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Our college exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the pastthe great traditionand to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract, but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

In 1967, an English professor gave a talk at the annual Honors Banquet at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and the University later sent it out to its alumni, saying that it was eminently worthy of note. The professor defended the idea of tradition against those who argue that the advances of the modern world have made the past useless. In The Use of Education, his critique was harsh: When a person says, in all honesty and not just to be smart, but sincerely, that he cannot comprehend the past, he means that he cannot rightly comprehend anything at all. He has no capacity for wonder, he has no imagination, and therefore thought for him is nonsense. A little later in the talk, sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he said that our own children are being stolenand not from us, but from their heritageby low philosophies of leisure and luxury, a shameless materialism, cheap notions of success.

What Dr.John Senior said was eminently worthy of note. A few years later, he left Wyoming and moved to the University of Kansas, where he became a seminal figure in the renowned Integrated Humanities Program. An undergraduate named Robert Carlson was his student as an undergraduate, and several decades later, Dr. Carlson wrote the founding document of WCC, the Philosophical Vision Statement. The PVS draws everywhere upon the spirit of education articulated by Senior in his teaching and his writing, not only in the 1967 lecture, but in his later books, notably The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture.

Why found a new college? That was Dr. Carlsons question, and in the PVS, he explains the need for WCC. He lists major changes in contemporary life, including the loss of the authority of the traditional family and the evaporation of content from education on every level. The major problem, he explains, is the disintegration that results from the absence of a center. Reflecting on the various devastations that result from the loss of God, he comes to this conclusion:

Today, more and more students come to our colleges and universities enmeshed in nihilism acquired from their early education and from our culture at large. This nihilism is further nourished in our colleges and universities. It is rooted in the denigration of objective truth and feeds a denial of any objective meaning in life. It leads to a loss of hope that ends in the despairing cry of Macbeth: Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Dr. Carlson wrote the PVS in 2005, but strong contemporary thinkersJordan Peterson comes to mindcontinue to emphasize the corrosive nihilism of the culture. What exactly do they mean? What do they understand nihilism to be?

The history of the word goes back to the early 1800s, when it had a different meaning, but the pertinent sense was fully present 150 years ago, from about the time that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto:total rejection of prevailing religious beliefs, moral principles, laws, etc., often from a sense of despair and the belief that life is devoid of meaning. Also more generallynegativity, destructiveness, hostility to accepted beliefs or established institutions. The question to askand the answer entails a study of the past 500 yearsis why the advancement of science over these centuries coincides with the denigration of objective truth in the moral and religious spheres.

No one has escaped the fundamental argument, which goes something like this: science is about facts, and meanings are about values. Through some evolutionary trait, once useful, people want their lives to mean something, so they collectively invent ways to value things so that meanings exist. Baseball might be an example. What does it take to understand the excellence of Shohei Ohtanis 2021 season for the Los Angeles Angels? Sports Illustrated compared Ohtani to Babe Ruth and even implied that he might be a better player than the Sultan of Swat himself. To baseball fans, such comparisons are monumental. To those ignorant of baseball (which is obviously an invented game), the attention paid to Ohtani might draw a mild interest, but not awe, not the reverence he has earned, especially in Japan.

In fact, the argument continues, isnt all meaning invented in the same way? Nothing means anything in itself, but only in terms of its place in a constructed system of value, and such systems include all religions, all laws, all philosophies. In the world per se, there is no objective meaning or good. We invent all systems of value. We are just kidding ourselves that being good makes any difference. Nihilism is simply the default position of the mind convinced that it has to invent its own meaning.

On the other hand, if a good and loving God gave his creatures an intelligible world, and if it takes every bit of human capacity to understand even the smallest bit of what exists, what we have been given, then baseball looks very different. It offers a brilliantly complex imitation of the order built into the world as we really experience it. The better the double play or walk-off home run, the better the analogy. Every challenging game, every good legal system, every morally responsible code reflects the given order and teaches us more about it. We have reason to exclaim over Shohei Ohtanis incredible season.

As the PVS makes clear, Wyoming Catholic College exists to combat nihilism by opening our students to the integral wisdom of the pastthe great traditionand to the truth of nature directly experienced. We are firmly centered in God, not in the abstract (as though He were a useful organizational idea like Orwells Big Brother), but in the real world, in what He has revealed about His action in human time, and more specifically still, in the cross that pierces the center of history.

