Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus · The Sophia Society

We Don't Have to Live This Way w/Derrick Jensen

·49 min·4 clips

“Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency.”

Gary Allen Taylor opens the conversation by setting a serious tone around analysis, action, and responsibility. The discussion quickly lands on a central point: analysis matters, but analysis alone does not change physical reality. Salmon are not being killed because there are not enough books; they are being killed because there are too many dams, among other reasons. That example becomes the bridge to a larger claim that, at some point, somebody has to act. The conversation then opens into a historical example. The guest brings up George Elser, the trade unionist who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1939. He lays out the mechanics of the plot in detail: Elser stole explosives, got a job at a mine to steal more, and planted a bomb in a restaurant where Hitler was scheduled to speak. The attempt failed because of a sequence of timing changes tied to fog and travel logistics, so the bomb went off after the speech had ended. The discussion treats that near miss as historically significant, while also stressing that the same analogy does not cleanly apply to the United States. The exchange explicitly resists equating Trump or Biden with Hitler or treating present-day U.S. politics as the same kind of situation. Taylor keeps the conversation moving with questions that let the argument develop. The tone stays direct and unsentimental. It does not hide its position behind neutrality, but it also draws a line between serious historical comparison and overreach. The episode ends with the familiar closing credits, resource mention, and Patreon invitation. Across the whole run, the show stays with the tension between thought and action, history and urgency, critique and responsibility.

As heard by us

A faith-and-ecology conversation that keeps returning to the gap between knowing harm and stopping it.

Gary Allen Taylor keeps the episode centered on a blunt question: what good is analysis if it never becomes action? The talk moves from salmon and dams to the bigger problem of systems that keep doing damage while people keep explaining them, and that gives the hour some bite.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a faith conversation that moves from analysis to action and wrestles with power, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus