Mount Vigil

"If the Church is really supposed to be yours, you'll have to make that much more obvious than it is at present."Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, paraphrasing the temptations of ChristThe Church is a vital step in the Story of God. It hearkens back to Eden; it...

In this episode, Anthony and Blaine discuss the Ascension and Pentecost, linking those events as two sides of the same coin in the story of God. In the Ascension, Jesus has anchored our humanity in the heavens. At Pentecost, the Sermon on the Mount and the Old...

In this episode, Anthony and Blaine discuss suffering, surrender, and incarnate spirituality as Jesus’s solution to the World and the Flesh. This is the third installment in a three-part series on Jesus as the crescendo of the Story of God.Also in this conversation:...

In this episode, Blaine and Anthony continue their conversation on the work of Jesus: How, exactly, does Jesus deal with the problem of spiritual oppression? Why does it matter that Jesus reigns supreme over the council? Where is the gate of hades, and what would it...

In this episode, Blaine and Anthony continue their series on the Story of God by arriving, at last, at Jesus. In particular, this show addresses the way in which Jesus deals with sin and death so that the story of Israel, with its law and sacrificial system to manage...

Why did God choose to create the nation of Israel? How was God's decision to create a people where there was no people part of his plan to deal with sin, death, and spiritual oppression? How does the story of YHWH and Israel prepare humanity for the ultimate...

In this special episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss self-examination. Self-examination, or Examen, is a practice that followers of Jesus have used for centuries to see their lives as God sees them, and, therefore, as they really are. The 5 steps of Examen Center...

In this episode we continue our Story of God series by talking about the Fall, or more accurately the Falls. We explore the origins of evil in the world, including the first human sin, the role of depraved spiritual powers, and the descent into darkness that forms the...

In this episode we pick up where we left off in telling the Story of God. We ask the big questions like: What is the meaning of life? Why did God create is? What are we here for? Some of the things we cover in this episode: How babies are like rainbow trout How...

We're interrupting our series on the story of God to talk about the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Church's response to it.Some of the things we cover in this episode: What our fleshly responses and our repentance of those responses looks like How Christians can find...

This is the second in our series on the Story of God. In this episode we discuss the spiritual powers found in the Bible: the Elohim and the Divine Counsel, angels and demons. Our aim is to continue developing the foundations worldview this is not selectively...

This is the first in a series of episodes on the story of God. We've talked about seeing reality as a story, we've talked about Apocalypse or spiritual revelation as to the nature of that story, and in our Endgame episode we talked about what it's like at the end of...

Grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca said that to succeed "you must study the endgame before anything else.” In this episode we talk about endgame, an idea from chess that we extrapolate to answer the question, What is it like to be at the end of a great cosmic war?We...

In today's episode we talk about Apocalypse: the word, the genre of literature, the spiritual event. We attempt to develop a nuanced, robust, rounded-out sense of Apocalypse, which means "revelation," a sense that is grounded in the fact that, ultimately, the Good...

In this episode, Blaine and Anthony discuss a foundational ability, an ability on which the rest of the Mount Vigil work depends: seeing reality. It’s never been easy to see reality well. But it’s especially difficult in our time: the fallout of postmodernism and...

In this episode, we introduce Mount Vigil and the themes we'll be unpacking over the course of this project. 1. Understanding God's storyWhat's the nature of the great cosmic story we're in, and where in that story do we think we are? What's missing from our...