Shifting Culture

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 ambitious goals can't, and how we learn to hear God's voice through Scripture and community. We also talk about keeping a rule from becoming self-help, and about discipleship that fits the life we actually have.

A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Jen Pollock Michel is an award-winning author, speaker, and podcast host living in Cincinnati. Her sixth book, A Rule for the Rest of Us, releases on September 8th. Jen holds a B.A. in French from Wheaton College, an M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University, and an M.F.A from Seattle Pacific University. Her writing has appeared widely in print and online publications, and her popular weekly Substack posts publish most Mondays. Jen also serves as the first-year writing mentor in the Whitworth University low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing. You can find out more about Jen at jenpollockmichel.com.

Jen's Book:

A Rule for The Rest of Us

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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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 roots of the religious right, question the myth of a Christian nation, and consider what it looks like to love our country while keeping our allegiance to Jesus first. When those loyalties collide, which one wins?

Wes Crawford is the Vice Provost at Abilene Christian University. He also is an Associate Professor of Church History. His research interests center on American religion generally and the intersection of race and religion specifically. His books, Shattering the Illusion: How African American Churches of Christ Moved from Segregation to Independence (2013) and Courage in the Sheer Silence: Challenging Racism in 20th Century Churches of Christ (2025), examine the relationship between white and black members of Churches of Christ throughout the twentieth century. His forthcoming book, One Nation Over God, explores the implications of American civil religion. In addition to his academic pursuits, Wes also served twenty years as a Preaching Minister within Churches of Christ and maintains a passion for local congregational ministry. Through his work with the Siburt Institute, he spends most weekends preaching for various congregations across the country. Wes has been married for twenty-nine years to his wife, Kim, and they have four children.

Wes' Book:

One Nation Over God

Wes' Recommendations:

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt

Theo of Golden

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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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 creation, the dignity of the body, and a resurrection already at work in the world. What would change if we believed God is like Jesus?

Kenneth Tanner is pastor of Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rochester Hills, Michigan, where he has served since 2005. He is the author of Vulnerable God: How Jesus Upends Our Assumptions About God—and Shows Us How to Be Human (Brazos Press, 2026). His writing has appeared in many outlets, including Huffington Post, Sojourners, Mockingbird, National Review, Christianity Today, Clarion Journal, and more. He and his wife, Debbie, have seven children and four grandchildren.

Kenneth's book:

Vulnerable God

Kenneth's recommendation:

The Wound of Unknowing

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 the body, community, and liturgy carried him through. We also talk about shame, a generation leaving the church, and why we don't have to explain suffering before we cry out.

Dave Nienhuis is a teacher, writer, speaker, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Seattle Pacific University.

Dave's Book:

And the Sea Was No More

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 of fun along the way.

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Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 artists, grief that never fully resolves, why resurrection never looks like restoration, and why none of this can be worked out alone. Don't let that hold you back.

Annie F. Downs is a New York Times bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and successful podcast host based in Nashville, Tennessee. Known for her engaging and honest style, Annie makes readers and listeners feel like long-time friends. She is the co-founder of the That Sounds Fun Network, home to her flagship podcast, That Sounds Fun and host of the television talk show I Gotta Ask.

Annie's Book:

Don't Let That Hold You Back

Annie's Recommendation:

Calamity Club

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 through what the numbers do and don't show, and talk about what women are finding after they go. Some have left faith entirely. Some are still following Jesus without the institution. 

Sarah Stankorb is a journalist, essayist, and author. Hundreds of her pieces have been featured in publications including: VICE, ELLE, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and others. The award-winning writer tends to break taboos, offering women a platform to discuss the quiet hurts and joys that define their lives. Stankorb's beat spans religion, politics, gender, and power, but is informed by questions of basic morality. 

Sarah was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and often found escape in books. She studied world religions and philosophy at Westminster College, and a chance to study abroad in Northern Ireland and then Israel further opened her eyes to how faith (and conflict) can shape people’s everyday existence. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where she studied ethics and South Asian religion and history. 

She’s more fun than all this sounds.

Sarah lives in Ohio with her husband and two children, and she writes regularly about the quirks of American faith for her Substack, In Polite Company.

Sarah's Book:

Damned if She Does

Sarah's Recommendation:

The Conspiracists

The Magicians

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 Christian bookstores to the blogosphere and Beth Moore. If confession can heal and confession can control, how do you know which one you're inside?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University. She is a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent books include Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) and Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (September 2026).

Kristin's Book:

Live Laugh Love

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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't, about losing his religion and finding his faith, and about why he says God got him through but people got him out. Love is the bedrock. Everything else burns.

Jeff Woodke is a speaker, writer, poet, and hostage advocate. He and his family worked with Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in Niger, West Africa, for decades and served their community by digging wells, establishing primary schools, assisting with land regeneration and famine relief, and advocating for climate change adaptation. He won a Sasakawa Award in 2009 from the United Nations for disaster risk reduction work in Niger. In 2016, he was taken hostage by terrorists linked to al-Qaida and held for six and a half years in northern Mali. Released in 2023, he returned to his wife, children, and grandchildren in California with PTSD and stories that needed telling. His book debut, All the Way Home, is available nationwide this September.

Jeff's Book:

All the Way Home

Jeff's Recommendation:

The Crucifixion of the Warrior God

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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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 have held without much thought. There'll be no easy answers here; just some honest wrestling. So, if you're looking for a podcast that doesn't ask you to leave your mind or your faith at the door, then pull up a chair

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Jesus and... Everything is a part of the Shifting Culture Podcast Network

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube

Support the podcast and the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below

Listen to Radical Common Sense wherever you get your podcasts.

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