Republished with gracious permission fromWyoming Catholic College.

This essay was first published here in December 2021.

The Imaginative Conservativeapplies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politicswe approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please considerdonating now.

The featured image is Der Dorfschulmeister seine Gebhren einsammelnd (1854) by Carl Schrder, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Why We Teach - The Imaginative Conservative

If the right gets its way, maybe in a decade or two, the United States will be free of its slave-owning past.

All gone gone with the wind. Its just not taught anymore. Yeah, we had a civil warabout states rightsand then we moved on: We conquered the West, saved the world first from the Nazis, then from the commies, and remain the greatest country ever. Hurray for capitalism! Any questions?

Oh, one last thing: The commiesa.k.a., the Marxistsare still around. Theyre everywhere. As Ben Burgis noted, Marxism means anything conservatives find frightening. I recently learned, for instance, that theyve invaded the Smithsonian Institution specifically, an exhibit about Latino history in the United States.

As critics wrote a year ago in The Hill: A new Latino exhibit at the National Museum of American History offers an unabashedly Marxist portrayal of history, religion and economics. It is, quite frankly, disgraceful.

Indeed, the exhibitwhich focuses on the history of Latino youth movementsis so outrageous, according to the critics, that it clearly demonstrates the need to immediately cut congressionally approved funding for the construction of the National Museum of the American Latino, because . . . you know, the Marxists. Among their current tactics to undermine the greatest country ever is to write their own version of American history, which focuses on all the stuff we need to forget about.

By now everyone knows about the ongoing conservative furor over American schools teaching what they called critical race theory. This is a name they plunked from the world of academia and turned into an evil, Marxist plot to make (white) American children feel uncomfortable by forcing them to learn about how there used to be systemic racism in this country. That is, once upon a time, white America, in the wake of freeing the slaves and outlawing slavery, maintained its sense of supremacy by legally, and often violently, enforcing, as George Wallace once put it, Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And of course, the essence of segregation was separate and unequalfrom housing, jobs and schools to bathrooms and drinking fountains.

From the conservative point of view: poof! It no longer exists, so it never happened. And those who insist otherwise are caught in the grip of Marxistsa term nowadays that simply means the purveyors of absolute evil.

Beyond the teaching of history, here are a few other ways that Marxists, according to conservative writers and pundits, have infiltrated America:

2. Black awareness, a.k.a., being woke. Ron DeSantis has described it as a form of cultural Marxism, which of course is pervading American schools.

3. Gender equality. As AP reported, various Republicans, including DeSantis and Ted Cruz, have used the term cultural Marxism to characterize fights for gender or racial equity that they argue are woke and threaten a traditional American way of life.

4. Racial integration. Ah, the old days. In 1959, according to Current Affairs, protestors surrounded the Arkansas state capitol building in Little Rock, carrying signs that declared: Race Mixing Is Communism.

5. The prosecution of DonaldTrump. According to AP: Hours after pleading not guilty in federal court, Trump told a crowd of his supporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, that Biden, together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy. He added that, even if the communists get away with this, it wont stop me.

Im sure there are plenty more ways that conservatives envision the Marxists are trying to skewer the countrys greatness, or will in the future. For the moment, what continues to consume my attention is the right-wing desperation to control history and not simply challenge but banish any version of it that counters their certainty about who we are.

For instance, Alex Skopic at CurrentAffairs quotes author James Lindsay, who described efforts to address racial injustice in America as, in actuality, the tip of a one-hundred-year-long spear that is being thrust into the side of Western civilization.

Ouch!

The present moment comes and goes. Apparently what matters is how or whether you talk about it afterwards. In other words, establishing our history creates the present. Thats the reason critical race theory is such a serious nuisance to the right wing. While I am absolutely willing to acknowledge that virtually any version of history is likely factually flawed and politically influenced, I would suggest to conservatives that trying to banish versions they dont like, and writing them off as Marxist, will not make the truth go away.

History is not some kind of Biblical narrative: In the beginning, God wrote the Declaration of Independence . . . Or whatever. History is deeply complex and full of chaos. Our understanding of it is ever-shifting. Terrible things have occurred that need to be faced, addressed and, eventually, transcended.

