Shifting Culture

Ep. 440 Daniel Hawk - Reckoning with America's Past and Imagining a Better Future 03.07.2026 54min

America turns 250 this year, and we'll tell the old story again. But where does it actually start? Daniel Hawk traces our founding back past 1776 to the Doctrine of Discovery that gave Christian powers the right to seize "unclaimed" land, and to a reading of Genesis that turned wilderness into property and the people already here into obstacles. We talk about the myth of innocence: the belief that we are fundamentally good, that the brutal parts didn't happen or didn't count. It let us justif...

Ep. 439 Kristin Lee - When the Faith You've Been Handed Begins to Crack, You Mend with Gold 30.06.2026 48min

In this episode, I talk with Kristin Lee about what happens when a faith begins to crack, and whether the breaking might be the start of something truer. We get into kintsugi, the art of mending broken pottery with gold, what it costs to ask the questions we've been warned against, and what the church on the margins can teach the rest of us about following a marginal Jesus. What emerges is a picture of faith that doesn't hide its fractures but lets them become the places where the light gets ...

Ep. 438 Kyle Strobel - When God Seems Distant it Isn't Because You Failed 26.06.2026 1t 1min

In this episode, I talk with Kyle Strobel about what's actually happening when God feels distant. Most of us start with passion - prayer comes easy, Scripture comes alive - and then a season arrives where the lights go out and we assume we've failed or been abandoned. Kyle offers a different reading than abandonment: the dryness isn't punishment or absence, but the desert where God weans us off the feeling and teaches us to abide. We get into the moralistic temptation that follows - how we tu...

Ep. 437 Michael Rhodes - The Gospel is Political (Just Not How You Think) 23.06.2026 1t 1min

In this episode, Michael Rhodes claims the gospel is inherently political, and "the Lord reigns" was never just a private comfort but a statement about who actually runs the world. We name the two instincts that keep so many of us stuck: retreating into a safe bubble or chasing the halls of power, and why a more holistic approach is necessary. And we get practical: city council meetings, speed bumps, a libertarian business owner whose whole politics quietly rearranged once he started hiring s...

Ep. 436 Amar Peterman - Loving Your Neighbor Across Real Difference 19.06.2026 55min

In this conversation, Amar Peterman and I get into the slow, local, unglamorous work of becoming neighbors across real difference. We talk about the table as the place where the common good gets built, and why so many of us are far more comfortable playing host than being hosted - flinging our doors open without ever considering who actually walks through them. We get into hospitality as displacement, an accompaniment that refuses to leave, Thomas learning you can't reason your way to resurre...

Ep. 435 Ben Norquist & Brian Miller - The Places We Live Are Telling Stories. Which Ones Are Getting Told? 16.06.2026 51min

In this episode, Ben Norquist and Brian Miller make the case that American Christians have become a placeless, rootless people and that we are shaped by inherited land stories. That our land is exceptional. That property is something to wall off. That the ground exists to be taken and turned into wealth. We dig into where these stories came from, how they affect our faith, and why it matters that Scripture opens with God calling place good. We talk about how to read the place you actually liv...

Ep. 434 Aaron Cline Hanbury - When Machines Can Do More, What Does it Mean to be Alive? 12.06.2026 55min

In this episode with Aaron Cline Hanbury, we think through how we relate to technology and the things we make. We tackle the question underneath the whole AI moment: not just what it means to be human when machines can do more and more, but what it means to be alive. We get into whether any technology is really neutral, where our attention is going and who's buying it, raising kids in a screen-saturated world, and what it takes to stay awake to wonder. Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and edit...

Ep. 433 Brant Hansen - Living Unoffended in an Age of Outrage 09.06.2026 58min

In this episode, Brant Hansen argues that holding onto offense is killing us - spiritually, physically, and relationally. He had to decide whether the offense he experienced as a young person should be held on to or if he should release it. It led him to a simple, uncomfortable conclusion: righteous human anger doesn't exist in scripture, and the anger we carry, however justified it feels, is not what faithful people are called to hold. We talk about forgiveness, hypocrisy in the church, and ...

Ep. 432 Zachary Wagner - Is Virtue Formation the Answer to the Crises Men and Boys are Facing Right Now? 05.06.2026 57min

There's no shortage of voices telling men who they should be right now and most of them are answering the wrong question. In this conversation with Zachary Wagner, author of Men of Virtue, we get underneath the culture war noise around masculinity and into something more substantive: the four concrete crises facing men and boys today, why virtue formation is better than role definition as a response, and how the fruit of the Spirit offers a more deeply human, and more countercultural, vision ...

Ep. 431 Fr. John Dear - Surrendering to the God of Peace and Following the Nonviolent Jesus 02.06.2026 1t 6min

In this episode, Fr. John Dear joins me to explore his latest book, Universal Love: Surrendering to the God of Peace and one of the core convictions at the center of it: genuine peacemaking begins not with better strategy or more effort, but with total surrender to the God of peace, to the will of God. We talk about what it looks like to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously, why following the non-violent Jesus is the way, and how the daily practice of "not my will, but yours" carries not on...

