Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Епизоде

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  Episode 416: Dr. Alison Cook, "A Part of Me Doesn't Like God Very Much" 14.09.2026 36мин

  Dr. Alison Cook is a psychologist, host of The Best of You podcast, and the author of The Secure Soul — and the first line she wrote for that book was: a part of me doesn't like God very much. She assumed her editor would cut it. Her editor said it was staying. That moment — a prayer walk in London, an eight-year-old part of her that didn't want to be there — opens a conversation with Michael about what it actually looks like to pay attention to the inner life. Alison and Michael talk about b...
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  Episode 415: Restoring the Soul Weekend, "Healing for Men In 66 Hours" 07.09.2026 39мин

  Seven spots remain for the October men's weekend — and Michael wanted the men (and women!) who still needed to hear about it to hear it from two men who've been there. Matt found out about the Restoring the Soul podcast from a therapist in 2018, listened for a few months, heard an ad for the men's weekend, and signed up. He showed up to the airport terrified, texted his therapist from the gate, flew to Denver, and left four days later with something he'd never had before: the sense that he wa...
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  Episode 414: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Dr. Jim Wilder, "Attachment Is How God Communicates Now" 31.08.2026 54мин

  Dr. Jim Wilder has been thinking about the relationship between brain science and spiritual formation since before most people knew the question existed. He trained under one of the inventors of the EEG machine, spent years working alongside Dallas Willard, and has spent decades building what he calls the Life Model — a unified account of what it looks like to grow up into the likeness of Christ, neurologically and spiritually. This conversation is an hour inside that work. Michael and Jim ta...
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  Episode 413: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Andy Crouch, "Create More Than You Consume" 24.08.2026 31мин

  Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family isn't about keeping pornography out of your home. It's about building the kind of home where you know what you actually want — and where technology doesn't quietly replace it. In part two of this conversation, Michael and Andy get into the ten commitments at the heart of the book, and they're not what you'd expect. They talk about why the goal is wisdom and courage rather than limits, and how untethered access to technology quietly reinforces the fear of bei...
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  Episode 412: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Andy Crouch, "Amusing Ourselves to Death" 17.08.2026 30мин

  Andy Crouch didn't set out to write a parenting book. But when he'd mention offhand that his family had no screens in the house until his kids turned ten, young parents would rush to him afterward with what he described as hungry desperation in their eyes. The Tech-Wise Family came out of that hunger — and out of original research with Barna that helped quantify what most people were already sensing: something has shifted, and it isn't just about the kids. In part one of this two-part convers...
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  Episode 411: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Haejin Shim & Mako Fujimura, "The Fractures Filled with Gold" 10.08.2026 53мин

  Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — not to hide the damage, but to make the fractures the most beautiful part. Mako Fujimura, one of the world's leading contemporary artists, and his wife Haejin, an attorney and founder of Embers International, have built their lives and work around that image. This conversation is about what it actually looks like to believe it. Mako talks about his own experience of 9/11 as a Ground Zero resident, and why he sees making — pain...
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  Episode 410: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Dan Allender, "The Story You Haven't Told" 03.08.2026 40мин

  This is the second half of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and it's the more personal of the two. Dan opens by talking about his mother, her death earlier that year, the borderline unpredictability, the way she triangulated him into a surrogate role he never asked for and couldn't escape. He shares it not as a confession but as a map: here is where the wound began, here is how long it took to see it clearly, here is what it cost and what it gave. From there, they talk about what...
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  Episode 409: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Dan Allender, "None of Us Gets a Pass, Part 1" 27.07.2026 27мин

  Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart, among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just come undone. That history is present in every minute of this conversation. They talk about why sexual brok...
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  Episode 408: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Brad Jersak, "The God Who Never Looks Away" 20.07.2026 43мин

  As part of our Soul Care Summer, we're revisiting a conversation that's stayed with many listeners. Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that God can only look at us through gritted teeth, or worse, has to look away. Brad Jersak joins Michael to gently dismantle that picture, showing that the ache of feeling far from God was never God's doing. The conversation moves through a recovering addict's encounter with pure light, Cornelius in the book of Acts, and a fresh reading of...
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  Episode 407: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Curt Thompson, "The Look That Sees You" 13.07.2026 30мин

  Michael continues his conversation with Dr. Curt Thompson, picking up where last week left off. There's a tender ache running underneath the neuroscience here — the ten-year-old boy on a summer evening, looking for permission to just be a kid, and the mother who couldn't see it. Most of us carry some version of that missed look, and Curt names how the body remembers what the mind can't always explain. From there, the conversation moves into the architecture behind that ache: the domains of co...
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  Episode 406: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Curt Thompson, "You are Dirt and Breath" 06.07.2026 39мин

