Reading the Bible in the Kingdom of Love: A Conversation with Tom Bolin

Welcome to the encore edition for 2026, the sixth episode of Pop Culture Matters, the sixth episode of season four, and the sixth episode of season five, first released in 2025! In today's episode I discuss Halloween, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, and Samhain (sow-in) too. Growing up, I was clear what Halloween was: a night to get candy and dress up. Halloween is All Hallows Eve, hallows referring to Saints, that is, Halloween was the day before All Saints Day on Nov. 1, and two days prior to All Souls Day on Nov. 2. These links seem strangely tenuous now. Halloween stands on its own. But then I also heard later that Halloween emerged from or was adopted from Samhain (sow-in), an ancient pagan Celtic festival that was celebrated on November 1 in Ireland and Scotland and preceded the arrival of Christianity. These connections, touted both by modern Wiccans and pagans and bemoaned by fundamentalist Christians, have led some Christians not to celebrate Halloween due to pagan or satanic connections. Fang Fang tells me Christians in Indonesia are encouraged not to celebrate the festival. Since I am no expert on Halloween, but do see its ubiquity all around me, I wanted to understand how we got from a Church festival that focused on purgatory, to a modern celebration of wirches, goblins, spooky movies, and a lot of candy. I relied specifically on an excellent book from 2003 by Nicholas Rogers, a historian now retired from York University. The book is Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford University Press, 2003), and one its best features is that history and practices from both Canada and the USA are discussed. I have to say that one thing that I did not get into, as I think it needs its own episode, is Dia De Los Muertas (Day of the Dead). This festival, which is celebrated in Mexico and parts of the USA, traditionally is celebrated on November 1 and 2, though other days, such as October 31, are often included. Day of the Dead in some ways preserves more of the medieval traditions surrounding All Hallows Eve than Halloween does. Nicholas Rogers covers it in depth, but not only does it need its own episode, I think it could benefit from a conversation with someone who knows the lived experience of Dia De Los Muertas. Next year! This podcast emerges from the Centre for Christian Engagement at St Mark's College, the Catholic college at UBC, a centre that explores the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition and seek to learn from others, other Christians, other religious traditions, and those who do not claim any particular or formal religious affiliation. Upcoming Podcast Episodes and Events And now some news on upcoming podcast episodes: Let us know what you want to discuss next on Pop Culture Matters. Follow us at our Instagram page @stmarkscce or our new Facebook page Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark's, and drop us a line as to what you want to see or hear. Or email us with your suggestions to [email protected] What Matters Most: Conversations About Religion has started its fifth year. Coming soon, an episode on Hinduism and Catholicism featuring Dr. Ted Ulrich, the Rev. Dr. Rob James from his new home in England on 50 OT Stories for children, and Danny Zacharias and Chris Hoklotubbe on their book Reading the Bible on Turtle Island: An Invitation to North American Indigenous Interpretation. Upcoming events: Our next event is with Bill Cavanaugh on November 16, part of the Christian nationalism series leading up to our Cross Purposes: Christianity and Nationalism conference. His lecture is called Idolatry and the Eucharist and you can now sign up for the lecture on Eventbrite for in person or live streaming. Please check it out. Thanks again for listening and remember pop culture matters. John W. Martens Intro music for this podcast from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/ancient-caves License code: WGRTZGRDSALHU07U

Welcome to What Matters Most, episode 5 of our fifth season. You were just listening to Dr. Jane Barter, a professor in the University of Winnipeg Religion and Culture department and Joint Masters Program Chair. I'm Dr. John Martens, the host of What Matters Most and Director for the Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark's College at UBC in Vancouver. In this episode I speak with Jane Barter about Pope Leo's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. This is the fourth episode on What Matters Most to discuss the encyclical and like our previous episodes, new ground was broken in my understanding of the encyclical during this conversation. I walked through the encyclical on my own a few months ago, and then I spoke to two ethicists, Drs. Tisha Rajendra and Ruben Rosario Rodreiguez, on AI, migration, war, and whatever else came up for them in their readings. The third episode dedicated to Magnifica Humanitas featured St. Mark's theology faculty and our conversation focused a lot on the anthropology of the document, the role of education, about AI and with AI, the problem of deep fakes and how that impacts especially women and children, and how one builds a civilization of love, grounded in truth and humanity, in contrast to the forces that desire power, the technocratic paradigm, and increasing calls for warfare. This episode with Jane Barter focused a lot on the human cost of AI, something I toyed with as a title for this episode, and the way the inherent dignity of human beings is constantly under threat by the structures of sin, now found in AI, which is manifested in violence against people militarily, such as in Gaza, and in the violence of work in which people are increasingly seen as things to be monetized and surveyed. This is a powerful episode. Dr. Jane Barter's (she/her) research interests include political theology, contemporary, Christian thought, theopolitics, religion, and memory. Barter's research bridges the fields of Christian theology, political theology, decolonial, and feminist thought. Her work engages Christian thought and history with contemporary ethical and political questions, with particular attention to the context of colonialism. She has published three monographs, including her a recent book on witnessing to political atrocity, Theopolitics and the Era of the Witness (Routledge. 2025). She recently co-edited (with Doris Kieser, St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta) a special volume of the Journal of Moral Theology on the papal visit and apology to survivors of Residential Schools in Canada. She is also general editor of the forthcoming (2026) multi-volume T & T Clark Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (Bloomsbury Press). She is currently working on a new book, The Pope's Two Cities: Babel and Jerusalem in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The word I was struggling to find to describe my conversation with Jane was "generative." I used the word productive, but that sounds too much like the work of a factory and I was aiming for something more creative. Generative was the word. Jane delved into aspects of the document that I had not seen with as much clarity as she brought, including Christian theologies of labour and whether Catholic theology is too optimistic about the rights of labour being respected in the time of AI and digital capitalism. She spoke clearly about the alienating and corrosive impacts of technocratic capitalism and the forms of enslavement taking place under technocratic capitalism. But she also noted that Pope Leo in his recognition of this is doing something new, that the role of work is a central element of his papacy and that Leo is acknowledging that the treatment of labour under digital capitalism is foundationally abusive and that AI perpetuates a value system of some people being considered more valuable than others. But Leo is pushing back against that, not the first pope to do so for certain, but also interpreting CST as grounded in a preferential option fo

