The Disrupters: Faith Changing Culture

By InterVarsity Press

Religion & Spirituality Christianity

What's The Disrupters: Faith Changing Culture about?

For season four of The Disrupters, through both her life experiences and interviews, sociologist and pop-culture expert Nancy Wang Yuen will explore the nature of Christian spirituality in the real world. Guests will include people with experience, insights, and advice in doing just that. Yuen said, “This season, I invite listeners to join me on my spiritual journey toward liberation. Each week, a new guest will help me process the foibles of evangelicalism, teach me how to heal from spiritual trauma, and share fresh new ways of doing faith.” Yuen is the author of Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism and coeditor with Deshonna Collier-Goubil of Power Women: Stories of Motherhood, Faith, and the Academy. She has appeared on PBS, NPR, MSNBC, CBS News, NBC News, BBC World, and Dr. Phil. She is a guest writer at CNN, Elle, Los Angeles Times, NBC, and Newsweek.

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LAST EPISODE

Introducing the New Host of...

09.25.2023

Hey, Disrupters fam! Can you believe we're diving into Season 5 of already? Time sure flies when you're challenging conventions and sparking meaningful conversations. Speaking of which, we've got some exciting news to share. We are introducing a new voice, ...

The Disrupters: Faith Changing Culture episodes:

09.25.2023 Introducing the New Host of the Disrupters Hey, Disrupters fam! Can you believe we're diving into Season 5 of already? Time sure flies when you're challenging conventions and sparking meaningful conversations. Speaking of which, we've got some exciting news to share. We are introducing a new voice, ...
02.27.2023 Weinstein Survivor Rowena Chiu Writes Her Own Script Content warning: This episode contains sensitive content about sexual assault. Former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was recently sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison on top of his current sentence of 23 years for sexual assault. In this bonus ...
01.09.2023 Kaitlyn Schiess Has a Warning for White Evangelicals In recent years there has been much cynicism regarding Christians’ role in American politics, especially from younger generations. Kaitlyn Schiess, a doctoral theology student at Duke Divinity School and author of Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of ...
01.02.2023 Deb Liu’s Double-Edged Sword of Resilience and Resentment For those not paying attention, it might seem as though Deb Liu, the CEO of Ancestry.com and the author of Take Back Your Power has been on a straightforward path to success her whole life. Despite Chinese cultural norms that ...
12.19.2022 I’m Dreaming of a Not-White Christmas, Part 4: How White Santa Overshadows Jesus In this series, Nancy Wang Yuen is joined by co-host New York Times bestselling author and historian Jemar Tisby for a miniseries exploring the Christmas season through the lenses of race, gender, and class. They examine some of the implicit ...
12.12.2022 I’m Dreaming of a Not-White Christmas, Part 3: Christmas in Color In this series, Nancy Wang Yuen is joined by co-host New York Times bestselling author and historian Jemar Tisby for a miniseries exploring the Christmas season through the lenses of race, gender, and class. They examine some of the implicit ...
12.05.2022 I’m Dreaming of a Not-White Christmas, Part 2: The Christmas Rom-Com In this series, Nancy Wang Yuen is joined by co-host New York Times bestselling author and historian Jemar Tisby for a miniseries exploring the Christmas season through the lenses of race, gender, and class. They examine some of the implicit ...
11.28.2022 I’m Dreaming of a Not-White Christmas, Part 1 For the next four episodes, Nancy Wang Yuen is joined by co-host, New York Times bestselling author and historian Jemar Tisby for a miniseries exploring the Christmas season through the lenses of race, gender, and class. They examine some of ...
11.21.2022 Why It Doesn’t Matter Whether Tennis Legend Michael Chang Wins or Loses Michael Chang is a legendary tennis player, primarily known for his improbable 1989 victory as a teenager at the French Open, among his many successes. But for Chang, that is not his primary legacy. “I've never thought of tennis as ...
11.14.2022 You’re Ready to Heal. Now What? With Dr. Christina Edmondson It can be exhausting to fight injustice. But for those who are marginalized, it can be traumatizing. And especially when that injustice is around every corner, it can often seem impossible to heal in the face of it. But according ...
11.07.2022 Leaving Evangelicalism, with Jon Ward If you’re listening to this podcast, you’ve probably left, or considered leaving evangelicalism. But what does it mean to leave evangelicalism, and what is evangelicalism anyway? In today’s episode, Nancy speaks to reporter Jon Ward about the disparity between what ...
10.31.2022 What Happens If We Don’t Tell Our Stories, with Jemar Tisby Back in early 2020, on the first season of The Disrupters, Jemar Tisby told then-host Esau McCaulley that a person of color’s participation in historically white Christian spaces inherently come with a cost: “You get pushed out, you burn out, ...