Johanna Fernandez, one of the historians who put together the Latino history exhibit that caused such a stir, said: We live in La-La Land. White Americans, Black Americans, Latino Americans walking around, really not understanding who we are, why were here, and how we got to this place. Whats so dangerous about honestly grappling with the history of this country?

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The Painful Facts of American History Cannot Be Erased - Common Dreams

In August, 2021, a new, shirtless figure appeared on Instagram and TikTok. With a great shaggy beard and muscles the approximate size and color of ripe pumpkins, he was part cowboy, part Conan the Barbarian. Im Brian Johnson, he said in his third Instagram video. My family and tribe call me Liver King. He is the owner of Ancestral Supplementswhich sells desiccated organ meat in capsule formand a walking marketing campaign.

Within eight months, the Liver King had amassed a million and a half followers on Instagram and nearly three million on TikTok. He was mellow at first, but he embraced the new persona, growing crasser and more meme-worthy, and less clothed. (On a podcast in March, 2022, he said that the Liver King broke out of his cage, and he fucking ate Brian Johnson.) Most of his videos centered on eating meat, lifting heavy stuff, and doing punishing, unorthodox workouts. His body, he said, was all natural, the product not of steroids but of exercise and eating animals.

The Liver Kings premise, a familiar one by now, is that we are mismatched with the modern world and that many of our problems can be solved by reconnecting with long-lost ways. He insists on nine ancestral tenets. These include reasonable suggestions like sleep, move, and bond, but, as he once explained, if I tell you all nine, you dont remember anything. Instead, he boiled his recommendations down to one: I say, Eat liver, because liver is king. The best-selling, stand-alone product on ancestralsupplements.com is Grassfed Beef Liver.

The craze for eating the way our ancestors did is nothing new; it has been more than two decades since the exercise physiologist Loren Cordain published The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat (2001), helping launch a billion-dollar industry. But the Liver King, along with a crew of other meatfluencers, has pushed paleo to an extreme of carnivory. They maintain that humans evolved to kill animals similar in size and constitution to domesticated cattle, to devour their organs (often raw), and to eat vegetables only in the most desperate of circumstances.

Forget the leaves and fibrous tubers, were going hunting! Paul Saladino (IG followers: 1.6M) writes in The Carnivore Code, the closest thing the new movement has to a manifesto. He asserts that this approach appears to be exactly what our ancestors did. (Saladino co-owns a supplement company, Heart & Soil, with the Liver King.) According to The Carnivore Code, plants are poisonthey dont want to be eaten, and have, as a result, evolved defensive chemicals designed to disrupt your digestion. Likewise, in The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker (IG followers: 319K) says that the most efficient way proto-humans got protein and calories was to take down a big, fatty, energy-filled megafaunal animal. They may have nibbled on the occasional fruit or nut, he admits, but the time and energy needed to get the same payoff would have been greater by at least an order of magnitude. The Liver King himself came up with the pithiest tagline: Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?

The notion of the meat-loving ancestor has a history. In the nineteen-fifties, the anatomist Raymond Dart, famous for discovering the first authentic fossil of an early African hominin, advanced what became known as the killer ape theory. Hunting, Dart thought, made us human. Our furry forebears climbed down from the trees to gorge on the more attractive fleshy food that lay in the vast savannahs of the southern plains, he wrote in the book Adventures with the Missing Link (1959). Elsewhere, he described the earliest hominins as confirmed killers: carnivorous creatures that seized their quarries by violence, battered them to death, tore apart their broken bodies, dismembered them limb from limb, slaking their ravenous thirst with the hot blood of victims and greedily devouring livid writhing flesh.

The killer-ape theory seeped into the mainstream. In 1955, Dart, then based at the University of the Witwatersrand, met the playwright Robert Ardrey, who was in South Africa for a reporting trip. Like a convert seeing the holy truth, Ardrey came away transformed. He was convinced that the predatory transition not only made us human but also explained what he described as mans bloody history, his eternal aggression, his irrational, self-destroying inexorable pursuit of death for deaths sake. Ardrey was inspired to write the Nature of Man series, a set of books about human nature and evolution, published between 1961 and 1976. Time later named African Genesis, the first in the series, the most notable nonfiction book of the sixties. It was cited as an influence on Stanley Kubricks film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose opening sequence showed primate violence as a turning point in the development of our species.

