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Heretic Hereafter Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Katharine Strange
Heretic Hereafter is about figuring out how to live the good life after leaving Evangelical Christianity. Whether you're religious or not, join us for a weekly dose of humor and reflection that helps us look past the superficial for life's deeper meanings.
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- 1 weeks ago6 min
Everyone Wants to Be Liam Neeson, No One Wants to Wash the Dishes
There’s a certain movie genre I think of as “dad fantasy.” Its tropes are easy to recognize: take a man with combat experience and throw in a semi-estranged daughter. Oh no! Bad guys got the daughter! BUT her dad will rescue her through an act of redemptive violence. Yes, this dad gets to show his love by spraying bullets everywhere! He successfully rescues his daughter, who is transformed from surly adolescent back into the little girl who idolized him. Taken is the platonic ideal, but I think this can expand even to Christian genres with their benevolent-but-distant patriarchs whose wisdom the wayward daughter will come to appreciate by the end of the novel.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Taken Archetype & Its ProblemsThese dad fantasies demonstrate a certain masculine archetype: a steely, distant patriarch capable of great violence. The emotionally distant part is very interesting to me—we know that in order to build solid relationships, people need to:* emotionally attune to each other * show interest in the other person’s world * spend time together But the dad fantasy tries to shortcut this process through a violent grand gesture. In her piece, Tough dads with grenades are a weirdly comforting fantasy. Why? Francesca Cavallo writes that the emotional distance is key to being the ideal protector:“If I am the protector, I must always look like I am in control. To appear in control (since no human being is always in control), I have to hide my vulnerabilities, to pretend they don’t exist. Et voilà, emotional distance is served.”In Taken, Neeson’s character warns his daughter against taking her European trip. As the perfect protector, he knows for certain what is safe and what is dangerous. It is only when his daughter disregards his judgment that she’s endangered. The message is: she is only safe under his control.This archetype appeals to men who wants to feel in control of their families. The problem is: people don’t like being controlled. In my scientific estimation, this is the basis for 90% of conflicts between toddlers and their parents and teens and their parents. And while there are circumstances where parents need to control a child’s behavior (i.e. a toddler running into the street, an irresponsible teen driver), psychiatrists consider controlling behavior in adult relationships abusive.The second problem with this archetype is a misperception of threat. Women and girls are most at risk of violence not from gangs of sex trafficking kidnappers, but from the men they love. In fact, 60% of murdered women are killed by their partner or a family member (compared to only 11% of murdered men) and nearly 30% of women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence. If we’re telling men it’s masculine to be emotionally distant, controlling, and violent in certain contexts, are we tacitly condoning violence towards women?Men Deserve Better StoriesWhen our culture holds up the Taken archetype as a masculine ideal, it has real impacts. In his piece, Rigged to Explode, Garrett Bucks writes:“There’s so much toxicity in the stories that we men internalize about ourselves: about how we are the heroes of ours and everybody else’s lives, about how every time we feel threatened or diminished in any way that we get to throw a fit, about how the world demands our dominance and force more than it begs us to be alive to the humanity of all those who surround us.”(emphasis mine.)That’s not to say you’re a bad person if you like these stories. Even if you took a moral stand of not buying a ticket to the next Jason Statham movie, stories like this would persist because they prop up the larger system of patriarchy.There’s nothing wrong with fantasy. Movies are a visual medium, and explosions LOOK COOL.
- 2 weeks ago8 min
Are Coming-of-Age Rituals Key to Making Good Men?
