Window tapping like a branch
small clicks and clacks 

a cello bow drags a slow whine 
a long-sustained note
between my fourth and sixth ribs 
on the left 
draws a wet line down my cheek

these year-frozen hopes thawed
crackle in bacon grease, too hot
one handed cast iron, spill and burn

dreams stacked like firewood
in long lists awkwardly in the closet 

like shotguns and rifles leaning 
into the corner with no gun cases 
falling and sliding out 
banging blue steel on the hardwood floor

I push the butts of the guns with my foot 
shove the door shut 
against my own will

I am a music box slowly wound 
at Christmas or Easter
notes strung from five black lines
words tagging along like a pack of wild dogs

it bangs and slams 
and bumps with light ticks 
scratching of a pencil on rough paper

speaking in tongues and awkward melody
before the lyrics make it through
the birth canal

Boom tick cap tick boom boom cap tick
Boom tick cap tick boom boom cap tick

that long sustained low cello note
hanging all things still in a moment
pencil lines and lines of lyrics

drug across my rib cage, the bow
like tightly pulled strings
droning like “om” so quiet 

I can barely hear it
tucked just under my heartbeat

then, the loud CRACK 
of the tree through the forest
echoing off the canyon walls 
and back to me 
like echolocation

arrests all living things in their tracks
if there are any

I am a painting 
orange hat 
and checkered jacket 
in a truck bed of darkness
ten-degree air sinks 
like an unwelcome blanket 
onto my fifteen-degree sleeping bag
between Williams and Flagstaff 
water jug frozen
stove knobs too
a dark December night 
even the fire is cold

can’t stop thinking about tomorrow morning
by myself, like a pattern 
that unfolds before me 
I come up short

the elk turns his ass to me 
and trots away, no shot
like a dream on loop where 
everything escapes 

I am a tree falling in the woods 
reaching to connect with heartbeats 
but hit the forest floor 

erasing marks until the paper fibers fray
whirring like a bomb, I nosedive
canopy and crown

poems written on papers 
and songs captured in voice memos 
on my phone
dusty bin of podcast equipment 
in craigslist queue
paintings stacked upright 
in the garage

the universe cracks
a ponderosa pine splits on the Mogollon rim
echoing through me 
rattling my ribs
like riding in a truck bed on a rough dirt road 
wind in my ears
the tree is felled

Read more

He said I’m leaving

don’t leave Wendell
we need you here
your presence restrains it

I have to go now
I’m tired and I’ve said all I can

they will take over now if you leave

I know

I am so thankful for you and for all you’ve given us

I go to prepare a place for you
not made of zeroes and ones
but of compost and soil
my hands with the grain of the oak 
the veins of the leaves 
pounded leather and pine needles

are we going to be ok?

you will be, but not for long

and what of our children?

they better listen and sow the fields

he smiled, closed his eyes, and left

August 31, 2026

The classic black-and-white photograph of Wendell Berry was taken by his close friend, the prominent Kentucky photographer and writer James Baker Hall

First of all, I want to say thank you to my paid subscribers, you are my patrons and you have said yes to supporting my creativity and I really appreciate you for that. Even the $5/month patrons are a huge encouragement. I hope to make this very worth your while as we go and as I build this out. I had mixed feelings about Substack because I found out that poetry and writing journals demand that you haven’t posted it to Substack yet, so I was hesitant, and it was holding me back halfway this year because I was trying to submit to these journals.

But then I got to attend a writing retreat this weekend in Stockbridge, MA, with an author named Jedediah Jenkins. I was able to ask him about this. And he said “F the journals, who cares? Just build your own audience and find the people that really resonate with you. That’s what publishers care about anyways.” So, I said ok, I actually like that advice. That way I can bring my work to my people directly. So, I’m sorry for how I was hesitating but that won’t be happening anymore and I will be bringing most of my work directly to my Substack.

On his writing retreat, one of the prompts was Who is your tribe? Who do you want to write for? And I ended up enjoying what I wrote. And so I would like to share that with you here to my patrons, my partners, my paid subscribers. Here it goes.

(Next up for paid subscribers: New Poem – No Witness, New Short Story – Puerto Peñasco, Writing Prompt - This is me at 8 years old)

Read more

Want to go fishing? he whispered.

Yes, the boy yawned, popping up like a spring out of his last dream.

Only a few streetlights illuminated the asphalt in front of their house. The white ‘89 Ford pickup was backed up to the garage, loaded with the gear, a cooler, and a couple canteens of water. The boy made sure he grabbed his Curtis Creek Manifesto. As they grabbed any last items and prepared for the road, they were in and out of the house a few times, trying to be as quiet as they could as to not wake up the rest of the family. The dark morning hours and the glowing gray street held a certain familiar stillness for the boy. When he got into the truck, the smell of coffee woke him up a little more. Steam rose from his father’s thermos cup.

