Stories Are Soul Food

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Did you know that N.D. Wilson found a method that would have allowed a medieval to fake the Shroud using glass and paint, including photo negativity and all? This Stories Are Soul Food episode has the entire scoop -- including: Nate's impetus for the whole experiment (a professor discarded the Bible becau...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . After a quick discussion of Brian's decision to shout more at Nate to please a few vocal liseners, the SASF guys discuss what it takes to sell more than 8 million copies of your books. Turns out, if you published in the 2010s, putting "Girl" in the title pretty much did it. If you follow publishing, you s...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Will we tell stories in heaven? Nate says the answer is so obvious it's a dumb question. Brian tries to make him answer anyway. Instead, Nate talks about a sci-fi story he is working on in which nobody lives past age 18. Turns out storytelling is fundamental to humanity, and we should be living like it no...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Prepare for a very convicting episode of Stories Are Soul Food. Jesus warns of one kind of seed that springs up fast but quickly withers away. It's this kind of character the SASF guys discuss today, with Brian asking questions about Saul and Judas. Nate identifies one fundamental error such characters al...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Nate and Brian invite Forrest Dickison on to make sure he takes first place as SASF'S Most Invited Guest. But really they want to discuss Forrest's debut picture book, Crispin's Rainy Day, a story about a boy who wants to join a crew of pirate frogs -- but only if he can escape from his little sister firs...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . How do we, the members of a rotting democracy, read the story of the botched assassination of President Trump? God put a few more minutes back on the clock when DT turned his head to look at that immigration chart. Not only did we get a key character moment from Trump -- courage after being shot cannot be...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . This week Brian has abandoned Nate to attend the birth of his daughter, so Nate strikes back by having two of his own daughters on the pod instead. The discussion begins with what books the girls, Lucy and Ameera, are reading, and why Lucy hates detective novels and green food.  Lucy is moved to love, tho...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Today's Stories Are Soul Food episode covers two new dystopian tales, a book and a show. The book is Leif Enger's "I Cheerfully Refuse", which Brian cheerfully despised for Leif's overly luminous characters and bass-playing giant protagonist. The show is Amazon Prime's "Fallout," which Nate skipped his wa...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . If you're a crippled Eskimo girl, would the best story you could ever read have a crippled Eskimo girl as the hero? Many book publishers and movie studios today would say YES. (The part they don't say is that the only reason they don't make more movies about Eskimos on crutches is because that demographic...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Nate talks about his ability to sense changes in the weather, and proceeds to roast Brian for his opinions on prologues. But that's not the occasion for this wandering episode: If you're a regular SASF listener, you'll know that the guys are big proponents of filtering films for family movie night (they r...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Nate claims that talking about music is boring, but in this episode you're going to find out he has written lyrics to more than twenty (!) songs (as yet unscored). You're even going to get one scandalous title. Then Brian ambushes Nate by reading a stanza of Taylor Swift's new lyrics, and the guys discuss...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Can you name a successful Christian artist living today? Right now, to be a Christian artist means to be not a very good Christian and not a very good artist. Nate and Brian welcome the larger-than-life figure of Doug TenNapel to the SASF show to discuss this problem. Doug T. is a comic artist and video g...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Breaking news: Nate's son Rory is a senior at Columbia University where, late last night (Monday April 29th), a mob of professional protestors advocating intifada and abolition of Israel climbed through dorms and tried take possession of a university building. Only Rory and his friend Charles stood up to...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . FACE YOUR FEARS: If this week's "Soul Food" discussion is a sandwich, the first slice of bread is advice for helping your children face their fears, the other slice of bread is how moms and dads fail to face their fears as adults, and the mystery meat in the middle is delightful discussion on demon posses...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Nate and Brian discuss Doug Wilson's gospel-filled appearance on the Tucker Carlson Network. Turns out, this isn't Doug's first big media rodeo, and it makes perfect SASF fodder to discuss the different characters that come out of the woodwork after such an event. The guys discuss the "I don't agree with...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . This episode starts with a discussion of woke adaptations and ends with a discussion of the unavoidability of fiction in shaping your life. Would Nate be fine with having "woke" elements in a major adaptation of his films? His answer might surprise you. You'll hear war stories about ancestor worship in He...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Would you say Shawshank Redemption is "a movie with a happy ending"? Years ago as a young husband, that's what Brian picked to watch when his wife made a request for just such a film with a happy ending. (Spoiler: Shawshank Redemption was not the kind of movie she had meant.) For this momentous 145th epis...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Prepare yourself for the Dune-versation! (Sorry.) The guys liked Dune 2 and Denis Villeneuve proved that he "got" what made Dune great. But of course, the fun of a movie discussion is often in what you hate: Brian really disliked pouty Zendaya and the northern "modernist" Fremen. But Nate says there was n...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . In this episode you'll get to hear Nate sing (!) the unofficial English national anthem "Jerusalem"... but there's lots more: In England 1924, the sport of "sprinting" is in tension between faith and secularism, amateurism and the pros, and the nation versus world. Chariots of Fire is a tale of two athlet...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . As regular listeners know, Nate is a high school basketball coach, and for the first half of this episode he updates the SASF crowd with all travail his team has gone through -- the worst having to do with lies being told about his guys. This leads to valuable lessons for these young men, and has amply de...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Did you think we were dead? Brian apologizes for the long break between episodes and Nate does not. They then open the new year with a banger about being boring. Let's face it... most of us don't live what could be called "interesting" lives. We don't travel extensively, kill and then circumcise dead Phil...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . What should parents do if their six-year-old son wants to dress up like one of the most murderous bad guys, Darth Vader? It's fine -- and the key lies in a weakness in the story itself: Luke is a vanilla protagonist (at least until he gets his own robot hand). 2D good guys aren't inspiring to your kids? W...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Brian reads the hate-mail after SASF fired a few shots at Les Miserables. For some reason, Les Mis has become untouchable: one guy wrote that critics like Brian and Nate "will miss God's grace, for they do not have the capacity to receive it." Always willing to hear criticism themselves, the SASF guys tak...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . As longtime fans may remember, it's a Christmas tradition here at the SASF headquarters to take the worst Bible Stories and turn them into Christmas fodder... because that's what they are: they are the dark before the Light came down at Bethlehem two thousand and twenty-seven years ago. Today Nate chooses...

IT'S HERE! Pre-Order the 4th installment of the Ashtown Burial Series at ashtownburials.com . Christmas is coming, so as a gift Brian lights the fuse and Nate destroys Dickens and Les Miserables. But first, the guys discuss whether “It’s a Wonderful Life” mishandles George Bailey’s depression -- does the movie pat him on the back and tell him what a good boy he is, when it should be handling his s...