L.B. Graham's Blog

This episode overviews the hallmarks of Modernism and Postmodernism and how the rise of these things helps to explain the retreat of the American Church from the life of the mind. It also overviews some of internal reasons why the church retreated from the life of the mind, since there are and were reasons why this happened that can’t be laid at the feet of any outside force or factor.

In this second part of our two week overview of our intellectual history, we examine some of the things that led contemporary western culture away from the central tenets of Christian theism, and at the initially optimistic and later more pessimistic ideas that emerged. As we introduce the concepts of Modernism and Postmodernism, we are preparing to look more closely next week at the retreat of the American Church from the life of the mind.

As we continue to discuss embracing the life of the mind as part of our pursuit of a deeper Christian life, we survey our intellectual history in an effort to understand some of the things that have brought us where we are. In this first part of a two week overview of that history, we look at some of our classical and Christian roots. 

Episode 3 begins our exploration of the first of our four big themes – embrace the life of the mind, the Christian faith is rational – as we discuss the importance of both knowing God and loving God, and of embracing both mind and heart in our walk with God. 

The waters of the Christian faith are deep, and yet all too often, the American church is content to remain in the shallows. In this episode – the second part of the two-part introduction to the podcast – we talk a little bit about the shallowness of the church and reiterate the invitation to go deeper.

Do you sometimes think that there must be more to the Christian faith, that the American church seems pretty shallow? Do you want to pursue a deeper walk with Christ? This inaugural episode of The Further Up, Further In Podcast will introduce you to the vision of the podcast and begin to answer your most pressing question, “Will this be worth your time?” This is part one of the two-part podcast introduction. 

I wanted to post an update on my forthcoming podcast. I’ve been hard at work adapting material I gathered for my book on the shallowness of the American Church and the need to go deeper into podcast episodes. To this point, I’ve recorded 13 episodes, and my guess is that I’ll need about 30 to cover what I want to cover from that material.

My plan has been to build a reservoir of episodes, so that once I start publishing them, I can keep up with a ‘once a week’ schedule. I have some obligations this summer that will slow down my production, but I should be on the other side of all that by early August. So, my plan is to drop the first two episodes on August 10th, which is a Sunday, as these two episodes together serve as an introduction both to me and the podcast itself, and to release one a week each Sunday thereafter, probably taking a small break in late December each year.

Once I’ve worked through all the episodes based on the material I’ve already compiled, I hope to mix in a combination of interviews about the themes and topics I’ve covered with new solo episodes as well. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in this format both to encourage and to model the things I’m advocating for in the podcast, and I’m excited about where it might go.

As I indicated in the last post, I have recently finished a rough draft of a book I call Further Up, Further In, which is an invitation to move out of the shallows and into the deeper waters of our faith, to pursue a deeper walk with Christ. It’s an area of personal passion, and in some ways a culmination of much of my life’s work.

I also suggested that I had a corollary project that I’ve been working on, and I’ll speak more to that here. I have been thinking for some time that I want to start a podcast on this same topic. To that end, I have purchased some equipment with which to get started, and I’m beginning to tinker with it. There will be a learning curve for both the recording and the editing of the podcast, and I’ll want to have several episodes finished and confidence I can keep producing them on a schedule before I post any of them, but I’m excited to have begun that work.

I don’t have a hard and fast timeline for this. Even just this weekend as I’ve played around with the editing software, I feel much more comfortable with it. I’m a long way from being able to make something I’d release publicly, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Aside from the technical aspects, which aren’t necessarily a strength of mine, podcasting plays into my skillset. Words have always been a medium in which I felt comfortable working, whether written or spoken. I will need to figure out my work process, though, as in how detailed my outlines/scripts are per episode, and so forth. Likely, it’ll change as I go and grow as a podcaster.

I can’t say I enjoy listening to myself on playback, but not many people enjoy that part. It’s weird hearing my voice that way. It just is. Even so, I’m pretty determined to give this a shot, and I’ll try to post here from time to time to let those who might be interested in what I’m doing know how it is going.

