@ Sea With Justin Mcroberts

I think it was 6 or so years ago, I was in a session with a therapist who practiced cranial - sacral therapy.Which, in short, attends to the alignment of the body between the cranium (my noggin) and the sacrum (which is pretty much my tailbone). It’s a series of long tensions and pulls rather than muscle squeezing and all that.About 15 min into the session, she asked me, “It feels like you have some injuries on your left side.”“Yeah, probably.”She paused and then pulled me over onto my back and said, “tell me.”I’d never been asked before to recount my history of injuries. Regardless, I could recall all of them.broken anklemultiple sprained ankles (6-7)hairline fracture of my tibiaACL tearsome other mind of knee blowoutdislocated hip3 broken ribs (2 occasions)Broken collarbone (2x)Broken shoulderBroken wrist (2x)Hairline skull fracture (2x)All of it on the left side of my body.“That’s a lot of trauma.”My brain immediately reacted with something like, “What?! I don’t have ‘trauma.’ I just got hurt a few times.”

Often enough, the topic of pain gets tied up into the same kind of conversations had about “evil.”  Spoken of as a “problem” or a thing to be avoided. A thing that diminishes the human experience and limits relationships. Oddly, pain, including physical pain, is perhaps the most common human experience. in the eternally wise words of REM’s Michael Stipe: “everybody hurts”And there might not be anything quite as soul-binding as suffering together. Which is what makes the work Jennifer Ko does so beautiful, so good and so humanly true. Chronic pain and physical limitation take center stage in Jennifer’s story and her work. And rather than speaking in terms of “problems” and “ways to avoid,” Jennifer shares the reality of her pain as an experience and expression of her full humanity. I am regularly informed and inspired by who she is and how she shares herself. This is my conversation with Jennifer Ko. 

I didn’t know a lot about the actual life of Jesus before I was in my mid-twenties. Honestly, even after I started calling myself a Christian (which is far more interesting conversation now than it was then),  What actually led me to do the work of discovery and research wasn’t a sermon series; it was seeing a series of books or short documentaries on what people were calling the “Lost Years” of Jesus’ life. As the 4 biblical accounts of Jesus’ life have it, we can read about his birth, which is mostly about his mother’s faith and the political environment he’s born into, and then we actually get nothing until he’s right about 12 when he wanders off from his parents and ends up in a conversation with religious elders. THEN, there’s nothing until he’s about 30. In fact, all there is to read of the actual life of Jesus is roughly 3 years.So, I started noticing these books in which a whole slew of folks basically gave in to imaginative conjecture about what Jesus was doing as a young adult into his mid-twenties.

If you've been around me for any significant time, you'll likely know that my mother is a hero of mine. not in a cute "I love my mom, you guys" kind of way but more like "I hope I can be the kind of resilient and faithful and strong as that person" kind of way. From her very difficult childhood, marked by various in-house abuses and financial destitution to her adventures west to CA from Albuquerque, NM to the ways she held our family together while my father was falling apart and, more recently the relentless ways she cares for me and my kids, I marvel at her parenthood. Which leads me to this: The significance of parenthood seems to often allude faithful and respectful conversation. Either idolized in a kind of glass box and set aside untouched by critique or minimized in a smaller cardboard box and cast aside so that it doesn’t touch other vital things.Parenthood often gets treated as the alter on which all other aspects of life must be sacrificed or the pit of despair that must be avoided so that other as

Most of the guests I host on the podcast share some kind of faith in common. For many of them, that faith carries the label of "Christianity." for others, that label doesn't fit quite as well or as comfortably.My last guest, Jon Steingard, is one such guest for whom religious labels are somewhat unhelpful, at least at this moment in his life and career.But, then again, maybe it's not about this moment or season for Jon, or for people like Jon, and maybe there are a whole lot more people "like Jon;" folks who feel placeless and are somewhat comfortable with that. . Maybe the fact that religious labels are so unhelpful and inaccurate with Jon "right now" actually says something about the ineffectiveness and extreme limitation of those labels.In 2008, I released an album called "Deconstruction" after doing a fair about of my own deconstructive work, theologically and philosophically, and socially.One of the questions I started getting from folks was some form of "okay, where are you now?"Where are you on this to

Jon Steingard spent 16 years as a musician, songwriter and front man in a band whose success had its context in what some call the "Christian market." I've spent a bit of time there myself and there's a whole conversation herein about whether or not a marketplace can be "christian,"  (I think it can't). But that's what's significant and odd about that conversation is that what seems to bind that marketplace and its buyers together as a tribe is agreement on a very particular set of theological and social conclusions.So, when Jon began to question, doubt and distance himself from many of those theological and social conclusions, it meant having to intentionally begin a the work of reinvention. If you're a consumer of religious culture, particularly the religious culture Jon took part it, you might know that such a reinvention often comes with what can be a volatile mixture of frustration and disillusionment and respect and clarity and ... well... it can be a lot.So it's not that Jon has been undergoing a decon

