Recover Your Optimism with The Love Good Podcast

Plenty is happening in the culture that can bring a person down, but many of us aren’t content to stay there.

We’re weary of marketplace mantras and the pushy public square. Actively seeking sources of goodness, truth and beauty, we’re out to restore our resilient spirits and fill our hearts with hope. Are you with us?

Then do I have a podcast for you.

The Love Good Podcast’s host–speaker, musician and visionary Jimmy Mitchell–believes beauty will change the world. He’s dedicated to renewing the culture by initiating a movement. It’s smart. It’s vibrant. It’s a wellspring of hope in a weary world.

Each week the Love Good Podcast will remind you that It’s Not Over Yet.

I’ve followed Jimmy Mitchell’s career since his three-album collaboration with vocalist Colleen Nixon, which produced exquisite updates of ancient music and new songs I treasure, especially at Advent. Mitchell is also an accomplished pianist whose compositions can be heard on Spotify and purchased on iTunes, Amazon and at the Love Good Culture’s online store.

Love Good is a bigger, broader venture which has evidently been percolating while Mitchell was extending his work in a variety of venues including building an impressive archive of interviews with musicians of exceptional heart.

With the launch of Love Good’s podcast, the mark of a mission coming into its own is evident. In the pilot episode the voice of Jessamyn Anderson proclaims, “on top of being a media discovery platform and crowdfunding intiative, we are a grassroots movement that accompanies young artists who are transforming culture with beauty.”

Listen to those words while tapping your toes to the energetic opening tune and your heart is instantly on board.

The Love Good Podcast is brought to you by our patrons as they stand on the frontlines of discovering the world’s best music, books and art before anyone else. Our patrons raise media to a higher standard as they help young people turn that standard into a way of life. Join the movement today that will give you hope for tomorrow.

A bold promise, but Love Good does not disappoint.

What you’ll discover (if you haven’t already):

On the Love Good podcast you’ll discover first-rate music and interviews with artists of depth and integrity whose excellence and enthusiasm will touch you to the core. Among them: Luke Smallbone of For King and Country, American Idol Winner Kris Allen and folk-pop singer, Colorado-born Michelle Mandico (listen to her lovely “Ptarmigan” here).

Nick Fabian, whose bio quite accurately describes him as “the perfect combination of Saturday night at the club bliss and Sunday morning reflection,” debuted his haunting, tender single “Love Is Everlasting” on Love Good before it was relseased to iTunes.

Love Good’s interviews appear between two regular podcast segments. In the first, Jimmy and Canadian singer Janaya Trudel reflect on culture, beauty, friendship, silence, poetry and much more. Each conversation hits that place in the heart that fights to recover authenticity while resisting vapid media’s clamoring call for lordship over our souls. (Trudel is half of the sister-duo Jay & Lo, whose single “Grey Sky” is the epitome of realistic optimism and just might bring a tear to your eye.)

A Standard Worth Raising

Following Janaya’s segment and the first part of the artist interview, Jimmy chats with Jessamyn Anderson about Love Good Culture’s ongoing projects. One dear to my heart is the Love Good Standard: three qualities for evaluating the media we consume.

I want to share this standard with everyone I know, but especially the young people in my life. Patrons receive a link to a pdf that can be copied for discussion or placed anywhere you want to be reminded of our upward call. Emphasizing transforming beauty rooted in truth, the Love Good Standard inspires the soul. Anyone who takes it seriously is on the path to becoming fully human.

Love Good patrons can grow in personal transformation by applying the Love Good Standard to their own media consumption and have the bright opportunity as well to make an investment “in a generation of young people and artists who are building a better culture.”

Those who become patrons at lovegoodculture.com are offered inticing packages by level of donation. These quarterly packages include music, art and quality books. I’ve been so impressed with what I’ve received that I raised my own Love Good donation level. This is one worthy cause.

A Bonus: Who isn’t interested in discovering rich reading and solid entertainment? Jimmy Mitchell concludes each interview by asking the artists which books and other media they’ve been enjoying. Answers have ranged from Trappist contemplative Thomas Merton and Protestant philosopher Dallas Willard to singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga to the Netflix series, Black Mirror.

The Love Good store is another bonus. To know that C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Gregory Wolfe and Dana Gioia are among the writers young minds will discover there tells me all I need to know about the excellence and intent of this project. But there’s more: great music, fine art, and fun stuff to wear are also offered.

Love Good is an undertaking of “real adventure and real mission…of rebuilding culture, of bringing beauty back into the forefront of our lives,” Mitchell says.

Join the movement today that gives hope for tomorrow. Seriously. Love Good.

Reads & Other Seeds

Sparrowfare’s Intentional Earbuds 1 and 2: The Bishop Who Refuses to Dumb Down the Faith and The Mars Hill Audio Journal: Where All Things Considered Meets God.

The Love Good store instantly won my heart when I discovered one of my favorite books of all time as its first offering. Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy is a deeply evocative memoir of a romance, marriage and grief. It provides a unique glimpse of C.S. Lewis as students encountered him at Oxford. It’s about friendship. It’s about the price of conversion. A Severe Mercy opens the soul to the meaning of love.

Photos by Kari Shea on Unsplash and Stocksnap and Congerdesign on Pixabay.

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