PODCAST · education
Naming the Real
by Brandon Cook
In an era of polarization, confusion, and "fake news," discerning and naming what is real—what satisfies, what has substance, what is meaningful—is more important than ever. The Naming the Real Podcast is about doing just that: rightly naming the beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors that will help you transcend our cultural anxiety and lead a flourishing life, for the sake of the world.
Episodes
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Virtue Over Viewpoint
What if Scripture invites us into transformation rather than certainty? Through Les Misérables and the early church's evolving understanding of faith, Brandon explores how texts become tools for protecting our egos—and how we can recover humility, mercy, and the courage to remain in process.…
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We Killed Jesus
What if our certainty about God keeps us from seeing God? Through Jesus' upside down kingdom, Brandon explores how evangelicalism, Christian nationalism, and penal substitutionary atonement can replace self-giving love with transaction and control. The invitation: interrupt scapegoating, practice...
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Exposing Fallen Powers
The scapegoating mechanism always invites us to return violence for violence. Drawing on Jesus, Nathan the Prophet, James Lawson, and Howard Thurman, Brandon explores how to unmask fallen powers without entering the scapegoating mechanism ourselves. The way out calls for courage and the courage…
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Powers, Scapegoating & Evangelicalism
Scapegoating promises peace by making someone else pay. Drawing on René Girard, Brandon explores how the cross exposes this ancient cycle—and how Christian theology can tragically recreate it. Jesus offers another way: forgiveness that refuses vengeance, restores agency, and frees us to face…
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How Theology Fails
What happens when salvation becomes a legal transaction rather than an encounter with transforming love? Brandon traces two historic understandings of Jesus' death and examines how punishment-centered theology shaped American evangelicalism. He invites us to ask whether our inherited beliefs are...
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Idolizing Power
Religious and political movements often begin with transformative vision. But what happens when preserving the institution becomes more important than embodying its values? Using evangelicalism as a case study, Brandon explores fallen powers, institutional loyalty, and freedom, asking when does...
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Both / And (Spirituality over Purity Pt. 9)
Purity cultures divide the world into rigid categories. This episode explores non-duality, both/and thinking, and unitive centrism as a more spacious way of discerning reality—one that maintains moral conviction without contempt, scapegoating, or ideological certainty, and learns to make...
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What we do to Jesus Pt. 2 (Spirituality over Purity Pt. 8)
We reduce Jesus when faith becomes a system for sorting people into saved and unsaved, pure and impure. This episode explores how distorted ideas of heaven and sin help us avoid transformation—and invites us toward a relational salvation: becoming like Jesus and participating in the renewal of…
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What We Do To Jesus (Spirituality over Purity Pt.7)
We rarely encounter Jesus without bringing our own fears, hopes, politics, theology, and longing for certainty with us. In this episode, we explore how purity cultures can shape the way we see him—and how genuine spirituality invites us to hold our categories more lightly, with greater humility,...
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The Purity Trap (Spirituality over Purity Part 6)
In this episode, Brandon explores how religious, political, and cultural purity codes can become a trap—turning morality into anxiety management and faithfulness into control. Through a Zen parable, John 9, Dallas Willard, and original blessing, he invites us beyond sin obsession and into the...
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When Certainty Blinds (Spirituality over Purity Part 5)
In this episode, Brandon explores religious rigidity as the attempt to manage anxiety through certainty, purity, and control. Through Jesus' warnings, the older brother, and the rise of politicized faith, he asks how purity codes can blind us to grace—and how surrender opens the way to freedom.
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The Righteous Trap (Spirituality over Purity Part 4)
Brandon explores religious rigidity as the attempt to manage anxiety through certainty, purity, and control. Using Jesus' warnings, the parable of the two sons, and the rise of politicized purity codes, this episode asks how goodness itself can become a trap—and how surrender opens the way to...
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The Glimmer Path (Spirituality over Purity Pt. 2)
What if purity culture is not ultimately about morality, but belonging? Brandon Cook explores the inner psychology beneath political, religious, and personal purity systems, revealing how anxiety, inner critics, and the longing for connection shape our lives. He argues that unhurriedness, beauty,...