As Ardrey and Kubrick popularized the killer ape, anthropologists started to review the evidence. In 1966, at a meeting remembered in anthropological lore as the beginning of hunter-gatherer studies, seventy-five experts assembled in Chicago to synthesize our knowledge about foraging peoples. More than ninety-nine per cent of human history was spent without agriculture, the organizers figured, so it was worth documenting that way of life before it disappeared altogether. The symposiumand an associated volume that appeared two years later, both titled Man the Hunterexemplified an obsession with hunting, meat-eating, and maleness. Man was meant to cover all humans; hunter was shorthand for anyone who subsisted on wild food. The book devoted an entire section to the role of hunting in human evolution. Hunting is the master behavior pattern of the human species, a chapter began. It is the organizing activity which integrated the morphological, physiological, genetic, and intellectual aspects of the individual human organisms and of the population who compose our single species.

The meeting also revealed problems with the meat-centric story. Dart had asserted that all prehistoric men and the most primitive of living human beings are hunters, i.e., flesh eaters. But contributors to Man the Hunter showed how one-sided this perspective was. The anthropologist Richard Lee reported that the !Kung, one of the so-called Bushman people of Southern Africa, got two-thirds of their calories from plants. Nor were they an exception. When he compared fifty-eight foraging societies from around the world, Lee found that half got the majority of their calories from plant foods; another eighteen relied mostly on fishing. Only elevenless than a fifthrelied on hunting as their primary means of subsistence, and all but one were limited to either the highest or the lowest latitudes, far beyond our African homeland.

Since the publication of Man the Hunter, scientists have incorporated genomic as well as new archeological and paleontological methods into the study of diets from deep history. The details differ and its easy to get lost in the weeds, but the overarching message from each is clear: we evolved as opportunistic omnivores, Herman Pontzer, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, writes in his recent book, Burn. It includes a takedown of paleo-style tropes, including carnivory. Humans eat whatevers available, which is almost always a mix of plants and animals (and honey).

Pontzer shows just how far the consensus has shifted. Dart had insisted that Australopithecus, an early group of human ancestors, gulped down blood and guts, and yet scratch patterns on their molars suggest that they were lovers of tubers. Our more recent forebears ate plants, too, including ones vilified by paleo advocates. Consider Neanderthal diets, which Rebecca Wragg Sykes covers in vivid detail in Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Neanderthals certainly ate big beasts; sites are filled with the bones of butchered bison and red deerthere are even indications that they took down mammoths. Yet Neanderthals living in warm, wet environs had tooth-wear patterns similar to those of agricultural peoples who eat lots of fibrous plants. Further evidence has come from investigating Neanderthals dental calculusthat is, from probing their plaque. Shortly before he died, an individual known as Shanidar 3 consumed dates, a lentil-like plant, and an unidentified tuber or root. The remains of two adults found in Belgium had traces of grasses and water-lily-root starches, suggesting that they had foraged for plant food. A sample from El Sidrn, in Spain, had no large-mammal DNA, but it turned up matches for pine, mushroom, and moss. Scattered morsels of prehistoric diets reveal an enduring taste for veggies.

No controlled studies have been published that validate the extravagant health claims made for the carnivore diet, but the meatfluencers are undeterred. In The Carnivore Diet, Shawn Baker lists eczema, depression, and fibromyalgia as ailments that seem to respond positively to the carnivore diet. The psychologist Jordan Peterson claims that a regimen of beef, salt, and water sharpened his thinking, cleared up his psoriasis, and eliminated his gum disease; his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, insists that the same diet, supplemented with lamb, bison, and the occasional vodka or bourbon, cured her arthritis. In The Complete Carnivore Diet for Beginners: Your Practical Guide to an All-Meat Lifestyle, by Judy Cho (IG followers: 99.8K), carnivory is presented as a powerful remedy, with potential for alleviating depression, inflammation, eating disorders, and autoimmune issues.

