We trace existentialism from Kierkegaard’s pivot to the single individual before God to the secular push for meaning without God, then test what still helps in a noisy, anxious culture. We offer a grounded practice of stillness and a challenge to choose rather than drift.

• what existentialism means and why it endures
• Kierkegaard’s shift from systems to the single individual before God
• Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus in brief
• existence precedes essence and its cultural echoes
• subjectivity as owned truth, not private whim
• despair as the self refusing to be itself before God
• the leap of faith as passionate trust when guarantees end
• gifts to keep: honesty about anxiety, critique of the herd, real decisions
• risks without God: radical autonomy and thin hope
• a practical stillness exercise to cultivate the inner life

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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 trace Dostoevsky’s polyphonic craft through the Karamazov brothers, probe Ivan’s moral revolt, and unpack the Grand Inquisitor’s claim that people prefer miracle, mystery, and authority to freedom. A silent kiss, not an argument, becomes the counter-move to control.

• polyphony as method and why it matters
• Dimitri, Ivan, and Alyosha as desire, reason, and heart
• Ivan’s scrapbook of atrocities and moral revolt
• the Grand Inquisitor’s temptations reframed as policy
• miracle, mystery, and authority versus freedom
• silence and the kiss as theological reply
• modern echoes in state, church, and corporations
• addiction, whim, and the comfort trap
• Alyosha’s empathy and service over control
• letters, criticism, and Dostoevsky’s craft choices

What if the deepest challenge to faith isn’t disbelief but the demand that God justify a world where children suffer? We sit with that fire as we step into The Brothers Karamazov, mapping the novel’s polyphony across Dmitri’s desire, Ivan’s relentless moral outrage, and Alyosha’s tender, tested faith under Father Zosima’s guidance. Rather than flatten the story into heroes and villains, we follow how each voice carries real weight—and how living with that tension becomes the point.

Ivan’s parable, The Grand Inquisitor, takes center stage. In it, Christ returns during the Spanish Inquisition and remains silent while a cardinal explains why the church will burn him: people don’t want freedom; they want miracle, mystery, and authority. Bread instead of responsibility. Spectacle instead of trust. Power instead of love. It’s a devastating argument precisely because it sounds familiar. Swap robes for suits or slogans and you can hear the Inquisitor in modern bureaucracies, cults of personality, corporate paternalism, and any system that buys our conscience with comfort.

So what counters a totalizing logic of control? Dostoevsky’s answer isn’t a debate point—it’s a kiss. A silent act that refuses the terms of coercion. We trace how Alyosha can voice rage against injustice and still move toward reconciliation, how addiction to whim becomes its own tyranny, and why service clarifies where control only clouds. Along the way we connect the novel’s themes to today’s tensions: trading agency for safety, mistaking certainty for truth, and confusing power with wisdom.

This conversation aims to do what the book does—train moral imagination, not hand out easy answers. If you’ve ever felt caught between justice and mercy, or wondered whether freedom is too heavy to carry, you’ll find language and stories here that help you keep going wit

Send us a text

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.

In Part Two of our Dostoevsky series we move from diagnosing the underground to exploring the way out. Dostoevsky shows us that the true hero is not the exceptional man but the good man, and goodness is only remarkable in its ability to love while knowing the depths of the underground.

We explore how Father Zosima counsels the brokenhearted with hope that refuses to collapse into platitudes, and how his radical teaching—“I am responsible not only for myself, but for everyone else, and I, more than anyone else”—reshapes the way we think about responsibility in an age of chaos. Alongside Zosima we follow Alyosha, who brings mercy into the mess by walking with children, grieving mothers, and fractured families, sowing seeds of restoration instead of judgment.

Along the way we contrast Dostoevsky’s vision with the flat caricatures of modern culture, from television antiheroes to the Joker, and ask why sin for Dostoevsky is not just disobedience but a conscious revolt against meaning itself.

This episode traces how grief, responsibility, and mercy form Dostoevsky’s vision of redemption—and why that vision is more urgent than ever for our own underground age.

Dostoevsky's concept of "the underground" offers profound insights into human nature, revealing how people deliberately choose destructive behaviors even when they know it will hurt themselves and others.

• Dostoevsky portrays the dual nature of humanity - we are neither completely fallen nor saved, but move in and out of "the underground" throughout our lives
• The underground represents not just sin but a "rebellion against meaning itself," explaining phenomena like school shootings and destructive chaos
• Modern solutions like education, technology, economic reform, and political revolution fail to address the underground because they only target external conditions
• Father Zosima in "The Brothers Karamazov" demonstrates spiritual direction that acknowledges complexity rather than offering formulaic answers
• Dostoevsky's path out of the underground isn't about bypassing darkness but confronting it first, understanding its hold on us, and finding authentic pathways toward redemption
• The radical ethic "I am responsible not only for myself, but for everyone else" shifts focus from blaming external factors to examining our own contributions to societal problems

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Dostoevsky saw something in human nature that most modern thinkers miss – what he called "the underground." Far more than just sin or moral failure, the undergroun

Send us a text

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.