The Soloists

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was the most popular of all time, amassing 128 million views the day of the Super Bowl, with millions viewing afterwards through clips online. We felt a vibrant energy, his palpable love for Puerto Rico, and enjoyed the wedding at the center, and the inclusion of children and the elderly.
But according to our guest in today’s episode, Rosalynde Welch, the vivid snapshots of intergenerational community life of Puerto Rico is, somewhat, a romanticized projection. Puerto Rico’s total fertility rate is currently one of the lowest in the world — 0.9 births per woman — far below replacement level. This, combined with out-migration mean there may not be such a bustling Puerto Rican society in future decades.
Rosalynde outlines a conflict between Bad Bunny’s medium and his message: his performance celebrated Puerto Rico's vibrancy, yet most of us watched it on screens and smartphones — key culprits in eroding attachment to local places and communities and contributing to global changes in coupling and fertility. She cites sociologist Alice Evans, who observes that smartphones provide endless private entertainment while enabling “cultural leapfrogging” — allowing people to sidestep local norms and preferences for those they encounter online. This weakens the social conditions in which people once met, paired off, and built families.
All this, Rosalynde explains, makes the wedding at the center Bad Bunny’s halftime show worth sitting with. His most recent album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, mourns the loss of Puerto Rican culture. What, beyond economic and political reform, would it take to save the world he loves? Is traditional marriage and, well, creating more Puerto Ricans part of the solution?
This conversation led to personal reflections on how technology, among other factors, has complicated where we belong in the world, as well as coupling. Even when we grasp these problems on a theoretical level, we can’t always sufficiently reform ourselves to undo their influence. Rosalynde asks a beautiful question: knowing that we can’t go backwards, can you cultivate “a local world within yourself?”
After all, there is a conflict between the medium and the message of fertility discourse, too: its apocalyptic, often scolding tone can invoke panic, guilt, and anxiety among the single or childless, whom the discourse supposedly wants to persuade to have kids. For a generation prone to neurotic overthinking about love and fearful that the end of the world may actually be nigh, this undermines the trust, ease, peace, and self-confidence necessary to enter and sustain longterm relationships.Perhaps pronatalists could take a leaf out of Bad Bunny’s playbook. His joyful portrayal of intergenerational community life, with a wedding at the center, had a spiritual coherence to it, despite its contradictions. He didn’t tell us to reform ourselves; he made us love and want what we were seeing.Hope you enjoy the episode!
______________________Rosalynde Frandsen Welch is Associate Director and a Research Fellow at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Her research focuses on Latter-day Saint scripture, theology, and literature. She holds a PhD in early modern English literature from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA in English from Brigham Young University.



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In The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (2025), Leah Libresco Sargeant —our guest for today — envisions a world where caring for loved ones is not seen as an interruption of a real, normal, satisfying life, but constitutive of one. In fact, one measure love might be our “interruptibility.” The myth that we are independent is an “anthropological falsehood” promoting the lie that we can survive or thrive without others who choose to care for us. Women’s bodies point continually to this lie, and its tragic that pregnancy, birth, nursing, and parenting overall are treated as interruptions from work and life. Yet, as she reiterates in this episode, “men can’t get away with pretending to be autonomous, either. They just get caught later.”
We talk to Leah about her book and how it relates to single people, whose lives are often structured so that they simply don’t receive as many interruptions from other people, and often struggle to ask for help. Hope you enjoy the conversation!



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Today we share another interreligious dialgoue on the relationship between sex and the spiritual, which — contrary to pretty much all public messaging on the topic since the day I was born — is not inherently antagonistic. Not when you look deeper into the texts and teachings. And certainly not among the Dharmic faiths, which are known for being anthropologically astute on matters of desire, love, and attachment. Our guest for this conversation is Premananda Villasa, a museum curator and yoga instructor based in Washington DC, and a fellow Residential Minister at Georgetown University.
Prema taught us about the four stages of life in the Dharmic traditions, which show the arc of spiritual progression across the life cycle from student to householder to retiree to renunciate. Sex and sexual energy play a different role in each of these life stages. You can’t truly advance to the next stage without grappling with the former. These earthly/pragmatic stages are what we might call our “dharma” — they define the relationships and duties through which we can access and channel divine love.My takeaway: knowing your own “dharma “is the first place to start in figuring out what’s right for your life, with sex and many other things. Just as we learned in our conversation last year with Fr. Briscoe and Sara Perla, it depends on the type of relationships and the forms of service we are called into.Beyond the theology of it all, we discuss the challenge of trying to live in a way that is both holy and human when it comes to sex. It takes time and experience to know our own bodies and understand how we love, hurt, and heal through them — how do we give ourselves and others the grace to learn from experience, while not being careless? How do we navigate dating norms or religious expectations that conflict with what we feel is right? Similar to our conversation on sexual maturity with Jennifer-Finlayson Fife, we ask: what does it mean to be adults about sex?
Hope you enjoy.



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We’re coming up on Giving Tuesday, which is a good time to reflect on what we’re giving our time and money to. Today’s guests, Abe Collier and Melissa Robel, discuss their own wrestles with this question as they heeded unexpected calls to found their own humanitarian organizations. I was eager to talk to Abe and Melissa because their organizations are both young and small — right at that point where leadership can be lonely and it’s easy to wonder am I crazy for even attempting this?
Abe is the founder and director of Dignity Aid International, which delivers essential food and hygiene supplies to rural villages and psychiatric hospitals in Ukraine. Melissa is the president and founder Pads 4 Refugees, which supplies disposal menstrual products to women in refugee camps. Both Abe and Melissa caught their inspiration while volunteering (separately) in refugee camps in Greece, noticing unmet needs at different extremes. While being a founder sounds sexy — and it certainly takes a lot of confidence — it also asks for humility to sit in spreadsheets, patience to communicate across cultural and language barriers, and grace for people living through the immediate effects of war, displacement, chaos, and loss. Sometimes life feels like a hero's journey and sometimes it feels like grunt work. As we discuss, both mindsets are necessary to getting things done in the world.Follow these awesome organizations for more information:Dignity Aid International: Follow on Instagram or Substack | Donate | Volunteer Pads 4 Refugees: Follow on Instagram or LinkedIn | Donate


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David Boice has done one of the most interesting public experiments on the internet — 52 Churches in 52 Weeks. What began as a personal search for a spiritual home has become a rare document of the Christian architecture of America: not just what churches teach, but how Churches treat people as they walk inside for the first time. Over dozens of Sundays, David has become a quiet expert in the subtle social technologies of community — hospitality, fellowship, teaching, and the fragile process by which a stranger becomes an insider. At a moment when many of us are asking how “thick community” is built, David’s observations carry unusual weight.
But the institutional dynamics — how Churches greet, orient, and integrate new attendees — are only half of the story. We also discuss the psychology of the newcomer. The imposter syndrome that surfaces without a shared history, ancestry, or education in the faith. The question of legitimacy (“Is this the one true church?”) that mirrors the modern anxiety of dating (“Is this the one true spouse?”). The deeper tension between a spiritual life that maximizes freedom and optionality and a spiritual life that requires commitment. How do we recognize the difference between ambient doubt and genuine warning signs? What does it mean to choose something — or someone — in a world engineered to keep every option open? Mallory, Diana, and David compare notes on the varying anxieties that come from being a convert versus a lifelong member of an organization.
David brings incredible stories from the road — and by now, he’s far beyond the original fifty-two. Some are funny, some are moving, all of them illuminate what it means to belong where you’re still learning the rules. This was a joyful, surprising conversation, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.



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