Character Study: The Bible for Real

About Character Study: The Bible for Real

Two dads reduce anxiety by applying scripture to the news. Journey with journalist Jon Fortt and pastor David Tieche as we process the modern world in a way that helps you talk about issues with peers and mentees. The social media-driven cycle is stressful and paralyzing. We offer journalistic and pastoral guidance, rooted in the Bible, to help you focus and act.

Publisher

David Tieche and Jon Fortt

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

20 Oct 2025

Latest episode

11 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

25 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   11 Oct 2026

   Why That Sydney Sweeney Ad Is a "Sin Sandwich"; plus Presley Gerber, Bo French

   Jon Fortt and David Tieche launch Two Gen X Dads — a running conversation that takes the week's biggest headlines and holds them up to a scriptural lens. In this edition, three stories, and the uncomfortable question sitting underneath each one. First: the Sydney Sweeney sports-betting ad everyone has seen and no one can quite pronounce (Novig). Jon calls it a "sin sandwich" — a triple-decker of sexualization, gambling, and the quiet power of sports as a badge of belonging. Is placing a bet really any different from spending money at the movies? David turns to 1 Corinthians 10, where Paul writes that everything is permissible but not everything is beneficial, and "I will not be mastered by anything." The hosts trace how fast sports betting went from taboo to ubiquitous, why the apps are engineered to be addictive, and what Proverbs' warnings about get-rich-quick schemes say about short-circuiting God's careful provision. Jon adds 2 Peter 2:19 — people are slaves to whatever has mastered them — and James 1:14-15, on how desire, once conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin to death. He widens it to the machinery itself: the algorithms behind these apps are "built for mastery," laying down breadcrumbs to get you to the next click, the next game, the next bet. Second, a tragedy: the death of model Presley Gerber, son of Cindy Crawford, at 27 at a rehabilitation facility. Rather than speculate on the cause, Jon and David sit with the grief — the families in their own circles touched by addiction and mental-health crises, including a teenager's overdose that shook an entire church community. They reach for comfort in Matthew 10:29-31 (not one sparrow falls outside the Father's care) and Romans 5:3-5, where suffering produces perseverance, character, and hope. And they wrestle with a hard balance: Paul's charge to "bear one another's burdens" set beside his very next line, that each should carry their own load. Even Frodo and Samwise — and Moses needing his arms held up at the battle — become pictures of helping carry someone without taking their load from them. Third, a controversy at the University of Texas, where a Republican Railroad Commission candidate called South Asian students celebrating at a football game "a problem." Jon unpacks why the "replacement" framing collapses on the facts — 90% of UT's slots go to in-state students — and what it feels like as the father of Black and Korean sons who are constantly asked where they "really" belong. He and David connect it to the Great Commission's vision of every tribe and tongue, and to Jesus' call to welcome the stranger rather than fear them. The thread running through all three: it is in our nature to stray — toward enticement, toward suspicion, toward the easy story — and the invitation, each time, to bring it honestly before God. — Two Gen X Dads with Jon Fortt & David Tieche Reading the week's headlines through a scriptural lens. #TwoGenXDads #Faith #Bible #Christianity #CurrentEvents

2. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Stadium Mom, Verlander's Daughter Moment, and the Cornell Case: Week In Faith 10/02/26

