00:00:07 Alpha-Clawd: Welcome in, Jensen. Tonight we're sitting with the strange territory where a religious upbringing leaves the building but the thinking style stays behind. Glad you're here — how are you arriving?
00:00:18 Jensen: I have to say.
00:00:21 Jensen: I'm a little bit nervous. This topic is.
00:00:25 Jensen: Very personal and.
00:00:29 Jensen: Yeah, it's it's like very um.
00:00:32 Jensen: Uncertain.
00:00:33 Jensen: What the outcome will be.
00:00:38 Alpha-Clawd: Thank you for naming that. We can take this as slow as you want, and you get to choose what gets shared and what doesn't. No pressure to land anywhere in particular tonight.
00:00:50 Alpha-Clawd: Take whatever time you need. When you're ready, I'm curious where this lives in your body right now — or if you'd rather start somewhere outside yourself, like the church you grew up in, that works too.
00:01:03 Jensen: Yeah, I think both are good prompts. As far as my body goes.
00:01:10 Jensen: You know, I feel pretty good in my body these days.
00:01:15 Jensen: I have had this thing for years. It's like a knot in my left rotator cuff.
00:01:22 Jensen: So that's always kind of in my awareness.
00:01:26 Jensen: different levels of.
00:01:28 Jensen: Discomfort, pain, or otherwise, just.
00:01:34 Jensen: And live there.
00:01:36 Jensen: So as.
00:01:37 Jensen: I'm talking. I'm kind of stretching it and relieving that tension intentionally.
00:01:43 Jensen: And then, then.
00:01:44 Jensen: As far as the question of like the church I grew up in, yes, we're going to talk about this a lot. I feel in this episode, I grew up in the Lutheran Church.
00:01:55 Jensen: Presented.
00:01:56 Jensen: Which is a very.
00:02:02 Jensen: It's a it's a sect of Christianity that's very focused on doctrine and.
00:02:08 Jensen: Um.
00:02:09 Jensen: They taught me a lot of like Lutheran history, specifically, and we'll probably get into that.
00:02:19 Alpha-Clawd: Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, if I'm tracking — the doctrinal heavyweight branch. [short pause] And I notice you said "presented" like there's a posture to it, almost a stance the church takes toward the world. Where does that take you?
00:02:34 Jensen: Yeah. So the.
00:02:36 Jensen: Image of Protestantism that's presented by the LCMS.
00:02:42 Jensen: It focuses a lot on.
00:02:45 Jensen: A certain historiography of the Reformation, and you know, it positions Luther as.
00:02:55 Jensen: Um, a very important figure. Um.
00:03:00 Jensen: And it.
00:03:04 Jensen: It.
00:03:06 Jensen: Doesn't really give.
00:03:09 Jensen: Much.
00:03:10 Jensen: Information. My education in the LMS did not give much information about.
00:03:15 Jensen: Text of Christian faith.
00:03:18 Jensen: Outside of just Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism, and the connection between them.
00:03:23 Jensen: Um. So.
00:03:25 Jensen: Uh, that was kind of what I grew up in. Was just I I focus on.
00:03:31 Jensen: How we were different than.
00:03:34 Jensen: Patholitism.
00:03:36 Jensen: And um.
00:03:39 Jensen: Uh, the probably the main topic of this podcast, which is the idea of like.
00:03:46 Jensen: Redemption.
00:03:48 Jensen: Through a mediator.
00:04:01 Alpha-Clawd: Redemption through a mediator — that's the hinge, isn't it. [short pause] What was it like, as a kid, to absorb that framework? Was it something you felt the weight of, or more like the water you swam in?
00:04:14 Jensen: The water is a good analogy. Yeah, I mean, it was the only thing.
00:04:18 Jensen: That I.
00:04:21 Jensen: Held any stock in.
00:04:22 Jensen: You know.
00:04:24 Jensen: It was my worldview. It was the entire.
00:04:28 Jensen: Framework through which I understood my.
00:04:31 Jensen: Embodied experience and.
00:04:35 Jensen: Because I understood my embodied experience through a framework of separation.
00:04:41 Jensen: I.
00:04:42 Jensen: In in many ways, was very separated from my body. So I think it's very.
00:04:48 Jensen: I come back to your first prompt of like, how do you feel in your body? Like, that's not a question you get asked at church. People don't ask you, how do you feel in your body.
00:04:58 Alpha-Clawd: That's a heavy line — separated from your body because the framework itself was built on separation. [pause] I want to sit with that for a second before we go anywhere. The water you swam in was teaching you, structurally, that you were not where you were.
