Shifting Culture

In this episode, Josh Larsen and I have a great conversation that covers many different horror genres including prophetic horror, zombie films, creature features, slashers, found-footage, and psychological horror. We talk about how each genre provokes certain fears in us like the loss of our humanity, the lack of control, nature run amok, anxieties unmet, and the brokenness of society. We then see how the Bible and the Gospel answers the fears we are confronted with. So join us and open yourself up to seeing the reality of Gospel hope in the light of the horror of a horror movie.

Josh is the co-host of the radio show and podcast Filmspotting, author of Movies Are Prayers and Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror, as well as editor/producer for Think Christian, a website and podcast exploring faith and pop culture. He’s been writing and speaking about movies professionally since 1994.

Josh’s career began in the newspaper business, where he started out as a beat reporter for a weekly community newspaper and went on to become a film critic for the Chicago-based Sun-Times Media for more than 10 years. In 2011, he joined the Christian media landscape as editor of Think Christian, and in 2012 he joined the long-running weekly podcast Filmspotting, aired on WBEZ in Chicago.

A veteran of the Sundance, Toronto, and Chicago International Film Festivals, Josh has given talks on film at various colleges and conferences. Since 2017, he has led “Ebert Interruptus,” a tradition established by Roger Ebert, which analyzes a single film scene by scene over several days at the University of Colorado’s Conference on World Affairs.

Josh's Book:
Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies

Josh's Recommendations:
Interpreting Your World by Justin A. Bailey
Astroid City

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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Karen Swallow Prior and I have a fantastic conversation around evangelical culture and true Christian faith. We dig into the history of Evangelical faith, what myths, stories, and narratives have contributed to the underlying assumptions we have on how the world works, and we talk through how to be faithful to Jesus in the midst of unexamined culture. Join us as we start to unveil the underlying narratives that we follow unaware.

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph. D., is a reader, writer, and professor. She is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis (Brazos, 2023); On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books (Brazos 2018); Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014); and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T. S. Poetry Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Cultural Engagement: A Crash Course in Contemporary Issues (Zondervan 2019) and has contributed to numerous other books. She has a monthly column for Religion News Service. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, First Things, Vox, Think Christian, The Gospel Coalition, and various other places. She hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus. She is a Contributing Editor for Comment, a founding member of The Pelican Project, a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum, and a Senior Fellow at the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture. She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens, and lots of books.

Karen's Book:
The Evangelical Imagination

Karen's Substack:
The Priory

Karen's Website:
Karen Swallow Prior

Karen's Recommendation:
The Brothers K

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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Karen  Wright Marsh and I have a wonderful discussion about our invitation to wonder and amazement. Through looking at the specific lives of those who have come before us, we can find practices that will shape the way we see the world and interact with God. Through beauty, art, singing, poetry, walking, cooking, writing, and more, we can start to pay attention to God at work and become people that are intentioned towards wonder. So join us as we contemplate these things and more.

Karen Wright Marsh is an author, speaker and the executive director and cofounder of Theological Horizons, a ministry that supports Christians & seekers in academia by providing a welcoming community for engaging faith, thought & life. She is the host of the Vintage Saints and Sinners podcast. She holds degrees in philosophy from Wheaton College & linguistics from the University of Virginia. Karen lives with Charles Marsh, a UVA professor, at the Bonhoeffer House in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Karen's Websites:
Karen Wright Marsh
Theological Horizons

Karen's Book:
Wake Up to Wonder

Karen's Recommendations:
How to Have Impossible Conversations
The Great Belonging by Charlotte Donlon

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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In this episode, Todd Hunter talks about the aims of Jesus and how getting back to His purposes can help us through bad religion. We talk about living in the Kingdom of God, how we receive it and how we are sent to be His witnesses, and many other facets of the Kingdom. We talk about spiritual practices, so that we can do good works when moments present themselves. We talk about the gospel – what it is, what Jesus said it is and how we can live into it. 

