Shifting Culture

In this episode, Kayla Craig joins me again to talk about her new devotional, Our Daily Breath , a year of breath prayers, Scripture, and short reflections for anxious people living in anxious times. We talk about breath as a recurring thread through Scripture, from Eden to the valley of dry bones, and what the science says about how breathing shapes a body under stress. Kayla describes prayer as...

In this episode, Kutter Callaway joins me to talk about his new book, Be Afraid , and why horror might be one of the most spiritual genres in film. We explore the difference between managing fear and fearing rightly, what happens when fear goes unresolved, and how Scripture, from Eden forward, can be read as the long work of redirecting our fears. We talk about what Frank Peretti got wrong, why th...

In this episode, Jen Pollock Michel and I talk about A Rule for the Rest of Us and what Saint Benedict might offer people who will never live in a monastery. We start with the anxiety of optimization and the strange burden of unlimited freedom, then ask what happens when we're left to manufacture our own meaning. Jen explains what a rule of life actually is, why small daily habits can do what...

In this episode, Wes Crawford joins me to talk about his new book, One Nation Over God , and why faith and patriotism have become so tangled in American life. We explore Robert Bellah's idea of American civil religion, how a nation without an established faith came to treat its flags, anthems, and founders as sacred, and why that stirs so much anger in our churches and families. We trace the...

In this episode, Kenneth Tanner and I contemplate the human face of God. We talk about why we split Jesus into a divine half and a human half, and what we lose when we do. We get into the story we've been told about strength, survival, and success, and how a God who takes the lowest seat overturns it. We talk about serving as a way into the permanence of God, the cross as the foundation of cr...

In this episode, Dave Nienhuis joins me to talk about his memoir, And the Sea Was No More . We explore the deep, the chaos waters that run through Scripture from Genesis to Revelation, and what happens to faith when anxiety and trauma take away your ability to control your own mind. Dave shares how Scripture gave him language for drowning, why Jesus enters death rather than destroying it, and how...

This is The Good, The True, and The Cinema , a film podcast in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Join Joshua Johnson, cultural critic and host of Shifting Culture, Craig Detweiler, filmmaker, author, and president of Wedgwood Circle, and John Dougherty, writer, educator, and film critic for America Magazine. Together, they review new releases, revisit the classics, and have a lot o...

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...

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 t...

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 Chri...

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&ap...

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 ha...

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...

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 de...

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 fragm...

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...

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...

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 com...

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, th...

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...

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'...

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 America...

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...

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 jus...

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...