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Sunny Banana

The Chaplain

32 episodes

4 days ago

What if Christmas isn’t a soft-focus memory but the moment the world tilted toward restoration? We open the season with a bold claim: if God truly became human, then matter matters, history bends toward healing, and every ordinary moment can carry eternal weight. No clichés here—just a step-by-step walk through why the Incarnation changes everything from the ground up. We start with the wound beneath our restlessness: the story of Eden as a pattern of misdirected desire. Then we trace a surp...

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Religion & Spirituality

Society & Culture,

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What if Christmas isn’t a soft-focus memory but the moment the world tilted toward restoration? We open the season with a bold claim: if God truly became human, then matter matters, history bends toward healing, and every ordinary moment can carry eternal weight. No clichés here—just a step-by-step walk through why the Incarnation changes everything from the ground up. We start with the wound beneath our restlessness: the story of Eden as a pattern of misdirected desire. Then we trace a surp...

Show more...

Religion & Spirituality

Society & Culture,

Episodes (20/32)

Sunny Banana

#31 | If God Became Human, What Does That Make Of Us

What if Christmas isn’t a soft-focus memory but the moment the world tilted toward restoration? We open the season with a bold claim: if God truly became human, then matter matters, history bends toward healing, and every ordinary moment can carry eternal weight. No clichés here—just a step-by-step walk through why the Incarnation changes everything from the ground up. We start with the wound beneath our restlessness: the story of Eden as a pattern of misdirected desire. Then we trace a surp...

4 days ago

7 minutes

Sunny Banana

#31 | Anxious? God has a plan: Mercy. Love. Thankfulness.

Anxiety loves to keep us time-travelling—looping old regrets and forecasting worst-case futures—until the present feels thin and brittle. We take a quiet, focused walk through a three-part path that restores peace: repent and receive mercy, forgive and be free, love and live gratefully now. We start by naming psychological time and the wisdom of the Desert Fathers: three thieves steal our joy—regret about the past, fear of the future, and ingratitude for the present. From there, we move into...

1 week ago

7 minutes

Sunny Banana

#30 | Being a Man

A gentle greeting turns into a clear call: men and women are not rival camps, and strength is not the enemy. We share three hard-won lessons from lived experience and faith, starting with a simple truth that changes everything—when one side rises, both rise; when one side falls, both fall. That lens reframes relationships, work, and community as shared projects where we complement each other’s strengths and choose to walk each other home. We then press into a charged question: what if mascul...

2 weeks ago

6 minutes

Sunny Banana

Andy Bannister | Men, Machines, And A Not-So Holy Beard #29

Something is shifting. The old script—more science equals less God—no longer fits the moment, and faith is making a comeback. With Andy Bannister, we explore how the edges of AI and physics are reopening big questions about meaning, purpose, and the origins of intelligence. From fine-tuning to the ethics of machines, the conversation moves beyond slogans and into the risky, refreshing territory where truth matters again. We dig into the classroom, where students are more open than cynics exp...

3 weeks ago

43 minutes

Sunny Banana

Raising Resilient Girls | Adversity + Community + Faith > Labels And Pills #28

Here is a link to the Conversation from Freya India's Substack - Girls https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/p/diagnosing-our-daughters?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web What if the fastest way to strength isn’t fixing feelings but facing them together? We delve into a father’s candid perspective on raising resilient girls and the simple yet demanding equation that anchors the conversation: adversity plus community plus faith beats pills plus labels. Through real moments, hard-won reflections, an...

1 month ago

9 minutes

Sunny Banana

God is Love | When Light Opens The Closed Rose Of The Heart #27

A single beam of light through a church window changed how we saw the day—and ourselves. What began as a personal story of losing hearing in one ear and living nine years in partial silence becomes a wider meditation on restoration, grace, and the brave work of loving people back to who they were made to be. When hearing returned, music sounded new, a daughter’s voice felt like a gift unwrapped, and gratitude turned into a map for finding love in a noisy world. We unpack a simple but demandi...

1 month ago

5 minutes

Sunny Banana

Porn, Money and Modernity | Desire Aims At God Or It Eats You #26

Desire isn’t the villain of a spiritual life; it’s the compass that needs re‑calibrating. We’ve been sold the idea that wisdom means wanting nothing, but what if real freedom is wanting the right things with our whole heart? In this conversation we walk straight into the heart of longing, talk honestly about temptation and distraction, and point toward communion as the place where desire finally breathes. We start by questioning the popular mantra “free from desire” and explore how modern li...

1 month ago

8 minutes

Sunny Banana

Black History Month | "Dig up the past and you will loose an eye. Forget the past and you will loose both"

Memory can either blind us or guide us. We open up a timely reflection on Black History Month by asking a hard question: how do we face what happened without turning the past into a weapon—or pretending it never happened? The answer, we argue, lives in the daily practice of humility and forgiveness, and in the choices we make about which stories we carry and how we carry them. We ground the conversation in a vivid image from rugby: a rope woven from dyed strands marking wins, losses, and dra...

1 month ago

8 minutes

Sunny Banana

Transhumanism | Please Hold While We (not God) Upload Your Soul

A polished pitch promises a future without pain, work, or death—just upload your life, give up a little control, and enjoy a near-perfect world. We took that claim head-on, read it aloud, and held it up to the quiet strength of prayer, the honesty of humility, and the Christian vision of eternal life that transforms rather than deletes suffering. What emerged wasn’t a tech-versus-faith brawl, but a deeper question: are we trading the soul-shaping work of love for a glossy illusion of control?...