5th Year Anniversary! Welcome to What Matters Most! I'm Dr. John Martens, the host of What Matters Most and Director for the Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark's College at UBC. Do you know I have been saying that for 5 years now? On October 7, 2022, we released the first episode of What Matters Most with my friend and once upon a time colleague at America Media, Fr. Jim Martin. We have been doing this for 5 years because people have been listening for 5 years! Thank you so much for listening, whether you started with episode 1, 10, 40, or 106, our last episode. Or somewhere in between. I appreciate you joining me on this journey. It is a shared journey! In the spirit of sharing, I acknowledge that the land on which I record this podcast is the shared, traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Tsawwassen people, where I and my family live. St. Mark's and Corpus Christi Colleges are on the unsurrendered, traditional, and ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). The Land we are on is known as ?əlqsən ("Ulksun," or Point Grey); it is a promontory claimed by the British as a Colonial Admiralty reserve in the mid-nineteenth century and occupied by the University of British Columbia since 1914. This land has been a site of learning for many generations before the Colleges stood here, and we recognize our obligations as teachers, researchers, and scholars in ensuring that our classrooms and our work uphold the best of that longstanding learning context now and into the future. In acknowledging Musqueam territory, we recognize that acknowledgment is an active dedication to more just, more accountable relations. More just relations in many ways is at the heart of this podcast and its ethos, more just relations with our neighbours of all religious backgrounds, or none. We have had guests who represent many, though not all religious traditions by any means. Many guests have been Catholic, which makes sense at a Catholic college and centre, but many have been Christians of other sorts, and Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, and people who explore religion as scholars, but have no particular religious tradition, or people who study religions other than the ones they profess. I love it. I love talking to people about what they think and believe, what they study, their ideas, their hopes, their practices, their beliefs. In another podcast, I mentioned the great Catholic theologians Bernard Lonergan who said that the Catholic tradition is not a forced uniformity, but a unity among diversity, similar to indigenous ways of knowing. This is increasingly important for Catholics themselves but for people in all of the world's religions. There are temptations in Catholicism and Christianity that are coming to fruition currently in a sort of rigidity and fundamentalism that rejects the other in numerous ways, whether other other forms of Christianity, other religions, other ethnicities. But we are also seeing this growing in other religions around the world too. This is something we resist here. Indeed, and you will hear this in a forthcoming podcast, the position we take is one that is found in a recent document from the Vatican, A JOURNEY OF HOPE: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate. Do read the whole document, but I will start at the end of paragraph 53, where it says, "Today, in the face of those who foment divisions and stir up conflicts, believers of different traditions—and above all their leaders—while remaining aware of their irreducible differences, are called to seek, with clarity and hope, the conditions necessary for peaceful coexistence." Paragraph 54 says, "To achieve this goal, a genuine shift in mindset is necessary: abandoning the logic of defensiveness, hostility, or conquest in order to adopt an attitude that is open, benevolent, and courageous. Monolithic and isolated models, which encourage a closed view of reality,

