In this episode, Tim chats with author and activist Brian McLaren about his new novel The Last Voyage, a provocative and emotionally rich exploration of what might happen when the powerful elite try to escape a dying Earth and build a new civilisation elsewhere.
Drawing on decades of theological reflection and his recent work on collapse and ecological crisis, Brian reflects on what spirituality might look like at the end of the world. Can faith survive without institutions or certainty? What happens when spiritual practices are reduced to survival strategies? Is surrender a form of wisdom, or just disguised defeat? And what does it mean to live meaningfully when the future is fragile and unknown?
After the interview, Nomad hosts Tim and Nick reflect on how Brian’s novel resonates with their own faith journeys—particularly their experiences of institutional loss, their relationship to hope in a time of climate breakdown, and the challenge of staying spiritually open when despair feels like the path of least resistance
Interview starts at…
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QUOTES
“The word surrender can mean a kind of surrender to reality, a surrender of our illusions, a surrender to face the facts. That to me is humbling and difficult and necessary and painful and beautiful, all of those things at once”
“There are the colonizers and there are the colonized. Indigenous people feel that they belong to the land… Colonizers think the land belongs to them.”
“The market was supposed to solve all of our problems, but it turns us into decadent, greedy creatures without foresight.”
“I don’t know what the future holds, but I know how I want to show up. And gaining clarity on how we want to show up, whatever happens, I suppose that’s a practice of intentionality that’s grown more important to me over time.”
