The world’s first flammable podcast.
Welcome to Death by Burning.
In the spirit of those revolutionary dream-darers, inventors and doomed gadflies of hypocrisy, we’re on a mission to find the heretics among us and put a mic in their hands.
What’s the difference between Socrates and your crazy uncle? A medical reformer and a half-baked anti-vaxxer? A true visionary and an asshat? We don’t know the answer, but we want to find out.
Imagine a world robust enough to listen to its heretics, an institution strong enough to incorporate their insights, a community eager to honor in real-time those who choose to ruffle feathers instead of smooth them?
That’s what we’d like to help to build. And the best place to start is by listening —suspending our assumptions, our knee-jerk reactions, our disbelief.
From Saint Lawrence to Giordano Bruno, join us as we declare: “I’m well done on this side, friend, turn me over.” Or as Kris Kristofferson wrote after Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope: “Maybe she’s crazy, maybe she ain’t, but so was Picasso, and so were the Saints.”
Let the burning begin.
What is a Heretic?
Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs. A heretic is someone who holds such a belief.
A guest on Death by Burning is someone who has questioned, provoked, antagonized, challenged and changed a status quo.
A winner of The Heretic Award is someone who not only broadcasts their heresy but effectively uses it as a battering ram against entrenched beliefs and practices. Sometimes the benefits of their heresy arrive in our lifetimes; sometimes we all just need to sit tight for another 1000 years.
Chief Fire Warden
Death by Burning is hosted by Jonathan Englert. Jonathan is a technologist, strategist, and author of nonfiction books and mystery novels including one told from the perspective of a Labrador retriever.
He is a practitioner of long-form immersive journalism, a doctoral student of invention processes, a sailor and an aspirational swimmer with sharks.
The Chicago Tribune called his full-length nonfiction book The Collar (Houghton Mifflin 2006) "an impressive portrait." He is the recipient of the Nona Balakian Award for Literary Criticism, the Sackett Graduate Award for law and journalism, a grant from The Louisville Institute (a Lily Foundation partner) and a Maxwell Award for Best Novel.
But that’s the past. Today, he is on a quest for heretics in their many forms.