Faithfulcrum

S2E5- Sing it Together

Faithfulcrum — Season 2, Episode 5
Sing It Together
In this episode of Faithfulcrum, the conversation wanders—intentionally and patiently—into the territory of soul, authenticity, creativity, and what it means to truly show up. What begins as a reflection on AI tools and “bringing the soul to the tool” opens into something much older and more human: the idea that the soul is not something to be summoned or forced, but something that appears only when it feels safe.
Scott Simpson, Mark, and guest Sharla Steever explore the soul as something shy, fragile, and resilient—more like a wild animal than a fixed possession. Along the way, they reflect on vulnerability, burnout, creativity, prayer, group singing, humor, and the ways love and attention quietly shape authentic connection. The conversation moves fluidly between philosophy and story, seriousness and laughter, skepticism and reverence, never trying to resolve the tension so much as dwell honestly within it.
This episode has also been reimagined as a vocal jazz song suite, drawing on the warmth and swing of the 1940s and 1950s—a musical form rooted in conversation, improvisation, and communal feeling. Each segment corresponds to a movement in the dialogue, together forming a cohesive musical arc.
🎶 Song Suite Segment Guide
1. Shy Soul
Opening reflections on soul, AI, and the Circle of TrustA gentle, swinging introduction that treats the soul as something wary but alive—like a deer at the edge of the woods. This segment sets the emotional tone: slow down, make space, don’t grab. The soul arrives only when it feels safe.
2. Masks, Mirrors, and Data
Authenticity, vulnerability, and the tension of technologyThis piece explores the difference between safety and avoidance, questioning whether turning to tools—AI included—can feel easier than risking ourselves with other people. Beneath the swing is a subtle unease about performance, masks, and being seen.
3. Love Is the Place
Sharla Steever on soul as the place where love shows upWarm and grounded, this segment centers love as the defining quality of the soul. It lingers on connection, acceptance, and the way being truly seen can reignite a flickering inner flame.
4. Burnout Ain’t About Fire
Burnout, vocation, and misplaced promotion — up-tempo swingLively and forward-moving, this up-tempo number reframes burnout not as overwork, but as the cost of giving what you don’t actually have. Its energy mirrors the insight: when the work fits, it feeds you back.
5. Who Are You Writing For?
Creativity, audience, humor, and artistic honestyPlayful and self-aware, this segment reflects on why we create at all—whether for others, for ourselves, or for someone who may never hear it. Humor and vulnerability intertwine as the song embraces imperfection and intention.
6. Sing It Together
Prayer, community, awe, and shared songThe suite closes with a communal feeling—less about belief than belonging. Prayer becomes mindfulness, singing becomes connection, and voices blend into something larger than any individual. The ending invites listeners to stay awhile, humming together.

S2E4 - Bring Soul to the Tool

Faithfulcrum — Season 2, Episode 4
Bring Soul to the Tool
In this episode of Faithfulcrum, Mark and Scott circle a question that refuses to stay technical: what happens to the human soul when our tools begin to speak back to us? Beginning with fears of AI as something demonic or exploitative, the conversation ranges widely—through science fiction, loneliness, attachment, imagination, culture, and the long human habit of turning new technologies into mirrors for our deepest needs.
Threaded through the episode is a seven-part musical suite in a comical, dark cabaret style—part Weimar, part carnival sermon, part philosophical confession. Each segment distills a moment from the conversation into song, not to resolve the questions, but to embody them.
“The Great C Knows Everything” opens the suite with awe and irony, invoking the all-knowing machine as oracle, prophet, and unreliable god.
“Hallucinations in Orbit” skewers the false confidence of artificial authority, where answers arrive polished, persuasive, and sometimes entirely wrong.
“The Sacrifice of the Young” turns tender and unsettling, exploring loneliness, vulnerability, and the quiet costs of synthetic companionship.
“Vacuum Shaped Like You” reflects on attachment and loss, tracing how love creates absences that feel custom-made—and how easily something else can move in to fill them.
“Authentic or Attached” wrestles with a modern dilemma: unconditional acceptance without friction, and what we trade away when we choose comfort over conflict.
“Monsters, Tulpas, and Lovers” leans into imagination and creation, where stories, companions, and even lovers are built from language and belief—and sometimes outlast their makers.
“Bring Soul to the Tool”, the finale, steps back to a longer view, arguing that no tool is truly soulless until humans decide to leave it that way, and that meaning has always been something we manufacture together.
Season 2, Episode 4 suggests that culture itself—conversation, music, satire, and care—is how humans metabolize danger, novelty, and power. Like fire, like disco, like every tool before it, AI will take on the shape of the soul we bring to it.
This is Faithfulcrum.

S2E3 - Fear Gotta Way of Knockin' First

Faithfulcrum | Season 2, Episode 3“Fear Gotta Way of Knockin’ First”
Welcome to Faithfulcrum, where we slow the conversation down long enough to feel its weight—and maybe find our footing again.
In this episode, Season 2, Episode 3, we sit with a force that shapes our lives far more than we’d like to admit: fear. Not just fear of death, but fear in the streets, fear in politics, fear in violence, fear in silence, fear in the tools we build—and fear in what happens when we stop seeing each other as human.
Our conversation moves through seven movements, and each one becomes part of a single Delta blues suite titled “Fear Gotta Way of Knockin’ First.” You’ll hear each movement between parts of the conversation and hear it all as one continuous piece at the end—raw, acoustic, stripped down—an old blues voice carrying modern questions.
We begin with Fear in the Blood, where fear shows up before thought, before reason—pure reflex.
Then we move into Words That Make Us Shake, where rhetoric, surveillance, and silence teach us to edit ourselves.
In Frozen Men, Hard Lessons, we look at trauma—how fear trains us for survival but leaves reflection undeveloped.
Ruthless Hands, Human Hearts wrestles with violence, war, and the dangerous ease of dehumanization.
At the center is The Pause Between the Blow, that fragile moment where reaction can stop and something else can happen.
From there, Tools Ain’t the Devil asks what responsibility really belongs to us when we blame guns, machines, or technology.
And finally, Live the World You Want closes the suite with a refusal to live as victims—choosing instead to practice the world we say we want, right now.
This episode doesn’t offer easy answers. But it does offer a rhythm—a place to pause, to listen, and maybe to decide how you’ll respond when fear comes knockin’.
This is Faithfulcrum.Season 2. Episode 3.“Fear Gotta Way of Knockin’ First.”

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)