The two and a half hour drives to the creek were just a man and his son, and one of four cassette tapes. He studied the passing landscape as a hunter. Their whole family loved looking for wildlife. It was in their blood. Long drives would pass the time unknowingly. When the boy wasn’t staring out the passenger window, he studied illustrations about fly-fishing from his book. The boy was always asking questions. The father didn’t waste words, except to quiz the boy on his geography.

What’s that Tommy? the father would ask, pointing towards a landmark.

Weaver’s Needle, the boy would proudly profess.

That’s right. In the Superstitions, the father said.

The father knew a lot about Arizona and he had traveled it extensively on horseback with his father. He knew many places, but these days in his truck, he would return to the same places whenever he got out. He’d pass beautiful country each time on his way to his favorite spots, which were always where the pines were.

The Superstitions are a long stretch between the city and the Four Peaks. The boy listened to the truck’s vibrations while the saguaro’s blurred out his window.

Hey Tommy the father interjected in the silence.

Yes? the boy asked.

The father had just refilled his coffee from his thermos at the stoplight about to turn left onto Route 87.

You know the only thing better than that first cup of hot coffee? the father asked.

That second cup of hot coffee, the boy replied, as his father said it.

As the sun came up the father slid a tape into the deck. Frankie Laine, Hell Bent for Leather. Bowie Knife, Wanted Man, cowboy songs. He sang in a low exaggerated Johnny Cash voice looking at his son, half smiling, trying to make him laugh.

The drive out of the northeast corner of Phoenix follows the mountain ranges north. First the boy’s eyes would find wild horses standing in the Verde. Then the Superstitions, with Weaver’s Needle and Battleship framing out the landscape. Before cutting due north, the Four Peaks caught the first light, and the highway followed the Mazatzals to Payson. That raw unventured land hallowed the highway. Arizona was wild and inexhaustible. The father knew this. He had driven it a hundred times and still watched it go by at sixty-five like a man who was counting his blessings.

The sun was up by the time they came under the Four Peaks after Weaver’s Needle and the orange and pink laid down over the saguaros. The boy wondered if God made these beautiful sunrises every morning.

Up along the Mazatzals they went, the range always on their left as they ventured north through vast high desert until they passed by tiny villages along the way. Tiny unknown places like Rye, and Sunflower until Payson. Two hours of desert and a half a dozen dry creek beds, and then as they approached Payson the first ponderosas started to stand up out of the cedars and junipers. The boy rested his forearm out the window and made a flat rigid palm like an airplane wing to catch the lift. The air felt cool. They stopped in Payson for gas, coffee and a Gatorade. In the center of Payson the truck took a right to head up the Rim. The highway climbed alongside the cliffs of the Rim and the whole world changed. Up top the ground cover was thick, green, wet and much cooler. The biggest ponderosa forest on earth laid across Arizona like a sash, and under those pines there was water everywhere.

This morning was like the rest. The father rolled down both windows once they reached the top of the rim and rested his arm on the door.

Smell that? Ponderosa pines.

The boy could tell how much his father loved the pines, the smell and the sound of how they whispered. So did the boy.

Then the father pulled a half of a Backwoods cigar out of his truck visor and put it into the corner of his mouth. He wouldn’t light it. This part of the drive was where the father began talking more and asking the boy questions.

So, you like your teachers this year? or How do you like that baseball coach? or What do you think your grades are like this year?

The boy could smell the creek and the riparian heaven that awaited them. The fall webworms hung in the hardwoods in their silky tents along the side of the road. The smell of sycamores filled the cab. The road was dirt now, bumpy, like a washboard. The old truck was for towing horses, so the father and son’s voices shook as they talked.

They parked just past the cattle guard. The mid-morning light shone white in the reflection of the waxy leaves of the cottonwoods surrounding the road. He turned the truck off; the silence was confronting. A few Steller’s Jays, the ponderosas rustling in a slight breeze, and nothing else but the slightest sound of the creek in the distance. The father was getting things out from behind the truck seat and walked to the back and opened the truck bed. He set his bags and gear on there and got to work.

First, he’d get the boy set up and then himself. The sound of the reel as he strung up one rod broke the silence. The boy stared off to the tree line. A large meadow started near the truck and twenty yards to the west was one tree line, then about one hundred yards of meadow before the creek. Old wooden log fences, half broken down, were just off the side of the shoulder of the dirt road. Then on the other side of the creek another fifty yards of meadow and then a hill covered in pines, the other tree line. At the top of the creek there was a large old ranch. The father and son would joke about buying it someday. The son secretly dreamed of doing it someday if he became rich enough.

What do you want on here? the father asked.

Elk hair caddis.

