On Culture

As usual, this episode of On Culture stems from an article from The Embassy - You’ll want to check out the whole article as you listen to the whole episode. The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

Drew and I talk There Will Be Blood, Wake Up Dead Man, and Black Bag and what we see as a surprising trend in movies and culture - God as the plot twist. This podcast comes out of the latest article from The Embassy - We mention a few other movies that follow this trend, but forgot to mention Project Hail Mary, which has another surprising God conversation right in the middle. Our hero, Professor...

Trey Herweck and the people of Refuge Church in St. Charles hosted a live episode of On Culture. We talked about what On Culture is and what The Embassy is - then we talked about a lot of things we have talked about, and finished with a little bit on the latest piece: Thanks for listening, love to have you subscribe! The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support m...

Trey Herweck and I talk about living in a world without all the info. Based on this dispatch from The Embassy - As always - read the whole thing. Also - we invite you to an upcoming On Culture live event - Sunday, April 26 from 5pm to 7pm at Refuge Church in St. Charles MO. Love to see you there. There will be snacks and beverages available. We will have some audience interaction (not required, of...

View This episode features Trey Herweck, pastor of Refuge Church in St. Charles, MO and I together and in person talking about local following, local discipleship, local transformation. Along the way we talk about Lent, the Pope, the Olympic Hockey teams, John Piper, and a bunch of other things. Here is the dispatch from The Embassy that we are talking about - Read the whole piece and comment on t...

Trey Herweck and I talk about winter, aging, school buses, snowballs, and memories. This episode comes out of a recent piece in The Embassy, called Early Winter - Read the whole thing! The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

Trey Herwick and I talk about what makes community necessary and what makes it difficult and how individuality and community can coexist Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

Trey Herweck and I talk about what is real - based on a recent dispatch from The Embassy - here is an excerpt: We live in a world where we, if we choose it, even if it is completely self-destructive, we can find some person or artificial companion to tell us what we want to hear, justify what we want to believe, live the way we want to live. But it isn’t real. We can’t escape reality without conse...

Drew Wendt (from DoYouLikeApples) and I talk Revolution, Resistance, Instagram, One Battle After Another, Eddington and other movies - and, also, talk about living. Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

Trey Herweck and I talk about ‘The Algorithm’ - and how we should respond to it. This episode of On Culture is based on the most recent dispatch from The Embassy - Thanks for listening! The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

This episode discusses the latest dispatch from The Embassy - Funerals and Other Expressions of Reality. Here is an excerpt - I officiated a funeral service for the mother and grandmother of friends of ours recently. I had never met the woman whose life we were remembering and whose absence friends and family were grieving. She was someone who lived within the big gospel story, who had, by all acc...

Trey Herweck and I share our thoughts about thoughts and prayers. This episode of On Culture - Thoughts and Prayers - is based on the article of the same name from The Embassy: Thanks for reading The Embassy! This post is public so feel free to share it. The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full ac...

Chad Myers and I discuss this piece from The Embassy - Watching From The Sidelines. Take I may post this again, but I wanted, in light of even more violence that appears to be part of our political divide or cultural wars to repost this piece: Interesting Times I pray there won’t be many more repostings in the near future. The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and sup...

This episode interacts with the latest dispatch from The Embassy - here is an excerpt: View Sharon Melzer, 24, has long believed in manifestation, or the idea that she can bring her hopes and dreams to life by visualizing them. Coming Soon: Your Beautiful, Successful, Confident Life - Ayson Krueger - NYT - 7/26/25 Manifestation is one of the watchwords of our time. The idea is to take an idea, a p...

As always, we use the latest dispatch from The Embassy for our discussion - here is an excerpt: The debate concerning the origin or foundation of mathematics has been around for a very long time. Particularly, this question: Is mathematics invented or is it discovered? Because mathematics describes to an unreasonable level of accuracy how the physical world operates, is it something like a part of...

Trey Herweck, pastor at Refuge Church in St. Charles, MO, joins me to talk about living in Interesting Times. We are using the most recent article from The Embassy as our jumping off point. Here is an excerpt: View Although it is often mislabeled as a Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times” is of English origin. It appears in British diplomatic circles during the late 19th and early 20t...

This week’s On Culture is a conversation between Trey Herweck and me about privacy and our public selves and how they relate. It uses the latest piece from The Embassy as the jumping off point. Here is an excerpt … Even though it is something I feel called to, it is a strange thing, not ever being a professional writer, to send these things off to people I don’t know. And, perhaps because of that,...

Chad Myers and I talk about the latest piece from The Embassy - The Good People and The Bad People . Here is an excerpt: About four or five years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Richard Beck’s book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality. In this book, Beck explores how we view concepts like purity and contamination in our culture (and other cultures) and how that transfers to o...

We are back! It has been awhile since our last On Culture - but I’m going to work back to my old schedule, if I can, with some exceptions. Anyway - this episode features frequent collaborator Trey Herweck and is engaged with the last issue from The Embassy - Struggling Imperfectly Forward . Here is an excerpt: K asked a question during the conference, a question I answered, but one that we discuss...

You’ll have to listen to this one: * A brief recap of the last two dispatches from The Embassy * And solo podcast explaining the lack of other podcasts Enjoy! The Embassy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Embassy at theembassy.substack.com/subscribe

Here is an excerpt from the dispatch from The Embassy - Show Me Something Real … Phillip Hancock was on death row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. He was convicted of two murders committed in 2001, resulting in a penalty of death. Devin Moss was his chaplain, or spiritual advisor as Moss described it. Moss had spent much of the prior year conversing with Hancock leading up to the night of the s...

This week Susan James and I talk about how and why we ruin words. As always, we are discussing the latest dispatch from The Embassy - Ruining Words - here is an excerpt … … We don’t tend to use these words with their actual meanings engaged. I think many of us don’t even know their meaning as we use them. We begin to lose the ability to talk about reality … The flattening of these words mirrors an...

Chad and I talk about how we face endings and beginnings throughout our life and how that connects with a life of faith. Here is an excerpt … Trying to find meaning in an alienated world. I’m not a Doomer Optimist, but that is actually pretty good. In fact, the Christian narrative offers meaning in an alienated world. More specifically, the Christian narrative of the end of all things, the Christi...

Trey Herweck, pastor of Refuge Church here in St. Charles, and I talk about faith and doubt and certainty and mystery. As always, we riff on the latest edition of The Embassy - Certainty, Doubt, Faith, Mystery. Here is an excerpt: About that path to God - much of the New Testament interacts with this question - what is the way (or way back) to God? Almost the entirety of the book of Hebrews stress...

This episode of On Culture interacts with this latest dispatch from The Embassy. Here is an excerpt - Some commercials stay with you. Perhaps they resonated during a particular time or place, or became a cultural talking point like Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl spot introducing the Macintosh or Wendy’s iconic question - also, interestingly, from 1984. Or perhaps they resonated with you because you just...