Subversive Orthodoxy

Episode Synopsis

Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery seeking a life of prayer, contemplation, and silence. He somehow became one of the most widely read spiritual writers of the twentieth century.

In this episode of Subversive Orthodoxy, Travis and Professor Robert Inchausti explore the life and spiritual imagination of Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain. The conversation becomes deeply personal as Inchausti re...

We start a four-part set of field notes by admitting the word freedom still surprises us when we hear it from Solzhenitsyn, Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Chesterton. We trace the “freedom we inherited” through American politics and pop culture, then question whether external rights, endless choice, and economic survival can leave the inner life unfree. 
• why the word freedom suddenly feels unfamiliar in classic wr...

We pick apart why “freedom” causes so many arguments by comparing the major definitions that shape politics, psychology, and moral philosophy. We end by naming what nearly all of them miss and why that gap pushes us toward a bigger story in part three. 

• inheriting words without checking what we mean by them 
• Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty as non-interference 
• Berlin’s posi...

“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?
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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 Maur...

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...

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 ...

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, Heideg...

We trace Dostoevsky’s polyphonic craft through the Karamazov brothers, probe Ivan’s moral revolt, and unpack the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that people prefer miracle, mystery, and authority to freedom. A silent kiss, not an argument, becomes the counter-move to control.

• polyphony as method and why it matters
• Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha as desire, reason, and heart
• Ivan’s scrapbook of atrocit...

In Part Two of our Dostoevsky series we move from diagnosing the underground to exploring the way out. Dostoevsky shows us that the true hero is not the exceptional man but the good man, and goodness is only remarkable in its ability to love while knowing the depths of the underground. 

We explore how Father Zosima counsels the brokenhearted with hope that refuses to collapse into platitudes, and how his radical teaching—...

Fyodor Dostoevsky revolutionized literature by creating battlegrounds of the mind and heart where faith and darkness constantly struggle for dominance. His concept of "the psychology of the underground" offers profound insights into human nature, revealing how our willfulness often overrides our reason in ways that defy rational explanation.

• Born in 1821, Dostoevsky's life was shaped by trauma—his father's murder, a ...

Episode #11: Life After Deconstruction, How to Be Free Without Losing Your Soul: Nikolai Berdyaev (part two)

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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, includin...

Nikolai Berdyaev challenges both Marxism and bourgeois liberalism with his prophetic vision of freedom rooted in Orthodox Christianity, not in political centrism.

• Exiled Russian philosopher who viewed freedom as cosmic and primordial—the very ground of human existence
• Criticized the "bourgeois spirit" as a degrading clutching after security and small-mindedness
• Rejected institutional religion and revolution...

Travis Mullen and Professor Robert Inchausti explore G.K. Chesterton's insights on how Christianity transcends cultural collapse and continually renews itself throughout history. They examine Chesterton's paradoxical understanding of orthodoxy as something exciting and revolutionary rather than stale or safe.

• Chesterton identified five historical periods when Christianity supposedly "died" but was actually being rediscover...

Wonder as rebellion. That's the surprising path Gilbert Keith Chesterton blazed through the intellectual landscape of early 20th century England—and precisely why his voice feels so startlingly relevant to our screen-addicted, anxiety-ridden modern world.

Born into the spiritual uncertainty of late Victorian England, Chesterton emerged as perhaps the most joyful apologist Christianity has ever known. Where others defen...

This episode dives deep into the restless brilliance of Søren Kierkegaard — the 19th-century philosopher, outsider theologian, and reluctant father of both existentialism and Christian authenticity. If you've ever doubted the plastic gods, burned out on hollow church talk, or longed for a faith that costs something real, Kierkegaard was speaking to you.

We explore:

• The Self as a Task

• “The self is a relation...

What if grace isn’t something you deserve, or even understand—but something that finds you in the middle of your restless, stumbling search for meaning?

Did Faust accidentally find grace?

That’s one of the most provocative and mysterious questions at the heart of Faust. Here's a way to unpack it:

In Faust Part II, despite making a pact with Mephistopheles and engaging in a life of ambition, desire, and sometimes dest...

William Blake's visionary poetry represents a revolutionary approach to spirituality, offering a third way between rigid religious dogma and cold scientific materialism through the power of imagination as a divine faculty.

• Blake's poem "The Book of Thel" processes the loss of his daughter through miscarriage by imagining conversations with short-lived creatures
• Even the smallest creatures in Blake's poetry understand ...

The latest conversation on Subversive Orthodoxy plunges deep into the heart of creativity and belief through the lens of two iconic figures: William Blake and Johann von Goethe. This episode invites you on a journey as we unravel the intricate relationship between imagination and faith, set against the backdrop of the dominating philosophies of the Enlightenment. In a world increasingly detached from its spiritual roots, Blake and ...