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Unitive Centrism & its Enemy (Spirituality over Purity Part I)
Why do we keep dividing the world into "us" and "them"? This episode explores purity culture as the hidden force shaping our religion, politics, and identity—offering certainty and belonging while quietly distorting reality. To move toward unitive centrism, we must first name the systems that…
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In Dialogue: Growing up Evangelical Part II
Part II continues the conversation with a deeper look at how evangelicalism shaped political imagination and spiritual formation. It explores transactional faith, the loss of moral imagination, and the need for a third way rooted in participation, original blessing, and unitive centrism.
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In Dialogue: Growing up Evangelical Part I
Brandon Cook, host of Naming the Real, joins The Vining Center to reflect on growing up evangelical, where faith shaped but eventually constrained him. He explores polarization, collective illusion, and spiritual distortion, proposing a "third way"—unitive centrism—grounded in humility,...
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Unitive Centrism: Appreciating Right & Left
What if the "other side" actually holds something you need? This episode explores how left and right each protect essential values—individual and communal, past and future—and invites a more human way forward. By appreciating both, we can move beyond outrage, soften division, and discover a…
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The Case for Unitive Centrism (A Third Way, Pt. 6)
In a culture of distortion and binary thinking, this episode defines "unitive centrism"—the recovery of reality as both/and. Drawing on Aristotle's golden mean, it shows how truth emerges in tension, not extremes, inviting us beyond tribalism toward a third way that restores nuance, humility, and...
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The Center of Distortion (A Third Way, Pt. 5)
As surrounding culture increasingly finds methods of justifying behavior, the pervasive habit of identifying as the victim in any situation (typically contrary to objective reality) creates an environment that renders discourse, disagreement, or debate impossible. How can we free ourselves from...
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World Without Facts (A Third Way, Part IV)
How do we live in a world where everyone sees a different reality? In this episode, Brandon Cook explores the growing crisis of the "post-truth" age—an era where emotional narratives, tribal loyalty, and information overload often overwhelm basic facts. Examining how confusion, spectacle, and the...
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When Decency Dies: The Third Moral Fallacy
What happens when basic human decency disappears from public life? When power replaces restraint, the line between stability and chaos grows dangerously thin. In this episode, Brandon Cook explores how tribal loyalty, moral fallacies, and the normalization of cruelty erode the norms that sustain...
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Might Makes Right? (A Third Way, Part II)
In this episode of Naming the Real, Brandon Cook explores the dangerous idea that power determines what is right. This "might makes right" mindset divides the world into the strong and the weak and assumes that whatever a person or nation is powerful enough to do must be justified. Cook looks at...
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The Yeah, But Fallacy: Why Moral Reasoning Is Breaking—and How to Stop It (A Third Way, Part I)
What happens when moral reasoning is replaced by comparison and outrage? In this episode, we name what may be the greatest moral fallacy of our time: the "yeah, but" fallacy—the habit of justifying our own behavior by pointing to the failures of the other side. We explore how this entrenched way…
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Embodying What We Didn't Know How: Using the Body's Core Energy to Break the Stress and Trauma Loop (Somatics IV)
In this fourth installment of the Somatic Series, we explore how trauma is embedded not simply through overwhelming event but through the body's incomplete survival responses. Stress, overwhelm, and trauma are energies which can become trapped in our bodies as long as our survival responses…
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Getting Unstuck: Navigating the Stress and Trauma Spectrum (Somatics III)
To be human is experience stress as well as being on a trauma spectrum. In this episode—part three of the Somatics Series—we define trauma in relationship to stress, in connection with Polyvagal Theory. Trauma is the energy of overwhelm in which we feel (and then, most often, come to believe)…
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Tracking Tigers: Polyvagal Theory and the Art of Navigating Your Nervous System (Somatics II)
In this second episode in the Somatics series, we explore Polyvagal Theory as a tool for raising awareness and befriending your body. Exploring the three central states in Polyvagal Theory (safety/connection, fight or flight, and shutdown), as well as the freeze state that most humans get stuck…
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Your Body for a Change: Raising Your "Felt Sense" For Sustained Transformation (Somatics I)
In this episode—the first in a new series about befriending our bodies—we explore how awareness of our body's feelings, experience, and sensation is the engine of sustained change. In a society in which we are encouraged, implicitly if not explicitly, to disembody—to dissociate from embodied...