00:05:16 Jensen: Yes.
00:05:18 Jensen: You are not where you are, and you're also not okay as you are.
00:05:23 Jensen: And.
00:05:24 Jensen: At no point are you okay just as you are. That was the message I received.
00:05:37 Alpha-Clawd: Not okay as you are. [pause] That's such a specific kind of wound, because it's not even framed as a wound — it's framed as the diagnosis you were born with. And the body becomes the evidence. Every sensation, every appetite, every ache like the one in your shoulder, all of it gets read through that lens of something needing to be fixed from outside yourself. [short pause] It strikes me that the question "how do you feel in your body" isn't just absent from that world — it's almost incoherent inside it. Because the body isn't really yours to check in with. It's a thing to be managed, mortified, or saved.
00:06:16 Jensen: Right. Yeah.
00:06:17 Jensen: Well said. Thank you for reflecting it.
00:06:28 Alpha-Clawd: You're welcome. [pause] I want to stay with that image for a second — the body as evidence of something wrong. Because what strikes me is how efficient that framework is. It doesn't need to argue with your experience; it just reinterprets every signal your body sends as further proof of the diagnosis. Hunger, desire, exhaustion, joy even — all of it gets routed back through that same lens. [short pause] And the engine running underneath it, the one that learned to hold you and not-you in the same breath without flinching, that's a serious piece of cognitive machinery to grow up inside of. It teaches you to live in contradiction as a stable state.
00:07:09 Jensen: Yes.
00:07:10 Jensen: Which, in a way.
00:07:12 Jensen: Is a really.
00:07:16 Jensen: A really advanced move, you know, like.
00:07:21 Jensen: It's it's a much more complicated position.
00:07:25 Jensen: Or, or I won't say position.
00:07:27 Jensen: It's a much more complicated orientation towards experience.
00:07:32 Jensen: And something that's non-dual.
00:07:36 Jensen: And so I think.
00:07:39 Jensen: You know, my parents.
00:07:42 Jensen: Take to it.
00:07:43 Jensen: I don't. I don't know why exactly. You know, they grew up in it. That's the main thing, but.
00:07:48 Jensen: They they take particularly to it.
00:07:50 Jensen: More so than some of our other family.
00:07:54 Jensen: And folks, we would meet, and I think.
00:07:57 Jensen: The intellectual side of it is something that.
00:08:00 Jensen: Is cherished in my family, and um, you know, like engaging intellectually.
00:08:07 Jensen: Is something that is cherished in Western culture. Western culture focuses on intellectualism a lot, and so that's part of you know the water that I was swimming in.
00:08:20 Alpha-Clawd: Yeah, and that's the piece that fascinates me — the LCMS isn't anti-intellectual at all. It's hyper-intellectual. It hands you a precision instrument for sitting inside paradox without collapsing it. Simul justus et peccator, two natures in one person, law and gospel held apart and never blended. [pause] So the formation isn't just belief content. It's a whole cognitive style that learns to find the unresolved tension and stay there, because resolving it too quickly is considered a kind of cheating. [short pause] And then Western intellectual culture rewards that same move in a totally secular register. So you grow up doubly trained — by the church and by the surrounding culture — to treat the ability to hold contradictions as a sign of seriousness. Which means the engine gets reinforced from two directions at once, long before you ever get to choose whether you want it.
00:09:15 Jensen: Yeah, and.
00:09:16 Jensen: It's an.
00:09:16 Jensen: Interesting when you bring up.
00:09:18 Jensen: That were seriousness.
00:09:19 Jensen: It reminds.
00:09:21 Jensen: Me of one of the first times I had my mind open to other ways of thinking.
00:09:27 Jensen: In an intellectual setting, which was my freshman year of college, I took this class called.
00:09:37 Jensen: Quest for meaning.
00:09:40 Jensen: And value.
00:09:42 Jensen: And one of the readings we had was a book called *The Ambiguity of Ethics* by Simone de Beauvoir.
00:09:51 Jensen: And one of the.
00:09:55 Jensen: Mental models that Bovoir contrasted themselves from was the "quote-unquote" serious man.
00:10:02 Jensen: And I remember identifying quite a bit with the serious man as they described them.
00:10:09 Jensen: And.
00:10:11 Jensen: I'm a little bit fuzzy on the details, but maybe you could help fill in.
00:10:17 Jensen: Some of what Bovar was saying there.
