Samsara Audio

Are you allergic to the ancients? What images do the words ‘wisdom’ and ‘participation’ evoke for you? What’s at stake in our models of truth? This month’s episode of Samsara Audio sees your host Matthew in a reflective conversation with Jonatan Anabalon, a Norwegian middle school teacher with a Master's in Anthropology from the University of Bergen. Matthew and Jonatan met through Samsara Study G...

This month’s episode of Samsara Audio features a conversation with Cleo Kearns (PhD, Columbia) who writes about continental philosophy, science, and the book of Genesis at her Substack . Cleo has taught and published for decades about the psychology of religion, the anthropology of ritual, and the reading of the Abrahamic Scriptures. Cleo is a sister in Christ and an esteemed colleague, so I’m par...

This week Samsara Audio welcomes Mark Gerard Murphy , author of The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan, and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction . Mark teaches mysticism, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and is also actively involved in spiritual direction within the Roman Catholic Church. Together we explored the...

This week I’m excited to share a conversation I had with Daniel Tutt , a Marxist and psychoanalytic theorist, and also a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, about his recently published book How to Read like a Parasite: How the Left got High on Nietzsche. His book provides a much needed intervention in Nietzsche studies by rigorously insisting on reading Nietzsche in his polit...

In this long overdue episode of Samsara Audio, my old friend Joel Carini (“The Natural Theologian”) joins me to discuss his piece “ Berating the Godfearers ” which raises a host of questions close to both our hearts — how does the Christian ideology of “worldview” get conversion wrong, and consequently disable real conversation along the way? This conversation was born out of years deep inside par...

I’ve wanted to have Quinn Whelehan on for a while, and now it’s finally happened. This week Quinn joins me on Samsara Audio to talk about studying at a Buddhist university, understanding the basic structure of Nagarjuna’s four-fold logic, and how to put Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Hegel. If you’d like to hear more from Quinn, I recommend his excellent presentations “ Hegel, Buddhism, and...

I’m joined on Samsara Audio this week by my long-time Twitter mutual Shinkyū , a working class Zen practitioner and a teacher at the Grand Rapids Buddhist Temple. You can follow Shinkyū on Twitter/X , and you can find some of his dharma talks on his YouTube channel . This week’s conversation brings the reader into a different religious perspective — Zen in small town America where the ancient trad...

Two episodes in one month? It’s been crazy here at Samsara Audio, and I couldn’t be more excited to welcome my friend Dimitri Crooijmans to the podcast to discuss not only his work on a Hegelian “forward return to the self,” but also his latest piece “ How to Regrow the Soul’s Wings .” I highly recommend Dimitri’s written work at Actual Spirit , but I would be remiss to pass over his high quality...

Minnow Park joins us this week for an unforgettable episode of Samsara Audio. I had Minnow on to discuss his journey deconstructing and reclaiming his Christian faith, as well as the role that the writing collective Foster has played in that ongoing process of reconciling writing, truth, and God. Foster will be launching season 4 of their writing cohort on October 16th, 2024, but there is still ti...

This month's episode of Samsara Audio brings Javier Rivera into our studio for a conversation on the necessity of the negative, the discomforts of compassion, and the abyssal act of forgiveness. Javier Rivera is a writer on Substack , a veteran, and a student of religion at the University of Arizona. He has a forthcoming book called Ruptures releasing near the end of the year. Thank you for li...

Samsara Audio is back, and for this episode I sat down with Vivid Void , a writer and mystic I've been following for a while. It was a delight to talk with him about healing from trauma, the disaster of encountering the emptiness of things too soon, and also asking what the word 'spiritual' really means. Follow Vivid Void on Twitter and at his Substack. Hopefully this isn't the las...

I spent the past month working on a rough draft of chapter 3 of my book, so this episode of Samsara Audio brings you my most up to date articulation of the book I'm writing about Endo Shusaku's novel Silence . You'll hear about (1) Japan's largest peasant uprising, (2) emerging Japanese nationalism under Tokugawa, (3) Slavoj Žižek's reading of St. Paul, (4) my critique of Chris...

In the first episode of Samsara Audio, I provide an overview of the essay series I've been running at my blog Samsara Diagnostics . The series is titled " what sort of problem is a human being ?" and focuses on the philosophical problems raised by the question of self-destructive behavior in humans. I draw on an eclectic set of sources, including Nietzsche, Lacan, and Girard, and I b...