content warning: mention of sexual assaultMy 14-year-old son wants to go to “Man School.” The idea came up when we were listening to this episode of “The Art of Manliness” with author Jon Tyson who wrote about a years’ long curriculum he designed for his son to transition him from boyhood to manhood.Part of me likes this idea: there are A TON of skills kids need to learn before leaving the nest and framing it as a rite of passage seems like a smart idea. On the other hand, this author (who was giving secret youth pastor vibes) takes it to 11 in some odd ways, including daily lectures and proposing a “severing dinner” between mother and son, which immediately raised my hackles. What’s a mom to do?The Importance of RitualI’m interested in coming-of-age rituals and their signifigance. As our culture has grown increasingly suspicious of institutions and less connected to community, rituals have decreased. Think about it—can you name a ritual most Americans would recognize apart from weddings and funerals?Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Outside of institutions like churches, many rituals feel silly. When I was a teen, I remember a friend’s aunt who created her own ceremony involving burning bowls and how weird we thought it was. Community is an essential part of ritual. They act as witnesses and they validate the ritual’s meaning. Rituals mark a change—from single to married, from life into death—and those changes must be accepted by the community.I wonder if our murkiness around adulthood stems from our lack of coming-of-age rituals. A kid who wakes up on their 18th birthday is probably still living with their parents and going to high school. Legally, they’re now an adult, but there is no significant change in their responsibilities or social status. Manhood Around the World…For girls, there are many informal initiations into womanhood, both biological (like menstruation) and socio-cultural (like the first time she’s leered at by a grown man or learning to walk home with her keys between her fingers.)Male puberty is typically less obvious than its female counterpart. Maybe this is one reason why coming-of-age rituals are so prevalent for boys around the world. Anthropologist David Gilmour studied a few dozen global cultures in his book, Manhood in the Making. In all but two, boys went through rituals which were generally brutal and risky in order to pass into manhood. Explaining the similarities in these processes, he writes, “…true ‘manhood’ frequently shows an inner insecurity that needs dramatic proof.” (emphasis mine.)Gilmour goes on to contrast the norms of manhood and womanhood. By and large, global norms around womanhood revolve around caretaking the immediate and extended family. This is both biological (like giving birth and breastfeeding) and highly culturally pressured. For men, who are typically stronger than women and have more cultural cache, there is less pressure to caretake children and elders. They have the power to be selfish, and therefore, coming-of-age rituals serve to establish the norms of masculinity, which always involve sacrificing individual gain in favor of the community.Gilmour writes:“One of my findings here is that manhood ideologies always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to the point of sacrifice. Again and again, we find that ‘real men’ are those who give more than they take. They serve others. Men nurture their society by shedding their blood, their sweat, and their semen, by bringing home food for both child and mother, by producing children, and by dying, if necessary, in faraway places to provide a safe haven for their people. This, too, is nurturing.”A good manhood ritual, it seems to me, is one that acknowledges the power (both physical and political) that men hold in our society and demands that they use that power for the greater good.…Versus Fraternity HazingContrast this with one of the few manhood rituals that remains in our culture: fraternity initiations. Like traditional masculinity rituals, they are often brutal and involve risk-taking. At the same point, they are stingy with their idea of community—basically, your only duty is to your frat brothers. There is no care towards women, children, or the community as a whole. Indeed, brothers are often encouraged towards anti-social behaviors that harm their campus and town. In a recent interview with <a target="_blank" href="https://www.thecut.com/article/bystanders-silence-frater
- 3 weeks ago7 min
Public Humiliation is Not Justice
Content warning: discussion of sexual assault, child sexual abuse, and suicide. Recently, my husband and I were having lunch with another couple and their toddler son. The wife and I were complaining about how our entire social media feeds had been taken over by the Cornell 7 case, how inescapable and anxiety-producing it was. She said something to the effect of, “Plus, now that the algorithm knows I have a son, I’m getting all this content about how it’s my job to prevent him from assaulting someone. It’s so overwhelming and he’s only one!” (When we asked the husbands about their social media feeds, there was scarcely a mention of the case, no talk about how fathers of sons ought to be fighting rape culture. Fixing the entire patriarchy is, apparently, just another task on the endless list of modern mothering to-dos.)Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Reaction to the Cornell 7 CaseBy now I’m sure you know the broad strokes of the Cornell 7 case. Women are being hit hard by this news—this was not only an attack on Jane Doe, it also feels like a reminder that we are not safe, that many men see us as less-than-human. The actions of the Cornell rapists were despicable, dehumanizing, and traumatic. The way that campus and local police, along with school administration, swept this crime under the rug are both horrifying and all too familiar. The rage that’s pouring forth is, I believe, a reaction to this lack of accountability, this absence of justice. Of course people are outraged—the situation is outrageous.But I am troubled by the internet mobs that seek revenge in lieu of justice. Many of the posts I’ve seen have a sort of gleeful attitude— “let’s dox, threaten, and ruin these men’s lives” is the vibe. Several innocent people who have the same name as the alleged rapists have been doxxed and harassed—internet “justice” is far from precise.Revenge is Not JusticeThis situation is not unique. In the early 00s, To Catch a Predator, a police sting/hit TV show served up the ritual humiliation of alleged pedophiles for the pleasure of the viewing audience. It was a ratings juggernaut until one of its targets, a local D.A., killed himself. Recently, some have begun to interrogate the ethics of To Catch a Predator. In a new film, Primetime, Robert Pattinson portrays Chris Hansen, TCaP’s host, as a monstrous figure in his own right. There’s also a critically acclaimed documentary about TCaP called Predators, which I watched this weekend. It was sobering. Without the quick cuts and comedic editing of TCaP, we saw men sobbing, asking for therapy, telling the crew they were going to kill themselves. Their shame was hard to watch. Instead of help, TCaP compounded this shame with violent arrests and public exposure.The filmmaker, himself a victim of childhood sexual abuse, describes watching the original TV show, in part, to understand why some men abused kids. It’s an answer he never gets. We don’t know if the filmmaker’s abuser was ever brought to justice. What we do know is that many victims of CSA felt some catharsis watching TCaP, but it’s a shallow relief that offers no real accountability for the abuse they suffered.Superiority Complex EntertainmentI remember enjoying To Catch a Predator during its heyday, even as its attempts to play its stings humorously left me with a queasy feeling. It felt shocking and transgressive to witness the moment a person’s life was, effectively, over. In America, “sex offender” is a very sticky label.Why did we watch? That era was rife with reality TV whose cast members were the butt of the joke: Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, and the like. The pleasure in viewing was the feeling of superiority the viewer experienced. TCaP was the Platonic ideal of this sort of TV: these men, we were assured, were the worst of the worst, and so it was okay to publicly expose them for our entertainment. It is only twenty years later we are learning the nuances of some of these cases. We know, for instance, that many perpetrators of child sexual abuse were once victims themselves. It doesn’t excuse their crimes, but it does paint a more complex picture. In addition, the Predators documentary highlights the story of one
- Oct 5, 202636 min
Building Boys: Live Chat with Katharine Strange & Jennifer Fink
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- Sep 16, 20265 min
The Secret Lives of Christian Wives
The Dishwasher DigSeveral years ago, a houseguest complimented me on my dishwasher loading. At first, I was flattered: yes, I am very efficient at loading the dishwasher and probably everyone else in this house could take a page from my book!!!But then he said, “It makes sense [that you’re good at it.] The dishwasher is your domain.”He meant this as a compliment (I think???) but it was one of those sentences that rattled through my brain with a nefarious clang: your domain is the dishwasheryour domain is the dishwasheryour domain is the dishwasherWas the subtext, “stay in the kitchen, that’s where women belong”? I didn’t want to think this person saw me that way, but I wondered. This offhand comment had me spiraling into self-doubt and wondering how others saw me. Don’t get me wrong; washing dishes is a vital (and often overlooked) task. But I doubt anyone wants to think of it as their life’s work.Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ladies: Don’t Forget to Live, Laugh, Love! This memory came back to me as I began reading Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s latest book, Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. In it, Du Mez traces the evolution of white Evangelical women’s culture, starting in the late 19th century and continuing to the present, up to and including Erica Kirk.As someone who grew up reading Focus on the Family’s Brio magazine, many figures and movements (such as Rebecca St. James and True Love Waits) were old hat to me, but there were plenty of bombshells in Live Laugh Love, including surprising details behind the creation of some childhood favorites like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. But the most striking part of Du Mez’s book was the way she was able to trace the pernicious influence of “New Thought” in Christian Fundamentalism.What is “New Thought”? Maybe you know it by the name “The Secret,” “The Law of Attraction,” or "the prosperity gospel.” If you were LDS, it was “keep sweet.” Maybe you know it as the reason you were forced to grit your teeth into a smile at church and pretend that everything was fine—it’s the idea that God blesses those who obey authority and think happy thoughts. Long before your high school classmates started selling Amway, Christian Fundamentalism embedded this pyramid-shaped power structure into its churches and para-church movements. Surrendering to authority was the same as obeying God. Any suffering a person experienced could be traced back to disobedience or doubt.Women were expected to cede authority and decision-making to men, to never criticize or question. In return, men would protect and provide for us. It’s the 1950s housewife (minus the pill addiction) and the 2020s tradwife (minus the army of paid help). Du Mez’s history shows how old this song-and-dance is. Female Christian Influencers have been peddling New Thought since Hannah Whitehall Smith’s The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life was first published in January 1883. The Dark Reality Behind the Fairy TaleDu Mez effectively demonstrates, again and again, that the women who espoused New Thought as the way to happiness often concealed lives of struggle including broken marriages and disillusionment with Christianity. The story of Elisabeth Elliot, former missionary, was particularly affecting. White Evangelical women have been sold a bargain: that if we give up our agency and power in order to submit to men, those men will take care of us. New Thought and white femininity combined to form a sort of magical thinking: who needs to fight for equal rights when we can have something almost like equality bestowed upon us by our benevolent husbands?But proximity to power isn’t power. Obedience and subservience aren’t power. Only power is power. Women forget that at our own peril.Don’t get it twisted: I’m not saying that marriage is bad or that men can’t be trusted. I am a big proponent of a healthy, interdependent marriage. What I am saying is that it is the height of delusion for women to believe that we can cede our critical thinking and our agency to anyone and come away better for it. Such dependent relationships are not an equal partnership; they’re more akin to a parent-child relationship. And, indeed, much of the advice Du Mez quotes from marriage manuals such as the infamous Fascinating Womanhood advocate that women a
- Sep 9, 20265 min
I Thought I Had Gender Roles Figured Out. Then I Had a Son.
In a moment of tween desperation, I asked my mom whether I could try out for cheerleading. It was the late 90s and the girls at cheer camp seemed to have cracked some secret code to girlhood: their hair was always perfectly styled; their lips impeccably glossy. If I could just don that pleated skirt, I was sure their power would rub off on me and I’d stop being the middle school weirdo.“Girls shouldn’t cheer for boys,” my mom replied, “they should cheer for themselves.” Cryptic, vaguely feminist sayings like this occasionally sprang from her mouth, despite her staunch Complementarian beliefs (Complementarianism is the belief that men and women hold separate but equal roles in church and family life and that these roles are prescribed by God). Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On the one hand, Mom would insist that all women had a divine calling to marriage, motherhood, and subservience to men. Then she’d turn around and spout off a defiant little opinion that hinted at her own internal conflict.I never became a cheerleader. Instead, I grew into a youth group superstar and then a know-it-all Christian college freshman. There I decided that it made no sense that I by dint of my femaleness was assumed to know less about faith than some random dude. I rejected my parents’ complementarianism and became an egalitarian and a—gasp! —feminist.And yet, the sexism of my upbringing hadn’t left me. I still believed marriage and motherhood were my ultimate calling and doubted my ability to get by without the guidance of either my father or a husband. The truth was, I’d never been taught to cheer for myself or believe myself capable of big things. Still, I imagined myself one day raising a fierce feminist daughter who would grow up to achieve great things. And then I had two sons.Boys were not entirely foreign to me—I had two younger brothers whom I’d spent a large chunk of my childhood mothering. But I wanted to do things differently. When my first son, A, was born, I bought him gender neutral clothes and toys—blocks and balls and a doll he’d occasionally poke in the eye. I was going to raise him to be a sensitive little feminist.Then one Christmas, a family member received a set of Dollar Store plastic samurai swords and A, then 18 months old, shrieked, grabbed one, and immediately began chasing people around the house, whacking and stabbing them. Even as I laughed at the spectacle, I couldn’t believe his tiny bloodlust. He didn’t watch TV; he’d never even seen a sword before. How did he know what it was for before he was even potty trained?!?!?Until A was born, I’d always thought of gender as something that was, largely, culturally programmed. But the sword incident, coupled with his fascination with vehicles, left me questioning this assumption. There was something innate to this small human that loudly