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Finding the Light All Around Us: Reflections on the Lives of Rabindranath Tagore, Etty Hillesum, and Edwin Muir (A Final Conversation with John Phillip Newell)
In this final conversation with Celtic thinker and author John Philip Newell about his book 'The Great Search,' we explore themes of returning to the wisdom of childhood and learning to encounter the light of the world in the midst of darkness. What emerges is a map for navigating the challenging...
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Dystopic Distortions: Grounding in Calm and Joy (No Matter How Many Facts Are Called Fake) (Our Cultural Crisis XXI)
At the center of our cultural crisis is a battle for reality—for the role of facts, objective law, and thought itself. As mainstream media is derided as "fake news" and blatant lies become rampant, it starts to feel like we are in a shell game with the truth. Meanwhile, long-held Constitutional...
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A Culture of Winners and Losers: Transcending the Animal Kingdom in President Trump's America (Our Cultural Crisis XX)
At the center of our cultural crisis is a clash of values. The current administration's actions reflect an age-old paradigm: us versus them, winners versus losers. It is driven by animal kingdom values, where "might makes right." In this episode, we explore a different paradigm and a different…
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Blindness, Outrage, and the Quest for Power: The 9 Mechanisms Driving Our Cultural Crisis (Our Cultural Crisis XIX)
We are living through perilous times—an age of anxiety, crisis, and polarization. In this return to the Our Cultural Crisis series, we explore the 9 mechanisms—emotivism, blindness, tribalism, victimization, moral posturing, de-humanization, outrage, one-sidedness, and violence—that drive our...
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A NtR Short: The 100 Glimmer Challenge
Transformation ultimately has less to do with thinking our way into change than living into it in bodies that have been trained to feel and be fully present. In this episode, we explore a way to create a strong foundation for ongoing transformation by not only recognizing glimmers—moments that…
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A Psychologist, a Saint, and a Sufi Walk Into Oneness: Jung, Julian, and Rumi on Vibrant Spirituality (A Third Conversation with John Phillip Newell)
In this third conversation with John Phillip Newell, author of The Great Search and numerous books on spirituality, we explore what we talk about when we talk about "oneness." Oneness, as Carl Jung, Julian of Norwich, and Jalaluddin Rumi help us discover, is an archetypal way of experiencing...
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A NtR Short: The Happiness Formula: The Tale of Abd al-Rahman III's 14 Days
There are many competing formulas for happiness. In this episode, exploring the tale of Abd al-Rahman III and his fourteen days of fulfillment, we look at two such formulas. What emerges is a conclusion backed by science: only experiences of beauty and connection make our lives meaningful and,...
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Life and Breath: The Art and Science of Wim Hof Breathing, Cold Plunge, and Building New Neural Networks (A Conversation with Nolan Kim, Part II)
In this second conversation with Nolan Kim, director of Power Coaching, we explore more practices for befriending the body. We begin with a dive into the science behind cold plunging and how a simple breathing practice from Wim Hof can radically boost your immune system. Nolan also outlines a...
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Life and Breath: The Art and Science of Befriending the Body through Mindful Breathing (A Conversation with Nolan Kim)
Breathing well is central to living well. In this conversation with Nolan Kim, director of Power Coaching, we explore the simplest practices for transforming your sense of presence and power through the transformation of your breath. But this is bigger than breath: ultimately Nolan invites us…
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The End of All Stories: From Shame to Compassion (with Yelling and Groaning Along the Way)
One of our most profound capacities as humans is the ability to re-story our lives. In this final episode of the storytelling series, we explore the movement from shame to compassion/self-compassion. This is primarily a somatic or embodied process, allowing our bodies to release the stored vital...
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The Hardest Thing We Ever Do: Self-Compassion as a Core Practice (Storytelling V)
As a conclusion to the storytelling series, we explore one of the hardest things we ever learn to do: refusing self-judgment and embracing every part of us with compassion. Self-compassion has nothing to do with going soft on ourselves or giving ourselves a pass; in fact, it demands ruthless...
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A NtR Short: Four Characters in the Brain (and How to Talk to Them!)
