Shows
The FermentNeither Wolf Nor Underdog: Ch. 5 of Life at the End of Us Vs. ThemSome would question the wisdom, or the right, of someone like me--White, Mennonite, Christian--writing about the historic practices of torture among Indigenous cultures on Turtle Island. Hopefully, the work I have been doing on this podcast and in my book so far has helped me pull enough of the log out of my own eye that I can at least look at the speck in my brother's eye, from a place of connection that says, we've all got some dirt that clouds our vision. "For all have fallen short of the glory of God," as Saint Paul says. Repentance...
2024-02-281h 12The FermentSex Fiends: Jian Ghomeshi, My Rooster and Me--Ch 4 of Life at the End of Us Versus ThemA golden-voiced radio host falls from glory. A rooster crows and struts and demands rough sex. A husband catches some reflections of himself.
2024-01-131h 20The FermentSpare the Rod and Take the Child: Ch. 3 of Life at the End of Us vs. ThemA horse-and-buggy Mennonite community has all of its children apprehended by agents of the state because of the use of corporal punishment in the community. What does this story expose about how we think about the legitimate use of force in our modern world? Girard and Illich offer some insight on the odd role of the Gospel in reshaping everything from parenting to policing.
A recommended related story that I covered on another podcast: Diandra Rose Powderhorn on the Return of the Buffalo Podcast: I am the best person for my children
2023-12-191h 36The FermentAve Maria/Sophia/Gaia: Katherine Bubel and Michelle Berry Lane on Illich and the Sacred FeminineFor our fourth and final conversation, around and beyond the legacy of Ivan Illich, we hear reflections and discussion from Katherine Bubel and Michelle Berry Lane before moving into an extended open discussion.
Katherine discusses Illich's mythopoetics of Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Pandora, the latter a patriarchally diminished version of the Earth Goddess Gaia, who Katherine connects to the biblical divine wisdom figure of Sophia, and Mary, Mother of God. Where Prometheus pursues mastery and technology, "Epimethean man stays and listens to the dream of Gaia/the Earth."
Michelle talks about about the conviviality with and...
2023-12-051h 41The Ferment”One No, Many Yeses” Sam Ewell & Dougald Hine in Illich Conversation #3Gustavo Esteva coined the slogan "One No, Many Yeses" to communicate the way Illich's sense of "the vernacular" offers many small and winding exits off of the one big road of industrial "progress" that tries to gather up the whole globe into one great machine, one overriding system. In this conversation, Dougald Hine, Sam Ewell and friends colour in some of the small, convivial possibilities that lie on the other side of a no to the promises of modernity, the kinds of gardens that can grow up in the cracks of big systems.
2023-11-231h 31The FermentWalking the Razor’s Edge: Illich Conversation #2 with David Cayley and Sam EwellChristian mission has gotten a bad name in our time, for good reason. Illich talked about the razor's edge walked by the missionary, between violating the world into which one has been sent (he used the word raping, actually) and betraying one's spiritual inheritance. Some have read Illich as anti-mission. In this conversation, both David Cayley and Sam Ewell argue that Illich is decidedly not anti-mission, any more than he is anti-technology, but that he makes us sensitive to the imperialism of either one when they tilt us out of the convivial relationship of friends and the action of...
2023-11-031h 29The FermentPregnant with an Evil - Chapter 2 of Marcus’ AudiobookWelcome to chapter 2 of Life at the End of Us Versus Them. This is where I give an introduction to the thought of Ivan Illich's sense of the way Christianity was perverted when it sought to impose the Gospel of Christ through state power and institutional administration. I could think of no clearer case example than the Indian Residential Schools project.
2023-10-2944 minThe FermentFour Illich Conversations, Part 1: Cayley & HineTwo Illichian thinkers dialogue on the legacy of Illich, in the light of our present times and predicaments. This is the first of four fortnightly conversations.
David Cayley: friend and associate of Illich and the author of Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey.
Dougald Hine: co-founder of The Dark Mountain Project, A School Called Home and the author of At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics, and All the Other Emergencies.
To join in the upcoming Zoom meetings, reach out to either Dougald Hine or Da...