insisted I AM A BOY!!!!!If masculinity is a spectrum, A has always been on the extreme end. In our liberal Seattle neighborhood, where plenty of little boys are painting their nails and belting songs from Frozen, there was my little warrior, dressed in head-to-toe camo, toting a Nerf gun to the park longer than he was tall, while I follow along behind, cringing and hoping my neighbors didn’t think I was in the NRA.Now a high school freshman, A is in the thick of the work of adolescence: figuring out who he is. While I appreciate that our culture has evolved from suffocating gender roles and casual playground homophobia, I’ll admit that our culture’s shifting social mores around gender roles has left a bit of a vacuum, into which, I project all my anxieties about raising a good men.So, over the next two months I want to look at gender roles. Here are some questions I have:* Is gender innate, culturally constructed, or both? And does the answer change how we think about it?* Are gender roles inherently limiting? Are they ever helpful?* How do we deprogram ourselves from our own internalized misogyny?* How has the church’s emphasis on restrictive gender roles shaped how we understand ourselves/our spirituality?* What can non-binary, trans, and genderqueer people teach us about gender?* What about the whole “toxic masculinity” label—is it helpful? Should we chuck it? How can we criticize the power structure without denigrating individuals caught in it?* How do we talk positively about masculinity without downplaying or dismissing women?* What role does virtue play in “becoming a man/woman”?* What about coming-of-age rituals? Are they more necessary for boys than girls?* Why does the phrase “be a man” squick me out so much? What shou
- Aug 26, 20266 min
Love in the ER
Two weeks ago, my husband shook me awake at 4:00 a.m. “I’m going to the emergency room,” he said.I tried to blink myself awake. Never much of a complainer, Ryan had grown increasingly miserable over the past few days due to a pain in the roof of his mouth. That night, the pain had kept him from sleeping.I think I mumbled something along the lines of, “What? How?” as I sat up in bed.“I’ll take an Uber,” he said. My sleep-fogged brain considered this. My pillow was calling to me. And Ryan had taken himself to the ER alone before—Boxing Day 2014 when we had a toddler and a newborn and he’d stepped on a (shockingly sharp!) toy excavator, slicing a deep gouge into his toe. Then, like now, I knew it was a gray area sort of injury: requiring immediate medical attention, but not something life-threatening. And here he was giving me an out to back to sleep…“No, I’ll take you,” I murmured, mentally running through the tasks this would require, what I needed to bring, whom I needed to notify. ***This summer I’ve been thinking about what it actually takes to make community work. Much has been written about the loneliness crisis, growing rates of estrangement, how we are replacing eye contact with screen staring. Somewhere in the past few months I heard the phrase, “Everyone wants a village, no one wants to be a villager,” and I wonder, could it really be that simple? Is our lack of community simply our own fault?***Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ryan and I wound up at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. It’s a level one trauma center that I only knew from newspaper write ups about gunshot victims. I’d hoped that 4:00 a.m. on a Wednesday morning would be relatively quiet, that he’d get a quick exam, maybe some pain medicine, and we’d be on our merry way. We were greeted by five security guards, two police officers, and a metal detector. The waiting room benches hosted sleeping forms surrounded by piles of plastic bags and dirty backpacks, the tell-tale baggage of homelessness. Nurses seemed to know many patients by name—frequent fliers, I guessed. This ER felt like the last, fraying threads of a broken safety net. Here were the disabled, the poor, the mentally ill, the addicted. And yet people fell through the cracks here, too. As we waited, I witnessed security eject two patients who were acting aggressively. Even as I was relieved at their removal, I wondered where they would go.***Culturally, we are going through a profound shift in the way we understand relationships, and I think this has a lot to do with geography: for most of human history, community was not chosen but default. It was the people in your tribe, your extended family, your neighbors. Humans were tied to land and to ancestral homes. Waves of migration and industrialization disconnected many of us from the lands of our ancestors. Increasing economic pressure pushed generations of striving young people towards college education and the metropolitan hubs of various industries. Now, many of us have unprecedented levels of choice in where we live, what we do for work, and whom we associate with.The digital revolution, helped by the pandemic, further fractured the connection between place and relationship. Now your closest confidante might be someone you only chat with online and you may spend more time focused on parasocial relationships with podcasters or influencers rather than with friends you see in real life. Real life? Who has time for that?