Welcome to What Matters Most, episode 3 of our fifth season. This is also the third episode on What Matters Most to discuss the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and every conversation reveals nuances to the document and aspects of it we have not discussed previously. I surveyed the encyclical on my own a few months ago, but next I brought in a couple of experts in moral theology and Christian ethics, Drs. Tisha Rajendra and Ruben Rosario Rodreiguez to discuss the encyclical on AI, migration, war, and whatever else came up for them in their readings. This third episode dedicated to Magnifica Humanitas features St. Mark's theology faculty and our conversation focused a lot on the anthropology of the document, the role of education, about AI and with AI, the problem of deep fakes and how that impacts especially women and children, and how one builds a civilization of love, grounded in truth and humanity, in contrast to the forces that desire power, the technocratic paradigm, and increasing calls for warfare. The guests on this episode were Dr. Fiona Li is an assistant professor and inaugural holder of the Archbishop J. Michael Miller Chair in Catholic Studies at Corpus Christi-St Mark's College. She is originally from Toronto and received her PhD in Theological Studies from Regis College and U of T. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of feminist theology, Chinese Canadian Catholic women's experiences, and Mariology. Rev. Dr. Nick Meislis a priest of the archdiocese of Vancouver, whose parish is St. Peter's in New Westminster, a professor of scripture at St. Mark's College, and at Christ the King Seminary, and he recently earned his doctorate in Scripture, writing a dissertation on 1 Corinthians 7, supervised by John Barclay, at University of Durham and Harry Maier at VST. His dissertation will be published soon. Dr. Nick Olkovich is an associate Professor and Marie Anne Blondin Chair in Catholic Theology at St. Mark's College. He holds a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. His ongoing research focuses primarily on the relationship between ethics, politics and religion in democratic contexts and on a variety of issues in theological anthropology, ecclesiology, and foundational theology. A few notes about documents and popular culture that were mentioned in this episode. There have been two previous Church documents on AI: January 14, 2023, Dicastery for The Doctrine of the Faith; Dicastery for Culture and Education: Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence March 4, 2026, the International Theological Commission released a 50-page reflection titled "Quo vadis, humanitas? Thinking Christian anthropology in the face of some scenarios concerning the future of the human." Also, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think About Artificial Intelligence—Before It's Too Late by Cory Doctorow was mentioned as was The Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's Open AI by Karen Hao. And Fiona mentioned Pixel Perfect, which turns out to be a Disney Channel movie from 2004. A few thanks are in order. First of all, I am grateful to Martin Strong, who guides me in the podcasting world and joins me for the Pop Culture Matters regularly. Second, the episodes are edited, engineered, and produced by Kevin Eng who is the first listener to all the episodes and my consultant for each episode, especially with the snippets that begin each episode. Thank you, Kevin, for all of your expertise and support and especially for saving this episode when I could not convert it to a listenable or viewable file. Finally, to the Fang Fang Chandra, the CCE assistant, who helps me bring this podcast to you, but also makes the CCE run so much more smoothly. I also want to thank our donors to the Centre, whose generosity enables this work to take place at all: Peter Bull, Angus Reid, and Andy Szocs. We are

Welcome to What Matters Most, episode 2 of our fifth season and episode one of the "Childhood, Education, and Family Relations in Early Christian Communities" SSHRC Insight Grant Podcasts. This episode is the first in a series of episodes that are funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant. SSHRC is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Margaret MacDonald and I are co-principal investigators on this five-year grant titled "Childhood, Education, and Family Relations in Early Christian Communities." Cornelia Horn and Teresa Morgan are collaborators on this research grant. We are thankful for SSHRC's support of our research through this Insight Grant. Here is a part of our proposal submitted to SSHRC: "The main aim is to explore the relationship between childhood, education, and family relations in early Christian communities and their relevant contexts from Jewish beginnings to the Late Antique period (approx. 100 BCE-500 CE). The research reflects the trans-disciplinary interest in the experiences of children which have often been neglected. Employing an emerging theoretical approach, "childist" interpretation, investigators will move children from the margins to the center of investigation. They will highlight potential advances in our understanding resulting from a deliberate effort to listen to and learn from children through analysis of ancient textual and material evidence. Researchers will highlight findings which suggest that children and youth were important agents, instrumental to growth, the passing on of traditions, and transition into new generations. They will draw upon the category of "intersectionality" (exploring identity with reference to overlapping factors linked to status), especially the intersection between the lives of slaves and children (free and slave) in educational experiences. Rather than focus exclusively on the use of teaching language and authority figures (usually male), the aim is to probe the parameters of educational spaces, paying attention also to the presence of women, slaves, and children." In this first SSHRC funded episode I speak with the team about the parameters of the grant. What do we mean by education? Formal and informal education? Literate education? Scribal education? What methodologies are we using? How do you study ancient children? Were there differences among the educational experiences of Greek, Roman, and Jewish children? How did these differences influence the emerging Christian movement? Who were the teachers of children, and adults for that matter, as perhaps the lives of children were more integrated into the adult world in antiquity than the lives of children today. We had a lively discussion and even though our team comprises experts on all of these topics, it is clear that in these beginning stages of our research, we have much to sort out and define. I find this exciting, as I know Cornelia, Margaret, and Teresa do also, and I want to invite you along on our research journey, which begins its public dissemination with this first episode. I also want to introduce the team a bit more, which for this episode will include me, and focus on some of their research relevant for this grant. I cannot cover all of the teams research in this episode but I will highlight some key contributions: Dr. Cornelia Horn is Full Professor & Chair, Depart. of Oriental Christian and Byzantine Studies, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She is the author, with me, of Let the Little Children Come to Me": Childhood and Children in Early Christianity. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. She was also, with Reidar Aasgaard, a principal investigator on the major research study, "Childhood in Early Europe," through the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway. Some of her articles are as follows: "Raising Martyrs and Ascetics: A Diachronic Comparison of Educational Role-Models for Early Christian Children." In