2023-10-171h 23The FermentThe Religion of the End of Religion - Part 1 of Marcus’ audiobookFiring up the old podcast again! This is the first in a series of audiobook chapter releases. I never did figure out how to package and sell my book as an audiobook per se, but it feels like the right time to put this out into the world. The "expectant - and apocalyptic time" that was named on the back cover seems more vividly at hand now than in 2017 when I first published the thing. Illich and Girard helped me find my bearings in this strange time that is the end of something big--Dougald Hine names it modernity, Paul...
2023-10-171h 07The Ferment15 - Lydia Wylie-KellermanLydia Wylie-Kellerman is co-editor of the blog, radicaldiscipleship.net, coordinator of Word and World: A People’s School bridging the gap between seminary, sanctuary and the street, and the newly minted editor of geez magazine, recently flown the coop of Winnipeg to be nested in Detroit.
2020-04-1046 minThe Ferment14 - Leah Kostamo - PlantedFor Leah Kostamo, Jesus’ counsel to “Consider the lilies” is not just a preamble to some advice on living simply. It is an exhortation in its own right. For Leah, a life of paying attention to the natural world has led to a passion for conserving the integrity of that world, our common home. Leah is the co-founder and spiritual care coordinator for A Rocha Canada, a Christian conservation organization involved in environmental education, habitat restoration and organic farming. She also is a co-founder of Kingfisher Farm, an A Rocha offshoot where some of the A Rocha staff and their f...
2020-02-151h 10The Ferment13 - Jodi Spargur - Catalyzer for JusticeJodi Spargur is a settler of Nordic/German heritage living and working on the unceeded territory of the Squamish, Musqueaum and Tslei-Watuth Peoples. Jodi is a farmer, furniture-mover, pastor and catalyzer for justice and healing between the church and indigenous peoples in Canada.
Jodi continually crosses thresholds into spaces where she has much to learn, whether that be in the implications of residential schools for well-meaning people of faith today, or the struggles of Indigenous families to resist apprehensions by the Child Welfare System, or a resistance camp of the Wet’suwet’en standing in the way of p...
2019-12-161h 15The Ferment12 - Stan McKay - The Liberation of TheologyWe like to think of Stan McKay as Manitoba’s Bishop Tutu. He has held the highest office in the land in the United Church of Canada, but his influence and recognition as a spiritual leader of the Cree extends well beyond the bounds of the church. The name given to him in the lodge is Walking Buffalo, a name that associates him with a creature and a way of life threatened by extinction. It is also a name that ties him to the teaching of Respect, the teaching held by the Buffalo in the Seven Sacred Teachings of hi...
2019-10-291h 15The Ferment11 - Alana Levandoski - IntegralAlana Levandoski has been called a “right-brain theologian,” but she wasn’t always open about her faith. Today her website introduces her as “a song and chant writer and recording artist, in the Christian tradition, who lives with her family on an aspiring permaculture farm on the Canadian prairies.” She is really on her second music career. Her integration of faith and art, her grounding in a life of family and a life on the land arises from a moment of rebirth at what seemed like the end of the road for an up-and-coming darling of the alt-folk scene, a starlet wh...
2019-07-031h 32The Ferment10 - Steve Bell - Completely PorousSteve Bell is a much beloved Winnipeg singer/songwriter. Steve sings songs of Christian faith, but with an authenticity that makes him accessible to fans well beyond the Christian fold. “You are singing your story, you aren’t telling me my story,” says one of Steve’s regular atheist concert attendees. We were delighted to sit down with Steve to hear his thoughts on the vocation of the artist, the story of how he learned to play guitar from inmates in the Drumheller prison chapel, and to learn about Steve’s recent forays into advocacy for Indigenous rights.
Most rec...
2019-04-301h 01The Ferment9 - Chris and Hazel Harper - Indigenous & Catholic: “One Road”Chris and Hazel Harper are leaders in the Indigenous food sovereignty movement from St. Theresa Point, Manitoba. Born and raised Catholics, they have reclaimed and reintegrated the ceremonies of their people, including the Wabanu thanksgiving ceremony, which was passed on to Chris after Christian influence pushed it underground and nearly extinguished it. They conduct their work with humble reverence for all living things and have become vital knowledge-keepers to their remote community and well beyond. They made time for an interview on The Ferment in the midst of a conference where they were busy in multiple roles, teaching, emceeing...