Not a wooly worm? They do pretty good here for you.

No, I want an elk hair caddis, the boy confirmed.

Ok. The father smiled, as he began to tie on the fly to the boy’s tippet.

As they approached the water, the father stopped him and pointed with his rod towards a ripple at the front of a pool. He was frozen like a deer, staring at the creek. He said in a hushed voice, You see that pool? Where would you cast in that pool?

Um…I’d cast into the whitewater and hide behind that tree?

Yea, that could be good, but if there’s any fish in the back of the pool you’ll scare ‘em.

So I should fish the back first?

And so he did. On his second cast, a trout hit the fly but didn’t take it. The boy jerked the rod up to set the hook. His line shot straight up and behind him. He looked up, relieved that there wasn’t a tree to get caught in.

And so they fished. Pool after pool, and ripple after ripple. Making stealthy presentations from one or two pools behind. The father had taught him at eight years old. Now he was ten and was a pretty good fisherman. But sometimes the father would say, Come over here and watch me on this one. Watch my presentation, where I put my fly.

And the boy would watch. The father’s way on the water was poetic. He could cast very far with precision and a tempo that looked like time slowed. He would lay his line down on the water silently and the fly would delicately float down exactly where he aimed. As they fished, as if it was something known intuitively, they would leapfrog around each other and give one another at least five pools ahead before they’d cut in above the other.

On the creek, the boy would often get excited and focused to catch a fish so he would have something to shout to his dad. One pool, no hits, on to the next, five or six casts and still nothing, onto the next. First cast, a perfect presentation to the front middle of the ripples. A hit! With a trout on the line he raised his rod to tighten it.

The tension would tire out the fish so that he could net it at his feet. He landed it into the net and examined it. A nine-inch brown.

Yesss! he exclaimed. I got one Dad! he yelled, fifty yards away.

That’s great Tommy!

(Artwork note: Linocut Print - Juvenile Trout - Travis Mullen 2025)

The boy pulled his hemostats from his vest and with the fish in his left hand he pried out the fly from the fish’s lip. Then he held him in both hands and coddled him in the water, holding him loosely as his body swayed side to side, and then he darted off.

A while later the boy had to relieve himself. He unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans to the side of the creek on some large sandstone rock formations where the water was running. He undid his belt and went pee. After he finished, he caught up with his dad.

They fished for a while longer and then it was lunch time. The father pulled out two sandwiches from his vest and handed one to his son. They ate and talked about the fish they had caught. The father had caught a twelve-inch rainbow in a bigger pool and landed it. So it was one to one on the day so far. A lot of activity, even several hits that don’t materialize, is always good. Once they had finished their turkey sandwiches, the father pulled out his usual surprise. Two frozen snickers bars from his pack. The boy loved chewing into that half-frozen bar with his back teeth.

After they stood up the father noticed the hunting knife wasn’t on the boy’s belt.

Where’s the knife?

The boy looked down.

Oh no.

That was Grandpa’s knife. The father looked at him. You’ve got to take care of things.

I know. The boy’s eyes welled up.

Did you take off your belt at all?

I only went pee.

Well let’s go back and look.

They went back and found the sandstone formation around that area where he had undone his belt, but there was no knife. There had been no people around either. They couldn’t find it. He had lost his father’s cross arrows silver ring on a football field in second grade and cried then too.

You can’t keep losing things, the father scolded.

I know.

They fished out the afternoon and caught a couple more fish each. Arizona’s dark gray-blue monsoon clouds had arrived over two-thirds of the sky.

Want to head back? the father asked.

Ok.

Five minutes into their forty-five-minute hike back to the truck, thunder struck hard as a car crash. They both ducked their heads in reflex. A bolt of lightning split the sky like a giant crack in the northeast. Another crash of thunder paused their heartbeats for a second.

Do we need to run? the boy asked.

No, we’re fine.

The lightning and thunder increased, and the rain was like sheets.

Let’s keep moving. Count how many seconds between the lightning and the thunder.

Three.

After the worst of the lightning, the storm continued to rumble. They saw the white truck from a distance, and the cattle guard. As they approached the truck the meadow lit up as clear as day. It smelled like rain.

On the drive home it was dark. The boy kept thinking about that sandstone spot on the creek. Once they came out of the dirt roads and onto the T of the highway, a herd of elk was in the tree line directly across the highway. A huge bull elk was bringing up the rear of his harem, six cows, antlers reflecting the headlights.

How many points, Tommy?

Um…uh…I think six.

A Royal Elk.

Do you think they know it’s not hunting season?

Yes, I think they do. They’re smart.

What do you want to listen to?

Dancing in the Dark or Wild World.

The father fingered through his tapes: Tea for the Tillerman, So Far by Crosby Stills Nash and Young, or Born in the USA. He slipped Springsteen into the tape deck.

