Sarah shares some exciting news about the podcast for next year and her best friend Phillip asks her questions about the past year and the future for the podcast and her career.

Michelle is the creator and owner of Ruffled By Grace: Parisian Wedding Blessings. She serves as an officiant for couples seeking personalized spiritual wedding blessings or to renew their wedding vows in Paris. In the episode, Michelle and I talk all about her entrepreneurial church business Ruffled By Grace.

Rev. Michelle Wahila was born and raised in Endicott, New York. She graduated with honors from Grove City College in 2002 and received her Master's of Divinity from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in May 2005. Michelle was ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in November 2005. Michelle is the creator and owner of Ruffled By Grace: Parisian Wedding Blessings. She serves as an officiant for couples seeking personalized spiritual wedding blessings or to renew their wedding vows in Paris. She works with a team of professionals to offer creative and tailored services that reflect the uniqueness of every couple.

This is the last week with Rev. Anita Peebles who is the Associate Pastor for Next Generation Ministries at Seattle First Baptist Church.  We discuss her work on atonement theology for children.  Atonement theology is more or less the meaning of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and ascension.  It can be very heavy stuff so Anita’s strategy for presenting this to children is really fantastic and I think super helpful for even adults who are learning about atonement for the first time or just trying to explore their theological understandings of god more

Rev. Anita serves as the Associate Pastor for Next Generation Ministries at Seattle First Baptist Church.

Sarah and Dr. Robyn have a lively discussion about the ethics and theology of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy.  And also, what it means to be in christian relationality. 

“Knowing intimately that the borderlands are a place of learning and growth, Dr. Robyn draws on their identity and heritage as a queer Latinx in everything that they do. From doubt to divine and everywhere in between, their call as an activist-theologian demands the vision to disrupt hegemony and colonialist structures of multi-layered oppression.

As an anti-oppression, anti-racist, non-binary Trans*gressive Latinx, Robyn takes seriously their call as an activist theologian and ethicist to bridge together theories and practices that result in communities responding to pressing social concerns. Robyn sees this work as a life-orienting vocation, deeply committed to translating theory to practice, and embedded in re-imagining our moral horizon to one which privileges a politics of radical difference.”

I’m honored to share another episode with Rabbi Jill Hammer.  This is one way I think we can build relationships across religious lines and learn from other amazing humans.  This is my act to make the world just a little bit better, a little more loving and to start tearing down the ignorant walls of anti-semitic bigotry.  Rabbi Hammer shares about the Jewish Tradition’s history of speaking about God as woman.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, a program that trains women in embodied, earth-based, feminist Jewish spiritual leadership. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic seminary for rabbis, cantors, and educators.  She is the author of eight books, including Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for all Seasons, The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere), The Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook, and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries.  She lives in New York City with her wife and daughter.