Sara Billups returns to Shifting Culture to talk about her new book Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics. Together we explore the anxiety running through our lives, our churches, and our culture and what it means to find peace that’s deeper than control. Sara shares how Ignatian spirituality and the practice of “holy indifference” can help us let go, stay present, and love well in a restless world. We talk about caregiving, community, mental health, and how the embodied way of Jesus leads us toward healing, trust, and wholeness.

Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer and cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Aspen Ideas, and others. Sara writes Bitter Scroll, a monthly Substack letter and co-hosts the podcast That’s the Spirit. She earned a Doctor of Ministry in the Sacred Art of Writing at the Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary. 

Sara works to help wavering Christians remain steadfast through cultural storms and continues to hope for the flourishing of the Church amid deep political and cultural division in America.

Her first book, Orphaned Believers, follows the journey of a generation raised in the 80s and 90s of evangelicalism reckoning with the tradition that raised them and searching for a new way to participate in the story of God. Her second book, Nervous Systems, will be released November 4, 2025, from Baker Books.

Sara's Book:

Nervous Systems

Sara's Recommendations:

Slow Horses

Semi Permanent by Molly Parden

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