  You were made for beauty and goodness. You feel that, even on the hardest days. What neuroscience is beginning to show us is that this longing isn't incidental. It's written into the architecture of how you were made. In this conversation, psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson opens up the world of interpersonal neurobiology and what it has to do with the soul, how the mind is not the brain but something that emerges between bodies and relationships, how 80 to 85 percent of a newborn's neural...
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  Episode 405: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Chuck DeGroat, "The Nine Faces of Narcissism" 29.06.2026 47мин

  Most people picture narcissism as loud, obvious, and easy to spot. The research says otherwise — and so does the Enneagram. In this second conversation with Chuck DeGroat, Michael and Chuck work through all nine Enneagram types and the unique way narcissism hides inside each one: the nine's quiet, invisible anger; the two's helpfulness that quietly demands to be needed; the three's stage self that performs even in the counseling room; the seven's flight from anything that feels like limitatio...
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  Episode 404: Brian Zahnd, "Why Heaven Has Gone Missing from the Church" 24.06.2026 42мин

  There are at least three wrong ways to write about heaven, and Brian Zahnd spent his new book carefully avoiding all of them — too sentimental, too sensational, too escapist to bother caring about the world right in front of us. In this conversation, Brian and Michael talk about why heaven isn't a far-off destination but a realm woven through the space between every atom of this one, and why love and wonder might be the most reliable hints we get of its nearness. Brian shares the mystical mom...
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  Episode 403: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Sheila Wray Gregoire, "The Great Sex Rescue" 15.06.2026 45мин

  For decades, the church's answer to struggling marriages has been clear: pray more, submit more, give him what he needs. Sheila Wray Gregoire's research asked a different question: What if the advice itself is the problem? Drawing on a survey of 20,000 women, the largest ever done on Christian women's marital and sexual satisfaction, Sheila lays out what the data actually shows: a stark gap between men's and women's experiences, the quiet damage done by teaching women that sex is only his nee...
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  Episode 402: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Aundi Kolber, "Try Softer, Part 2" 08.06.2026 32мин

  We can know we are loved and still not be able to let it in. The gap between believing something and feeling it in the body is not a faith problem — it's a physiological one. In this second conversation with Aundi Kolber, Michael and Julianne press deeper into what it actually takes to change: why being loved is not just a comfort but a biological prerequisite for growth, why asking someone to change before they feel safe is, in Aundi's word, cruel, and what it means to come home to yourself ...
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  Episode 401: SOUL CARE SUMMER - Aundi Kolber, "Try Softer, Part 1" 01.06.2026 33мин

  Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that the answer to pain is to push through it. Try harder. White-knuckle it. And for a long time, that worked — until it didn't. Aundi Kolber wrote Try Softer as a love letter to her younger self, and in this conversation with Michael and Julianne Cusick, she unpacks what it actually means to pay compassionate attention to your own experience — not as self-indulgence, but as the very thing Jesus modeled in taking on a body. They explore why our...
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  Episode 400 - Dr. Gary Chapman, "The Love Language That Matters Most" 25.05.2026 26мин

  Most people who know the five love languages have tried speaking their partner's language — and wondered why it still isn't working. The problem usually isn't the language. It's something underneath it. Dr. Gary Chapman returns with new research showing how personality, empathy, and the subtle dialects within each love language determine whether love actually lands. In this conversation, he and Michael explore why speaking someone's love language can backfire if it runs against their personal...
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  Episode 399 - Ken Shigematsu, "How To Become Yourself" 18.05.2026 52мин

  Shame doesn't only live in the dark corners of a broken life. It lives just as quietly in the person everyone else envies — the one who has achieved everything and still wakes up feeling like it isn't enough. Ken Shigematsu grew up moving between Japan, England, and Canada, carrying the weight of a shame-and-honor culture that most Western theology never addresses. In this conversation, he and Michael explore why deep grace is different from knowing grace is true, what it means to grow our ca...
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  Episode 398 - Michael John Cusick, "The Temptation of Jesus and Your Attachment" 11.05.2026 34мин

  Most people assume temptation is about weakness or willpower. But the wilderness story in Matthew 4 reveals something far older — evil moves first against the places where we have not been seen, soothed, safe, and secure. In this conversation, Michael and AJ Denson walk slowly through the baptism and temptation of Jesus, presenting them as a portrait of attachment under siege. They explore how the devil's opening accusation — if you are the Son of God — lands precisely where God's voice had j...
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  Episode 397 - Geoff Holsclaw, "Your Attachment Style Shapes How You See God" 04.05.2026 1ч 3мин

  Most people assume their distance from God is a faith problem. It may be something older — a pattern in the nervous system, learned long before you had words for it, that quietly shapes how close you let God come. Dr. Geoff Holsclaw and his wife Cyd spent years watching people plateau spiritually and realized the stall wasn't theological — it was relational. This particular conversation with Michael John Cusick traces how our earliest attachment wounds create an image of God in our own likene...