In this episode, Beth Matheson leaves home fifty times, Jamie Vanbiber has reason to wish she had stayed home, and Greg Finley leaves for college in an especially vulnerable moment in his life.

"Leaving Home Stories,” is a special summer series in which writers from The Habit Membership read personal narratives on the theme of leaving home, literally or metaphorically, temporarily or permanently.

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In this special Fourth of July episode, Irish writer Judith McQuoid reads a story of her first arrival in the United States, in the summer of 1976. This beautiful reflection is a love letter to America, and a reminder of what this country can still mean to people from around the world.  

This episode is part of a special summer series called “Leaving Home Stories,” in which writers from The Habit Membership will read personal narratives on the theme of leaving home, literally or metaphorically, temporarily or permanently.

Judith McQuoid is the author of Giant, a fictional retelling of CS Lewis’s boyhood in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

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Andrew Wilson is Teaching Pastor at King’s Church London, and has degrees in history and theology from Cambridge (MA) and King’s College London (PhD). He is a columnist for Christianity Today, and has written several books. The most recent is Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Historian Mark Noll wrote, “Andrew Wilson’s book is extraordinary in every way: extraordinary in the breadth of research; extraordinary in the multitude of world-significant events that Wilson identifies for 1776; extraordinary in the depth of his insight on what those events meant (and continue to mean); extraordinary in the verve with which he makes his arguments; and, not least, extraordinary in the persuasive Christian framework in which he sets the book. Remaking the World is a triumph of both creative historical analysis and winsome Christian interpretation.”

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Dr. Warren Kinghorn is a psychiatrist and theologian at Duke University, where he holds joint appointments at Duke Divinity School and the Duke University Medical Center. Warren’s work focuses on the intersection of theology, mental health, and human flourishing—and he brings an integrated, humane perspective to questions that too often get reduced to biology or technique.

His new book is Wayfaring: A Christian Approach to Mental Health Care. In this episode, Warren Kinghorn and Jonathan Rogers discuss how the metaphor of the human being as a machine has shaped mental health care—and what is gained by reclaiming the older metaphor of the human as wayfarer; they talk about the ways that Thomas Aquinas’s teleological vision of human behavior opens up a richer account of freedom, agency, and virtue; and they talk about the possibility that the meaning of life is an active participation in blessing.

This episode, brought to you by The Habit's Writer Development Cohorts, first ran in 2025.

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Russ Ramsey is a gifted storyteller and a trusted guide in the world of art. He is the author of Rembrandt is in the Wind and Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart: What Art Teaches Us About The Wonder and Struggle of Being Alive. In this episode from October 2024, Russ and Jonathan Rogers talk about sunflowers, the sublime, and the connection between suffering and wonder. 

This episode is sponsored by The Habit's Writer Development Cohorts.

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Sarah Clarkson is a writer whose work centers on beauty and grief, story and quiet. She has written of herself, “I’m trying to write well about my own sorrow, and my own encounters with the beauty that defied my darkness and drew me into a life of creativity, quiet, and wonder.” She studied theology at Oxford University. She is the author or co-author of six books, most recently Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention, which she wrote to answer her own questions about what it means to have a quiet mind in a fallen, screen-driven world. In this episode, Sarah and Jonathan Rogers discuss a better definition of quiet, the importance of physical presence, the dangers of screens, and the value of boredom.

This episode is sponsored by The Habit's Writer Development Cohorts, a small-group intensive for fiction and nonfiction writers. Apply at TheHabit.co/cohorts.

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In recent years there has been a resurgence of serial publishing on Internet platforms. In this episode Mick Donahue and Andy Patton talk with Jonathan Rogers about serial publishing. Mick and his wife Rachel are is the co-founder of the new serialization platform, Flicker.Press. Andy, besides being the Rabbit Room’s Director of Content, is the author of the serialized novel The Ill Starred Knight, published on the Royal Road platform under the pen name Ix.

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Jeffrey Overstreet is a novelist, creative writing professor, and film critic at the intersection of art, faith, hope, and love. His new book, Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema, is a memoir in essays about film. He has described it as “a celebration and an expression of gratitude for the films that shaped my young imagination, that helped me recognize the glory of God's work in the world that God loves, and that then set me free to learn to love the world — the whole world — myself.” If you’ve ever been moved by a movie, you will enjoy this conversation with Jeffrey Overstreet.

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Priest and poet Malcolm Guite has become something of a regular on The Habit Podcast. And yet familiarity breeds ever more amazement at what a gift Malcolm is to the reading world. Galahad and the Grail is Book 1 of Merlin’s Isle: An Authuriad. This four-part epic poem in ballad form will retell the whole story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. In this episode, Malcolm and Jonathan Rogers talk about poetic forms, the beginnings of Malcolm's own work on Arthur, and the old legends about how the grail got to the British Isles.

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Tish Harrison Warren is an Anglican priest, a former columnist at the New York Times and Christianity Today, and a writer of wise and thoughtful books about living lives of connection and meaning. Her new book, What Grows in Weary Lands, explores a reality that early Christians often grappled with but that we rarely talk about in contemporary life: at times, God seems to abandon the soul, leaving us feeling as if we are alone and left to our own resources. These are times of futility, when work and relationships feel hard, when prayer feels unsatisfying, and we question whether our efforts amount to anything. In this conversation, Tish and Jonathan Rogers talk about the possibility that aridity, languishing, and even burnout are an invitation to deeper, more connected, and more fruitful life and work.

This episode is sponsored by The Habit's Writer Development Cohorts. 

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