Ep83. How to Have an Enemy, Melissa Florer-Bixler

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Ep83. How to Have an Enemy, Melissa Florer-Bixler

“No good comes from the denial of enmity.” I spoke with Melissa Florer-Bixler about her new book, How To Have an Enemy. The question, she emphasises, is not whether to have enemies, but how to have the right enemy. We also talk about the myth of the Christmas Day truce, problems of 'unity', and why Melissa's job as a pastor isn't "to create a politically diverse church where people share their ideas dispassionately in an attempt towards middle ground or mutual transformation.” We end with a discussion about what the church can offer in a society riddled by inequality, dispossession, and violence and how stepping out to work against the principalities and powers of this world might require us to make ourselves enemies of the community (even the family) in which we were once so lovingly rooted.

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Ep49. Reading the Bible, Melissa Florer-Bixler and Emmy Kegler

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Ep49. Reading the Bible, Melissa Florer-Bixler and Emmy Kegler

How does one pick up a Bible and start to read it?

It’s a deceptively complex question. And in the time of COVID19 when many people are reaching for their Bibles outside of their familiar contexts of a worshipping community, shared liturgy and the proclamation of the word, it’s a question well worth considering.

To help us consider it I sat down with two wonderful pastors, authors, and friends of the podcast, Melissa Florer-Bixler and Emmy Kegler. We talk about the questions we bring to scripture and the questions scripture asks of us. I ask about resisting the urge of reading scripture to “come to something” and we discuss how to approach texts that have been used to wound. We cover how the pandemic is re-shaping their ministries and how it feels to have their books turn one.

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Ep25. Fire By Night, Melissa Florer-Bixler

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Ep25. Fire By Night, Melissa Florer-Bixler

I sat down with Melissa Florer-Bixler to talk her new book Fire By Night: finding God in the pages of the Old Testament. This is an exceptional, exciting, and accessible work, drawing us into the nuance, beauty, and challenge of the OT in order to draw us deeper into the life of God. We talk about reading slowly, how difficult texts often reveal parts of ourselves we’d rather turn away from, holiness, justice, Sodom and Gomorrah, and how the Mennonite practice of testimony fits well with the nature of debate and conversation within the pages of the OT. Also, we recorded this a day after the Oscars, so we talk about our desire for a Jael movie. Listen in iTunes // Watch on YouTube

This is a special episode, co-presented with Insights, the magazine of the Uniting Church in Australia Synod of NSW/ACT.

“From page to page, chapter to chapter, book to book, we encounter the human and divine in the same verse, the same ink, as one bleeds into the other.”

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