I would imagine most of those people – people, not bots looking for blogposts to attach inane comments to – who find my site do so because of one of my novels. It would make sense, then, that most of the people who read this post might think of me as a novelist, a fiction writer. Of course, even when you successfully get a novel into print, very few people who jump that hurdle make enough money from their writing to do it full time, and certainly I never did. My point here, is that while I am a guy who has long enjoyed writing on the side, it has never been my day job.

For most of the time I was writing, my day job was teaching. I spent 20 years as a high school teacher at two different schools. For the last 7 years, though, I have been a hospital chaplain. I work at a very large, level one trauma center, where I am the staff chaplain who covers our ED (emergency department), our SICU (surgical intensive care unit) and 2 different oncology floors.

Spending a lot of time in these two contexts has driven home for me the importance of tending to the roots of our faith. I often wondered about students graduating from our school, about how they would fare, not just at college but in life beyond school, and if the roots of their faith were sufficiently deep to hold them steady when challenged. Now that I work in a hospital, I see plenty of adults who are in the midst of life’s storms and struggling with their own faith. In fact, if being a chaplain has taught me anything, it is that sooner or later, the storms will blow. The time to tend to the roots of your faith is now, not then while you are in the storm.

This brings me to Further Up, Further In, my working title for the book I’ve been working on for a while and recently finished. It is a book calling the American church out of the shallows and into the deeper waters of our faith, inviting all to pursue a deeper walk with Christ. It is a very different kind of book than the others I have written, but in many ways, my work over the last 30 years has been preparing me to write it. I have not yet tried to find a publisher for it, as I’ve been focused on writing it, as well as a second, corollary project, which I will talk about when I post “Part 2” on this topic.

For now, I just wanted to mention the book, which has been rumbling around in my head for a few years, but which I worked pretty steadily on from August of ’24 until I finished the initial draft in February of ’25. The writing flowed pretty quickly when it came right down to it, but that’s likely because I spent quite a long time thinking about what I’d write and tinkering around with the chapter by chapter outline and the sub-outlines for those chapters. For those who have followed me for a while, this part of my process hasn’t really changed: I’m a planner at heart when it comes to my writing.

Finally, for those who have enjoyed my other books and supported me on this writing journey so far, thanks for that. I’m grateful for you. I’ll have more on what I’m working on soon.

He’s alive. As crazy as it sounds, it’s true. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but I’ve seen the tomb with my own eyes. More than that, though, I’ve seen Him.

It started this morning when the women came hurrying back to us, full of crazy babblings about the stone being rolled away and the tomb being empty. They said they’d seen angels, and we thought that perhaps the strain of the past few days had been too much for them. But, John grew excited and said he was going to go see, so I went too, afraid of what I’d find. Afraid the tomb would be intact and the body there. Afraid that it wouldn’t be, and that perhaps angels might appear to us as to them, appear to tell me what I already knew, that I had no business with Him anymore, for I had disowned Him.

We ran, but I couldn’t keep up with John. My fear perhaps heavy enough that it held me back, just a little. But when we got there and found the stone indeed rolled aside, John hesitated at the entrance, staring at the empty space. I did not hesitate, hope rising despite my fear, and I pushed on inside. The linen was there, but Jesus wasn’t. The tomb was truly empty, just as the women had said.

We went back to the others, full of wonder, but unsure of what all this meant. No angels appeared to us, and I kept to myself on the way back, knowing why – or so I thought. I had disgraced myself, and rather than being rebuked by the angels that had spoken to the women as I had feared I would be, I was apparently to be ignored completely.

But, marvel of marvels, my fears and my doubts turned out to be completely unfounded. That night, Jesus appeared to us all, except Thomas, who was away. He appeared in our midst, and He spoke peace unto us and greeted us warmly, showing us His wounds so we would not doubt but believe. When it came to me, He didn’t hesitate or falter, but He greeted me as He did the others. I could see in His eyes the same love as before.

I should have known He wouldn’t forsake me, and this doubt rebukes me almost as much as my threefold denial does. I should have known that His love would not waver, that His grace was greater than my shame, His mercy greater than my sin. I know now, and I will not forget. I will spend my days making sure no one else does either. I will tell His story as clearly as I can, as often as I can, for He was dead, but now He’s alive.

And me? I was lost, but now I’m found, and in the end, that’s all that really matters.