Gravity Commons Podcast

That love does not control seems obvious to many people. And yet the temptation to control—often with good motives — is strong. The long-term results of yielding to this temptation damage everyone.

Thomas Oord and Christy Gunter join us to talk about uncontrolling love from a theological and therapeutic perspective. They are both contributers to Love Does Not Control: Therapists, Psychologists, and Counselors Explore Uncontrolling Love.

Dr. Christy Gunter is the director of Client Services at an agency that serves families of Domestic and Family Violence in DFW. She's the author of "Survivor Care: What Religious Professionals Need to Know about Healing Trauma" and has her doctorate in Global Health and Wellness, a M. Div., and a Master of Social Work with over 500 additional hours of specialized training in violence, assault, trauma-informed care, and other related topics.

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. Oord is a best-selling and award-winning author, having written or edited more than twenty-five books. Academic Influence ranks him among the most influential theologians in the 21st century. Oord directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and directs the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He is known for his research and writing on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, evil and power, and the implications of freedom and relationships for transformation.

Connect with Gravity:

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• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
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• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
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We talk with Dr. Janyne McConnaughey about her book Trauma in the Pews: The Impact on Faith and Spiritual Practices, which is a practical and compassionate roadmap for spiritual leaders to effectively minister to those struggling with the effects of trauma.

Janyne McConnaughey, PhD is a trauma survivor who draws from her life-long involvement in church ministries to train teachers and ministry workers at colleges and universities and serves on the Board for the Attachment & Trauma Network (ATN) and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tabor College.

You can connect with Janyne and learn more about her work on her website janyne.org.

Connect with Gravity:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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Religious trauma is something that happens far more often than most people realize. In When Religion Hurts You, Dr. Laura Anderson takes an honest look at a side of religion that few like to talk about. Drawing from her own life and therapy practice, she helps readers understand what religious trauma is and isn't, and how high-control churches can be harmful and abusive, often resulting in trauma. She shows how elements of fundamentalist church life--such as fear of hell, purity culture, corporal punishment, and authoritarian leaders--can cause psychological, relational, physical, and spiritual damage.

Dr. Laura Anderson is a psychotherapist, trauma resolution coach and consultant, writer and educator specializing in complex and developmental trauma, dynamics of power and control and religious trauma based out of Nashville, TN.

You can connect with her work on her website drlauraeanderson.com.

Connect with Gravity:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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What does it look like to live a flourishing, messy, wonderful life together with our kids? As parents, we’re tasked with nurturing and guiding our children, even as we navigate our own wonderings about faith. In the overwhelm and constant demands of life, is it possible to tend to our own souls and to our family’s flourishing?

Kayla Craig's book Every Season Sacred is a weekly invitation to grow spiritually alongside our children. Blending thoughtful musings and practical resources, author Kayla Craig meets parents right where they are.

Kayla Craig is a former journalist who brings deep curiosity and care to her writing. She's the author of Every Season Sacred and To Light Their Way. With a poetic, prophetic voice, she created the popular Liturgies for Parents Instagram account, which Christianity Today named an "essential parenting resource." She also hosts the Liturgies for Parents podcast. Kayla's nuanced and accessible reflections, essays, and prayers are featured in various books, devotionals, and Bible studies. Kayla lives in a 115-year-old former convent in her Iowa hometown, where she hopes to create spaces of welcome alongside her four children, two dogs, and pastor-husband, Jonny.

Connect with Kayla:

• Visit Kayla Craig's website
• Kayla on Substack
• Kayla on Amazon
• Liturgies for Parents Podcast
• Find Kayla Craig on Facebook
• Follow Kayla Craig on Twitter
• Follow Kayla Craig on Instagram
• Follow Kayla Craig and Liturgies for Parents on Instagram
• Follow Kayla Craig and the Upside Down Podcast on Instagram

Connect with Gravity:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].
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Pastor and discipler E. K. Strawser shows that when discipleship becomes central to your leadership and community, then discipleship becomes central to congregational mission and cultural renewal. Her new book Centering Discipleship is a practice-based guidebook for leaders who are doing the hard work of re-imagining and re-structuring their churches and communities to turn spectators into missional, mature followers of Jesus.

Eun K. Strawser (she/her) is the co-vocational lead pastor of Ma Ke Alo o (which means "Presence" in Hawaiian), non-denominational missional communities multiplying in Honolulu, HI, a community physician at Ke Ola Pono, and an executive leader at the V3 Movement, the church planting arm of the BGAV. Prior to transitioning to Hawaii, she served as adjunct professor of medicine at the Philadelphia College of Medicine and of African Studies at her alma mater the University of Pennsylvania (where she and her husband served with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) after finishing her Fulbright Scholarship at the University of Dar es Salaam. She and Steve have three, seriously, amazing children.

You can connect with her work on her website centeringdiscipleship.com.

Also, you can help Strawser and her church community (Ma Ke Alo o) in their commitment to respond long-term to the devastation of the Hawaii wildfires by donating using the link below:

​https://impactmissionsmovement.org/hawaii-wildfires/​

Connect with Gravity:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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We talked with Rev. Fran Tilton Shelton about the complex nature of grief, and what it looks like to walk through grief with God. Fran expounds on these themes in her book The Spirituality of Grief: Ten Practices for Those Who Remain.