Living off flesh alone is not easy, though, and Cho lays out suggestions for how to survive. Too much lean protein can cause problems, so make sure at least seventy per cent of your calories come from fat. Too little mastication can lead to constipation, so try to chew each piece of meat twenty to thirty times. Carnivores tend to have messed-up thirst cues, so drink more often than might feel natural. If you dont like meat, stop snacking until youre so hungry that it becomes appealing. To ease the transition, Cho offers various weeklong meal plans, along with helpful tables of permissible items and their nutritional statistics.

Some meatfluencers stress that human beings are animals and maintain that, if allowed to eat according to our animal instincts, we will favor a meaty menu. But the biologists David Raubenheimer and StephenJ. Simpson have been investigating animal alimentation for more than thirty years, and their new book, Eat Like the Animals, suggests that the meatfluencers have it all wrong. The authors started collaborating at Oxford, studying the eating preferences of locusts (grasshoppers, basically). First, they found that locusts preferred a certain ratio of carbohydrates to protein. When forced to live on foods higher in carbs and lower in protein, the insects ate a lot, becoming obese, and took longer to molt to adulthood. Conversely, when put on the insect version of the Atkins diet, they ate far fewer calories and were less likely to make it to adulthood. Second, they found that locusts with a decent food selection always ended up with near-identical ratios of protein and carbohydrates. Its as if, regardless of whether we were offered meat and pasta, or egg and bread, or beans and rice, or fish and potatoes, we always consumed the exact same balance of protein and carbs. The critters somehow track which nutrients are in which foods.

These findings arent limited to insects. Raubenheimer and Simpson have since determined that the pattern is widespread across the animal kingdom, from beetles to baboons. And they have found that protein-loaded diets dont just age animals; they kill them faster. Our sexy, lean mice who ate high-protein, low-carb diets were the shortest lived of all, they wrote of research published in 2014. They made great-looking middle-aged corpses.

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Is an All-Meat Diet What Nature Intended? - The New Yorker

If you live in California, New England, or a certain corner of the internet where Christian Reformed pastor Paul VanderKlay posts long, deep think pieces on the big questions of life, you might have heard of Estuary. Its a place where things get stirred up and people who might have been alienated from Christians are finding themselves in fascinating conversations with them.

CrossPoint Church, a large, multilingual Christian Reformed congregation in Chino, Calif., is home to the Inland Empire Estuary meetup group. Meeting since 2021, this group is part of a growing number of groups that use the Estuary model to facilitate two-hour conversations on big questions the group chooses at each session.

Many Estuary groups meet in person; some meet online by video conference. The Chino group was started by John Vandonk, a former CRC pastor who is one of roughly 26,400 subscribers to Paul VanderKlays YouTube channel. VanderKlay is pastor of Living Stones CRC in Sacramento, Calif. Responding at first to things he found interesting about psychologist, author, and speaker Jordan Peterson, VanderKlay started a thinking out loud YouTube channel in 2009. He hosts conversations and commentaries on cultural happenings, movements in the CRC, and the intellectual explorations of people like the controversial Peterson, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lecturer John Vervaeke, and The Symbolic World commentator Jonathan Pageau. Vandonk encouraged VanderKlay to find a way to extend and improve on the disjointed and disembodied conversations comment sections on social media are known for. Together they developed Estuary to be a place and a way to have those conversations.

In addition to meetup groups24 are currently listed on estuaryhub.comthere have been conferences: in September 2022 in Thunder Bay, Ont., and in May 2023 in Chino, Calif. And Pleasant Street CRC in Whitinsville, Mass., hosted VanderKlay for a sample Estuary meeting Aug. 2.

The name Estuary was chosen because of the imagery it projects. In geography an estuary is where rivers meet the ocean. It is a sometimes chaotic space where mighty currents may encounter crashing waves, where floods may change the boundaries, where the water is neither fresh nor salt, but something in between, where shifting currents may alter the wetlands, the CrossPoint website explains. Vandonk said Estuary is a place for the exchange of ideas, where questions are encouraged, where judgment is not tolerated, and where finding answers is secondary to the journey. The discussion groups use specific protocols to ensure that their conversations are fruitful, nonjudgmental, and well-run.

