The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
Meaning in proximity
Closer, not louder.
Perigee Arts is a platform for deep human meaning, with media as its vehicle. Some of the work is a podcast. Some of it is a night in a room. One of it is built to travel.
The organizations
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
The point is not reach. The point is proximity.
“All real living is meeting.”
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Podcast
Podcasts
“A conversation you can return to.”
Begin with three: GeNexus, Beyond the Survivor Zone, and Smoldering Flax. Legacy Encore sits beside them, a portrait of a creative house.
OpenPresentation
Presentations
“The audience is part of the work, not a backdrop.”
Evenings at The Odeon with FlaxCo. A guest, a room, and time enough for the real question.
OpenTour
The tour
“What smolders is not discarded.”
The Smoldering Flax Tour is an immersive night for churches, campuses, and theaters. It shares a name with the podcast. It is not the same work.
OpenListening
Three conversations.
Begin here. Each one is close enough to stay with.
A portrait · Podcast
Legacy Encore
Creativity inherited, interrupted, and chosen again.
Nashville and Franklin are where it begins. The households are not limited to them.
What the house taught that no school could.
Evenings · The Odeon
Nights in the room.
One work, one life, or one question. FlaxCo brings people into the making. Perigee keeps the conversation. The Odeon is where you sit.
Come for one question, and stay with it.
Presentation · Podcast
Epic Fail
What failure costs, exposes — and sometimes makes possible.
Presentation · Podcast
1 of 1
There is only one of this person.
Presentation
Irreplaceable
The human touch, after the machine can imitate the rest.
Presentation
Biblical Creativity
Making as image-bearing, not as decoration.
Presentation · Podcast
The Work Behind the Work
One work, from first idea to finished form.
Presentation · Podcast
The Long Game
What it takes to stay creatively alive for decades.
A night that travels
The Smoldering Flax Tour
Sit in emotion. Bathe in vulnerability. Embrace renewal.
A ninety-minute immersive evening of music, film, testimony, image, and silence. Rooted in Isaiah 42:3. Not a concert, a conference, a worship night, or a therapy session.
A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering flax he will not snuff out.
Closer to truth
“Name it before you explain it.”
Say what is happening without turning every story into a lesson.
Closer to one another
“A person is not a position.”
Make people harder to reduce to a tribe, a brand, or an enemy.
Closer to what we avoid
“Stay until it becomes human.”
Failure, beauty, power, and hope need more time than a headline will give them.
Closer to meaning
“Redemptive, without the sermon.”
Rooted and present, and still unwilling to preach at the room.
Films and books still being made.
“You can read the question. The release is still ahead.”
Now · Presentation · Podcast
GeNexus
What one generation cannot see about the other.
A conversation across a real generational gap — at least twenty-five years — about craft, culture, assumptions, and why people who should understand each other still sit apart, including in the church.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
As a podcast
Two voices, a generation apart, and sometimes a third. What you don’t understand, what you assume, what you need to hear. About forty-five to sixty minutes.
As a presentation
The same tension, in the room at The Odeon, presented with FlaxCo. Two creatives in the same or adjacent field compare craft, technology, mistakes, and what each generation misunderstands. Audience interaction is part of the evening, not an add-on.
Who belongs on it
Guests have to be at least one generation apart. The distance is the point. Fame is not.
Questions we care about
- What do you love that the other generation dismisses?
- What do you hate that they treat as normal?
- What don’t you understand?
- What agitates you?
- What do you wish they would see?
- Why are we still so segregated — even in the church?
Now · Podcast
Beyond the Survivor Zone
From survival toward integration and purpose.
A serious space for trauma, recovery, resilience, memory, and the long arc of healing — without collapsing a person into what happened to them.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Form
Interview and guided story, with room for an occasional teaching. Forty-five to seventy-five minutes. A person, never a case file.
The standard
Safe, grounded, and not sensationalized. People are not props. The show does not mine pain for a clip.
Where it sits
A Perigee conversation. It may later become an essay or an evening. It is not therapy, and it is not a youth program.
Now · Podcast
Smoldering Flax
Faith, formation, and what still has ember.
Reflections and conversations on faith, formation, suffering, honesty, and restoration. Explicit when the subject requires it. Not dependent on insider language.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
“A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.”