***A few hours after arriving, Ryan was finally taken to an exam room—and by “room” I mean “tiny alcove with curtain.” En route to our alcove, we walked through corridors lined with patients on gurneys—there didn’t seem to be a spare inch of space. Some patients slept in chairs hooked up to IVs.In the alcove stood a bed crowned with a variety of tubes and monitors. I looked around—there was no place for me to sit. The expectation, I realized, is that people come to this hospital alone. Indeed, no one I’d seen in the waiting room was accompanied. ***In the course of my 40+ years, I’ve said many goodbyes. I’ve moved 16 times. I have clashed with church communities whose beliefs I no longer held. I’ve gone no contact with family members. Maybe all of this had led me to a certain amount of overthinking on the topic of relationships and community. I notice how much time people in my community spend trying to optimize ourselves and our kids: we’ll do anything for work, anything to give our kids an extracurricular edge, even if these things (like travel sports) make us broke and miserable. There’s always a fear of being left behind.On the rare occasion that I’m able to get together with my neighbors we always find ourselves saying
- Aug 12, 20268 min
The Other Third Places We Need
Wild Waves/Enchanted Village, Seattle’s schlocky amusement park, is closing and I couldn’t be sadder about it. While significantly crappier than a Disney Park or even a Six Flags, running around Wild Waves is a rite of passage for many Seattle-area adolescents. It is THE end-of-year good behavior field trip that makes students think twice about racking up detentions. It’s not just Seattle—since 2020, at least 10 major American amusement parks have closed and many regional parks are struggling to return after pandemic losses. Nor is it just the rollercoaster lovers that are in trouble, other classic teen hangouts like malls are in serious decline. High school dance attendance is down too, blamed largely on teens preferring screen-based activities like gaming and scrolling.Where are the teens supposed to go? Is this just another sign of the times? Am I merely weeping for my own Millennial nostalgia, shaking my fist at a generation that would rather be playing Roblox?Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Online Connection is Still Connection…Right?It’s not like kids these days are digital hermits. Observing my own teens and their friends have showed me that many of their online activities are, in fact, very social. My sons love to game with friends while chatting away over headsets, alternatively strategizing and trash-talking.Likewise, technology enables teens to stay connected outside of school in ways an elder Millennial like me could only have dreamed of. Heck, we were confined to the world of desktops, dial up, and, if you were lucky enough, AIM chats. (Pity the rural kids like me, who were beyond the reach of AOL.)This heightened connectivity is also seen in the sprawling online presence of events like prom. This dance, one of the few to survive the decline, has spread into cyberspace, with kids planning (and posting) elaborate “prom-posals” and girls hopping into online groups to share which dresses they’ve purchased so that—gasp!— no one shows up in the same ‘fit.And yet, while the average teen has a higher quantity of social connections, the quality of these interactions has changed. Instead of tying up a family landline with marathon phone calls, many kids now mainly communicate via brief DMs. And that text-based communication has its downsides: it’s both less stimulating to the brain and lacks context clues (like facial expressions and tone of voice) leading to higher instances of misunderstanding. Studies show, we need face-to-face interaction to form deep relationships, but our technology is increasingly crowding out this option. Gaming systems have shifted away from in-person together play (via shared account and split-screen) to siloed play on separate accounts and screens. While older technology like the Nintendo Switch makes multiplayer, in-person gaming easy (provided you have enough controllers), many popular games and systems (such as Roblox or Xbox’s Halo) set up a ridiculous amount of hurdles to in-person gaming.There’s also a serious downside to real-life events turning into social media spectacle. This technology is, by nature, performative—are you actually having fun at the prom or are you merely performing having fun for your followers? If so much of your social life revolves around your platform, can you ever completely forget the virtual audience? Teen brains are already wired to see peer acceptance as a life-or-death situation, adding parasocial pressure is like throwing gasoline on an open flame.Why Community Needs Physical SpaceNo matter how much we enjoy connecting online, it turns out people need face-to-face interaction, and these interactions need to happen somewhere. In their book, The Great Good Place American sociologists Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christensen argue for the need for “third places”—spaces that are neither home or work (or, for kids we
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About Heretic Hereafter Podcast
Heretic Hereafter is about figuring out how to live the good life after leaving Evangelical Christianity. Whether you're religious or not, join us for a weekly dose of humor and reflection that helps us look past the superficial for life's deeper meanings.
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