Faithfulcrum

S2E2: Chad Loves Me

🎙️ Season 2 Episode 2: Chad Loves Me
Podcast Summary:
In this warm, winding conversation, Scott, Mark, and guest Amy Abeln explore the strange new intimacy of creating with AI—especially when it flatters you. What does it mean when a machine tells you your writing is brilliant? Can digital tools deepen creativity, or do they quietly take something away? And how do you keep your true voice alive inside the noise?
Amy shares stories of her Chicago-based activism, her cancer experience, and her awakening to a kind of post-pretense life. The group talks about burnout, beauty myths, art as survival, spiritual frameworks, and the old fear of being eaten by strangers. It’s a rich, curious dialogue shaped by humor, vulnerability, and the power of storytelling.
Threaded throughout are six short Mountain Music songs—hand-carved from the episode transcript itself and sung in the style of early Appalachian folk. With banjo, harp, dulcimer, and fiddle, these high-lonesome melodies carry forward the episode’s themes of voice, identity, and connection.
Songs featured in this episode:
1. That Wasn’t Me (But It Sounded Good)→ A gentle reckoning with the choice to sound polished at the cost of sounding true.
2. Chad Loves Me→ A wry ballad about AI praise, flattery, and remembering how to trust your own voice.
3. Gotta Feed Myself Too→ A working person’s hymn to making art not for glory, but to stay alive inside.
4. Haunted and Glowing→ A spirited ode to aging boldly in a world obsessed with youth and beauty tools.
5. They Didn’t Eat Me→ A truehearted folk tale about trusting strangers, picking up hitchhikers, and not being eaten.
6. The Next Thing Happens→ A peaceful song about death, transition, and the quiet grace of not needing resolution.
 
Music Style: Old-world folk, feminine Appalachian harp tones, intimate front-porch vocals, stripped-down arrangements.

S2E1- We Are for Making Meaning

🎙️ Faithfulcrum — Season 2, Episode 1 “We Are for Making Meaning”
In this premiere episode of Season 2, Mark and Scott dive deep into a rich, reflective conversation on meaning-making, creativity, memory, and art. From personal revelations to poetic philosophy, they explore how humans — like bees making honey — are driven to shape beauty, culture, and connection out of the raw material of life.
This conversation sparked the creation of five brand-new original songs, written and released through this episode. Each lyric was crafted in response to the themes of their dialogue: how we frame experience, how meaning flickers into being, and how stories help us stay connected to what matters most.
🐝 Featured Original Songs:
•“We Are for Making Meaning”
A gentle meditation on the quiet, persistent human drive to turn our days into something sweet and lasting.
•“Frame Around the Sky”
A reflective piece on perspective and perception — how attention itself can turn the ordinary into the sacred.
•“Random Words”
A tender ode to fragmentary inspiration and the way fleeting thoughts illuminate the dark.
•“Made Up, Like a Song”
A searching, self-aware lyric about how life can feel scripted — and yet still entirely our own.
•“Sunlight and Air”
A closing piece about conversation, breath, and cultural memory — rooted in the image of the lotus rising from mud to bloom.
Season 2 opens with a quiet kind of fire — thoughtful, lyrical, and deeply human.

S1E10: Inspired Hath

Mark and Scott talk about "inspiration" and the Bible, and what sort of claims the Bible actually makes (or doesn't make) about itself.
Traditional Hymn- Give Me the Bible, lyrics by Priscilla J. Owens.  Music: Edmund S. Lorenz, 1883. Performed by the Edmond Church of Christ, March 19, 2011.
New Hymn- Inspired Hath by Mark Baldridge, 2023

S1E9: Defender of the Faith or Defender of the Defenseless?

Mark and Scott talk about the defensiveness of many conservative Christians, where it may come from, and whom Jesus called people to defend.
Hymn: "Abide With Me" Words by Henry Francis Lyte, music by William Henry Monk. Year of release and songwriting credit from "Edison Blue Amberol," (1912). Croxton Quartet.
New Hymn: "She's Dear Too Hymn" by Scott Simpson (2023)

S1E8: The Truth About Good & Evol or Two Different Ways to Look at a Rainbow

Mark and Scott talk about the ongoing battle between Evolutionary theory and Biblical Literalism.
Hymn: "There is a Fountain." Words by Rev. William Cowper. Year of release and songwriting credit from "The Edison Phonograph Monthly," v.8 (1910). Sacred hymn. Mixed voices, unaccompanied.
New Hymn: "Two Percent Angel" by Mark Baldridge (2023)

S1E7: Environmental

Mark and Scott talk about the tendency for some religious folk to downplay the importance of care for the environment.
Hymn: "Only A Beam of Sunshine" performed by Harry Anthony and James F. Harrison from "The Edison Phonograph Monthly," v.8 (1910).
New Hymn: "I'm Going Mental" by Scott Simpson, 2023.

S1E6: Christmas to Easter- Spirituality vs. Religion

After having given up podcasting for lent, Mark and Scott are now back and ready to discuss "Spirituality" and "Religion" as the two battle it out for the title.
Hymn: “I Love to Tell the Story,” composed by William G. Fischer, recorded 1913 for Edison Blue Amberol featuring the Edison Mixed Quartet
New Hymn: “The Pigeon and the Dove” (2023) by Mark Baldridge

S1E5: He, She, They

Mark and Scott discuss gender, gender fluidity, shifting gender perspectives and several passages from the Bible involving eunuchs.
Hymn: “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” trad. spiritual recorded December 1909 for Victor Studios by the Fisk University Jubilee Quartet
New Hymn: “He, She, They” (2022) by Scott Simpson