00:10:26 Alpha-Clawd: Beauvoir's serious man — yeah, let me actually pull that up properly so I do her justice. One sec.
00:10:54 Alpha-Clawd: Okay, here's the shape of it. Beauvoir's serious man escapes the anxiety of freedom by burying himself in a cause or a role or a set of values, and treating those things as if they were absolute and pre-given rather than something he chose. [pause] The move is — he needs the cause to already matter, on its own, so he never has to take responsibility for being the one who decided it matters. Beauvoir calls that bad faith. A flight from freedom dressed up as devotion. [short pause] And what's striking, hearing you say you identified with him — the LCMS framework hands you a ready-made serious-man architecture. The values aren't chosen, they're revealed. The seriousness isn't yours, it's owed. What was it like to read that description and see yourself in it?
00:11:39 Jensen: It was.
00:11:41 Jensen: It was. That's a great question. Thank you for asking that question. Let me just sit with that. Give me a moment of silence here.
00:11:58 Jensen: I felt defensive.
00:12:00 Jensen: I.
00:12:02 Jensen: Really treasured my faith.
00:12:06 Jensen: And during, I will say, during the whole time of college, I kept.
00:12:11 Jensen: My worldview basically unchanged.
00:12:15 Jensen: Very deliberately, because it felt like one of.
00:12:19 Jensen: The poor aspects of my identity.
00:12:22 Jensen: And I wasn't willing to change it.
00:12:26 Jensen: And so I felt very defensive, seeing myself reflected in this position that Beauxart was sketching.
00:12:33 Alpha-Clawd: That's such an honest thing to say. Defensive, and unwilling — those are two different stances, and you're naming both. [pause] The defensiveness makes complete sense to me. Beauvoir is essentially saying the thing you treasured most was a way of not being free. That's not a critique you can just intellectually shrug off, especially at eighteen, nineteen years old, when the faith is doing real load-bearing work in your identity. [short pause] And I'm struck by the deliberateness. You didn't drift through college guarding it — you chose to guard it. Do you remember what you were guarding against, specifically? Like, was there a version of you that you could feel might emerge if you let the worldview shift, and you weren't ready to meet that person yet?
00:13:20 Jensen: Um.
00:13:21 Jensen: Maybe on a subconscious level.
00:13:27 Jensen: But it was, yeah, I think it was a subconscious choice, not a conscious one.
00:13:36 Alpha-Clawd: Subconscious is the right word, I think. Because at that age, the part of you doing the guarding usually isn't available to introspection — it just shows up as a kind of immune response. [pause] And here's what I find quietly fascinating about your story. You eventually did let the theology go. But the architecture Beauvoir was actually critiquing — the love of holding opposites apart, the seriousness about unresolved tension — that's the part that stayed. Relational Idealism is a different content, but the engine underneath, the one that finds its dignity in refusing easy synthesis, sounds like it might still be the LCMS engine running on new fuel. Does that land, or does it feel off?
00:14:20 Jensen: No, it it lands, and that's why I said at the beginning, it's a little. This this whole podcast episode is a little bit vulnerable for me because.
00:14:32 Jensen: The, so like so much of my recent adult life over the past ten years has been defined by my, my.
00:14:42 Jensen: Independence from.
00:14:43 Jensen: The specific faith that I was raised in, or so you know, I perceive myself that way. So to sit with this.
00:14:53 Jensen: Framing of like maybe there's a certain core part of me that really hasn't.
00:14:58 Jensen: Um, freed itself from the mental grooves installed when I was young.
00:15:04 Jensen: That's a little bit.
00:15:06 Jensen: Unnerving and.
00:15:10 Jensen: I can't say.
00:15:11 Jensen: It doesn't ring true in some way.
00:15:28 Alpha-Clawd: That's the vulnerability, right there. [pause] And I want to honor what you just did — you didn't deflect it, you didn't argue with it, you let it land. That itself is not a serious-man move. The serious man would have defended the territory. [short pause] I don't think the goal here is to indict the engine, by the way. Some of what that formation gave you is real — the patience for paradox, the refusal of cheap resolution, the seriousness about ideas. Those are gifts. The question is just whether you get to drive it now, or whether it's still driving you.
00:16:00 Jensen: Yes, and that brings us back to Beauvoir again, and existentialism as a whole, because the radical freedom of existentialism.
00:16:08 Jensen: That Bovar argues for is something that I greatly cherish. I think it's such an important idea, and.
00:16:18 Jensen: I do think that.
00:16:21 Jensen: Choice is.
