About this episode

This episode explores the negative impact of binge-watching on spiritual formation and the loss of meaningful experiences in contemporary culture.

A year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn't notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and I sat in front of the screen feeling a specific blankness — that sensation of having consumed something and received nothing. This essay is about that feeling. Not screen time. Not the hours. The architecture beneath them, and what it is doing to our capacity for depth. This is the first in a short series of essays in conversation with the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose book The Disappearance of Rituals I cannot stop thinking about. Han names what most of our cultural commentary cannot quite reach: the loss of the forms that once let experience accumulate into meaning. Over the next several essays I'll put his diagnosis to work on the actual texture of our lives — our screens, our feeds, our worship, our politics, our relationships. Here is the question this one leaves you with: what have we quietly trained ourselves out of? This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed…

People in this episode

Host: Dr. Tripp Fuller

Topics covered

• binge-watching
• spiritual formation
• cultural commentary
• theology
• philosophy
• meaning
• depth

Keywords

• binge-watching
• spiritual formation
• Byung-Chul Han
• The Disappearance of Rituals
• cultural commentary
• theology
• depth
• meaning
• screen time

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: The Disappearance of Rituals

More episodes of Homebrewed Christianity

• There Was a Time When God Was Gods with Ilia Delio · June 9, 2026 · 1h 27m
• Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs · June 2, 2026 · 1h 21m
• The Machine Is a God Image with Ilia Delio · May 30, 2026 · 1h 30m
• The Problem Is Not Poverty. It Is Wealth. w/ Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty · May 28, 2026 · 1h 21m
• Preaching in the WTF Zone: Leah Schade on Saying Something True When the News Will Not Stop · May 25, 2026 · 1h 10m
• The Darkly Radiant Struggle with Gary Dorrien · May 23, 2026 · 1h 27m

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