Bishop Todd Hunter’s life-long passion is to help others heed the call of Jesus to “come follow me” and thus to live their life in the kingdom of God as Jesus embodied, taught and demonstrated it. Bishop Hunter’s vision for such a life entails being the cooperative friend of Jesus, seeking to live a life of constant creative goodness, for the sake of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

This overarching vision has led Bishop Hunter to engage deeply with a few core themes:

The Gospel of the Kingdom 
The person and work of the Holy Spirit 
The nature and purpose of the church at the intersection of gospel and culture (missional ecclesiology) 
Spiritual formation as core to discipleship to Jesus 
Servant-hearted, kingdom-minded, Spirit-empowered leadership

Bishop Hunter has expressed his kingdom-Spirit-formation-church-culture focus in various settings. He is the founding bishop of The Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others, a diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. He writes a weekly newsletter: “The Gospel of the Kingdom.” Bishop Hunter is past President of Alpha USA, former National Director for the Association of Vineyard Churches, and retired founding pastor of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Costa Mesa, California. He is the author of Christianity Beyond Belief: Following Jesus for the Sake of Others, Giving Church Another Chance, The Outsider Interviews, The Accidental Anglican, Our Favorite Sins and Our Character at Work. His latest book  is What Jesus Intended: Finding Faith in the Rubble of Bad Religion.

Bishop Hunter is also the founder of the Center for Formation, Justice and Peace.  Alongside trauma-informed spiritual director Vanessa Sadler, Bishop Todd hosts Peace Talks, a podcast that spotlights women and men who are working to undo oppression, leading to lives of deeper peace for all.

Bishop Hunter holds a Doctor of Ministry degree and has served as an adjunct professor of evangelism, leadership in contemporary culture and spiritual formation at George Fox University, Fuller Seminary, Western Seminary, Vanguard University, Azusa Pacific University, Northern Seminary, and Wheaton College. 

Bishop Hunter and his wife Debbie live in Franklin, Tennessee. They have two adult children.

Todd's Book:
What Jesus Intended: Finding True Faith in the Rubble of Bad Religion

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, Mark Baker talks about Paul’s letter to the Galatians. We talk about non-judgmentalism, bounded, fuzzy, and centered sets, our orientation to God and to each other in the body of Christ, spiritual powers that have influenced us and the freedom that we have from them, and more.

Mark Baker is Professor of Mission and Theology at Fresno Pacific Biblical Seminary. He previously was a missionary in Honduras for ten years and a campus minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Syracuse University for three years. He continues ministry involvement in Latin America through regular visits. Since 2008 he has led a weekly Bible study at the Fresno County Jail. He has written a number of books in English and Spanish, including Ministering in Honor-Shame Cultures: Biblical Foundations and Practical Essentials, and Centered-Set Church: Discipleship and Community Without Judgmentalism.

Mark's Website:
www.centeredsetchurch.com

Mark's Books:
Centered-Set Church
Freedom from Religiosity and Judgmentalism

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, Jamaal Williams and Timothy Paul Jones talk about how to create a multi-ethnic Kingdom community in our churches like it will be in heaven. We talk through the unity and diversity in the identity of God, how our unity and diversity flows out of that identity, and how lament is important to establish ties between ethnic groups. We ground our conversation in the story of Jamaal, Timothy, and their church Sojourn Midtown in Louisville as an example of the work we can step into to see the body of Christ start to reflect the vision laid out in Revelation 7:9 where people from every tribe tongue and nation surround the throne of Jesus.

Jamaal Williams (DEdMin) serves as lead pastor of Sojourn Church Midtown in Louisville, Kentucky, and as president of the Harbor Network. In addition, he regularly consults churches on leadership matters and issues related to building healthy multi-ethnic churches.

Timothy Paul Jones (PhD) teaches apologetics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and serves as a preaching pastor at Sojourn Church Midtown. In addition, he has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including Finding God in a Galaxy Far, Far Away; Christian History Made Easy; and, with James Garlow and April Williams, the bestselling The Da Vinci Codebreaker. 