Vandonk said its common for a group to include a wide variety of viewpoints, backgrounds, and religions. He recalled a meeting earlier this year where there was an atheist, a few Christians, a Muslim, and a Jew all participating in the same conversation.

The discussions we have are rooted around the bigger idea of what it is to be human; these are questions that every person of every tribe and religion is trying to answer, Vandonk said.

The conversations are not purposely centered on spiritual or religious topics, but VanderKlay and Vandonk each said the discussions theyve participated in usually turn in that direction because thats where the deep truths of what it is to be human lie.

Vandonk said he doesnt like to put too many labels on what Estuary is because then it limits what it can become. Estuaryhub.com offers this definition: Estuary is a place where people come for conversation. Honest conversation. Not ideological warfare, memes, and trolling, but mutually respectful attempts to understand one another, and to learn to appreciate different perspectives and viewpoints. Estuary is a place where different ideas and ideologies meet. Where participants allow themselves to be exposed to new ways of thinking, where listening may be as important as talking, where being open to feedback will force you to hear yourself think.

Although most Estuary groups on the Estuary Hub are in the U.S., there are some in Canada, Australia, Germany, and Greece, and new groups are popping up all the time. Many of the groups use Meetup, an online events calendar, to keep track of their gatherings. Leaders are encouraged to follow the protocols for conducting conversations so every group is run in a similar way. Leaders attend an online group to be introduced to the process, which Vandonk said is designed to ensure that the conversation does not become a debate about who is right or wrong and instead encourages mutual understanding and respect.

Spreading The Word

In August of 2022, VanderKlay and Vandonk took the Estuary concept on tour. They spent some time in Germany, introducing the conversation model in a festival format. It was an introduction for the uninitiated and encouragement for those who were already participating in online and in-person gatherings. VanderKlays online presence drew many interested people to the festival. Im somewhat of a celebrity, he said, albeit only in one specific corner of the vastness that is the internet. It is a great pleasure to meet people face to face after having shared many conversations with them via comment sections and forums.

After the trip, Vandonk, VanderKlay, and other festival speakers talked about their experiences on VanderKlays podcast.

A month later, several Estuary leaders and subscribers gathered in Thunder Bay, Ont., for a four-day event on Consciousness and Conscience. That successful conference sparked plans for an event this past May in Chino, The Quest for a Spiritual Home, which featured lectures, a tour of a Greek Orthodox church, and an afternoon of paintball. One of the conference attendees, Moises Pacheco, pastor at Grace in Garfield CRC in Chicago, Ill., said, The lectures and the panel discussions were really insightful. Having a couple of Protestants, an Orthodox artist, and a non-Christian cognitive scientist all talking about a spiritual home and seeing similar things and giving common language for it to (speak to) people from all over is something important.

Pacheco said that while many of the talks can be viewed online, the way most conference attendees usually consume content, the embodied nature of the conference gave the opportunity to do some things that are likely not common in an academic conference or even a religious conference with this level of intellectualism.

Vandonk said that many attendees expressed gratitude for the opportunity to meet people from different walks of life, different religions, and different backgrounds all coming together in an effort to broaden their understanding. Pacheco shared how one evening he, a Protestant pastor, ended up on stage singing Leaning on the Everlasting Arms with a Sikh man who seemed to know the song better than I did.

Nothing Quite Like It

VanderKlay and Vandonk share a passion for Estuary, believing there is nothing else like it around today. In a world of cancel culture, groupthink, and binary thinking, VanderKlay said, a space for the free exchange of ideas and experiences with fellow humans is a cool breeze on a hot day, a gentle rain falling on a parched landscape.

Lon Wagner, pastor of discipleship at CrossPoint CRC in Chino, called Estuary a ministry of the church, but not for the church, recognizing it instead as a place for people to ask questions and explore in ways they might not be comfortable doing or able to do in regular Sunday morning services.

VanderKlay would love to see every church have an Estuary group. In a YouTube video describing his vision, he said churches have a long history of hosting various kinds of not-specifically-religious groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, other recovery groups, or community groups, and theyd benefit from welcoming the spectrum of people Estuary groups attract.

Churches are too insular. Churches dont know whats going on in the hearts and minds of the people around them too often, VanderKlay said. Churches need these kinds of credible conversations that are on the edge.

