Desert

Give me that.

And the Contact in the Desert people are great.

This is only a very positive.

I love the owners.

And then we start getting into the conference scene and plugging into the grassroots public.

This is how I got onto this whole thing.

And going to the Contact in the Desert in 2024 and it's like, wow, he's a hit.

Chris, you want to come back next year officially? He's like, sure.

But does anybody ever ask about how many people were killed in any given year in Syria or know those numbers? Starting in 2011, the Assad regime in Syria began a killing spree that killed hundreds of thousands and created millions of refugees.

And yet Vogue magazine put that year the first lady of Syria on its cover titled A Rose in the Desert.

Nobody is ever told about indiscriminate killings of torture by Middle Eastern and African regimes whose charnel houses would astound and surprise most college students if they ever knew about them.

Or maybe they wouldn't care because it would be cultural bias to judge such regimes everyone expects horror from.

George Van Tassel, his testimony comes out of that region.

And the venue itself is where the original Contact in the Desert was held, and they've done an entire revamp and remodel, and we're going to be one of the first events moving into that space after their remodel.

So we're excited about that.

Yep, can't wait.

I did not find the name of this guy.

I don't know if you know who this is, Aaron.

It says Contact in the Desert.

Yeah, it says Contact in the Desert.

All right, guys.

What is the name of the song that transports Link to the Desert Colossus? Oh, boy, oh, boy.

Oh, I'm going to say Song of the Desert.

Oh, I just did this.

I need a second.

I am your host, Shannon Stark, and I'm here in studio today with Pastor Robbie Symons.

We are going through some encouraging, pivotal chapters in the book of Isaiah in our current series, Rivers in the Desert.

And Robbie, today I am so grateful to have traveled a lot.

And when I think of the desert, the picture is so clear.

I'm praying you'll be very encouraged by our text today.

And this profound passage really is.

We have a couple of weeks left in our series, Rivers in the Desert, Lord willing.

And just last week, I was in Romania with Pastor Greg McFarlane.

Here's the Forest of Symbols moment, which is to talk about the desert.

Because it's...

He writes very poetically about driving through the deserts here, and it's also a phrase that famously comes up in the Simulacrum Simulation book of The Desert of the Real.

Now, he might mean something different in that context, but it does seem to be an image that is important to Baudrillard, and I know it's important to you as well.

There's another article in addition to The article you wrote on America, and it's been a while since I read this, is from your substack, I believe you wrote of the desertification of signs and men, which I think is a quote from this book.

Yeah, that first article was one of the first I wrote for my substack.

I think it was quite a short one.

But it was called Notes on the Desertification of Signs and Men.