Shifting Culture

Епизоде

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  Ep. 460 Annie F. Downs - When Something is Stolen, Killed, or Destroyed, How Do We Keep Going? 15.09.2026 59мин

  In this episode Annie F. Downs joins me to take John 10:10 apart. Steal, kill, destroy — we tend to read them as one sentence, but Annie treats them as three different losses asking three different things of us. Something stolen still exists somewhere. Something dead doesn't come back. Something destroyed has to be cleared before anything gets built there. We talk about courage borrowed from artists, grief that never fully resolves, why resurrection never looks like restoration, and why none ...
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  Ep. 459 Sarah Stankorb - Millions of Women Have Left the Church in the Past Decade. What's Happening? 11.09.2026 54мин

  In this episode Sarah Stankorb joins me to talk about Damned If She Does and the sixteen million American women who have walked away from the church in the last decade. Sarah is a journalist who covers religion, and someone who left herself, and she argues that women leaving isn't a side story but a signal we have about where American faith is going. We follow the threads back decades, sort through what the numbers do and don't show, and talk about what women are finding after they go. Some h...
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  Ep. 458 Kristin Kobes Du Mez Returns - Positive Thinking, Holiness Theology, and the Power Women Were Promised 08.09.2026 54мин

  In this episode Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces how holiness theology and New Thought merged into a faith that promised women power right where they stood, and taught them that naming what was wrong was itself the sin. We follow the thread from Hannah Whitall Smith to corporate campaigns against the New Deal, from a YMCA small group in 1910s China to postwar evangelical totalism, through MLMs and Christian bookstores to the blogosphere and Beth Moore. If confession can heal and confession can con...
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  Ep. 457 Jeff Woodke - After Six and a Half Years as an Al-Qaida Hostage, What Remained? 04.09.2026 49мин

  In this episode, Jeff Woodke tells me what six and a half years as a hostage in the Malian desert stripped away. We talk about the day he was taken, the years of false promises that killed hope first, the months in a box, and the depression he couldn't outrun once he was the only one in the room. We talk about forgiving his captors daily in their own language, about praying until he couldn't, about losing his religion and finding his faith, and about why he says God got him through but people...
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  Introducing: Jesus and... Everything 03.09.2026 6мин

  Jesus and... Everything is a space for those of us who want a faith that is deeply spiritually alive, but also rooted in the big framing issues of the world. Every week, Pete Portal sits down with a guest, and has an honest conversation exploring how faith in Jesus can help us navigate big issues and topics, but also how real life in the real world can challenge our own perspectives that we may have held without much thought. There'll be no easy answers here; just some honest wrestling. So, i...
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  Ep. 456 W. David O. Taylor Returns - How Artists Bear Witness to the Fullness of God's Creation 01.09.2026 58мин

  In this episode, W. David O. Taylor joins me to talk about To Set the World Aflame and the artist's calling to bear witness to the fullness of God's creation. Artists work with the sensory, the imaginative, the emotional, the metaphorical, the material stuff of the world, and in doing so they help the rest of us see what's actually there. We talk about what an artist really is, why belovedness comes before output, and how the calling has shifted across centuries without losing its center. We ...
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  Ep. 455 Derwin Gray Returns - We've Made our Wounds our Identity: It's Time to Heal 28.08.2026 56мин

  In this episode, Derwin Gray and I talk about what it actually takes to heal. He noticed years ago that people were making their wounds into their identity, and It's Time to Heal is his answer - be honest, expect it to be hard, accept what happened without letting it define you, live from love instead of for it. We get into salvation as healing rather than a one-time event, why the fleshly desires still call after we become believers, and what forgiveness cost him in his own story. We also ta...
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  Ep. 454 Sandra Glahn - A Woman's Place Is in the Story 25.08.2026 55мин

  In this episode Sandra Glahn helps us read Scripture the way we already know how to read a story. We talk about the women we've skipped as bunny trails, handed only to women, flattened into ideals, or made into sinners the text never called sinners — Tamar, the woman at the well, Abigail, Job's daughters, Rhoda at the door. We get into reading bigger sections instead of verse-sized fragments, what place and naming and silence are doing on purpose, translations that narrow the room, and why th...
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  Ep. 453 Eric Geiger - Rooted Leaders Bear Fruit That Lasts 21.08.2026 52мин

  In this episode, Eric Geiger and I dig into what's growing underneath a leader's life. We've all watched leaders fall over the past few years, and the wreckage takes a long time to clear. Eric's conviction is that we keep working on the things we can see, when the real question is the root system beneath it. We read Nehemiah as a leadership journal, talk about vision as burden and belief intermingled, how credibility gets built when trust in leaders is at an all-time low, what's actually wort...
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  Ep. 452 Pricelis Perreaux-Dominguez - We Have Mistaken Sameness for Unity 18.08.2026 53мин

  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 51мин

  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 53мин

  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 51мин

  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 53мин

  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 51мин

  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 53мин

  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 56мин

  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 59мин

  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 1ч 3мин

  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 55мин

  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...