Can I have the light on for a little bit?

Only for a little bit.

The father reached up to his right and turned on the right interior dome light.

The boy searched through his book. The father was quiet.

After thirty minutes the boy’s eyes got heavy. He rolled up his sweatshirt to make a pillow and leaned on the truck door.

Mural by Kirollos Kilada in the St. Pope Kyrillos VI Chapel at St. Paul American Coptic Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA. 

Artist’s Website: https://kkilada.com/

Church’s Website: https://www.stpauloc.org/about/chapel

Modern Martyrs

We correct a claim about martyrdom by telling the story of the 21 Coptic workers executed in Libya, a witness captured on video that terrorists meant as propaganda. 

We follow how their calm, their prayer, and their families’ response reshape what we mean by freedom, courage, and unity across centuries of division.

• visiting a Coptic Orthodox church and noticing the icon of “the 21”
• the workers’ background in Alwur and why they went to Libya for labor
• how ISIS separated Christians using IDs and cross tattoos
• captivity details and the repeated offer to recite the shahada
• Matthew Ayariga’s choice to die with the others
• the execution video as propaganda that accidentally becomes testimony
• families speaking with pride and refusing revenge
• canonization, recovered bodies, and the shrine church in their village
• Pope Francis, Pope Tawadros II, and the “ecumenism of blood”
• a parallel with Alexei Navalny and interior freedom under coercion

A single sentence could have saved their lives, and they had six weeks to say it. Instead, 21 men knelt on a Mediterranean beach in orange jumpsuits, lips moving in prayer, while their executioners filmed a spectacle meant to terrify the world. We started with a correction and ended with one of the most unsettling stories of modern Christian martyrdom: the 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs of Libya, ordinary Egyptian construction workers whose witness exists not only in ancient texts but in high-definition footage.

We walk through how they were identified and taken in Sirte, Libya, how pressure was applied with the “door open,” and why the offer to recite the shahada matters so much when you’re thinking about faith, coercion, and what freedom really is. Then we linger on the 21st man, Matthew Ayariga of Ghana, who was given a unique chance to step away and reportedly answered, “Their God is my God,” choosing to die alongside men who had become his people.

The story doesn’t end at the beach. It keeps going through the families who speak without revenge, the Coptic Church’s swift canonization, and a historic moment when Pope Francis adds these martyrs to the Roman Martyrology, calling it the “ecumenism of blood.” We also draw a modern parallel to Alexei Navalny and the strange power of interior freedom, the kind no prison, knife, or regime can finally touch.

If this moved you, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with courage, faith, or integrity, and please subscribe and leave a review so more people can find the show. What do you think real freedom costs?

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

We follow a line from John 8 to the martyrs and modern public life, arguing that the deepest freedom is interior and cannot be seized by empires, systems, or the crowd. We wrestle with why non-retaliation and surrendering outcomes to God can expose the limits of power and reframe what “winning” even means.  

• Jesus’ freedom claim in John 8 and why confident people miss it  
• Slavery to sin as an internal captivity beneath status and citizenship  
• Adoption and belonging as an unrevokable foundation for freedom  
• Solzhenitsyn’s insight that power depends on leverage and fear  
• Martyr stories that invert the usual picture of defeat and victory  
• Thich Quang Duc and the question of stillness under suffering  
• Ignatius and Perpetua as witnesses to fearlessness before execution  
• Martin Luther King Jr’s nonviolence as a claim about real power  
• Kierkegaard’s warning about the crowd and the comfort of compliance  
• Chesterton, Berdyaev, and the role of limits, habits, and inner life  
• Social media and modern pressure to consume, conform, and perform  

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

• Eden as a picture of freedom grounded in shalom, ordered goodness, and meaningful work
• The fall as a turn toward autonomy that makes fear the organizing force
• Exodus as liberation that includes covenant, law, worship, communal responsibility, and rest
• Sabbath as resistance to Pharaoh’s production logic and modern productivity culture
• Modern “pharaohs” selling endless output as virtue and calling it freedom
• Jesus, the cross, and resurrection as exposure and defeat of powers and authorities
• Inner freedom as release from fear that drives preemptive compliance
• Luther on freedom before God and love-motivated service in the world
• Freedom operating inside the soul, between people, and across systems

Freedom is a word we throw around like it’s obvious, but our defaults are often thin: more options, fewer limits, higher status, better control. We wanted to test that instinct by going back to the Bible’s deep storyline and asking what freedom looks like before empires, before modern ideologies, and before hustle culture told us who we’re allowed to be.