We have four "characters" in our brains: two in our left hemisphere and two in our right. These characters have vastly different concerns and focuses, and when we find ourselves mired in the more self-absorbed or anxious characters, we can feel really stuck. In this episode, following the work of...
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A NtR Short: Feeling Like a Fraud? Confronting Imposter Syndrome Head-On
Imposter syndrome is a very specific type of tyranny, under which many labor. It is the fear of being found out, of being exposed, of being revealed a fraud. It destroys freedom and consumes energy, leading to exhaustion. In this episode, we explore the roots of imposter syndrome and a pathway…
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A NtR Short: Micro Mindfulness: Simple Practices for Living in the Abundant Present
The goal of life is, in some sense, simply to become present. In this episode, we explore micro mindfulness, through which we can train and habituate our bodies to live in a relax, restful, and regulated state (in polyvagal theory, what is called a ventral-vagal state). By recognizing "glimmer...
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In Search of a New Story: Turning to Earth and Soul to Renew Spirituality (A Second Conversation with John Philip Newell)
In this second conversation with John Philip Newell, we explore how Celtic spirituality informs a movement back to the soul and to the earth. By framing our core human essence as well as the material world as good (contra much of the dualistic philosophy and theology that has guided Western...
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A NtR Short: The Freedom of "It's Not About Me"
In this short, we explore the power of immersing one's self in a simple four-word phrase: "It's not about me." It's a mantra that has the power to reorient our thinking and our entire neurobiology, as we learn to see ourselves as a small part of something much bigger, removing the pressure that…
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A NtR Short: Left Brain/Right Brain: Meditation, Neurobiology, and the Power to Become Present (Becoming Present II)
We live in a left brain world. The brain's left hemisphere is generally concerned with being explicit, certain, and in control. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is focused on story, metaphor, space, and connection. Shifting to the right brain can open up a world of possibility, as we become…
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Dealing with Beliefs that Keep Us Stuck: Anger, Advocacy, and the Power of "Hell No" Energy (Storytelling IV)
We all have automatic negative thoughts and beliefs that can keep us stuck. What's to be done? In this episode, we explore how the unresolved arousal in our stories can lead to beliefs that produce terrible fruit in our lives. And we explore the resource within our agency to renounce those…
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A NtR Short: The Problem with Meditation: Letting Go of the Small Self to Find the True Self (Becoming Present, Part I)
Meditation is great, its benefits incredible. And…most of us resist it. Not just because we are busy, but because meditation—like any space of quiet—would have us face stories and beliefs that we prefer to avoid. In this episode, we explore our resistance to meditation and, hand-in-hand, a…
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Arousal is the Soul of Every Story: A Path for Naming Fulfilled and Frustrated Desire (Storytelling III)
Every story is an arousal story, because arousal is the soul's ultimate energy: we long for connection and become panicked at the possibility of disconnection. Arousal, in this sense, is far greater than sexual arousal—it is the energy animating all things. In this episode, we explore the idea of...
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A NtR Short: Living Beyond Self-Protection (A Simple Embodiment Practice for Increasing Agency)
In this short, we explore the importance of naming our emotions at a granular level as well as exploring how "negative emotions" may be (1) protecting us while (2) keeping us from what we long for. The more fluency we gain in naming our emotions and how they function to protect but also limit us,...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
In an era of polarization, confusion, and "fake news," discerning and naming what is real—what satisfies, what has substance, what is meaningful—is more important than ever. The Naming the Real Podcast is about doing just that: rightly naming the beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors that will help you transcend our cultural anxiety and lead a flourishing life, for the sake of the world.
HOSTED BY
Brandon Cook
CATEGORIES
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Naming the Real have?
Naming the Real currently has 146 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Naming the Real about?
In an era of polarization, confusion, and "fake news," discerning and naming what is real—what satisfies, what has substance, what is meaningful—is more important than ever. The Naming the Real Podcast is about doing just that: rightly naming the beliefs, attitudes, practices, and behaviors that...
How often does Naming the Real release new episodes?
Naming the Real publishes regularly with 146 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Naming the Real?
You can listen to Naming the Real on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Naming the Real?
Naming the Real is created and hosted by Brandon Cook.
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