10.27.2022 Coming October 31: Disrupters Season 4! Nancy Wang Yuen is back for Season 4, and this season, she’s going to spill some tea. Join us on Monday, October 31 for the first in a series of conversations about how to heal and move on from the ...
03.24.2022 The Oscars Preview Bonus Episode! We're back, with a bonus Oscars episode of The Disrupters. Nancy talks to Rebecca Sun, the senior editor of diversity and inclusion at the Hollywood Reporter to discuss the various nominees, the lack of a dominant Oscars narrative, the confounding ...
02.24.2022 Mike Cosper Explores Why White Evangelical Churches Implode "I think it fundamentally comes back to, we want to win. We want to be told we're right. And we don't want to be put in a position where we're being called to lay down our lives for our friends ...
02.17.2022 Why You Need a Korean Dad Like Nick Cho As we exist in this life, in what ways can we make this world a better place? The simplicity and depth of this question exemplifies who Nick Cho is. As “Your Korean Dad” on TikTok, with over 3 million followers, ...
01.27.2022 Phil Yu & Jeff Yang are "Very Asian," and Just as Christian “I find that my journey as an Asian-American parallels my journey of faith as well this is where it intersects.” -Phil Yu “I don’t think I can talk about being Asian-American really without talking about the communities of faith that ...
01.20.2022 Terry Wildman Reframes the Message “When you take a story as beautiful as the Gospel of loving sacrifice, of a man who would heal the sick, care for the poor, bound up the brokenhearted, and you begin to force that belief in institutional settings, it ...
01.13.2022 Olivia Liang Fights for Nuanced Representation in Hollywood “I’ll be honest, my initial reaction to seeing an email that said ‘Audition for role of Nikki, Kung Fu,’ was like, 'Really? Haven’t we gone past this? Aren’t we done with the trope of the Asian doing martial arts?'” When ...
01.06.2022 Terence Lester Lets Go "I started to create what I call a 'let-go list,' trying to figure out as I evolve as a person, as a community leader, and as a co-leader in my family, really taking an evaluation and assessing the things I ...
12.23.2021 Jason Chu is Not a Contradiction “I always say there’s three strands in my life. There’s racial identity, there’s hip hop culture, and there’s religion. And all three are actually synonymous to me.” Jason Chu is a rapper and activist, speaking hope and healing to a ...
12.16.2021 Min Jin Lee Still Feels Like a Child of God “I don't like to be binary. But if you said 'you have to divide believers into two categories: fear-based or love-based...' I’m with team love.” Min Jin Lee grew up in the church with a grandfather who was a Presbyterian ...
12.09.2021 Peace Amadi is Done Hiding Her Emotions “I’m gonna stop suppressing myself … and lying to myself, or at least lying to you for the sake of peace and reconciliation. At this point, I’m just gonna need to be real.” Mental Health Expert Dr. Peace Amadi, PsyD, ...
12.02.2021 Gene Luen Yang Finds Comfort in Humility "Ultimately, my career could go up, it could go down. But, it doesn't necessarily have any bearing with what's actually important in life." Gene Luen Yang has been making comics and graphic novels since the fifth grade, and by any ...
11.22.2021 Season 3: The Disrupters Finds A New Voice Esau McCaulley discusses the new season of The Disrupters, coming December 2nd, with our new host, Nancy Wang Yuen, sociologist, pop culture expert and a professor at Biola University.
12.03.2020 Lisa Fields Snatches From the Fire "I've always had this radical approach to engaging lost people." Apologist Lisa Fields is the founder of the Jude 3 Project, a ministry dedicated to helping Christians know what they believe and why they believe it. From growing up in ...
11.26.2020 Alan Noble Takes Pop Culture Seriously Co-founder of Christ and Pop Culture Alan Noble believes deeply in the importance of learning how to interact and engage with the culture around us. "We need to talk. We need to have strong communities. We need to have these ...
11.19.2020 BONUS: What We've Learned From The Disrupters We're taking a break this week, but in the meantime, we thought we'd share some of our favorite episodes of The Disrupters and look back on what they meant to us.
11.12.2020 Jasmine Holmes Charts Her Own Path "I've honestly learned that nobody is owed the sound of my voice." As the daughter of someone with a significant presence in evangelical circles, author and teacher Jasmine Holmes is familiar with assumptions made about who she is—but she doesn't ...
11.05.2020 Chandra Crane Owns Her Superpower From fighting stereotypes to redefining isolating spaces, Asian American author Chandra Crane is an expert at disruption. But that doesn't mean it's easy—coming from a multiethnic and multicultural background, she's had to work to complicate oversimplified conversations. "It's actually a ...