We start in the garden, where freedom feels like shalom: harmony, wholeness, and life unfolding in a world that’s “very good.” Work is participation in meaning, not a frantic attempt to prove worth. Then Genesis 3 reframes the problem as a grasp for autonomy that displaces God and lets fear become the new operating system. That fear doesn’t stay personal, it grows into patterns and systems that enslave, which is why the story keeps moving toward Exodus. There, freedom comes with formation: covenant, law, worship, shared responsibility, and the scandal of Sabbath rest.

From there we name today’s “pharaohs” and their brick quotas: the productivity gospel that treats exhaustion like holiness. Finally, we widen the lens to Jesus and the New Testament language of powers and authorities, and we bring in Luther’s insight that grace frees us from self-justification so love can drive our actions. If you’ve ever wondered why rest feels impossible or why fear keeps making your choices, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review with your definition: what would real freedom look like in your life?

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

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 recounts discovering Merton as a young man searching for a Christianity intellectually and spiritually capable of confronting the world as he actually experienced it.

Merton offered a faith willing to live with difficult questions. His Christianity had passed through literature, modernism, war, suffering, doubt, and the search for an authentic interior life. For Inchausti, reading Merton felt less like encountering a religious spokesman and more like discovering someone who had “read your mail.”

That story leads into Inchausti’s own journey toward Catholicism, Dostoevsky’s influence on his conversion, late-night conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s with his friend Gary, a Vietnam veteran who introduced him to more of Merton’s writings, and eventually a confrontation at Gary’s funeral over whether serious questioning strengthens or threatens religious faith.

Through Merton’s life and Inchausti’s own story, the conversation asks what happens when Christianity takes suffering, doubt, literature, history, and the life of the mind seriously—and whether an honest search for truth can itself become a path toward faith.

Key themes in the episode

•  Thomas Merton’s restless path from writer and intellectual seeker to Trappist monk 

• The Seven Storey Mountain and why it became a spiritual phenomenon 

•  Merton’s refusal to offer easy religious certainty 

•  Professor Inchausti discovering Merton at twenty years old 

•  Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, and Inchausti’s movement toward Christianity 

•  Why Merton made Catholicism intellectually possible for him 

•  Merton’s unusual honesty about his own spiritual development 

•  The difference between receiving religious answers and learning how to ask serious questions 

•  Gary, a Vietnam veteran whose experience of war demanded a faith capable of facing suffering 

•  Late-night Catholic conversations over bottomless coffee at Denny’s 

•  Literature as a way of confronting tragedy, ambiguity, evil, and faith 

•  The intellectual life as part of spiritual formation 

•  Why serious Christian faith has room for doubt, difficulty, and unresolved questions 

•  Inchausti’s confrontation at Gary’s funeral over the value of books and intellectual inquiry 

•  Merton as a lifelong spiritual companion rather than simply an author Inchausti once read 

•  The kind of Christianity at the heart of Subversive Orthodoxy: a faith capable of looking directly at reality

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

We wrestle with Dorothy Day’s unsettling claim that worship becomes real when it turns into justice and care for the poor, especially when the work feels unglamorous and lonely. We also push back on the left right binary by asking what changes when we stop performing concern and start serving the person right in front of us.
• Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker vision of dignity, community, and voluntary poverty
• Why poverty debates miss the human need for attention, belonging, and self-expression
• How right and left politics collapse into a binary trap that insults our intelligence
• What an “anti-political politics” looks like in prayer, reflection, and concrete responsibility
• Dorothy Day’s rhetorical edge on war, nuclear weapons, and moral hypocrisy
• Distributism as a check on monopoly capitalism and the centralized state
• Local ownership, small economies, and why dependence erodes happiness
• The spiritual cost of long fidelity, loneliness, and staying put
• Personal conversion as the seedbed of social transformation
• Works of mercy as the substance of justice rather than commentary
• Confession and truth-telling as the source of credibility and freedom
• What Dorothy Day’s past raises for churches that curate respectability
• Holiness as a deeper aim than comfort-based happiness
Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. Please follow us on Instagram at Subversive Orthodoxy. You can email us at subversivorthodoxy at gmail.com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

A podcast extra from Episodes 18 & 19 — Dorothy Day

“The Works of Mercy” — woodblock print from The Catholic Worker newspaper. The paper has been published continuously since 1933, still sold for one cent. Art like this has run alongside Dorothy Day’s writing for over 90 years — inseparable from the movement’s theology that beauty and mercy belong together.

Image credit: The Catholic Worker, catholicworker.org

One of the things we mentioned in the Dorothy Day episodes is that the Catholic Worker newspaper is not just a publication — it is journalism as theological practice, a body of work that Dorothy Day built over nearly 50 years of continuous writing. What we didn’t spend enough time on is the art.

The paper has always carried original woodblock prints and illustrations alongside its writing. Feed the hungry. Give water to the thirsty. Clothe the naked. Shelter the homeless. Visit the sick. Visit the imprisoned. Bury the dead. These weren’t decorations. They were the visual theology of the movement — the same works of mercy Day insisted were the foundation of any serious politics, rendered in ink and printed on cheap newsprint and handed to people on the street for a penny.