2019-03-1944 minThe Ferment8 - Danielle Shroyer - Original BlessingFor many years, Danielle Shroyer was a pastor to people recovering from a toxic theology of original sin, a theology that said that God couldn’t even bear to look at them without a very bloody intervention by Jesus. With a fierce empathy for her parishioners and an intellectual hunger for good theology, Shroyer went digging through the early writings of the church and discovered there an understanding of salvation that was not based on an assumption of essential human depravity. For Shroyer, the blessing of humanity by God “is not if-then but as-is.” We may “choose not to echo the...
2019-02-191h 33The Ferment7 - Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove - What Does Love Look Like in Public?Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a southern-bred preacher, a New Monastic, and a street-level activist. His disciplined life of prayer has driven him straight into the public square as a leader in North Carolina’s Moral Monday movement, a movement that has now morphed into a nation-wide poor people’s campaign, Repairers of the Breach.
In a wide-ranging, candid conversation, Jonathan offers a compelling argument for faith-based political engagement, a punchy deconstruction of the Religious Right he once served as a foot soldier, lessons from the Black church in challenging the “bullhorn racism” of Donald Trump, and a hopeful vision for...
2019-02-041h 34The Ferment6 - Kathy Kelly - Granarchist for PeaceKathy Kelly learned not long ago that her last name is Gaelic for “strife.” Kelly has spent a career coaxing communities into the struggle for justice, always nonviolently, always in the face of formidable violence. So successful has she been in recruiting young people to this dangerous, disciplined activism that there is a joke going around about the formation of a “Mothers Against Kathy Kelly” group among families wanting to save their children from the influence of this peace-waging “granarchist.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Kathy Kelly shares stories about her family’s history with the IRA, the racist uproar...
2019-01-211h 10The Ferment5 - Tim Otto - Brave SpacesTim Otto is an openly gay Christian pastor, affirming of same-sex relationships for others, while committed to a life of covenanted celibacy for himself. He is truly queer. In one sense, he doesn’t fit in anywhere. In another sense, he has found his people and lived among them for thirty years. Tim lives as a life-long student of the art of loving as a member of an intentional, common-purse Christian community in San Francisco.
In his characteristically soft-spoken way, Tim challenges the self-righteous chauvinism of both right and left in the culture wars, holding out a vi...
2019-01-0855 minThe Ferment4 - David Cayley - Christian Thought and Public RadioOne of the strange wonders of Marcus’ life is that the core of his after-degree theological training came to him through the medium of publicly funded radio programming, almost all of it curated by David Cayley. For over 20 years, Cayley was a producer for a program entitled simply, “Ideas” at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Always clear, always careful, always genuinely seeking after the Good, David Cayley has deepened and enriched the public conversation in this country and well beyond it. “What is worth understanding is worth being understood well by everyone,” said Northrop Frye, one of Cayley’s many interviewees. C...
2019-01-081h 01The Ferment3 - Alana Levandoski - Beausejour Concert (Where it All Began)In the late winter of 2016, Alana Levandoski and her family traveled to Beausejour, Manitoba to give a concert in a small country church, one of the oldest buildings in the rural town. Alana was promoting her album, Behold, I Make All Things New.The acoustics were gorgeous, and attendees were hungry for an authentic, living voice to sing songs of praise and longing in the century-old, near-defunct sanctuary. A little group called Saint Julian’s Table was trying to keep alive the embers of a worship life in the building of Saint James Anglican, a local parish that had cease...
2019-01-081h 49The Ferment2 - James Alison - From the Outside InJames Alison might insist that he is “fairly clearly not an authority, and often just a silly old queen,” but underneath his mirth and modesty lies an exceptional theological depth. America: The Jesuit Review hails this institutional outsider as an authority who “belongs on any short list of the most important living Catholic theologians.”
In this conversation, Alison addresses himself to a generation that has good bullshit detectors, but little social glue, speaking into the challenge of how to cultivate a togetherness no longer defined over against the “baddie du jour.” Questions of catholicity, original sin and the high priest...
2019-01-071h 13The Ferment1 - Ring in the New - The Ferment LaunchesIn this episode, Alana and Marcus introduce the vision of The Ferment and introduce ourselves from opposite shores of a prehistoric lake. Then we ring in the coming New Year with Alana’s musical take on Tennyson’s achingly beautiful Ring Out Wild Bells. We couldn’t think of a better way to name our tender hopes and fierce longings to “Ring in…the larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.”
We made some references in our conversation that you may want to follow up on. Here are s...
2018-12-2938 min