Not the tour
This is the conversation: a recorded room for candor about brokenness and belief. The tour is a different night, about ninety minutes, in a room you can walk into. They share a scripture. They are not the same work.
Posture
Rooted in Isaiah 42:3 — a bruised reed is not broken, and a smoldering flax is not snuffed out. Hope is welcome. Tidy endings are not required.
A portrait · Podcast
Legacy Encore
Creativity inherited, interrupted, and chosen again.
Nashville and Franklin are where it begins. The households are not limited to them.
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The household
Six families. One remarkable room. A host who knows the work and can draw the story out. Slow enough that you can see what a house actually passes on.
What you are watching
Closer to a short documentary than a desk interview. The household is the subject: what was taught, what was resisted, what the next generation kept, left, or reinvented. Create. Inherit. Encore.
Questions we care about
- What did the house teach that no school could?
- What was transmitted — and what was refused?
- Was leaving a rejection, or another form of inheritance?
- What is inherited, and what is chosen?
An evening · Presentation · Podcast
Epic Fail
What failure costs, exposes — and sometimes makes possible.
A consequential failure, told without polishing it into a triumph. The Odeon evening and a Perigee podcast of the same conversation. Some failures become useful. Some remain losses.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
The evening
Seventy-five to ninety minutes at The Odeon. What they were trying to do, what they got wrong, the moment it became undeniable, who paid, and what changed.
FlaxCo in the room
People in formation may sit in the exchange or help prepare the night. The evening itself is for everyone in the room.
Questions we care about
- What were you certain of that was not true?
- What did you miss — or refuse to see?
- Who else paid a price?
- What did you lose that never came back?
An evening · Presentation · Podcast
1 of 1
There is only one of this person.
Conversations with singular humans whose presence and work make the world more humane, interesting, or whole. The live evening can include a demonstration or artifacts, not only talk.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“What I do is me: for that I came.”
In the room, and on the air
You can hear one person, unrepeatable. Or you can be at The Odeon: an interview, something you can see or hold, then your questions.
An evening · Presentation
Irreplaceable
The human touch, after the machine can imitate the rest.
What remains distinctly human as more of what we called creativity can be generated. A keynote, a panel, and exercises — not a product demo.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”
Whose night it is
Perigee shapes the idea. FlaxCo brings people who are still forming their practice. The Odeon is the room. The evening is a conversation and an exercise, not a product pitch.
Questions we care about
- What still requires a person in the room?
- What are we about to hand away because it is merely inconvenient?
- Where does taste live when output is cheap?
An evening · Presentation
Biblical Creativity
Making as image-bearing, not as decoration.
An Odeon evening on why people make. God creates. Humans bear that image. Beauty, skill, lament, and hope belong in the work itself — not as a sermon added afterward.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“If it’s bad art, it’s bad religion, no matter how pious the subject.”
The evening
Seventy-five to ninety minutes at The Odeon. A text, a conversation, and a piece of work in the room. FlaxCo brings artists in formation. The night is for anyone who makes, and for anyone who was told that making is extra.
What it holds
Creation, image, and calling. Skill as stewardship. Work that can lament and praise without sentiment. Story that teaches by indirection. Hope that can sit beside what is broken. Culture as what we make of the world, not only what we react to.
What it refuses
Decoration. Propaganda. Kitsch with a pious subject. If the work is false, the faith it claims is false too. Excellence is not the same thing as performance.
Questions we care about
- What does it mean that the first thing we are told about God is that He creates?
- Where does your work cultivate, rather than only express?
- What can you know by making that you cannot know by explaining?
- How do you tell the truth without preaching at the room?
- What must you now practice, resist, or make?
An evening · Presentation · Podcast
The Work Behind the Work
One work, from first idea to finished form.
An illustrated masterclass, in the room and as a podcast. Demos, sketches, rough cuts, discarded versions, the stuck point, and the decision that it was done.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
The evening
Not a career retrospective. One significant work, taken apart in public. FlaxCo participants may help prepare artifacts, watch a soundcheck, or stay for a short exchange.
Also a conversation
You can hear it later. In the room, you are close to the process: the sketch, the discard, the moment someone decided it was finished.
Questions we care about
- Where did it begin?
- What did you throw away?
- Where did you get stuck?
- How did you know it was finished?
An evening · Presentation · Podcast
The Long Game
What it takes to stay creatively alive for decades.