10.29.2020 David Swanson Refuses to Check Out "There's no end to my learning and growing." From missionary kid in Venezuela to pastor in Chicago, David Swanson's eyes were gradually opened to injustice in his communities. As the white pastor of New Community Covenant Church on the South ...
10.21.2020 Taylor Schumann Survived—Now She Speaks Up. "I was already an extremely empathetic person, but this took it to a new level." Since writer and activist Taylor Schumann, author of forthcoming title ‘When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun ...
10.15.2020 Robert Romero Amplifies The Brown Church 16th century priest Antonio de Montesinos once said to a group of American Christians: “God gave you the opportunity to share about Jesus and love, and instead you are exploiting it for greed. If you don’t repent, God’s gonna send ...
10.08.2020 Beth Moore Sounds the Alarm. "Sometimes, you don't think about whether you're going to say something. You know you have to." In 2016, Beth Moore found herself struggling to reconcile the gospel with the church's reaction to a political sea change. "All at the same ...
10.01.2020 Justin Giboney Saw a Problem. Then He Built Something. Justin Giboney is fundamentally invested social justice. But he doesn't have to prove that to you. For people who are serious about their Christian faith, there's a stereotype of the political issues that they might be called to address. Justin ...
09.24.2020 Lecrae Will Not Be Defined. Lecrae, Grammy award-winning rapper is used to people trying to box him in—as if they could box in a man who lives to tell the truth. In this episode of The Disrupters, Esau McCaulley and Lecrae discuss what it takes ...
09.17.2020 Season 2 Is Going to be a Problem. The world is different on the other side of a pandemic. The same kinds people who were ignored are now in the center of the conversation. The question is: when people are ready to listen, what do you have to ...
04.13.2020 Jemar Tisby Confronts His Collaborators For African American Christians in the evangelical church, cognitive dissonance is a way of life. As African Americans approach cultural change, there’s a long-standing tension between working within mainstream institutions, seeking to provide insight and challenge whenever possible, and then ...
04.06.2020 Ruth Everhart Reexamines Our Faulty Systems Despite the fact that the protection of those who are sexually exploited and abused in the church is of utmost importance, the issue continues to exist because of its very nature. Uncomfortable and unwilling to engage a topic that demands ...
03.30.2020 Jenny Yang Stands Strong in the Midst of a Moral Sea Change Immigration hasn’t always been as controversial as it is now. In the past, churches seemed to agree that any opportunity to bring the gospel to the foreigner would be welcomed. But in the last several years, Jenny Yang has found ...
03.23.2020 Sheila Wise Rowe Dignifies the Burdens of the Past For 25 years, Sheila Wise Rowe has counseled trauma and abuse survivors. Many of Rowe’s counselees struggle under the weight of history. For those who suffer from racial trauma, history is not an abstract concept; it’s re-lived with every racial ...
03.16.2020 Jasmine Holmes and the Power of Black Motherhood Within certain Christian communities, there’s tremendous pressure to fit within a box, to stay within your lane. Jasmine Holmes, a black Christian mother and author of Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope, has faced ...
03.02.2020 N.T. Wright Forces an Overdue Conversation At one point, N.T. Wright found himself standing before a sea change. He was guesting on TV talk shows and publishing bestsellers. All in an effort to address what he saw as a disparity between beliefs about Scripture and what ...
02.24.2020 Carmen Joy Imes and the Disruptive Power of the Old Testament Growing up, Carmen Joy Imes had no idea she’d one day be in an academic setting, lecturing on Old Testament to rooms full of men. Raised in an environment that was skeptical of women teachers, Imes deviated from expectations when ...
02.17.2020 Dominique DuBois Gilliard’s Truth Is Louder Than His Trauma Was it nature or nurture that led Dominique DuBois Gilliard to write Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice that Restores? Probably both. From his years in the historical black church to his personal encounters with police, Gilliard seemed fated to sound ...
02.10.2020 Tish Harrison Warren Interrupts the Cultural Narrative Let’s say you’ve written a book about a passion of yours. To you, and everyone else’s surprise, it’s a huge hit. Now, the thing you loved has become a “fad.” What do you do next? Nothing new. For author and ...
02.03.2020 Sho Baraka Evades the Evangelical Edit Sho Baraka, a rapper and creative, came out of a Christian music scene that felt safe at best and restrictive at worst. Sho felt an ever-present evangelical gaze looking over his shoulder, critiquing him and his work. Eventually, Sho decided ...
01.15.2020 Introducing: The Disrupters The gospel led them into disruption. They told the truth, and the truth set the world on edge. This isn't a podcast for cynics or apologists. It's bound to disappoint you. And that's it. That's the pitch. The Disruptors is ...