   This week, Jon Fortt and David Tieche take on three stories that look obvious from the outside — and turn out to be anything but what the crowd assumed. The thread running through all of them: you can watch a scene and feel certain you understand it, but until you know the values and the connection underneath, you're seeing only a fraction of the truth.First, the viral "stadium mom." At a Giants–Twins game in San Francisco, broadcasters Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper panned to a woman balancing her baby and three trays of food for her husband, crowned her "mom of the year," and ad-libbed a bit about a lazy dad. The internet took it from there — a referendum on useless husbands that curdled into real cruelty, with strangers telling a man they'd never met that he didn't deserve to live. Then the mom published a long account of what actually happened: a cold night, a husband quietly grieving a childhood friend who had just died, a family trip to the ballpark meant to lift him up. "I don't have a tenth of the story," David admits — which is exactly the point. Jon connects it to Jesus on the speck and the log, and to the way people once judged Jesus for eating with sinners and tax collectors; David brings the letter of James — quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, "for human anger does not produce the righteousness of God."Second, a goodbye. All-time-great pitcher Justin Verlander throws his final pitch, and his seven-year-old daughter runs onto the field to hug him as he leaves the mound — and he breaks down sobbing. In his press conference he reflects on a lifetime of sacrifice for the game, the cities he moved to, the moments with his daughter he missed, and the time he most wants to reclaim. The hosts notice that even a "manufactured moment" can't fake a child's run into her father's arms — and that unfakeable bond, Jon argues, is precisely why Scripture's picture of God as Father lands. David closes with Dallas Willard: the main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish — it's the person you become.Finally, the hardest one. A lawsuit alleging a horrific assault at a Cornell fraternity. Here Jon deliberately refuses to do what the first story warned against — pulling every familiar narrative off the shelf and laying it over facts he doesn't have. What he will name is the gap between the genuine community, love, and intention we were built for and the cheapened, twisted versions that take root around pleasure-seeking and drugs. David offers a definition of love that isn't very "Western": seeking someone's true best, even when it costs you. And both fathers land on their sons — that modeling love, and speaking up when a room turns wrong, has to happen long before a crisis, not after it.Matthew 7:3-5James 1:19-20Matthew 9:10-13Romans 8:15-16 / Galatians 4:61 John 3:1Psalm 139:13-14Romans 12:9Amos 5:15John 15:13Micah 6:81 Peter 3:15

3. 

   27 Sept 2026

   Esau: The Brother Who Ran to Forgive

   Jon Fortt and David Tieche close the Jacob cycle with Esau — the hairy, hot-headed hunter Jacob cheated out of a birthright and a blessing — and the reunion that turns out to be the whole season's defining moment. It's a rare kind of Bible story, they note: no clean villain and hero, but two brothers who each change messily. Since the womb (Genesis 25) they've struggled — "the older will serve the younger" — Esau born red and hairy, Jacob grabbing his heel. Isaac favored Esau, the man's-man who brought home venison; Rebekah favored smooth-skinned Jacob in the kitchen, and led the trickery that sent Jacob running for his life. Now Jacob comes home to face the brother he wronged — and Esau is riding out with 400 men. In "great fear and distress" Jacob splits his family into two camps so one can flee. Unlike Laban, whom God warned off in a dream, Esau has had no such warning, and unlike Laban his grievance is justified. But something has shifted: where Jacob used to hide at the rear as a human shield, after wrestling God he walks out front and bows to the ground seven times. Esau's answer is the hinge of the episode: he runs, throws his arms around Jacob's neck, kisses him, and they weep. Jacob presses gifts on him — offering away, ironically, the very kind of blessing he once stole — and the brothers trade "no, you keep it, the Lord has blessed me," both finally naming God as their provider. It reads as restitution, the hosts say — Zacchaeus paying back fourfold — a real sign of a changed heart. And then the line they linger on: "seeing your face is like seeing the face of God." Jacob's God-encounters have climbed from Bethel's distant angels to Mahanaim's army to the all-night wrestling — and now, face to face with the brother he feared, the same words. Loving God and loving your brother, they argue (the Shema and 1 John), are one thing: leave your gift at the altar and go reconcile first. It isn't tidy. Jacob promises to follow Esau to Seir, then quietly heads to Succoth instead — Jon calls it one more trick — and the brothers never settle together. But years later they stand side by side at Mamre to bury their father Isaac, and the favoritism that tore them apart is buried with him. Esau's run-and-embrace, the hosts note, is the very picture Jesus would later paint of the prodigal's father — the God who runs to the one coming home. Along the way: the John Williams strings swelling; Esau's venison, chicken wings, and football against Jacob's "typist hands"; a little Alanis Morissette irony; Samson torching Philistine fields with foxes; and why it mattered that, in that culture, important men don't run. Genesis 25 and 32-35. The finale of Season 2 — next up, maybe, Joseph. Jon's calling it a cliffhanger. Part of Character Study with Jon Fortt and David Tieche — a walk through the people of Scripture: their flaws, their faith, and what they reveal.

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