Jamaal and Timothy's book:
In Church as it is in Heaven

Timothy's Recommendations:
The Mandalorian
Augustine's Sermons

Jamaal's Recommendations:
The Spirit, Ethics, and Eternal Life by Jarvis Williams
God's Empowering Presence by Gordon Fee

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, Jessica Hooten Wilson talks about her latest book Reading for the Love of God, reading as a spiritual practice, how to use the four senses and the four stages to read well, how Jesus teaches us how to read well, what it means to read poorly, and how art, literature, and beauty can help transform our lives and move us closer to God.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the inaugural Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine University and a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. She is the author of several books, most recently Reading for the Love of God: How To Read as a Spiritual Practice.

Jessica's Book:
Reading for the Love of God

Jessica's Website:
www.jessicahootenwilson.com

Jessica's Recommendations:
Engaging the Old Testament by Dominick Hernandez
The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper
Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World's First Author

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, Josh White and I have a conversation about the foolishness of the cross. About our need to be confronted with the end of ourselves, so we can be dependent on Christ. We talk about how confession can drive our communities, being a witness to Jesus in the world, and radical grace and vulnerability.

Josh White is a speaker, recording artist, writer and founding pastor of Door of Hope, a family of church’s in the urban core of Portland Oregon. Josh lives with his wife Darcy, son Henry, daughter Hattie. Portland is the city where he and his wife Darcy met 23 years ago while Josh was playing a show with his then Seattle glam rock band, Man Ray, at the now defunct Satyricon night club. Little did they know that their lives within a few years would be turned upside down and revolutionized by the gospel of Jesus. When not traveling, preaching and leading Door of Hope, Josh is enjoying his family, obsessively reading — he actually is just obsessive — writing, producing and designing spaces. He just released his first book ‘Stumbling Toward Eternity’ for Penguin imprint, Multnomah press. Josh often refers to himself as the amateur pastor — for in the words of Robert Farrar Capon, ‘The amateur—the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy—is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound, by his love, to speak. The role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace.’

Josh's book:
Stumbling Toward Eternity

Josh's Recommendations:
The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self by Carl Trueman
I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightening by Rene Girard
Presence in the Modern World by Jacques Ellul
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut

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, Eun K. Strawser talks about centering discipleship in community. She answers the question, how do we imitate Jesus together, so that we can look like Him, and move toward our neighbor in mission? We talk through the elements of formation, rhythms, and examples that move our community towards one that centers Jesus and discipleship to Him. 

Eun K. Strawser 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

Rev. Dr. Strawser has nearly two decades of experience in centering discipleship and making mature missional disciples.  She has developed lay counseling curriculum, discipleship pathways for children's ministries, and discipleship pathways utilized both in established church and church-planting contexts.  While her heart is in locally-rooted kingdom work, she also consults and coaches pastors, planters and market-place/community leaders world-wide in developing discipleship pathways and structuring their context to center discipleship.

Eun's Book:
Centering Discipleship

Eun's Recommendation:
The Scandal of Leadership by JR Woodward

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, Benjamin Windle talks about the themes of his latest book Good Catastrophe. He talks about finding hope in the midst of despair, darkness, and catastrophe. Is it possible to find? Well, Ben takes the story of Job and illuminates it for our time.

Benjamin Windle is an innovative and empathic author, speaker, and Millennial/Gen Z specialist. As a pastor for over 20 years, he has walked with many through the dark shadows and valleys of the human experience. He has dedicated his life to helping people overcome life's challenges by growing deeper in their faith. 

Windle is a new-generation content creator for some of the most respected Christian brands in the world. He has a Bachelor of Theology, an MBA from Deakin University, and Executive Education at Stanford University and the MIT Sloan School of Management. He and his wife, Cindi, have three sons. 

Windle’s academic expertise and grassroots experience in discipleship have shaped him into an influential writer and public speaker. He is passionate about helping churches reach the Millennial and Gen Z groups, offering them wise counsel and practical resources. 

Windle and his family are based in both the U.S. and Australia. His work has been featured by the Barna Group, YouVersion, RightNow Media, and the Glorify App. For more about the author, go to benjaminwindle.com.

Benjamin's book:
www.goodcatastrophe.com

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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