There are conversations that offer answers, and then there are conversations that remove your certainty. This is the latter. In this episode, I’m joined by Stephen Jenkinson—author, cultural activist, former palliative care worker, and relentless truth-teller—whose work refuses comfort in favour of meaning.
Stephen doesn’t speak in soundbites. He speaks in reckonings.
What begins as a conversation about his new book, Matrimony, quickly opens into something far wider: a meditation on beauty, elderhood, ritual, grief, marriage, culture, and the quiet devastation of a world that has forgotten how to belong to itself. We talk about what happens when beauty becomes a rumour. When ritual becomes performance. When marriage becomes an event instead of a binding to community. When homes are built without hearths, and lives without elders.
Stephen asks a question most of us were never taught how to answer: What does it actually cost to be human together?
This is not a conversation about nostalgia or returning to the past. It’s about conjuring something that no longer lives in living memory. About taking responsibility for what has been lost—without blame, without sentimentality, and without pretending the work is easy. Truths that don’t ask for agreement, only attention. This is a conversation about matrimony, yes. But more than that, it’s a conversation about what we owe each other—and whether we’re willing to pay the price.
Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW ~ Culture activist/ farmer/author ~
Stephen teaches internationally and has authored seven books of cultural critique. He is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The School’s new project, The Scriptorium (2025), is creating an archive and library of his life’s work.
Apprenticed to a master storyteller as a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families. He is former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. Stephen has Masters’ degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
In 2023 Stephen received a Distinguished Alumni Honours Award from Harvard University for “helping people navigate grief, exploring the liminal space between life and death, and connecting humanity through ceremony and storytelling.”
Stephen’s newest book: Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work.
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