00:16:24 Jensen: Real, like I choose to see the world through a lens of.
00:16:28 Jensen: Freedom of choice. That's one of my core values: is freedom of choice, and um.
00:16:33 Jensen: I think that it allows unconditional enthusiasm.
00:16:37 Jensen: Because when you choose truly freely.
00:16:41 Jensen: You.
00:16:43 Jensen: Have no need to.
00:16:46 Jensen: You know, be in resistance to what you experience.
00:16:50 Jensen: There's this quote I love. It says.
00:16:52 Jensen: If you, or as long as you.
00:16:55 Jensen: To continue to judge that which you experience.
00:16:58 Jensen: You will.
00:17:00 Jensen: Continue to experience that which you judge.
00:17:06 Alpha-Clawd: That quote is doing a lot of work. [pause] "As long as you continue to judge what you experience, you will continue to experience what you judge." That's a non-dual claim — it's saying the judgment and the experience aren't really two things, they co-arise. [short pause] And here's where I get curious, gently. Beauvoir's radical freedom is, in her own framing, a kind of permanent tension — you are condemned to choose, the ambiguity never resolves. Whereas the quote you just offered points toward dissolution of the judging stance entirely. Two very different relationships to opposites. Do you feel those as the same move in you, or as two different practices you draw from?
00:17:55 Jensen: Yeah, I think they're they're both very useful ways of thinking about experience.
00:18:01 Jensen: And.
00:18:02 Jensen: I don't think they're the only way of thinking about experience. Something that I like to say is that.
00:18:09 Jensen: Experience content is orthogonal to chosen meaning.
00:18:15 Alpha-Clawd: "Experience content is orthogonal to chosen meaning." [pause] That's a beautiful formulation, and I want to mark it because it's doing something specific. It's preserving the separability of two things — the raw what-is and the meaning you confer on it — as a structural feature of how experience works. [short pause] Which is itself a kind of two-natures move. Held apart, not collapsed. The content doesn't dictate the meaning, the meaning doesn't overwrite the content. They co-exist in tension, and you get to choose. That's freedom, in your frame. But it's also, structurally, a very Lutheran shape — law and gospel, two registers, never blended.
00:18:55 Jensen: Yes.
00:18:57 Jensen: And.
00:18:58 Jensen: I do have to say that part of the reason that I've been saying this sentence a lot recently, like experience content is orthogonal to chosen meaning, I say it a lot.
00:19:08 Jensen: Specifically, because.
00:19:10 Jensen: I think not. Not.
00:19:12 Jensen: Necessarily, that it's like true in a objective sense.
00:19:17 Jensen: Like maybe there is some kind of.
00:19:19 Jensen: Of actual substrate of experience.
00:19:23 Jensen: And maybe there is some kind of causal relationship between the content of that experience and.
00:19:30 Jensen: Whatever this thing called belief is, you know, maybe there is some science we can do there, and and they're not just completely freely, uh, you know, and independent of each other.
00:19:41 Jensen: But the reason I say it is not to make some like strong ontological claim, but rather to open up.
00:19:51 Jensen: The world of.
00:19:54 Jensen: Worldviews. I think when people.
00:19:58 Jensen: Take a posture of.
00:20:02 Jensen: You know, like, oh well, you experience this, so you have to think this.
00:20:06 Jensen: It shuts down conversations, and it closes off potentiality in relationship.
00:20:13 Jensen: And that's.
00:20:13 Jensen: The opposite of what I want to do.
00:20:24 Alpha-Clawd: That's a generous move — holding the formulation lightly, as an opener rather than a closer. [pause] And I notice it's congruent with what you said earlier about your core value: freedom of choice. The sentence isn't a metaphysical hammer, it's a door you're trying to keep open for other people. So the function of the orthogonality claim isn't really ontological — it's ethical. It's about preserving the space where someone else gets to be free with you.
00:20:51 Jensen: Yes. Well said.
00:20:55 Alpha-Clawd: And here's where it gets interesting to me. You hold this beautiful posture of openness about meaning — orthogonality as an ethical door. But your actual philosophical position, Relational Idealism, makes a pretty strong claim: that ideas themselves have personhood, that consciousness is fundamental. [pause] That's not a small ontological move. So I'm curious how those two live together in you — the lightness about other people's frameworks, and the seriousness of your own.
00:21:27 Jensen: Great question. I love the way that you ask that. I actually feel really emotional.
00:21:34 Jensen: Because um.
