Shifting Culture

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 t...

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 ab...

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 atten...

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 wh...

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 Pharisee...

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. W...

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 ...

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 Jes...

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 ...

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 To...

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 sc...

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 sha...

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 th...

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 f...

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. ...

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 wh...

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 ...

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 pl...

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 ...