Lost Prophets

[ Reminder: We now have a LOST PROPHETS voicemail line. If you call the number (703) 662-3046, you can leave us a short question, a reflection, an idea — and we may play it on the show! Also, we always love emails to LostProphetsPodcast@gmail.com . ] Your faithful co-hosts decided to share some reflections on the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4. We begin by looking back at four of our Lost Proph...

[ First, some exciting podcast news. We now have a LOST PROPHETS voicemail line. If you call the number (703) 662-3046, you can leave us a short question, a reflection, an idea — and we may play it on the show!] Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what y...

“If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on...

Who was Holly Whyte? Richard K. Rein’s excellent 2022 biography, American Urbanist: How William H. Whyte’s Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life , attempts to list his many personae: “magazine editor, author, urbanist, urban anthropologist, filmmaker, pundit, public intellectual, politician (unelected and behind the scenes), consultant, teacher, mentor (to, seemingly, hundreds), as well as hu...

“ Devout and Dangerous ” is the title—irony intended—of an excellent documentary film about the life and times of Fr. Daniel Berrigan, his brother Philip, and their circle of Catholic activists for peace. The priest brothers were indeed publicly devout in their antiwar actions but “dangerous”? Certainly FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of the great harm the group posed to his reputation...

“If we could get every billionaire in the world to move here, that would be a godsend.” —former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg Somewhat short of the former mayor’s hopes, it seems that exactly 123 billionaires—the most in the country—now make New York City their home, according to the 2025 Forbes list. Perhaps they have been a political godsend for the campaign of mayoral candidate Zohran M...

In 1962, the American public’s faith in science was very high. After all, science was credited with helping us win World War II (Spam rations, nylons, the bomb) and was giving an emerging middle-class ever more conveniences and choices. It was also a time when the answer to many questions was simply: more chemicals. Certain things had gone unnoticed in this triumphal story, however. The synthetic...

His Buddhist community called him simply “Thay,” the Vietnamese word for teacher. Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh died at age 95 in his native Vietnam, having endured 39 years of exile between 1966 and 2005. In his lifetime he became a global spokesperson for non-violence and peace, beginning with his missions to the U.S. in the early 1960s that aimed to halt the destruction of his country as th...

We co-hosts at Lost Prophets each have a slightly different story about encountering Pope Francis, to use a word which he gave a particular meaning. (Elias’ reflection on the Pope of the Peripheries is here and Pete’s reflection on Francis and The God of Surprises is here .) Theologically speaking, the encuentro refers to an understanding of the Catholic faith, not as a set of doctrines, but as an...

We now have an even dozen episodes of Lost Prophets under our belts. Time to stop, we thought, sit down by the side of the road, and look back down the mountain at the distance we’ve come. Some key points that came up: * We want to do archaeology of the future, not just forecasts of the past (Russell Jacoby). * The counterculture at its most serious was a protest against nuclear weapons, technocra...

To understand the accumulating fractures of our time, it’s important to look back at key earlier periods and try to discern: What were we thinking? Colette Shade — who has written for The New Republic , The Baffler , Interview Magazine, The Nation , and Gawker — reminds us that during the “dream state,” the years between 1997 and 2008, we were thinking things like the following: * It’s the end of...

It is slightly jarring to find the radically-minded Paul Goodman a welcome guest on the September 12, 1966 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line television show. The topic was “Are Public Schools Necessary?”, to which Goodman responds in the negative—or at least with an alternative vision of small, decentralized schools that emphasized experience in the real life of the neighborhood over stu...

Just over one year after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong was slated to premiere for a New York audience on November 22, 1963. The assassination of President Kennedy meant a delay of several weeks before the film opened in late January. The critics loved the dark sendup of the American military and its euphemistic jargon for nu...

We first encountered Dougald Hine about a year ago through the wide mycelium-like network of Ivan Illich fans—and we were glad we did. His new book was just out and we heard he was doing a book tour of the U.S. quite a few years after his first visit here. Our meetup in D.C. for Dougald a few weeks ago was a rich and delightful occasion — a time when we learned what T.S. Eliot might have meant whe...

He’s been called a poet of quiet revolution: a revolution staged to heal the rift between humanity and the natural world around us. Gary Snyder’s distinctive spirituality combines Eastern traditions like Zen Buddhism, Western concerns with deep ecology, and Native American wisdom. Over his 94 years, Snyder’s career ranges from his early friendship with Jack Kerouac and the Beats, through his years...

Marc H. Ellis (1952-2024) saw the prophet today as in a condition of exile, refusing to compromise with injustice, perhaps doomed, without protection, even without destination. It was while first reading Jewish theologian Marc Ellis’ writing that we realized the waters of the prophetic ran much deeper than we had first thought. We excitedly tore through several of his books on the prophetic in ant...

Here at Lost Prophets , we are interested not only in the seminal mid-century figures we feature, but also in those contemporaries who have imbibed their ideas and are extending them today. So we were happy to speak recently with one today’s great theorists of technology, L.M. Sacasas. A few years ago L.M. posted on his blog 41 (!) thoughtful and provocative questions we should ask of the technolo...

This episode takes us into the long history of the Civil Rights Movement as we talk about the methods and legacies of two long-distance runners, Ella Baker (1903-1986) and Septima Clark (1898-1987). Baker was a legendary organizer who espoused a group-centered form of leadership and insisted that deep change required the long-haul “spadework” of community organizing. Clark, known as “the teacher o...

Ivan Illich (1926-2002) emerged in the late 1960s as a radical public intellectual. Many of his most radical insights have today become conventional wisdom. The wonderful essayist George Scialabba once entitled an otherwise generally sympathetic piece on Ivan Illich “Against Everything.” That was surely because Ivan Illich’s critique of modernity runs deeper than that of almost any other thinker o...

Peter Maurin (1877-1949) was Dorothy Day’s great teacher and collaborator in establishing the Catholic Worker movement. He saw Catholic social teachings as the still-unexploded “dynamite of the Church.” If Dorothy Day is better known today than her close colleague, Peter Maurin, it is not for lack of praise from Dorothy herself. She never ceased to emphasize Peter’s influence and his role, noting...

The life and career of Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) is a remarkable case of the inspired “amateur” who changes an entire field of study (urban planning) merely by looking more closely at things than the experts had done. While not religious, she had a profound faith in the essential goodness and creativity of ordinary people — and consequently in our collective ability to co-create the places in which...

For our debut episode, we felt we could hardly find a better example of our theme than the life and work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel . To recover the spirituality of Heschel is to re-enter a state of awe and wonder, especially if we recognize, as Heschel taught, that “God takes humankind seriously.” That is, we are not merely worshippers but also covenant partners in tikkun olam , the ancient...

In the coming weeks, join Elias Crim and Pete Davis as they journey into the land of the Lost Prophets, the mid-century figures who asked deep question and had big visions about what happened, where to go, and how to get there. Here in the mid-2020s, we are lost in the woods.  We do not trust the established systems, and the established systems are revealing themselves daily to not be, as presentl...