edge on everybody else. You've got the connections. You're going to get the better job. We look at college now in purely transactional forms. mean, even look at ratemyprofessor.com. Rate the professor.
Nathan (23:07)
Yeah, okay.
Cameron (23:24)
The professor is supposed to actually rate you, not you rate the professor. You're the student for goodness sakes. But now students are like, no, I'm the customer. I'm the client. So you, you got to serve me. This is just so different from the way things used to be. We do sound old. I'm going to stop now.
Nathan (23:27)
Thank
So what's the way forward though? Because I think it's very hard to collect enough popsicle sticks to build a fence that keeps a grizzly bear out.
Cameron (23:49)
we got to move to Sweden. Finland actually. Finland teaches its
teachers really well. just you got to move to Finland and they're all introverts there. So that's my heaven. Just kidding. Probably not.
Nathan (23:57)
But there you go. I don't think you'd like the climate cat camera the
⁓ So so what's the way forward here? What are we talking about? What are we doing? I mean, and so it can't be Like if every if all the Christians just tried harder, I think that idea has been put to rest So that's not it And it's also not to say well if we just you know get the right laws in place because the whole well through a net thing I don't have a lot of experience of what that looks like. I can imagine it but it's it's massively disproportionate
Cameron (24:21)
Mm-hmm.
Well, the
whale is through the net, think. mean, the whale has punctured the net, well and truly. Yeah, the net is in tatters. What do we do now? Well, I think I'm going to give a trite answer and then I'm kick it back to you, Nathan. As Christians, we take it one day at a time and we do what is right and we do what we know is right.
Nathan (24:29)
Okay, there you go.
I was thinking,
give us this day our daily bread.
Cameron (24:50)
Yeah, okay, there you go. Give us the Stare of Daily Bread. So I think this is part of where I really like and appreciate James Davison Hunter's Faithful Presence's idea where you, so ideally speaking also I'm gonna say in the background here, the church ought to be your village. So we live in the global village now and it doesn't work, it's falling apart. We don't know what will replace the global village. We do know that Western Europe,
faces some stark challenges. You go to London, there are certain districts that are completely Arabic. Those are challenges to the global village. But you do have a village to which you can go as a Christian. Ideally speaking, ⁓ the more local, the better. But your church is your village. This is your group of people.
This is your group of people who, this is your community where iron sharpens iron, where you worship the Lord together in spirit and truth. You have a kind of friendship that Aristotle does talk about in Nicomachean ethics. Your friendship is not, is predicated on a common goal. You have a telos. The, our versions, our cultural versions of community could include any, everything from a church, but to being part of a halo tournament. So it's a little bit of a thinner vision and it's purely voluntary. The church.
Nathan (25:54)
Mm-hmm.
Well, so.
Cameron (26:09)
Ideally speaking, not so. There is an element of compunction and obligation there too.
Nathan (26:14)
Here's
the question I ask myself in times of difficulty. know I've shared this before. Say you're suffering a crisis or a mini crisis in your life.
In a time of crisis, of the first things to do is to identify who are the people who are close enough to me, who actually that I know actually love and care for me, who understand the situation well enough that they can give me real advice and are far enough back that they have a little bit of broader experience and objective perspective on this. We tend not to find people in that balance very well. Either it's your best best friend who's in the the mud puddle with you, or it's somebody who's on the other side of the world, right? In a sociological treatise on the concept.
Neither of those are really that helpful. The church is one of the places where we find the village meeting who know us well enough to know the nuances of our specific situation, but also have a collective experience and perspective that's also really, really helpful. So there's that element of it. The other thing though to Cameron is that there are, and so if I'm giving my, what I think is the vision of the
Formation of kind of what led up to some of the thinking that John Adams had there there are ways in which Non-strategy does work Pragmatically, let me I'll give you an example. I was talking to this guy years ago speaking at something and he ran a whole network of convenience stores and It's a pretty good size operation and he became a Christian and he said suddenly I had this great conflict because he said we sold a ton of adult magazines in these stores
And he said, I mean, we're talking like box truckloads a week and the managers of the individual stores got commissions off of the sale of those magazines. And he's like, so this was a pretty, you know, significant revenue generator. And he's like, I just had a conviction. Like we can't do this anymore. So I called all of my managers together and said, look, this doesn't make any sense. You're going to hate it. You're going to make less money, but we're not doing this anymore. And everybody's and leaves. He's like, you know what happened?
He's like our sales spiked our numbers went way up and every other category and I was like what in the world happened? He's like then I realized you know what happens when you're not selling adult magazines people bring their kids in you know who buys a ton of stuff in convenience stores kids He's like we made way more money not selling that product Through ourselves of other things than we did with that, but he's like I wasn't making that as a strategic move. It was just like
Cameron (28:38)
Hmm.
Nathan (28:48)
This doesn't make any sense to me at all. We can't be part of this. And so I think so but so I There's this trick there where doing the right thing even when it doesn't make sense and it turns out hard We want a lot of that and be like, yes, that's right. The flip side is I do think there are times in which God does deeply honor The person who does the right thing for the right reason and does shower a blessing upon and does get I don't know if extra delight is the right theological concept but I think he does like blessing people who are working to
Cameron (28:51)
He was being virtuous.
Hmm.
Nathan (29:17)
honor him with their lives, be of service to the world around them, truly live this out. And so I think really, if you look at the formation of what preceded the rules-based order, this is Simone Weil, right? Obligations precede rights. That when you live with a sense of duty toward the other that isn't based on a legal framework of how do we build the net, but we're just doing it for the sake of it's the right thing to do, I think God does bestow and shower favor on that at times. And so we want to be able to say,
If I suffer yet will I praise him and look at the Apostles and be who said yep I'm willing to be crucified upside down or the people who are saying I'm going to Live and work and invest and serve and give for the sake of the kingdom and God looks at them and says hey If you're gonna be generous like that Let's pour some more oil in that lamp and let it rip so Both parts are there. I think in our we want to hold both of those and we can't you know strategically work that out, but
They both are biblical and they both are part of the experience that I've seen in the world around me.
Cameron (30:23)
That's well said and it's a good, yeah, it's a point I don't hear enough myself. You've been listening to Thinking Out Loud, a podcast where we think out loud about current events and Christian hope.