Christian imagination at the pub table.
Believe to See is a conversational arts-and-faith show staged around the Anselm Society Digital Pub. Its episodes connect Christian imagination with everything from dragon stories and video game music to art made by troubling people, multiverse films, birds, grief, and joy.
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Believe to See is a Christian arts-and-storytelling show built around the conceit of the Anselm Society Digital Pub. The setting matters. It gives the conversations a fireside rhythm, with jokes, digressions, and earnest questions sharing the same table. The show is interested in imagination as a Christian practice, not as an escape hatch from ordinary life. Recent episodes range widely. Saints become a way to think about stand-up comedy and holy foolishness. Dragons become a thread running from Scripture through church history and Christian literature. Video game soundtracks become serious examples of contemporary composition because games now carry sweeping narratives that need ambitious scores. Stranger Things becomes a way to ask how artistic truth can appear outside explicitly religious spaces. The show also takes on thornier subjects, including whether good art can be separated from harmful artists or offensive opinions. It does not reduce those questions to slogans. It lets distinctions breathe. That is one of its strengths. A conversation about joy can move from Family Guy’s nihilism to courage, dread, wartime suffering, and hope as defiance. A conversation about birds can hold grief and Monty Python in the same opening minutes. The show’s register is learned but informal, more pub table than lecture hall. It suits listeners who enjoy theology, criticism, fantasy, film, books, music, and the odd comic detour in close proximity. Believe to See is not simply reviewing media. It is asking what stories train people to notice, love, resist, mourn, and hope for.
Made for: For thoughtful Christian listeners, writers, artists, readers, film fans, and pop-culture obsessives who like theology with humor still intact. It also suits anyone curious about how faith shapes attention to stories, beauty, grief, joy, and moral complexity.
What sets it apart: The show’s pub-table frame lets serious arts criticism feel conversational instead of academic. It pairs Christian imagination with unusually varied material: saints, comedians, dragons, video games, Stranger Things, troubling people, birds, and defiant joy.
The podcast of the Anselm Society's Arts Guild. Join host Matt Mellema and a rotation of guests at the digital pub table for conversations about faith and storytelling. "Some things have to be believed to be seen." -Madeleine L'Engle
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Matthew Mellema uses playful disagreement and self-deprecating humor to make Christian conversations about art, stories and moral judgment more open-ended.
Believe to See turns questions about books, film, imagination and moral responsibility into loose table talk, with Matthew Mellema steering serious ideas toward playful comparisons and self-directed jokes.
Jane Austen meets Family Guy at a digital pub, and you get the seat nearest the argument.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
St. Francis, holy fools and an elusive performer lead a conversation about comedy, faith and art.
Matthew Mellema asks Jason Crawford what St. Francis of Assisi has to do with stand-up comedy. Crawford, whose book considers comedians through the idea of God's fools, describes Francis singing in bad French and preaching to animals.
McCarthy's prose leads to a candid discussion of art, its makers and where to draw ethical lines.
A Vanity Fair profile connected to Cormac McCarthy gives Believe to See a hard question: how should admiration for an artist's work affect the way people judge and support the artist? Matthew Mellema has his own reason to care.
Mellema and Gonzalez consider joy as an act of defiance in a fearful world.
Matthew Mellema begins with Family Guy and its willingness to make a joke at anyone's expense. From there, his conversation with Maya Gonzalez moves to a harder question: how people hold on to joy when the world gives them reason to be afraid.
Austen's love of novels prompts a warm case against literary snobbery.
Jane Austen's taste for novels gives Matthew Mellema a way into a familiar kind of literary snobbery. An Austen fan, he discusses Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf and the novels Austen mentioned in her own writing.
A pickup game and a virtual world prompt a playful discussion of childhood and outdoor play.
How do you destroy a child's imagination? The hosts turn that question toward the small negotiations of childhood play: who joins a pickup game, how rules are agreed on, and what children do when they have to solve a problem together.
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Scripture, surrender and faith put into practice.
The hosts of Believe to See introduce a conversation with author Carolyn Leiloglou about art, faith, and storytelling, beginning with a whimsical observation of a child stepping out of a painting.
On Believe to See, Matthew Mellema talks with Jason Crawford about Crawford's book God's Fools: Saints, Prophets, Martyrs in the Making of Modern Comedy.
Matthew Mellema explores the cultural phenomenon of multiverse stories in film and their connection to faith, art, and Christian imagination.
Matthew Mellema discusses the value of video game soundtracks for creative work and their artistic merit, connecting to faith and storytelling.
Matthew Mellema explores the role of dragons in the Bible and Christian tradition, arguing that a Christian imagination has historically involved dragon stories.
A discussion on the concept that all truth is God's truth, exploring its application in art and storytelling through the lens of the show Stranger Things.
Courtney Ellis discusses her book on birds, grief, and hope, exploring the intersection of faith, art, and storytelling.
Believe to See hosts Matthew Mellema, Mandy Houck, and Christina discuss the ethics of engaging with art made by morally compromised artists, prompted by a Vanity Fair profile revealing that Cormac McCarthy — Mellema's favorite writer — began a relationship with Augusta Britt when he was 42 and she was 16.
Believe to See host Matthew Mellema interviews Jamiya Gonzalez, author of Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight (Zondervan HarperCollins, April 2025), about the case for joy as a counter-cultural and distinctly Christian posture in art and storytelling.
Host Matthew Mellema of the Believe to See podcast talks with librarian Sarah Pottinger and Mandy Houck about Rebecca Romney's book Jane Austen's Bookshelf, which reconstructs the novels that shaped Jane Austen's writing.
The Anselm Society announces a weekend event and discusses designing a video game with Christian themes.
Co-hosts Mandy Houck and Christina Brown interview photographer Isaac Hans about his work and the relationship between faith, art, and storytelling.
["Believe to See, a podcast of the Anselm Society Arts Guild, centers on Anthony Esselin's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and the case for unsupervised play.