Vocation, money, family, health, rejection, reinvention, faith, and a definition of success that had to change. An Odeon evening, and a podcast. Not nostalgia. Accumulated judgment.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”
The evening
Interview, seminar, or an occasional multi-generational panel. Seventy-five to ninety minutes. Fame is secondary to candor and a real creative life.
FlaxCo
Younger makers sit near a life that has stayed at the work. There is time for a real exchange.
Questions we care about
- What has kept you at the work?
- What nearly took you out of it?
- What did you have to protect, or let die?
- What does staying alive require now?
An evening · Presentation
My Other Job
When the career that defined you ends.
People who left, lost, or changed the work everyone assumed would name them. The first life is not treated as waste.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
The evening
The first career, the season of change, the unnamed stretch between identities, and the next chapter. Less résumé, more the human fact of transition.
Questions we care about
- When did you know it was ending?
- What was hardest to release?
- What carried forward?
- What do you now understand about calling and usefulness?
An evening · Presentation
The Business of Making
The practical realities creatives often learn too late.
A seminar, not a theory talk: ownership, contracts, intellectual property, pricing, negotiation, royalties, collaborators, cash flow, and taxes.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.”
The practitioner
Attorneys, managers, accountants, agents, producers, publishers, and working artists who can speak plainly. Real situations. Language you can use.
Questions we care about
- What do you own?
- What should be in writing?
- How do royalties and splits work?
- When is counsel worth paying for?
An evening · Presentation
Unfinished
Bring the thing that is not done.
Established and emerging creatives put genuinely unfinished work in the room and talk about the uncertainty of making it.
In connection with
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
The room
Smaller on purpose. Unfinished work, and a critique that takes it seriously.
An evening · Presentation
Behind the Credits
The people who make the career possible.
Producers, editors, agents, managers, engineers, cinematographers, designers, lawyers, tour managers — the work that rarely gets the spotlight, told as a case, not a toast.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
An evening · Presentation
Hard Call
One decision, taken apart.
The information they had, the options, the competing counsel, the risk, the choice, and what it cost. The room can weigh in. The point is judgment under uncertainty.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
An evening · Presentation
The Crit
How to give and receive criticism without destroying the maker.
A few works, credible practitioners, and notes that are humane and serious. What is said in the room is for the people in it.
In connection with
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
“Criticism is as inevitable as breathing.”
An evening · Presentation
Office Hours
No speech. Bring the actual question.
A small room. Twenty to forty people and one practitioner. You bring the work, the decision, or the question. There is no speech.
In connection with
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
An evening · Presentation
The First Version
The crude beginning behind later excellent work.
Creators show the embarrassing first version — the demo, the sketch, the draft — and what had to happen before it could be shown to anyone.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
An evening · Presentation
Collision
Two disciplines that do not share a stage.
Composer and architect. Chef and filmmaker. Theologian and designer. Engineer and painter. A conversation plus a demonstration. The friction is the evening.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
An evening · Presentation
Free for All
No lecture. The room sets the agenda.
A respected practitioner arrives without a prepared talk. The audience anonymously decides what gets asked, in real time.
In connection with
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
The Odeon
A home for gathering, serious making, and public offering.
A night that travels · Tour
The Smoldering Flax Tour
Sit in emotion. Bathe in vulnerability. Embrace renewal.
A ninety-minute immersive evening of music, film, testimony, image, and silence. Rooted in Isaiah 42:3. Not a concert, a conference, a worship night, or a therapy session.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The Dignity Imperative
Dignity made visible through programs built to last.
FlaxCo
Made for Artists. Built for Community.
“A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.”
The liturgy
- 01
Arrival
Twenty to thirty minutes. The room is already working: sound, light, and image near the edge of ordinary. Phones may be put away.
- 02
Overture
Five minutes. The smoldering wick, before anyone explains it.
- 03
The Mask
About twelve minutes. Performance, noise, achievement, and the pressure to appear whole.
- 04
The Spiral
About fifteen minutes. What pulls a life inward: anxiety, grief, compulsion, fear. Film and testimony, not a spectacle.
- 05
The Silence
About ten minutes. Isolation, shame, secrecy, and the inability to say what is true.
- 06
The Confession
About fifteen minutes. Honesty before God, oneself, and trusted others. Pain is named. It is not staged.