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What Is 'Estuary' All About, and Is It Coming to a Church Near You? - The Banner

Its been a while since I watched Bill Mahers show on HBO, Real Time. There were times when many of Mahers opinions and views coincided with mine; while at others we were totally opposite. Which is fine with me. Mahers television personality is very strong: a comedian who enjoys making people laugh and generating controversy and being proud of it, like when Donald Trump sued him for $5 million because Maher made a joke that had to do with the possibility of Trump being the son of an orangutan. On the show, it doesnt matter the guest or the panel, the most important voice is that of old Bill. And that exhausted and bored me. But when over a year ago he announced that he would do a podcast, well, I got curious and so I began to see this surreal world called Club Random every single week.

Why? Because I wanted to prove something the only way possible: I once heard someone say that you only knew someone when they were drunk and after watching many episodes of Club Random, I can say that I know Bill Maher and he is a complete idiot.

A few months ago, in June, I read an article published in Mens Journal (obviously, Venezuelans favorite magazine) that said: Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did on television in this series of one on one, hour long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests in the undisclosed location called Club Random. And I was like: this couldnt be for real. I later understood that it was part of an advertising campaign between Mens Journal and Bill Maher. But it doesnt matter. I am going to deconstruct and destroy this announcement.

The problem with Club Random is that no matter whos the guest, its always the same. It doesnt matter if its Carrot Top or the man who knows everything about anything you ask him and if he doesnt know it, he invents it (Jordan Peterson). The tone of the show and even the topics, conversations, always end up pointing to the same things.And this happens because by the time the podcast filming begins, Bill Maher is already high and nearly drunk. Meaning its almost impossible for any guest to express their ideas without Bill interrupting them.

Even a talking machine like Quentin Tarantino couldnt handle Mahers boring, goofy interruptions. So forget about Real Times sharp Bill Maher. From the first minute of Club Random, Bill Maher is wasted. And theres no way hes sharp, funny, or shows a higher level of intelligence thanBingo! An orangutan. And right from scratch, everything goes downhill.

Now lets go with what Mens Journal claims:

1. Bill Maher rewrites the rules of podcasting the way he did on television. I didnt know there were rules in podcasts because precisely the idea of making a podcast is not to have rules and to speak and do whatever you want. And when it comes to television, I have never seen something like: And if you want to make a television show you must apply the following rules created by the great Bill Maher.

2. Hour-long conversations with a wide variety of unexpected guests. True, the podcast lasts an hour or a little more. unexpected guests? Here I think its hard to believe Richard Dreyfuss or Ice Cube will appear out of nowhere, without warning. and Bill reacts: Oh, I didnt expect you, but welcome to this hour when I wont let you talk but instead will enjoy smoking and drinking and laughing at my own jokes!

3. Undisclosed location called Club Random. Well, I dont know if the Mens Journal reporter had ever seen an episode of Club Random, but he doesnt know that in each of the episodes, Bill takes pride in Club Random being the basement bar of his obscenely huge property. So about the secret location thingwhatever.

Bill Maher has been effusive and passionate about the legalization of marijuana and glorifies himself by announcing that he is a great pothead. So I also wanted to see how big Maher was while he was high. Lets just say: this guy should never smoke even a chocolate cigarette ever again in his life. Why? He turns disrespectful, egomaniacal, slow, confused and lacking topics of conversation that have nothing to do with Screw the Woke and the COVID vaccine. He couldnt be more random and lost than this. Hes a far cry from Tommy Chongs supe powers when it comes to weed. And unfortunately the chance of what could have been great conversations with very interesting people has been lost.

Of course, there are always funny moments, like the episode with Woody Harrelson that I stopped watching because neither of them simply understood what the other was saying. But if I recommend any episode, its the one with Bella Thorne, who actually has her own brand of weed. And I recommend this episode for the following: here we see Maher trying to make sexual comments, which he does every time he interviews a young woman, but in front of a Bella who puts him in his place by making him look like a slimy old man. And what I find most important and valuable: Bella showed him to his face that she is the true pothead champion: funny, articulate, shameless but always smart. Bravo to Bella, who wrote a real new rule: never try to beat me by smoking weed, Bill Maher!

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Don't Party With Bill Maher - Book and Film Globe