The Artists Behind the Paper

Two current Catholic Worker artists, Sarah Fuller and Becky McIntyre, recently launched a newsletter called The Illuminator dedicated to documenting and celebrating that artistic tradition. In researching it, they discovered 943 metal printing plates stored at Maryhouse in New York, the original blocks used from the 1930s through the 1970s to transfer artwork into newsprint. Many were by the movement’s most prominent artists: Ade Bethune, Fritz Eichenberg, and Rita Corbin. Some plates had no identified artist until the night Fuller and McIntyre presented their findings at a Friday meeting at Maryhouse, where one attendee recognized her own work on a plate that had gone unattributed for decades.

Their goal with The Illuminator is to surface what McIntyre calls “the cloud of witnesses”, the artists who flew under the radar while contributing to one of the most sustained traditions of community art in American Catholic history.

Full story here: Catholic Worker Artists Celebrated in New CW Publication

To follow their ongoing work or share your own: theilluminatorcw@gmail.com

How to Get a Copy of the Paper

The Catholic Worker is print-only and always has been. To subscribe, send a written request to:

The Catholic Worker 36 East First Street New York, NY 10003

Subscriptions are 25 cents per year, issued seven times a year. If you’re outside the US, 30 cents.

For those who want to go deeper into the archives, complete scans from 1933 through 2021 are available through the Catholic News Archive. For specific or out-of-print issues, contact the Catholic Worker Archives at Marquette University.

Travis mentioned in the episode that there are Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in Phoenix and Tucson. If you’re local and want to find one near you, the full community directory is at catholicworker.org.

We talk through Dorothy Day’s life as a test case for faith that refuses both right-wing stereotypes and left-wing slogans. Her “apolitical politics” pushes us away from hot takes and toward conscience, local responsibility, and concrete works of mercy.
• Dorothy Day’s biography from early radicalism to Catholic conversion and lifelong Catholic Worker commitment
• Her key books and why the journals reveal the real person
• “Don’t call me a saint” as a warning against dismissal and excuse-making
• Anti-political politics as practical morality and meaningful life together
• Decentralization, subsidiarity, and distributism as alternatives to top-down control
• Conscience, civil disobedience, and the limits of obedience to the state
• The West Virginia farm story and the painful honesty of family responsibility
• The shift from abstract causes to loving the neighbor in front of you
• Thomas Merton correspondence and the temptation to seek “respectable” holiness
• Poverty’s paradox of suffering and joy in beloved community
This concludes part one of Dorothy Day. We will have part two coming out in the next week or two. So stay tuned.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

Longing for wilderness and needing to work to provide, I stepped outside and made this.

Scribbling daydreams, ticking the days until I get back out there.

16” x 16”
Mixed media on wood panel

Available

The King of the Universe is Hanging Today

Suspended from iron skin
polarized muscle 
from ligament

moonlight sentence
unjustly accused 
of blasphemy

riot inciter 
blind should stay blind
like their guides

lurking under rocks 
ready to rattle
when threatened

blood on the rocks
sweated since a manger
breast of a young mother

chaos brought to order…

Read more

Musings from Episode #17: You Are Lost and Don’t Know It: Walker Percy, the Malaise, and What It Means to Actually Be Alive

Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast -

For the distracted…from Walker Percy

Percy’s core diagnosis is that the worst form of despair is the kind that feels fine.

If you’re not crying, if you don’t feel broken, if you don’t feel very lost, then you’re probably fine, right?

You’re scrolling, watching, seeking, consuming, performing a version of yourself online for attention, to feel noticed…to feel like you exist.

The absence of strong every pain makes you think that everything is okay.

Walker Percy says this is ‘the trap’ of comfort and underlying despair.

Kierkegaard called it living aesthetically: organizing your life around pleasure, avoidance, and stimulation.

The phone is the perfect aesthetic machine. Marx said religion was the opiate for the masses. What if it is actually technology, phones, social media?

Percy’s challenge to a modern human is something like this….

You are not an organism managing inputs and outputs. You are a self that is being asked a question by your own existence. The distractions from this question aren’t neutral. Every minute, every hour spent numbing is an hour spent not hearing the question. And the question doesn’t go away, it just gets louder in the form of vague anxiety, restlessness, and the sense that something is missing even when everything is technically fine.

This is the infrastructure of despair, depression and anxiety. It is not the only diagnoses, but this is why our current culture has experienced such a huge increase.

Social media and the distractions provided by smart phone addictions have given us the most advanced superior distraction machine….

…to keep ourselves from answering the question our existence is asking.