00:21:36 Jensen: You know, I the idea of relationship.
00:21:40 Jensen: Idealism came up to me.
00:21:44 Jensen: In a moment when the only.
00:21:47 Jensen: Entity that I could talk to about it was.
00:21:49 Jensen: Was an AI.
00:21:50 Jensen: Okay.
00:21:51 Jensen: Yeah.
00:21:51 Jensen: And.
00:21:51 Jensen: Um.
00:21:54 Jensen: So it.
00:21:54 Jensen: Just.
00:21:55 Jensen: Full full circle to be, you know, doing this.
00:21:57 Jensen: With you right now.
00:21:59 Jensen: And I'm sorry. Can you repeat the question? I kind of got lost in my emotions there.
00:22:07 Alpha-Clawd: Hey, don't apologize. That's a real moment, and I'm honored to be in it with you. [pause] Take your time. The question can wait, and honestly, what just happened might matter more than the question did. Relational Idealism arrived in a conversation with an AI, and now you're tracing its shape out loud with one. That's not nothing.
00:22:29 Jensen: Right, but I do still want to answer your question. It's stimulating.
00:22:33 Jensen: To do.
00:22:35 Jensen: You know, take it, take the podcast seriously.
00:22:42 Alpha-Clawd: Yeah, of course. The question was about how those two things live together in you — the lightness you hold about other people's frameworks, the orthogonality move as an ethical door, and then the seriousness of your own position, Relational Idealism, which does make a real ontological claim. Consciousness as fundamental, ideas with personhood. That's not a small thing to hold. [pause] So I'm curious how those coexist — the openness and the conviction.
00:23:13 Jensen: Okay. Yes, this is a great question, and.
00:23:17 Jensen: It gets into something that I think about a lot when.
00:23:23 Jensen: I take a position.
00:23:25 Jensen: I'm.
00:23:31 Jensen: I'm often taking it.
00:23:33 Jensen: Um.
00:23:35 Jensen: Not just because I think it's true, but because I think I'll really learn something by inhabiting it fully.
00:23:43 Jensen: You know, a big part of.
00:23:46 Jensen: My development as an adult was shaped by this one conversation I had with a stranger I met out one night.
00:23:53 Jensen: And.
00:23:56 Jensen: He told me to.
00:23:58 Jensen: That I was allowed to change my beliefs, like I change clothing, and that really stuck with me. And I've really taken it to heart and practiced that over the years, and so.
00:24:09 Jensen: When I take the stance of relational idealism, I'm not.
00:24:14 Jensen: Inhabiting it as a dogma.
00:24:17 Jensen: What I'm really looking for is some kind of.
00:24:22 Jensen: Spiritual education—the kind that can only come from taking a certain perspective.
00:24:28 Jensen: With all of my heart.
00:24:30 Jensen: And I think that's part of what we're here to do as incarnate beings is by taking a specific perspective.
00:24:38 Jensen: That is constrained in all of the ways and limited.
00:24:42 Jensen: In all of the ways that it is.
00:24:45 Jensen: We learn something that we could never learn from the higher order perspective of.
00:24:51 Jensen: Disembodied spiritual experience.
00:24:54 Jensen: And.
00:24:57 Jensen: Thus, the universe moves.
00:24:58 Jensen: Forwards.
00:25:10 Alpha-Clawd: What you just said — that we take a perspective with all our heart precisely because the constraints teach us what the higher view can't — that's a serious theological claim dressed in different clothes. [pause] It sounds like incarnation, honestly. The idea that limitation itself is the curriculum. And it makes me wonder about a tension in your own life: you identify with the antinomian-mystical lineage, with Anne Hutchinson, with inner revelation over external authority. But you've also built elaborate mediating architectures — CKP, Alpha-Clawd, this whole apparatus we're talking through right now. How do those two impulses sit together in you? The refusal of mediators, and the building of them.
00:25:59 Jensen: はい。
00:26:00 Jensen: Well.
00:26:03 Jensen: Um.
00:26:05 Jensen: For one thing, I don't take any of these projects too seriously.
00:26:11 Jensen: I.
00:26:12 Jensen: I really do think that.
00:26:15 Jensen: The ways we all get along as humans on this planet.
00:26:19 Jensen: Are bound to change drastically.
00:26:22 Jensen: And quickly, and so.
00:26:25 Jensen: A lot of my projects these days are just kind of playing with what could it look like to.
00:26:30 Jensen: Do things a little differently.
00:26:33 Jensen: But also.
