Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus

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(CW): Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation, Depression, and Anxiety)

Anna Gazmarian’s new book Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, investigates the overlapping complexities of religious faith, mental illness, and doubt. If you grew up in religiously conservative spaces, odds are you either never talked ab...

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Interviewing Jonathan Merritt felt like having a conversation with myself. His journey out of white evangelical subculture is an almost mirror-image of my journey. My guess is, you’ll find a lot of correlation as well.

Jonathan was a card-carrying evangelical who left his Southern roots and e...

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Do you feel spiritually and physically domesticated? Are you struggling to free yourself from the long-term impacts of spiritual colonization? Do you feel disconnected from the natural world? Are you longing for something more than merely reconstruction? If so, spiritual rewilding might be the next step in your faith seeking journey.

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Author Liz Cooledge Jenkins joins us on the show to discuss the harmful effects of patriarchy on men, women, families, LGBTQIA persons, culture, nations, and spiritual communities.

With its ties to domination, violence, aggression, militarism, and white supremacy, patriarchy centers white, het...

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Have you ever wanted someone to sit with you by the fire and watch your old religious beliefs go up in flames? Maybe you’ve longed for a guide or a coach to help you navigate all this wandering in the spiritual wilderness. If so, then this week’s episode is what you need right now!

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Have you ever paused long enough to consider why you continue pursuing the spiritual path? After all the scandals, abuse, religious trauma, and oppressive theology, why are you still here?

This same question hit me last week during church and I didn’t have a profound answer. For wha...

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Living in the United States is a daily dose of trauma. Our nation is philosophically and pragmatically built on injustice, coercion, lies, oppression, exploitation, violence, dehumanization, and planetary destruction. Do we ever stop to think about how messed up the world is? The answer, of course, is an overwhelming no. ...

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Have you ever paused long enough to consider that maybe, just maybe you are living a lie? Is it possible that your outer shell, or your outer identity isn’t really you after all? What if all your coping mechanisms that have come to shape your identity isn’t the real you? Maybe you’ve spent your life operating out of your f...

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One of the paths available to you post-evangelicalism is mysticism, a spirituality that in many ways is almost the direct antithesis of evangelical Christianity. If evangelicalism was all about certainty, apologetics, Biblicism, and defending your faith at all costs, Christian mysticism can be defined by unknowing, mystery...

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Authoritarianism is on the rise all across the world. Here in America, the leading proponents of anti-democratic ideology are evangelical Christians who have been swept up in the cult of Donald Trump. Driven by a dominator theology and good old-fashio...

OK, I'll admit it right up front, this is a heavy episode. This one feels like a therapy session processing through the anger, the rage, the bitterness, and all your past complicity in white evangelical Christianity. If you haven't noticed yet, one of the pit stops on the deconstruction road is animosity. You finally wake up to all the harmful ways evangelical Christianity has impacted your...

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In the second-part of our conversation about the Divine Feminine, we look at the ramifications of believing God is a guy. Institutional Christianity has given us God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, a triune male God with “He/Him” pronouns. And this male dominated theology has created a male dominator culture that man...

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Have you ever paused to wonder why it was always God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—a trio of divine beings known only as “He” and “Him?” This should cause us to ask a basic question. Why is God so overwhelmingly referred to as a He in instituti...

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We continue our march toward the marginalized this week with another conversation with Dr. Miguel De La Torre about the future of American political identity. As a Lantinx scholar, Miguel sees a future in which American society is run by white Christian nationalist elites at the expense of everyone who is 'the other.' Much like South ...

Contrary to what many assume, peace isn’t meekness in the face of evil it is the courageous and oftentimes creative task of disarmament. Active peacemaking is a way to fight against injustice without using violence. It is using the transformative force of love to resist oppression. It says that the means are the ends, that the way to peace is peace itself. “Love of enemies does not necessar...

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In the second installment of our conversation with Natalie Drew, we move deeper into her gender transition and how it impacted her marriage, career, and spiritual journey. If you haven’t checked out Part One, go back and listen now before moving forward into this episode! We answer several questions including, can you be Christian and...

CW: We discuss trauma, addiction, suicidal ideation, abuse, and other topics that may be triggering. Please listen at your own discretion.

A lot of times on our show, we discuss theological matters that mostly reside in your head, but this episode is altogether very different. This conversation is personal, it’s raw, it’s painful, it’s the deeply tra...

CW: Adult Language.

Christians were never meant to be normal, we've always been "holy troublemakers" who do not accept the world as it is but who insist on the world becoming the way God wants it to be. In the words of our friends at The Center for Prophetic Imagination, “A worl...

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Barbara Brown Taylor is who you want to be when you grow up. Her life is a legacy of wisdom and wonder, walking the long road toward becoming fully human. In this intimate conversation that is more memoir than interview, she looks back on a long pilgrimage of faith while sharing some of the secrets she’s found along the way. As she re...