Shifting Culture

Episodes

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  Ep. 452 Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez - We Have Mistaken Sameness for Unity 18.08.2026 52m

  In this episode, Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez argues that much of what the American church calls peace is really just quiet — and that what we call unity is often sameness, congregations gathered around shared opinion rather than around Christ, where difference gets managed, silenced, or shown the door. We talk about how sameness took root in the church, why our opinions became idols we defend like God, what it means to hold truth with an open hand, and why discomfort is a practice rather than...
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  Ep. 451 Scott Cairns - Why Mystery Makes Better Meaning Than Certainty 14.08.2026 50m

  In this episode, Scott Cairns talks about certainty and mystery and getting glimpses of the unknowable God. Scott has spent forty years wrestling with, investigating, navigating words to help make meaning in our lives. In this conversation, we talk about words as things rather than labels, about reading a text the way the rabbis did - layer on layer, meaning that never closes - about prayer as communion rather than petition, and about what a culture loses as it stops reading. Underneath it al...
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  Ep. 450 Ian Morgan Cron Returns - Beauty Is a Doorway Home: What St. Francis Knew 800 Years Ago 11.08.2026 52m

  In this episode, Ian Morgan Cron and I talk about Chasing Francis, the novel he wrote twenty years ago (before anyone called it deconstruction) about a megachurch pastor who loses his faith mid-sermon and goes looking for St. Francis in Italy. We get into a 13th-century church that looks a lot like ours, beauty as a doorway back to God, why Francis walked across a battlefield to meet a sultan, the difference between spotlight attention and lantern attention, and why the sermon on the mount sh...
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  Ep. 449 Natalia Terfa - God Got There Before You Did 07.08.2026 50m

  In this episode with Natalia Terfa we talk about her book It All Counts, why questions deepen faith instead of eroding it, how to tell human authority from God's, what love looks like when a protest turns ugly, and why the prosperity gospel falls apart at a child's funeral. We get into loneliness and the risk community asks of us, the incarnation as an argument for the goodness of bodies, and how breath and creation return us to who we are. Natalia is a Lutheran pastor, podcaster, and author ...
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  Ep. 448 Scot McKnight - The Pharisees Weren't Who You Think 04.08.2026 52m

  In this episode with Scot McKnight, we ask whether the perception that the Pharisees were hypocrites, legalists with a religious spirit is the right way to view them. We move the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees from one of theological debate to one in response to charisma, the crowds, and power. We talk about what charisma actually is, why economic justice sat at the center of Jesus' movement, the seven things the Pharisees really were, and what it means to stop weaponizing the word ...
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  Ep. 447 Matthew Soerens & Issam Smeir - There are 120 Million Forcibly Displaced People Around the World, How Should We Respond? 31.07.2026 50m

  In this episode with Matthew Soerens and Issam Smeir, we touch on something that has shaped my faith - sitting across a table from refugees until a statistic became a person with a name. A decade after the first edition of Seeking Refuge, the number of forcibly displaced people has doubled to roughly 120 million, yet care for the vulnerable has become one of the most politicized issues in American culture and the American church. We work to untangle fear and misinformation from biblical convi...
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  Ep. 446 Joshua Luke Smith - Why the Life You Have is the Main Event 28.07.2026 52m

  In this episode with Joshua Luke Smith we sit with the idea that the life in front of you is the main event – even when it is limited, when it is unglamorous, when it’s not what you hoped for. We talk about lament and shame, consecration and wonder, what the cell and limits teach us about freedom, how we need to put ourselves in the way of beauty to bring us back to who we are. It’s a conversation about attention and presence. Joshua Luke Smith is a poet for the people. He’s a songwriter, com...
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  Ep. 445 Graham Joseph Hill - Are We Following Jesus, or Cultural Idols Disguised as Jesus? 24.07.2026 55m

  In this episode, Graham Joseph Hill joins me to talk through how every culture tends to read Jesus through their own lens and how we tend to remake Him in our own image. And when we do that, we tend to follow idols rather than Jesus. In his latest book Ten Movements of the Jesus Way, Graham maps ten typical idols and the turn we need to make to follow Jesus instead. Are we following Jesus, or just following our own culture with Jesus attached? Graham Joseph Hill (PhD, Flinders University) is ...
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  Ep. 444 - Jessie Cruickshank & Julia Schmaltz - How Do We Become Good News to the World? 21.07.2026 58m

  In this episode, Jessie Cruickshank and Julia Schmaltz join me to talk about Becoming Good News and the argument at its center: that discipleship is less about acquiring information and trying harder and more about receiving; receiving a name and a story. We get into what happens in the brain when something finally gets named, why the sentences we say about ourselves function as theology, and how autobiographical memory shapes the story we think we're living in. We talk about the difference b...
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  Ep. 443 Paul Anleitner - The Anti-Story is Collapsing. What's Replacing It? 17.07.2026 1h 2m

  In this episode, Paul Anleitner traces how a culture that once watched Rocky in full-throated sincerity learned to read everything through suspicion. We talk about the modern story we inherited, the postmodern anti-story that dismantled it, and the meaning crisis left in the rubble. There is a vibe shift happening as people reach for nostalgia and re-enchantment. We get into the three pillars of meaning, mean world syndrome, why Top Gun: Maverick and Project Hail Mary landed the way they did,...
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  Ep. 442 Randy Woodley - Has Plato Shaped Western Christianity More than Jesus and What Are We to do About it? 14.07.2026 54m

  In this episode, Randy Woodley argues that the church has been asking the wrong question. Not whether the story happened, but what the story asks of us. And to start to ask better questions, we have to go back to the root - where did this all come from? And how did Western Christianity get it wrong? We talk about Platonic dualism made belief more important than action, producing hierarchy, empire, and harm. We talk about reading scripture as story rather than evidence, replacing the word salv...
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  Ep. 441 Merideth Hite Estevez - Art is How God Loves Us 07.07.2026 51m

  In this episode, Merideth Hite Estevez joins me to talk about what happens when a lifetime of chasing excellence quietly empties out the joy that started it all. We dig into the idols hiding inside performance and perfectionism, why she redefines art not as a talent for the gifted few but as something anyone can do out of love, and what it means to create as an act of worship instead of proof of worth. It's a conversation about shame, recovery, and the spiritual thread running through every c...
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  Ep. 440 Daniel Hawk - Reckoning with America's Past and Imagining a Better Future 03.07.2026 52m

  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...
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  Ep. 439 Kristin Lee - When the Faith You've Been Handed Begins to Crack, You Mend with Gold 30.06.2026 46m

  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 ...
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  Ep. 438 Kyle Strobel - When God Seems Distant it Isn't Because You Failed 26.06.2026 59m

  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...
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  Ep. 437 Michael Rhodes - The Gospel is Political (Just Not How You Think) 23.06.2026 59m

  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...
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  Ep. 436 Amar Peterman - Loving Your Neighbor Across Real Difference 19.06.2026 53m

  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...
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  Ep. 435 Ben Norquist & Brian Miller - The Places We Live Are Telling Stories. Which Ones Are Getting Told? 16.06.2026 49m

  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...
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  Ep. 434 Aaron Cline Hanbury - When Machines Can Do More, What Does it Mean to be Alive? 12.06.2026 53m

  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...
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  Ep. 433 Brant Hansen - Living Unoffended in an Age of Outrage 09.06.2026 56m

  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 ...