When I started the @ Sea Podcast, I was doing a bit of soul searching. The way I communicated it originally was that the cultural spaces I was used to hosting the work of soul-shaping and meaning-making had ceased to work for enough people or enough kinds of people. In response to that, I wanted to be a guide (a good captain, as it were), helping to navigate the turbulent waters of an unsure/unclear future.  So, I set out to talk with people who were building that future, people who were making what comes next.Over time, I learned something vital: it wasn't' the artifact or the program or even the culture that comes next; it was the person doing the work of making and changing and rethinking and maintaining; that person is what's next.In short, you're what comes next.Then it hit me that I'm part of what comes next, in my own way.And this podcast is part of how I live into that.Over this next season, we will certainly touch on the issues and topics that have been a hallmark of this podcast. But I'll do less fo

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One of the most persistent criticisms of religious progressivism is that it is reactive, pushing back on (and sometimes warring against) older, institutional practices deemed out of date, unhelpful, and even unjust. And while there is some good to such a posture, it doesn’t constitute a full enough profile of leadership.  In his book “The Shift” Colby Martin rises to meet that challenge and critique, not only delving into his own journey but pulling principles of leadership, cultural formation, and communal care that do, in fact, more completely fill out a posture of leadership.  I enjoyed his book as well as the conversation we had about it. I think you might as well. Check it out.  

It’s one thing to say “we’re in this together.” It’s another thing entirely to practice “belonging” and pay the kind of price required to actually broaden one’s tent; to include people who would just as soon exclude or eliminate you from the socio-cultural mix altogether. For many years now, Ben McBride has been doing the strange and difficult work of redefining what it means for folks to belong to one another, not just as a sentiment, but as a personal, cultural and institutional practice. He is an activist, a spiritual leader, one of the most valued voices in the country when it comes to the conversation about police/community trust building and gun violence. He is my guest on this episode. Check it out.    

This episode airs in February of 2020 and gyms all over the country are wrapping up their New Year’s deals to entice newcomers. It’s a poorly kept secret in the fitness world that most gyms (24 hr Fitness, Planet Fitness and the like) harvest the majority of their memberships in January and then.. come February or March, actually count on you not showing up much at all, if at all. In other words, the expectation and intention of most of these campaigns has less to do with satisfying your actual need to live healthily and more to do with capitalizing on it and benefiting the financial health of the gym. Crossfit gyms are some of the few exceptions to that model. Started in Santa Cruz CA, (which is about an hour south of where I live), Crossfit (as a philosophy, a culture and eventually a network of gyms) has continued to upend and revolutionize not only the fitness world, but also the lives of many of its adherents. Of course, Crossfit has a good number of detractors as well. Some because of gyms and coaches w

In a recent poll of Australians, 70% of those polled claimed to mistrust religious leaders. Of course, I don’t spend a lot of time searching Australian polling data. I saw this because I pay attention to author and missiologist Michael Frost. Michael,  has spent much the past two decades tilting his ear towards those who live well beyond the walls of the institutional church, because… It is impossible to fulfill the Christian imperative to love my neighbor if I don’t know my neighbor. Michael’s work might be most poignantly categorized as a valiant and persistent effort to help us love those we live near. He is as a professor at Moorling college in Sydney and the author of 12 books, including his most recent: “Keep Christianity Weird.” He is also my guest on this episode of the @ Sea Podcast. Check it out. 

In his early letters to Jesus followers the Apostle Paul regularly and specifically warned against a religious philosophy called Gnosticism. In short, Gnosticism valued immaterial things and particular devalued the human body. Over 2000 years later, it seems to me that disembodiment of various kinds continues to pose a threat, not just to a healthy Christian practice of faith but to a healthy practice of life together with others, as neighbors, regardless of religious preference.      My guest’s debut book “This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession,” reads like an invitation to full, human embodiment. Which is to say, it serves as a kind of remedy to the disembodied value system continually looming in American religious, economic and political life. Cameron Dezen Hammon is an essayist, an author and the host of her own podcast (called The Ish). She is also my guest on this episode of the @ Sea Podcast. Check it out. 

The power of those who identify, translate and communicate current events is truly massive; sometimes frighteningly so. In 1978, Science fiction writer  Philip K. Dick warned against the power of what he called “the media,” writing… “I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.”  I think that’s a fair warning. At the same time I also think that entitles like FOX, CNN, The NYT, USA Today are inextricable from American culture; they’re not going anywhere. Sure, the names will change, but there will always be centralized sources whose role and responsibility is to identify, translate and communicate current events.  The question for me then becomes “What kind of person do I trust with that kind of influence?”  Kiresten powers has been and continues to be that kind of person. Former podcast guest and author Jonathan Merritt once described her as “that feisty, funny commentator on CNN” and she certainly is those tings. She a