Fran is a founder of Faith & Grief Ministries, and leads bereavement workshops and spiritual retreats. She is a preacher and a keynote speaker at conferences.​

For twenty years, Fran served PC(USA) congregations in Texas, primarily in pastoral care and was affectionately called “Funeral Fran” by the love of her life and last husband, Bob. She has the courage to take deep finesses in duplicate bridge, stamina to be a member of four book clubs and a spirit for life that sparks contagious laughter.

You can reach out to Fran and find out more about her work on her website frantiltonshelton.com.

Show notes:

Here's Ryan Flanigan's poem that he read in the introduction to this episode:

Taking Sides or “On the Side of Good”

Too long have I had to live;

among the enemies of peace.

I am on the side of peace,

  but when I speak of it, they are for war.

- Psalm 120:6-7

Moderacy says don’t take a side—

Neither side is good in everything—

But the thing I’ve noticed in these times

Is, more times than not, one side is vile.

Now, the vile are clear to those who know

Peace, which no one sees with violent heart,

But the heart that seeks to bless instead

Is the steady one who stands with God.

One with God can love an enemy;

As for me, my gut goes after war,

‘Til my warring spirit finds that I

Am the iron-fisted one again.

Then, to gain the favor of the world—

Yea, the world that God the Good so loved—

My belov’d, self-seeking, vengeful hand

Must unhand the weapon that I bear.

For to bear the burden of a friend

Puts a friendly spin on what they see,

But to see a foe through God’s own eyes

Realizes them as one of us.

Furious as I am at your sin,

On my sin I heap much more contempt.

When I’m tempted to abandon love,

Still God’s love demands that I forgive.

So, I give my life to follow Christ

In the Christian act of making peace.

If two pieces cannot reconcile,

May I silo on the side of Good.

Connect with Gravity:

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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This is a follow-up to our interview with Andrew Whitehead to chat about what the "kingdom antidotes" are for the fear, self-interested power, and violence that animate Christian Nationalism.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

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• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
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• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
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Power. Fear. Violence. These three idols of Christian nationalism are corrupting American Christianity.

Andrew Whitehead is a leading scholar on Christian nationalism in America and speaks widely on its effects within Christian communities. In this book, he shares his journey and reveals how Christian nationalism threatens the spiritual lives of American Christians and the church.

Whitehead shows how Christians harm their neighbors when they embrace the idols of power, fear, and violence. He uses two key examples--racism and xenophobia--to demonstrate that these idols violate core Christian beliefs. Through stories, he illuminates expressions of Christianity that confront Christian nationalism and offer a faithful path forward.

American Idolatry encourages further conversation about what Christian nationalism threatens, how to face it, and why it is vitally important to do so. It will help identify Christian nationalism and build a framework that makes sense of the relationship between faith and the current political and cultural context.

Andrew L. Whitehead (PhD, Baylor University) is associate professor of sociology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where he codirects the Association of Religion Data Archives at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. He is the coauthor of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which won the 2021 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Whitehead has written for the Washington Post, NBC News, Time, and Religion News Service and speaks frequently about Christian nationalism.

Connect with Andrew on Twitter or Instagram.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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Immersed in his physics studies at Cornell, Tom Rudelius never thought much about God until his brother, a new convert to Christianity, challenged him to explore faith. To placate his twin, he reluctantly began exploring the Bible and the life of Jesus. Seeking proof of God's existence, he found himself in a world of uncertainty, faced with plenty of reasons for both faith and doubt.

In Chasing Proof, Finding Faith, Tom, now a rising young theoretical physicist, traces his journey to unexpected faith, through subsequent doubt and anxiety, and ultimately to a firmer, life-transforming allegiance to Jesus.

Tom Rudelius completed his undergraduate work at Cornell, earned a doctorate in physics at Harvard, and has conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Currently a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, Tom will begin a faculty position at Durham University (UK) in the fall of 2023. His research focuses on string theory, quantum field theory, and early universe cosmology. A man of faith and an avid sports fan, he is frequently requested to speak on topics related to science and faith. He is also on the board of the Mamelodi Initiative, a tutoring organization based in Mamelodi, South Africa.

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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We are re-posting our 4-part series with Dr. Nathan Cartagena on Critical Race Theory (CRT) from a couple years ago. This is Part 4, where we talk we talk about why this all matters for the church.

Dr. Cartagena is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College (IL), where he teach courses on race, justice, and political philosophy. He also serves as the faculty advisor for Unidad Cristiana, a student group working to enhance Christian unity and celebrate Latina/o cultures. Connect with Dr. Cartagena at his website or on Twitter.

More info on critical race theory:

• Sojo article: Why Nathan Cartagena Teaches Critical Race Theory to Evangelicals
• What is Critical Race Theory? by Nathan Cartagena Part 1
• What is Critical Race Theory? by Nathan Cartagena Part 2
• What is Critical Race Theory? by Nathan Cartagena Part 3
• What is Critical Race Theory? by Nathan Cartagena Part 4

Connect with Gravity Leadership

• Leave us a message or ask a question about this or any other episode and we'll answer it on a future episode.
• Join our online community for free to get a curated list of interesting and edifying links each week, plus all kinds of other goodies.
• Check out the Gravity Commons, a place to connect and learn with others in the Gravity community.
• Check out Gravity Leadership Academy, our 12-month training intensive for Christian leaders who want to bring lasting transformation to their culture.
• Are you interested in advertising on the Gravity Leadership Podcast? Contact us at [email protected].

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