Episode #15: Field Notes #1: What Existentialism Gets Right — and What It Costs You

Episode #19: The Most Radical Thing She Did Was Stay — Dorothy Day (part two) on Presence, Personal Conversion, and Why Holiness Might Be What You Actually Want

“True worship is to work for justice and care for the poor and oppressed” sounds inspiring until you remember what that work actually feels like at 2 a.m. when you are tired, irritable, and out of patience. We sit with Dorothy Day long enough to let the romance burn off and the real questions show up: what do the poor really need to live with dignity, and what do the comfortable need to unlearn to see them clearly? We also challenge the modern impulse to turn every moral question into a left versus right loyalty test. Both sides can become a binary machine that pins groups against each other, simplifies reality, and sells us a team identity in place of truth. Dorothy Day refuses that trap by taking responsibility seriously, insisting on personal conversion, and treating the works of mercy as the actual substance of justice. That mix confronts progressives who want programs without transformation and conservatives who want talking points without costly love. Along the way we talk distributism, local ownership, and why centralized systems and monopoly capitalism can quietly make communities dependent on forces they do not know or control. We connect Day’s stubborn local fidelity to Wendell Berry’s “membership,” and we ask what it would mean to build smaller economies and deeper neighborhoods in a distracted techno state marked by anxiety and performance. We end with the power of confession and why Dorothy Day’s credibility comes from owning her wreckage rather than curating a clean image, then we land on a hard possibility: holiness might be more beautiful than happiness. Subscribe, share this with a friend who is tired of the culture war script, and leave a five-star review if this conversation helps you choose the concrete over the abstract. We wrestle with Dorothy Day’s unsettling claim that worship becomes real when it turns into justice and care for the poor, especially when the work feels unglamorous and lonely. We also push back on the left right binary by asking what changes when we stop performing concern and start serving the person right in front of us. • Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker vision of dignity, community, and voluntary poverty • Why poverty debates miss the human need for attention, belonging, and self-expression • How right and left politics collapse into a binary trap that insults our intelligence • What an “anti-political politics” looks like in prayer, reflection, and concrete responsibility • Dorothy Day’s rhetorical edge on war, nuclear weapons, and moral hypocrisy • Distributism as a check on monopoly capitalism and the centralized state • Local ownership, small economies, and why dependence erodes happiness • The spiritual cost of long fidelity, loneliness, and staying put • Personal conversion as the seedbed of social transformation • Works of mercy as the substance of justice rather than commentary • Confession and truth-telling as the source of credibility and freedom • What Dorothy Day’s past raises for churches that curate respectability • Holiness as a deeper aim than comfort-based happiness Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. Please follow us on Instagram at Subversive Orthodoxy. You can email us at subversivorthodoxy at gmail.com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/ Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/support] Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats. Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.   Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.

Episode #18: Don't Call Me a Saint — Dorothy Day (part one), the Woman Nobody Could Domesticate

Dorothy Day is the kind of person everyone tries to claim and nobody can fully control. One side calls her a socialist. Another side calls her a saint. She answered both with the same refusal: don’t use a label to dismiss the demand her life puts on you. We walk through her story from early bohemian politics and labor activism to her Catholic conversion, then the founding of the Catholic Worker Movement with Peter Maurin. Along the way, we dig into her most important writings, including The Long Loneliness, and why her journals may be the clearest window into her spiritual life. What emerges is not a superhero, but a painfully honest Christian trying to live the works of mercy in public, year after year, without institutional power or ideological shortcuts. The heart of our conversation is “apolitical politics”: politics as practical morality, local responsibility, and learning to love real people in real places. We connect Dorothy Day to Catholic social teaching, subsidiarity, decentralization, and even distributism, asking what it means to build economic autonomy through community, mutual aid, and hospitality instead of outsourcing every need to the state. We also face her hard questions about war, conscience, civil disobedience, nuclear fear, and the daily temptations of a distracted techno state. If Dorothy Day still unsettles you, that may be the point. Subscribe for part two, share this with a friend who’s tired of tribal politics, and leave a review with the question from this conversation you can’t stop thinking about. We talk through Dorothy Day’s life as a test case for faith that refuses both right-wing stereotypes and left-wing slogans. Her “apolitical politics” pushes us away from hot takes and toward conscience, local responsibility, and concrete works of mercy. • Dorothy Day’s biography from early radicalism to Catholic conversion and lifelong Catholic Worker commitment • Her key books and why the journals reveal the real person • “Don’t call me a saint” as a warning against dismissal and excuse-making • Anti-political politics as practical morality and meaningful life together • Decentralization, subsidiarity, and distributism as alternatives to top-down control • Conscience, civil disobedience, and the limits of obedience to the state • The West Virginia farm story and the painful honesty of family responsibility • The shift from abstract causes to loving the neighbor in front of you • Thomas Merton correspondence and the temptation to seek “respectable” holiness • Poverty’s paradox of suffering and joy in beloved community This concludes part one of Dorothy Day. We will have part two coming out in the next week or two. So stay tuned. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/support] Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats. Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.   Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.