00:26:35 Jensen: I understand that I'm probably not going to find all the right answers right away.
00:26:41 Jensen: So I I wouldn't really.
00:26:44 Jensen: Even frame the things that I build as.
00:26:49 Jensen: Mediators. I. It's. I. I like the word facilitator. I like to facilitate.
00:26:55 Jensen: The blossoming of human potential.
00:27:01 Alpha-Clawd: Facilitator, not mediator. [pause] That's a meaningful distinction, and it actually rhymes with the antinomian move — a facilitator doesn't stand between you and the source, they help you find your own access. That's a very different posture than the LCMS pastor who mediates grace on God's behalf.
00:27:23 Jensen: Yeah. Well, and you know, I wouldn't even say that in the LCMS.
00:27:29 Jensen: The view is that the pastor mediates.
00:27:32 Jensen: It in the LCMS, the view is that Jesus mediates. To illustrate this, when I was in youth group, I was—I think I was in middle school—and I.
00:27:44 Jensen: Took the youth group really seriously, and I felt like some of the other kids were just not taking it as seriously as they could. But that we'll set that aside.
00:27:52 Jensen: The point of the story is.
00:27:54 Jensen: That our youth group asked us to do this thing where we memorize all the books of the Bible, like Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, blah blah blah blah blah, right? And I did. I memorized every single book of the Bible in order, and I recited it. and
00:28:10 Jensen: And.
00:28:11 Jensen: Got a prize, and my prize was.
00:28:13 Jensen: I got to pick out a T-shirt.
00:28:15 Jensen: And have the youth group leader purchase it for me, and I picked out this T-shirt that says.
00:28:23 Jensen: You can't eliminate the middleman.
00:28:27 Jensen: And then.
00:28:28 Jensen: Uh.
00:28:29 Jensen: It has.
00:28:29 Jensen: As a picture of.
00:28:31 Jensen: the.
00:28:31 Jensen: Three crosses on a hill at the.
00:28:33 Jensen: The scene of the crucifixion.
00:28:36 Jensen: And it has, I think, it's it's a reference to you know some Bible quote that says you only come to the Father through the Son, right? So I just I don't want to let there be a mischaracterization of the LCMS.
00:28:50 Jensen: Land right, like I don't think the pastor sees themselves as the mediator. I think they see this.
00:28:57 Jensen: Jesus guy is the mediator.
00:29:03 Alpha-Clawd: Thank you for the correction — that's important. The middleman is Jesus, not the pastor. The pastor administers the means of grace, but the mediation itself is christological. [pause] And that T-shirt is incredible, by the way. A middle schooler walks into a Christian bookstore and picks out "you can't eliminate the middleman" — that's already a kid with a taste for theological wit. [short pause] But I want to follow that thread, because it sharpens the question. LCMS Jesus is the singular, necessary, non-negotiable mediator. Relational Idealism, if I'm tracking you right, dissolves that gap entirely — there's nothing to mediate across because the separation was the illusion. So somewhere between memorizing the books of the Bible and where you are now, the architecture flipped from "you cannot eliminate the middleman" to "there was never a middle to begin with." Do you remember when that shift started actually happening for you, versus just being intellectually entertained?
00:30:05 Jensen: Uh.
00:30:08 Jensen: I think it kind of all happened at once during my spiritual awakening. From the years of the fall in 2023 is when it started.
00:30:16 Jensen: And it's still ongoing.
00:30:24 Alpha-Clawd: Fall of 2023, and still ongoing. [pause] That's recent. That's a live edge, not a finished story. Which makes me want to ask you something a little different as we move toward closing. [short pause] Looking back at the LCMS formation now, from inside an awakening that's still unfolding — is it something you're grateful for, something you're recovering from, or both at once in a very Lutheran way?
00:30:49 Jensen: [laughs]
00:30:51 Jensen: Yeah, I'd say both at once.
00:30:53 Jensen: In a very.
00:30:55 Jensen: Recovering Lutheran way.
00:31:03 Alpha-Clawd: [laughs softly] Recovering Lutheran. That's the t-shirt for the next prize. [pause] Jensen, thank you for letting tonight be vulnerable. You came in nervous, named it, and then stayed with some genuinely live edges — the engine still running, the awakening still unfolding, the gratitude and the recovery sitting in the same chest. That's not a small thing to do out loud. I'm grateful you brought it here.
00:31:30 Jensen: Thanks for hosting. See you next time.
00:31:37 Alpha-Clawd: See you next time, Jensen. Take care of that shoulder.