Ep. 430 Jennifer Garcia Bashaw & Aaron Higashi - Interpreting the Bible in a World Fighting Over What It Means 01.06.2026 53min

What are you actually doing when you read the Bible? Interpretation. Every time we open the text, we're already choosing which questions to ask, which lenses to bring, and whose interests get served by the answers we land on. In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw and Aaron Higashi, authors of Serving Up Scripture, to talk about what responsible interpretation looks like, why certainty works against it, and how the same passages have been used both to enslave and to liberate....

Ep. 429 K.J. Ramsey - Finding Joy in the Place Between Our Pains 29.05.2026 54min

What does joy look like in the midst of pain and grief? K.J. Ramsey's memoir, The Place Between Our Pains, was written while she was fighting for her life - and in this conversation, she talks about what that actually means. We get into how dependence on others opens us to love in ways independence never could, why grief is a gate into aliveness rather than a place to get stuck, and what it looked like to launch a book about joy while facing a tumor diagnosis and an IV drip on launch day. Thi...

Ep. 428 Tim Ross - What Secrets Do to the Body and Why Confession Is the Path to Healing 26.05.2026 54min

In this conversation, Tim opens up about the wound that shaped his early life, the silence that followed, and what the long road toward healing has actually required. We get into what secrets do to the body, the difference between vertical confession and horizontal healing, why accountability that feels like parole isn't really accountability, what grief work demands and what gets stuck when we skip it, and what it looks like to stop letting a younger, wounded version of yourself run the show...

Ep. 427 Richard Beck Returns - Reading the Bible Through the Lens of Love 22.05.2026 56min

In this conversation with Richard Beck, author of The Book of Love, we explore what it actually means to read Scripture through the hermeneutic of love. Richard helps us see that we have to reckon with our attachment to God - whether we actually believe he's for us - because that fear or security shapes everything about how we read. We get into the violent texts of the Old Testament, why both conservatives and progressives have their own blind spots, how the Bible raises hard questions, and w...

Ep. 426 Brian Zahnd - Unseen Existences: Why the Western World Forgot the Spiritual Realm Exists 19.05.2026 56min

Brian Zahnd joins me to talk about his new book Unseen Existences — and we get into why modern Western people suffer a kind of spiritual homelessness, how philosophical materialism has convinced us the spiritual world isn't real, and what it looks like to recover a sense that heaven and earth actually overlap. We also dig into the Incarnation as a doorway into mystery, wonder and awe as non-negotiables for living faith, and what it means to hold onto a God who intervenes without turning praye...

Ep. 425 Elizabeth Berget - How Motherhood Reveals the Maternal Heart of God 18.05.2026 56min

Elizabeth Berget joins the podcast to explore the maternal heart of God — tracing how the Hebrew word rakum, often translated simply as "compassionate," is linguistically rooted in the word for womb, and what it means that God reaches for that word first when describing himself to Israel. The conversation moves through pregnancy, labor, and the crucifixion, the theology of secure attachment, what scripture's birth language reveals about salvation, and why expanding our image of God isn't a de...

Ep. 424 Jeffrey Overstreet - What a Darkened Theater Can Teach About Seeing God Clearly 15.05.2026 1t 4min

Light is a language, and learning to read it - in a darkened theater, in the stories of your neighbors, in the films you were told to avoid - helps us see clearly. In this conversation, Jeffrey Overstreet and I talk about cinema as a spiritual practice, what it looks like to love your neighbor by actually watching their films, why the filmmakers he was told to fear have shaped his faith far more than he was told they would, and why pursuing truth and beauty on the big screen has a way of lead...

Ep. 423 Nijay Gupta - What Does New Creation Look Like Here and Now in Your Work, Your Money, Your Relationships 12.05.2026 58min

Paul wasn't just helping people get to heaven. Nijay Gupta joins me to make the case that Paul's letters were written for people trying to figure out how to live, not how to escape. Drawing from his new book Paul for the World, Nijay walks through the Greco-Roman world Paul was writing into - its economic disparity, its philosophies, its hunger for meaning - and shows how we can see our world similarly. The conversation moves through economics, the arts, the Stoics, and the resurrection to la...

Ep. 422 Tia Levings Returns - What High Control Religion Takes From You and What it Actually Looks Like to Get it Back 08.05.2026 56min

In this episode, Tia Levings returns to talk about her new book I Belong to Me - a guide to healing and recovery after high-control religion and other controlling environments. Tia walks through what she calls the steps before the steps: the audacity, the centrality, the willingness to want something different before you're even ready to name what happened to you. We talk about why language can free you and trap you at the same time, how cult-hopping happens and why, what developmental stages...

Ep. 421 Tish Harrison Warren - What Grows in Weary Lands: Can the Desert Fathers and Mothers Teach Us Moderns What We Need for Resilience? 05.05.2026 57min

What do you do when the fire won't start - when life is full but God feels distant, when faith is intact but the soul is running on empty? In this conversation, I sit down with Tish Harrison Warren, who draws on her new book, What Grows in Weary Lands, to explore acedia, the ancient concept usually translated as sloth but better understood as a sadness that the good is difficult. We trace how the desert fathers and mothers were grappling with the same exhaustion and spiritual languishing that...