2 months ago

9 minutes

Sunny Banana

I kissed a priest and I liked it

"I kissed a priest and I liked it" – a provocative statement that opens the door to a profound spiritual exploration. This episode takes you on my personal journey from Anglican tradition into Orthodox Christianity, where I encountered the ancient practice of kissing a priest's hand during worship and greeting. What started as an unfamiliar gesture became a gateway to understanding deeper truths about reverence, symbolism, and our relationship with the divine. In Orthodox tradition, the prie...

2 months ago

7 minutes

Sunny Banana

Charlie Kirk and George Floyd | Our religious tendencies

Have you ever stopped to consider that regardless of your formal religious beliefs, you might be naturally religious in how you interact with the world? Through a thoughtful exploration of the Latin root of religion—religare, meaning "to reconnect" or "to realign"—this episode delves into how humans naturally venerate images and symbols. From sports heroes displayed prominently in school hallways to public figures like Charlie Kirk and George Floyd whose images appear on billboards and...

2 months ago

5 minutes

Sunny Banana

Peter Owen Jones | Disconnection from nature is our greatest mistake

Peter Owen-Jones invites us to rediscover our profound connection to the natural world in this thought-provoking conversation about spirituality, silence, and our place in the cosmic order. The vicar, author, and documentary filmmaker challenges conventional thinking about human separation from nature, offering a revolutionary perspective: we are not isolated beings but collections of organisms intimately connected with all life on Earth. "I have to take care of the planet because for me it ...

5 months ago

46 minutes

Sunny Banana

Nate Morgan-Locke | Behold: The Battle for Your Mind in the Digital Age

What happens when the most valuable thing you own isn't your smartphone—but your attention itself? In this eye-opening talk, filmmaker and "reformed mythologist" Nate Morgan-Lock pulls back the curtain on the attention economy that's reshaping how we experience the world. With humor and insight, he reveals how social media platforms have engineered their interfaces to keep us scrolling endlessly, exploiting our psychological "portion bias" and leaving us perpetually unsatisfied. Morga...

5 months ago

46 minutes

Sunny Banana

The Birds and the Beards

"What will the birds eat?" With these five simple words, Elder Thaddeus of Vitnovica offers us a perspective shift that could transform our lives and relationships. This brief but powerful episode explores the wisdom of Elder Thaddeus, an Orthodox monk whose philosophy is captured in the book title: "Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives." When a well-meaning pilgrim suggested the elder clean the breadcrumbs from his flowing beard, Thaddeus revealed that what appeared as untidiness was actu...

6 months ago

4 minutes

Sunny Banana

Sam Bickersteth | God is not a Cosmic Autocrat - How reading and thinking convicted me of God

Check out Sam's great YouTube channel and Substack YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@admoni. Substack: https://substack.com/@admoni What happens when inherited faith meets philosophical inquiry? In this thought-provoking conversation, Sam Bickersteth, a Cambridge philosophy student and former football player, shares his transformative journey from defending religious beliefs he didn't genuinely hold to discovering authentic spiritual conviction through literature, questioning, and int...

6 months ago

51 minutes

Sunny Banana

Stop Chasing Ghosts: A Guide to Genuine Happiness

Bede's Alumni, Sam Bickersteth (2020) shares what leads to good mental health Drop us a line

7 months ago

4 minutes

Sunny Banana

Thaddeus Patrick | Orthodox Christianity works because it's true

Link to Thaddeus Patrick's business: https://thaddeusthought.com/coaching/ Link to book on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/3pS5oow YouTube Video: https://youtu.be/Cl0hDe6vEMI?si=akYBQvPfWQ6LES8s What if your suffering actually had profound meaning? In this deeply moving conversation, Orthodox Christian coach Thaddeus shares how discovering the teachings of a humble Serbian monk completely transformed his life, taking him from a place of existential despair to finding purpose in pain and peace amids...

7 months ago

1 hour 5 minutes

Sunny Banana

Is Netflix Adolescence woke?

The Netflix series "Adolescence" has sparked heated debate, with many viewers labeling it as "woke" propaganda targeting specific demographic groups. But is this interpretation missing something profoundly important about the show's actual message? Looking beyond surface-level politics reveals that "Adolescence" is actually telling humanity's oldest story—one about our universal fallen condition. The series cleverly weaves biblical symbolism throughout, particularly through a character named...

7 months ago

12 minutes

Sunny Banana

Aidan Hart | Religion is about being truly human?

What does it mean to be "fully human" in an age of distraction? Iconographer Aidan Hart challenges our modern separation between religion and spirituality, suggesting that true fulfilment comes not from being "religious" but from living as God intended. Through the metaphor of a light bulb that needs electricity to shine, he illustrates how connection with the divine activates our fullest potential. The conversation explores how contemporary life keeps us constantly busy, preventing the atte...

8 months ago

40 minutes

Sunny Banana

In the Darkness Before Dawn: A Parable of Belief

One baby intuits that their current reality—with its darkness and limitations—must be preparation for something more. Why else would they have legs if not to walk someday? Why mouths if not to eventually eat? The other baby counters with scepticism, demanding empirical evidence and rejecting anything that contradicts their immediate experience as logically impossible. This simple story invites us to consider how our perspective shapes what we believe is possible. Like these babies contemplat...

8 months ago

4 minutes