Musings from Episode #17: You Are Lost and Don’t Know It: Walker Percy, the Malaise, and What It Means to Actually Be Alive

Subversive Orthodoxy Podcast

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, to medical training and a tuberculosis collapse that pushes him toward reading, philosophy, and ultimately writing. Percy is never a simple “religious novelist.” His Roman Catholic faith works more like a diagnostic tool as he studies consumer identity, modern boredom, and the way scientific confidence can leave the inner life unnamed. Along the way we map his major books, from The Moviegoer to Love in the Ruins, and why his satire still lands in an age of anxiety, distraction, and behavioral control.

A big turning point is Percy’s fascination with semiotics, the study of signs. We unpack why language is not just communication but a doorway into selfhood, including the origin of the word “meme” and how imitation spreads meaning through a culture. Then we linger on one of the most moving illustrations Percy uses: Helen Keller at the water pump, where naming becomes something like a new birth. By the end, we return to Percy’s haunting claim that we are “lost in the cosmos” when myth, faith, and shared accounts of the person collapse into thin explanations.

If this conversation hits home, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a five-star review so more people can find it. What part of modern life feels most like hidden despair to you?

We dig into Walker Percy’s strange genius and why his novels diagnose modern life better than most social commentary. We use Kierkegaard’s definition of despair, semiotics, and the Helen Keller story to ask what it means to become a self in a world that keeps flattening people into consumers.

• Walker Percy’s biography, including family tragedy, tuberculosis, and conversion to Catholicism
• The core themes across Percy’s novels and nonfiction, including alienation, boredom, and modern misdiagnosis
• Percy as a bridge between existential Christianity and scientific modernity
• The difference between emotional despair and Kierkegaard’s existential despair
• Why the aesthetic life of comfort can still be a life of despair
• Semiotics as the study of signs and why language changes what a human is
• The origin of the word meme and how imitation spreads meaning
• Percy’s critique of psychology when it reduces the human person to pathology
• The Moviegoer as a lived experiment in Kierkegaard’s stages of life
• Helen Keller at the water pump as the birth of selfhood through naming
• Lost in the cosmos as a diagnosis of life after myth and metaphysical certainty

Please subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already leave a five star review and share with anyone who might resonate. 

Please follow us on Instagram: @SubversiveOrthodoxy

You can email us at subversiveorthodoxy@gmail.com and now you can find podcast extras as well as all of my other creative work at my substack: https://beingtravismullen.substack.com/

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

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, including Subversive Orthodoxy, Thomas Merton's American Prophecy, The Spitwad Sutras, and Breaking the Cultural Trance. He is, among other things, a Thomas Merton authority, and editor of the Merton books Echoing Silence, Seeds, and The Pocket Thomas Merton. He's a lover of the literature of those who challenge the status quo in various ways, thus, he has had a lifelong fascination with the Beats.

Book by Robert L. Inchausti "Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise" Published 2005, authorization by the author.  

Intro & Outro Music by Noah Johnson & Chavez the Fisherman, all rights reserved.  

One day, a crowd gathered around Jesus, eager to hear His wisdom. Seeing their hunger for truth, He sat down on a hillside and began to teach:

“The kingdom of heaven is like a man who went on a journey, and before he left, he called three of his servants together. ‘Take care of my people while I am gone and do all of the things I have been teaching you,’

The first servant went out and said, ‘The Master’s name must be praised above all!’ So he gathered great crowds and built a magnificent hall, larger than any had ever seen. He filled it with dazzling lights, hired the finest musicians, and speakers with golden tongues. Each week, thousands gathered to hear grand stories about the Master, lifting their hands in joy.

When the Master returned, the servant beamed with pride. ‘Look, Lord! I have filled a stadium in your name! The people love to sing about you!’

The Master smiled. “And have they done as I commanded? Have they fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, and cared for the least of these?”

The servant hesitated. ‘Well, they came back every week. They sang louder than ever! Surely that means they love you.’

But the Master only sighed. “This is not what I asked.”

Then the second servant stepped forward. “Master, I have protected your truth! I built great campuses of learning where the wisest among us could debate your words. We have studied, argued, and refined every syllable to ensure that no one misunderstands you.”

The Master asked, “And what of the poor? The widows?”

The servant furrowed his brow. “Well… we have written extensively about the poor. Some of our scholars even have theories on what you meant when you told us to care for them.”

Again, the Master sighed. “This is not what I asked.”

Finally, the third servant stepped forward. He looked down, ashamed. “Master, I have nothing great to show you. I only did some of what you asked. I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, showed hospitality to the stranger, and welcomed the lonely. I sat with the broken and shared what little I had.”

The Master’s eyes filled with joy. “Well done, my faithful servant! You have done what I asked and have truly worshiped me.”

