The Warrior Priest Podcast

In Defense of the Ridiculous I have changed what I write about. Not because I ran out of sermons, meditations, and folktales, but because the world sounds too much like a pulpiteer—long, loud, and entirely devoid of mirth. I turned to absurdity the way a drowning man turns to air: instinctively, and with no guarantee of survival. The stories I tell now, about bureaucratic saints, apologetic corpse...

Despite all this good stuff, I have been feeling a little flat recently. It comes to us all. Much unrealised. Everything in the rear view mirror. I’m too asleep, bad-tempered, just irritable at the world. James Hillman told me it’s important to just ‘decompose’ every now and then. Don’t make everything alright. Let Saturn and his dry, difficult, Beckett-like thoughts own the house for a minute. Le...

What if the point of life isn’t about fixing, polishing, or endlessly improving ourselves. What if it isn’t self-help? What if the purpose of living is soul-work. The kind that remembers myth, story, and transformative conversation is not meant to enlighten or instruct, but to awaken: to open onto the deeper life where grief and wonder, death and newness, earth and heaven still speak. The soul doe...

The Underworld is the place where you broke bread with Baba Yaga, made peace with limit, were fed small scraps of meat by crows when you needed it the most. It’s the deep dip in a myth, the  katabasis , the descent, the mischievous, startling bewilderment of irrational energies. Logic has little traction at such a moment. Successful returnees of the Underworld are Blake, Anna Swir, Patti Smith, El...

Let’s begin with a question: Where are you? That’s the question we all ask, isn’t it? Whether we know it or not, whether we want to admit it or not. Where are we?  In 1968, a TV show called  The Prisoner  aired in the United States on CBS. The protagonist, known only as Number Six, wakes up one morning to find himself trapped in a place called  The Village.  The Village is a seemingly idyllic plac...

Civil Disobedience We’re taught that obedience is virtue. But what happens when the laws no longer guard the land, the people, or the soul. What happens when they only serve profit, machines, and the men who write the rules to feed themselves? They’ve built a world where you need permission to milk your own cow. Where the law protects what poisons the field and punishes the one who plants without...

In this episode, I read about fishermen, ecology, and the question: where do we belong, and where do we choose to live?

In this episode, a poem about the first words and the story of Cormac mac Airt.

St Kevin and the Blackbird (1996) And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside His cell, but the cell is narrow, so One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff As a  crossbeam , when a blackbird lands And lays in it and settles down to nest. Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked In...

There’s a hunger in the world now, not just for bread, but for meaning. A hunger not of the belly, but of the bones. A thirst nothing sweet can quench. No flag can feed it. No slogan can soothe it. And if you’ve felt it, that ache behind the ribs, that long pull in the chest, you are not alone. The world we’ve inherited is wired, clever, and slick with answers. It can mimic beauty. It can parrot t...

A starving child is a judgment on the world. Agus sin í an fhírinne ghlan —And that is the plain truth. And that judgment begins with us. As a man, I am sickened. The older I get, the more I understand what strength is for. And it is not for conquest. It is not for domination. It is for standing in the breach. For using your body and your words to protect the weak. To be silent now, when children...

In this episode, I discuss sitting with sadness, conforming our lives to the big “T” truth, the importance of using story to cover our everyday experiences with higher meaning and purpose, and why it’s worthwhile to comtemplate the size of our souls.

The truth is, modern man — "scientific man,” as he likes to call himself — has disarmed himself. He traded his old strength, his old faith, his old stories, for a spreadsheet and a dopamine hit. He threw out the saints and the warriors and enthroned the technocrats. In doing so, he cast off not just God, but his own courage, his own soul. He fashioned himself into a cold machine, a calculator...

A Thiarna, i mo thuirse, ná tréig mé. (O Lord, in my weariness, do not forsake me.) Tuirse is not only the sag of limbs at the end of a long day. It is deeper than that. It is the hush that gathers behind the eyes when hope has gone too far ahead and no longer waits for you. It is the weight in the chest, like a stone settling, when the sea gives no reply to your longing, and the hills echo back o...

In the modern West, the hearth has gone cold. The fires that once knit family and village together have been replaced with a different flame—the flickering blue light of the screen. John Michell warned of this in his strange, luminous writings. He saw how the displacement of the hearth led to the displacement of meaning. No longer do we gather around a living fire, telling the old stories, hearing...

But the truth is quieter than that. It moves without slogans. It walks without a flag. It looks like this: a deaf and blind man named Tim, finding his way onto a flight in Boston, one hand stretched out into the dark. And a stranger gives up his seat, and flight attendants allow their faces to be touched so he can know they are there, so he can feel the kindness in the lines of their cheeks. It lo...

...when we say,  “I am depressed,”  we start to believe the sorrow is the whole of us. That it's etched into the skin, like a birthmark. That it's our name now. But when we say,  “The sorrow is on me,”  we leave room. Room for the truth that this thing might lift. That it might pass. That we are more than what presses us down. There’s a similar pattern in Scots Gaelic, in older English, in...

What happened to you is not your identity. The wound you carry, the abuse you suffered, doesn’t get to have the final word. It’s part of your story, yes. It has shaped you, but it cannot define you, because Someone greater has stepped into your pain and claimed you as His own. Jesus knows exactly how it feels to be betrayed, violated, and wounded—He knows it in His flesh and blood. He knows it on...

We live in an age of collapse. Spiritually, mentally, emotionally, even physically, we are coming undone. The signs are everywhere. The old symbols no longer hold meaning. The words spoken in sacred places ring hollow. Our stories, once full of weight, have been traded for distractions that pass like dust in the air. We were given something rich, something rooted, something deep—and we have spent...

Somewhere along the way, we lost the old way of seeing, the deep sense that a pattern lies beneath all things. Scientific materialists insist we’re nothing more than arrangements of dirt, that our griefs and joys are sparks in a gray swirl of neurons. The Gnostics preach the world is a wicked trap, that matter is a cage for the spirit. But both stray from the bedrock truth. When God spoke the worl...

The Weight of Gold, the Lightness of Grace Poverty of spirit—what a strange, thin phrase it’s become, brittle in the mouths of modern men who’ve never walked barefoot on cold earth, never felt the raw ache of want, not just in the belly but in the soul. To be poor in spirit isn’t a matter of meek nods and saintly sighs. It’s not weakness, not a bowed head for show. It’s an emptiness carved out dee...

First, credit to Paul Kingsnorth and Mary Harrington for the topic. They are a wellspring of thought-provoking inspiration. Now… The great post-Enlightenment revolution that promised to unshackle the mind from superstition and lead us into an age of reason has, in its end, given us a world gripped by its own decadence. We've spent centuries in a brave, frenetic race to divorce ourselves from a...

Steel, Cloth & Waging the Hidden War I saw a read a missive on Substack recently by Matthew Herman Hudson that critiqued the claim that Christianity needs “less passive monks and more active knights.” To think the monk’s labor is passive, a withdrawal from the struggle that defines this world, is to see with dim sight and hear with a stopped ear. Such a view shrinks the spiritual into a shallo...

Apocalypse speaks not only of fire and destruction; it pulls back the veil, it bares what has always been lying underneath. Beneath the floodwaters, beneath the inferno’s roar, lies a revelation. They are stories of uncovering—not chaos—but the unlit truths buried under the veneers of our comfort, truths we kept at arm’s length for as long as the years would let us. - Donavon L Riley Link to full...

In these times, when the world is hungrier than ever for quick fixes, we must ask ourselves: what if the trouble isn’t something to be solved at all, but something to be faced with a turn back to the heart of what’s real? — D.