- 07
The Turning
About fifteen minutes. Grace, mercy, and the nearness of God. Not a cheap lift.
- 08
The Community
About fifteen minutes. Healing as being held, not as a private repair project.
- 09
Next step
About eight minutes. A real pathway out of the room, then thirty to sixty minutes of quiet care if people need it.
The promise
What smolders is not discarded. What remains can be tended. What has ember can be restored. What has smoke can be rekindled. The invitation is simple: permission to be broken as a way toward being made whole, and an invitation to extend that compassion to someone else. No shame, no hype, no emotional coercion.
Not the podcast
Smoldering Flax, the conversation, is a recorded room. This is the touring night: ninety to a hundred minutes, no intermission, built for churches, campuses, theaters, and ministry gatherings. Same scripture. Different work.
Translate, don’t illustrate
The night does not point at an emotion and label it. It tries to give the interior a true shape: weight instead of a dark room, acceleration instead of a panic scene, exposure without warmth instead of a shaming light. Hope arrives as one true note, not a triumph. Every choice has to be true to the lived thing, fresh rather than a cliché, and ordered toward mercy.
Who it is for
Churches and the people on their edges. Campuses. Pastors and caregivers. Young adults and families carrying anxiety, loneliness, grief, or exhaustion. Artists who want work that restores. Clear enough for someone who does not share the language. Rooted, not vague.
Where it plays
Only where the host can carry both the production and the care: stage, sound, light, projection, a quiet room, and a path home. A church, a theater, a campus, a retreat. Phones may be secured so the night is not performed for a pocket camera.
Care
The evening is not therapy, and it does not force anyone to speak. Hosts bring a trained care team, a quiet room, referral pathways, and a crisis protocol. No manipulative altar call. No public processing of traumatic material without a structure of care around it.
After
A doorway, not a destination. Pastoral care, spiritual direction, a local church, Holding Hope, Emberwell, Decision Tree Mentoring, or FlaxCo formation under The Dignity Imperative. When you leave, there is a next step.
Questions we care about
- What does depression sound like before it has words?
- What does anxiety look like when it is not panic?
- What does shame feel like in the body?
- What does trauma do to time?
- What does loneliness do to space?
- What does grief do to color?
- What does hope feel like before it becomes belief?
Still being made · Film
Feet of Clay
The culture that requires idols is the subject.
An investigative series about the impulse to make icons — in entertainment, sports, politics, business, technology, religion, and public life — and the machinery of elevation, exposure, and replacement.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
“His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.”
The story
The famous person is the case. The culture that needed the idol is the subject: elevation, exposure, and replacement.
Still being made · Film
Homemade Monsters
How environments cultivate predators.
An investigative series about systems that hide, rationalize, and repeat predation: authority, deference, denial, delay, and deception. The individual matters. The environment is the subject.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
The question
Accountability is the question. The individual matters. The environment is the subject. The method is not spectacle.
Still being made · Film
For King & Kingdom?
What was sacrificed in the name of the work.
A mournful documentary inquiry into public faithfulness that left private lives in tatters — forgotten families, neglected children, and a holiness that did not integrate.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Posture
The aim is to discover, not to uncover. Probing, and personally costly. A film still being made.
Still being made · Press
My Wrong Mind
A mind that would not stay simple, told from the inside.
A memoir of Chris Meidl’s mental and behavioral health from an early age. Written so you can stay with it.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
A slower attention
A book for the kind of reading that cannot be rushed. It is not in print yet.
Still being made · Press
Not Just for Girls Anymore
Eating disorders, framed too narrowly.
Personal story, culture, treatment, and the invisibility of male suffering. A book, essay, or curriculum — whichever form can actually carry it.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
Still being made · Press
The True Identity Crisis
Identity, centering, and what abuse takes.
The loss of identity and connectedness after child sexual abuse, in language a reader can actually stay with.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
Still being made · Press
Being Bad to Get Better
Moral frailty as a path, not a brand.
Failing your own standards, and other people’s, and how seeing that clearly can become the way back toward restoration.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.
Still being made · Press
The Age Beyond Decency
Culture and public life, still forming.
Culture and public life after the old agreements about decency. The question is ahead of the pages.
In connection with
Perigee Arts
Meaning in proximity.