Episode #17: The Diagnosis You Didn't Know You Needed: Walker Percy on the Malaise, the Moviegoer, and the Art of Being Actually Alive

WALKER PERCY:  EPISODE SUMMARY You can be comfortable, busy, and entertained and still be in despair. That’s the Kierkegaard line Walker Percy puts at the front of The Moviegoer, and it becomes our doorway into a bigger question: what if the real sickness of modern life is that we don’t even notice what’s missing? We walk through Percy’s story, from a Southern upbringing marked by repeated suicide, to medical training and a tuberculosis collapse that pushes him toward reading, philosophy, and ultimately writing. Percy is never a simple “religious novelist.” His Roman Catholic faith works more like a diagnostic tool as he studies consumer identity, modern boredom, and the way scientific confidence can leave the inner life unnamed. Along the way we map his major books, from The Moviegoer to Love in the Ruins, and why his satire still lands in an age of anxiety, distraction, and behavioral control. A big turning point is Percy’s fascination with semiotics, the study of signs. We unpack why language is not just communication but a doorway into selfhood, including the origin of the word “meme” and how imitation spreads meaning through a culture. Then we linger on one of the most moving illustrations Percy uses: Helen Keller at the water pump, where naming becomes something like a new birth. By the end, we return to Percy’s haunting claim that we are “lost in the cosmos” when myth, faith, and shared accounts of the person collapse into thin explanations. If this conversation hits home, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a five-star review so more people can find it. What part of modern life feels most like hidden despair to you? We dig into Walker Percy’s strange genius and why his novels diagnose modern life better than most social commentary. We use Kierkegaard’s definition of despair, semiotics, and the Helen Keller story to ask what it means to become a self in a world that keeps flattening people into consumers. • Walker Percy’s biography, including family tragedy, tuberculosis, and conversion to Catholicism • The core themes across Percy’s novels and nonfiction, including alienation, boredom, and modern misdiagnosis • Percy as a bridge between existential Christianity and scientific modernity • The difference between emotional despair and Kierkegaard’s existential despair • Why the aesthetic life of comfort can still be a life of despair • Semiotics as the study of signs and why language changes what a human is • The origin of the word meme and how imitation spreads meaning • Percy’s critique of psychology when it reduces the human person to pathology • The Moviegoer as a lived experiment in Kierkegaard’s stages of life • Helen Keller at the water pump as the birth of selfhood through naming • Lost in the cosmos as a diagnosis of life after myth and metaphysical certainty Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate.  Please follow us on Instagram: @SubversiveOrthodoxy You can email us at subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/ Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/support] Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats. Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.   Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.

Episode #16: The Saint of Holy Groveling: Jack Kerouac, Catholic Mystic, and the God He Could Never Outrun

The Saint of Holy Groveling, the Hungover Mystic, and a deep, aching longing for God Jack Kerouac is remembered as the voice of the open road, speed, freedom, and excess, yet beneath the motion lived a deep spiritual loneliness. He carried an intense longing for God that pleasure, travel, and rebellion never resolved. The party always ended in sadness. The road always circled back home. Formed by Catholic prayer, haunted by sin and grace, and bound to his mother in a small house far from the myth, Kerouac lived as a strange solitary mystic, restless for God and unable to escape the ache of faith that followed him everywhere. Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/support] Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats. Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.   Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.

Episode #15: Field Notes #1: What Existentialism Gets Right — and What It Costs You

We trace existentialism from Kierkegaard’s pivot to the single individual before God to the secular push for meaning without God, then test what still helps in a noisy, anxious culture. We offer a grounded practice of stillness and a challenge to choose rather than drift. • what existentialism means and why it endures • Kierkegaard’s shift from systems to the single individual before God • Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus in brief • existence precedes essence and its cultural echoes • subjectivity as owned truth, not private whim • despair as the self refusing to be itself before God • the leap of faith as passionate trust when guarantees end • gifts to keep: honesty about anxiety, critique of the herd, real decisions • risks without God: radical autonomy and thin hope • a practical stillness exercise to cultivate the inner life Please check out the subversive orthodoxy Instagram You can find my other creative work on beingtravismullen.substack.com You can always email us. Ideas for field notes would be great coming from you guys if you could email us at subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2443460/support] Contact: subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com Instagram: @subversiveorthodoxy Host: Travis Mullen Instagram: @manartnation Co-Host: Robert L. Inchausti, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and is the author of numerous books, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats. Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.   Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.