Karen Swallow Prior is a public intellectual— a writer, speaker, and literature teacher. Her work centers on the intersection of faith, narrative, and cultural life. Her Substack, The Priory, is devoted to the holy cultivation of a rich inner life. Her new book is You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good and Beautiful. In this episode, Dr. Prior and Jonathan Rogers talk about following your passion (she has her doubts about that advice), knowing your limitations (she doesn’t think you can be anything you want to be), and listening for your calling (she doesn’t think it has to be all that mystical).

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Mitali Perkins (mitaliperkins.com) has written many books for young readers, including You Bring the Distant Near (nominated for a National Book Award) and Rickshaw Girl (adapted into a film), all of which explore crossing different kinds of borders. Her goal is to make readers laugh or cry, preferably both, as long as their hearts are widening. Her new book is for grownups. It’s called Just Making: A Guide for Compassionate Creatives. In it, Mitali begins answering the questions, “Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc?” “How can we justify making beautiful things?” and “How do we keep doing the work?” In this episode Mitali Perkins and Jonathan Rogers talk about justice and creativity, the ups and downs of Mitali's career, five destructive interior forces that keep us from doing creative work, and practices that counteract those forces.

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Carolyn Weber was our special guest at The Habit Summer Writers’ Weekend this past June. Carolyn is the author of Surprised by Oxford and Sex and the City of God. She is also a professor at New College Franklin in Franklin, Tennessee. The following conversation was recorded in front of a live audience of writers. Carolyn and Jonathan Rogers talk about memoir-writing, the memoirist’s ever-developing sense of self, and what it means to be both honest and honoring of others in a memoir.

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Songwriter Wendell Kimbrough has been writing, recording, and performing songs based on the Psalms for the last few years. His most recent record is called You Belong. In this episode, Wendell and Jonathan Rogers talk about loneliness, perfectionism, feeling like an outsider, learning to belong–and how one writes songs that sound like the Psalms while also sounding like the Gulf Coast.

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Daniel McInerny is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Virginia. He is also a novelist and dramatist.

His scholarship is directed toward reactivating an Aristotle’s understanding of art as imitation, long out of favor among philosophers. HIs biggest step in that direction is his new book, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. Peter Kreeft wrote of his previous book, The Way of Beauty, “This is literally the best book on beauty that I have ever read: the most convincing, clear, and comprehensive; the most eye-opening and satisfying; the most insightful and delightful. It is a masterpiece.” 

In this episode, Dr. McInerny and Jonathan Rogers talk about why human beings take so much pleasure in imitation; they talk about the odd fact that an imitation can often afford us a better insight into a thing than does the direct experience of the thing. Also, they talk about Christopher Walken.

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A degenerative muscle disease has made Kevan Chandler altogether reliant on others for his daily care. So he has invited friends into his life—deep into his life—making his need a nexus for community and joy. Kevan’s new book, co-authored with his friend Tommy Shelton, is The Hospitality of Need: How Depending on One Another Helps Us Heal and Grow Together. For Kevan, need is an opportunity for community, an opportunity to love and care for those who love and care for him. Besides reminding us that we all need each other, Kevan’s life gives us courage not to hide our need.

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Besides being a stalwart of The Habit Membership for Writers, Meredith Davis is the founder of the Austin Texas chapter of The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. And she’s the author of the middle-grade novel series, The Amazing Adventures of Noah Minor. The Minor Miracle was published in 2024; The Minor Rescue was published earlier this year. In this episode, Meredith speaks with Jonathan Rogers about her long road to publication, as well as her longstanding practice of hospitality to other writers.

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Miroslav Volf is a theologian and professor at Yale Divinity School, where he is the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He is widely known for his work on reconciliation, forgiveness, and the intersection of faith and public life. He’s the author of at least twelve books, including the highly influential Exclusion and Embrace, as well as many articles and quite a few co-authored books. His most recent book is The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better than Others Makes Us Worse. In this episode, Dr. Volf and Jonathan Rogers talk about the difference between striving for excellence and striving for superiority. They talk about the freedom to be found when we stop defining ourselves in terms of our status relative to others. Also, they talk a good bit about Satan.

This episode is sponsored by The Habit's Short Story Summer Camp, a six-week online writing class devoted to the short story. Find out more at TheHabit.co/ShortStory.

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Judith McQuoid lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the hometown of CS Lewis—or Jacks, as he was known when he lived there. Inspired by Belfast, her love of Lewis, and her own family history, Judith wrote a middle-grade novel about young Jacks Lewis and an imagined friendship with a boy from a very different background. It’s a book about creativity, friendship, and the ways we can give one another a little more courage and a little more hope. It was my pleasure to talk to Judith McQuoid about her new novel, Giant.

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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.

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