Today's guest-host, Peterson Toscano, is bringing us an incredible creative gift to us today, and it's clear to me that he's not just showing off his writing gifts, which are considerable, but he's hoping to inspire you to develop and use similar gifts, hopefully for the kind of world-growing, world-healing, purposes that are at the core of Peterson's work. So, on one level, you'll hear some of the steps that he goes through to hone his writing, but on another level you're going to be diving deep into the ideas, emotions, visions, and concerns that Peterson has for the world.

The religious soup we grow up in affects all of us. Sometimes the influences are helpful and favorable, but especially for those off the mainstream, they can be very painful and alienating. Even passages from holy books, initially innocent or positive, can by so badly misconstrued as to become life-threatening. K.

Chloe Schwenke is a teaching professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy of Georgetown University, and has keen observations about the incredible damage, destruction, and death being visited upon Africa and many other areas by the Trump administration's reckless attack on US Agency for International Development, USAID.

Flamy Grant and their music is amazing & fun & deep & did I mention wonderful? You see, Flamy is such an unexpected combination of usually adversarial things like a drag queen singing Christian songs. In fact, Flamy's album Bible Belt Baby even made it to #1 on the iTunes Christian & Gospel chart. And in 2023 Flamy was a winner of the Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Competition.

George Lakey is many things to many people, including activist, organizer, author, professor, father, and friend. And now he's a movie star, of sorts, due to a feature-length documentary film, called Citizen George, directed by Glenn Holsten.

George Lakey has been on the vanguard of nonviolent activism for over 50 years, doing, innovating, and teaching organizing & activism with ever more effective ways of helping humanity forward.

The topic is individual spiritual discernment, and our guests are Jerry Knutson, author of a Pendle Hill Pamphlet on the subject, and Kat Griffith, who is working with Jerry on translating it into Spanish for a Latin American audience, with the prospect of jointly leading workshops on the topic.

Liam Hooper takes on the "gayest" passage in the Christian Bible, the story of the Roman Centurion and the healing of his personal servant. Does this text condone gay sex? Gay relationships? Slavery?

Liam deepens the significance of the passage by connecting it to the narrative that comes immediately afterwards: Jesus raising a widow's only son from the dead. 

North Carolina in 2017 is surely not the most welcoming place for a trans guy, yet it's where Liam Hooper is doing the work he's called to do. As Minister of Welcome & Beyond at Parkway UCC, Winston Salem, NC, Liam delivers a message of inclusion and strength to government, institutions, and individuals all around the state, rabble-rousing, preaching, and lecturing to make a difference.