Then Jesus paused, looked at the crowd, and said, “Did I ever say,”

“Therefore, go and make sure you have the biggest Sunday gathering. Build tall towers of knowledge, so you can argue over my words. But as for feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, and caring for the broken, well, those things are optional.”

The people stared at Him in shock. Some gasped. Others whispered among themselves.

Then Jesus smiled. “Did I say that? No? Then why did you live as if I did.”

And the crowd fell silent.

I remember sitting on the porch of a retreat center in the high mountains of Slovakia. We were there for an English camp, connecting with local teenagers and sharing the good news. The morning was misty and quiet. Down in the pasture between two lines of trees, there was a shepherd walking with about fifty sheep, guiding them through the fog. Below us a calm distant village resting in the valley, smoke slowly swirling from chimneys.

I was somewhat shocked, arrested, felt as if I were looking into another world. Like maybe I’m not supposed to see this. Painters try to capture this kind of scene, but the real thing is something to behold. The sheep grazed oblivious while the shepherd worked, and life went on with its steady rhythm as if this is just normal. And for them, this was normal. This is his actual job. This was not a scene for a gallery. It was a moment of a man doing his daily work in a real place.

Another memory comes from Guatemala. I had taken a boat across Lake Atitlán to reach a small village. There I met a pastor named Raul. His church gathered twenty or thirty people. His home was built from mud bricks, with a dirt floor and a clay stove that burned hot and black from years of use.

Raul’s wife, mother, and daughter showed us how to make tortillas. We pressed the masa dough and passed it between our hands until it reached the right texture. Then we flattened it with our palms and laid it on the hot clay to rise. The smell of corn and wood smoke filled the room. We laughed together, ate together, and prayed together. Their hands carried the marks of work and devotion.

I also remember a young boy in Turkey. He was about sixteen and asked if I had ever eaten Turkish food. When I said no, his whole face lit up. He begged to take me out for lunch, and we found a small restaurant nearby. He ordered several dishes, each cooked in a different way, and waited for me to taste each one.

His joy was unmistakable. He loved his country, his food, his people, and his God. There was no bitterness in him, only life and gratitude.

Travel opens your eyes to what is always happening. Whole worlds move forward in every direction, full of people living their days. Villages and cities are alive with prayer, labor, laughter, hunger, and rest. Each one has its rhythm and its hope.

If your world is limited to your town, your church, or your routine, you are seeing only a fraction of what exists.

Right now, a shepherd in Slovakia is leading his flock through the fog.

A family in Guatemala is pressing tortillas on a clay stove.

A boy in Turkey is sharing food with a guest, proud of his home.

There is a whole other world that is not your own.

And it is beautiful.

Journal Entry, 9/28/25 - On a flight from Phx to Denver with my father and brother. 8:37am Frontier.

My experience of life and growth has been a long slow walk, quietly.

It is a long slow bending to what I, in more hungry and hurried times took in, but couldn’t digest all that I read and meditated on.

My life is then, a fleshing it out, a slow bending of my will into what I already know, yet am still learning and relearning. The biblical theme of remembering here is vital in such an age of distraction.

This slow bending is not linear nor “progress” oriented but is progress nonetheless… as life is so varied and hurried.

It’s as if we have 20 irons in the fire.

For a lifetime.

One seasonal experience will speak to, pound and bend one iron or two or three. And then it may rest for months or years, while other irons are pulled and pounded.

We couldn’t be so arrogant or pompous to think all 20 are finished. Our spiritual maturity progresses in many micro and macro phases. The more integrated and developed each iron gets is the maturity of the man overall. The maturity builds in each part of the man as God calls him further into holiness, further on the water, further up the mountain of transfiguration and revelation.

Even when we think we are mature or holy, the Lord knows our hearts and inner thoughts. He loves us as we are, but He knows us without pretense or deception. He knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more completely as well.

His gaze is direct. It has no obstructions.

He sees every fissure and crevice inside each chamber and valve and artery of our heart and being. The irons in the fire are mistakenly managed. We imagine in our mind that we are working them.

But it really isn’t us at all. And realizing that, is how we abandon pretense and with some active participation, mostly passive reception, we watch and experience his working of the irons in our lives. On orders and as a master Craftsman.

He knows the long game and he knows what he is making of us. He is the master blacksmith, and we are the 20 irons. We are complicated in as much as we are not one single process. We are walking halls, carrying an orchestra inside. He is the conductor, calling it all into the air, calling it all into order, calling his masterpiece to be that is yet to be penned. He is writing it spontaneously, orchestrating at the same time, and only he knows the song in his head and only he can direct it.

The song and the finished work of the steel is in his head, but it originated in his heart. He is love. And you rest in him whether you are aware or oblivious.

We all are spectators to his master work, even when we are the work.

We are his, his master craftsmanship.