The longer version. If you only wanted the short one, it's on the front page.
This didn't start as a podcast. It started as a reckoning.
There was a moment when I told my wife, with total conviction and no doubt at all, that she was going to hell. I believed it. I thought I was doing the loving thing — that the most caring act available to me was to tell her the truth about where she was heading. In my own words since: I used love as a weapon.
I've had a long time to sit with how that was possible. The uncomfortable part isn't that I was cruel. It's that I wasn't. I was sincere, and certain, and the certainty was the problem. Everything that went wrong went wrong downstream of being sure.
And what broke that day wasn't her faith. It was mine. Not all at once, and not in the way anyone would have noticed from outside — but the moment I heard myself say it, something underneath the belief came loose. If this is what being right sounds like, I thought, then I need to go back and look at how I got here.
What followed was years of it. Reading, arguing, sitting in other people's traditions and asking them what it looks like from inside. Not a crisis — a long, slow, mostly unglamorous re-examination that is still going.
I want to be careful here, because it would make a tidier story to say this is the question I've carried since that morning. It isn't. This one is new. It arrived at the far end of a long journey, not at the start of it, and I've been sitting with it for a fraction of the time I spent getting to it.
Not love as one attribute among many — not a God who is powerful and just and also loving. Love as the whole of it. The entire substance of the thing.
It's a simple premise and it turns out to be enormously demanding, because you have to follow it everywhere. Through Jesus. Through every other tradition on the map. And straight into the passages and doctrines that seem to refuse it outright — the ones that are much easier to skip. The show doesn't skip them. If the premise breaks there, then it breaks, and that's worth knowing.
That premise is a point on the map, not the destination. It's where I'm standing today, held loosely, open to revision the moment something more convincing turns up. I'd rather be moved than right — and given how recently I got here, being moved seems more likely than not.
Because the searching is the thing, not the arriving.
Traditions built thousands of miles and hundreds of years apart, with no way of reaching each other, seem on the surface to have arrived at something that resembles each other. Not the same thing — the differences are real and this show has no interest in flattening them. But there's a family resemblance in places there's no good reason for one to be, and that is worth going to look at whether or not it ever resolves.
And the object of the search isn't really truth. It's people. What they believe, and why. Not to talk anyone out of it, and not to be talked out of anything either. Anyone is welcome to come along while that continues.
These will come up. They sound like gatekeeping and they aren't — they're just the names for the two halves of every argument anyone has ever had about God, and having the names makes the arguments much easier to follow.
What exists? What is actually there?
The study of being. Not how you'd find out, not whether you could prove it — just what the furniture of reality consists of. Whether there's a God, whether there's a soul, whether the world is one substance or two.
On this show: what happens if the thing we call God is love? is an ontological question. It's a claim about what's there.
How do we know? And how would we know we knew?
The study of knowledge — what counts as knowing something, what justifies a belief, and where the limits are. Two people can agree completely about what exists and still disagree violently about whether anyone is in a position to say so.
On this show: no man knows the truth, and no man will, this side of death is an epistemological claim. It's not about God. It's about us, and our equipment.
Which is the whole show in one sentence, once you have both words. It makes an ontological claim and then immediately disqualifies itself epistemologically — and keeps going anyway. That looks like a contradiction and it isn't. It's what it's like to believe something honestly. Most people you'll ever meet are doing exactly this; they just don't narrate it.
It's also why the certainty in that first story was the dangerous part. I hadn't got the ontology wrong so much as I'd forgotten there was an epistemology at all.
Somewhere in those years the searching turned into a manuscript. The Crack in the Light is where a lot of this got worked out the slow way, on paper, long before there was any thought of saying it out loud.
It's written. Whether it ever gets published is a genuinely open question — I've not decided, and it may well sit in a drawer. It isn't for sale, there's nothing to pre-order, and there's no announcement coming that I know of. I mention it only because it's part of how the questions got their shape, and because it would be strange to leave out.
If the show finds enough people who'd want to read it, that might change. That's a long way off, and it isn't a promise.
The map is the part that's finished. Pick the point closest to where you already stand and see what roads run out of it.
Enter the Map