Matt Mikalatos is one of my favorite people that I’ve never met in person. His online presence exudes love and he’s always kind, but that doesn’t mean he’s a pushover or lacks conviction. While most social media spaces can be toxic, Mikalatos has created a great space for dialogue and Loving Disagreement. Listen in as Josh and Matt talk about how to disagree and how to move ahead united despite disagreements.
The Conversation | Matt Mikalatos and Josh Olds
This transcript excerpt has been lightly edited for content and clarity.
Josh: So how exactly did this project come about?
Matt: So my one of my publishers, which is NavPress—who I had done two books with previously—reached out to me and said, “We are looking to do a book about kind of how Christians can get along when we disagree. And we’ve watched the way you interact on social media…” Which, particularly on Facebook, I have a diverse friend group. So Christians, non Christians, people on various political sides, US are international. And we talk about pretty thorny things sometimes. And people generally have been trained to be kind to each other as we disagree.
And they said, “What if you cowrote it with someone?” And I said, “Well, that would be interesting. Like, we could actually model some of these things maybe.” And they said, “Well, it’d be great if it was someone like this woman, Kathy Khang”—who is a Korean American naturalized citizen in the US, obviously has a very different experience than me. I happen to know Kathy, she’s a dear friend of mine. I reached out to Kathy and asked if she would be up for writing the book with me. And she said yes. Which I was delighted to discover, because I thought she would say no. And that’s how we got started. We basically pitch to the publisher, what if we did a book about the fruit of the Spirit—that when we’re in disagreement, we’re supposed to be showing things like love, joy, kindness, peace, gentleness, those things, which is a much more difficult thing than just civility.
The Book | Loving Disagreement by Matt Mikalatos and Kathy Khang
What does it look like to love someone you disagree with?
Fighting, disagreements, hatred, dissension, and silence. These things seem common in the wider Christian community today. Politics, theology, and even personal preference create seemingly insurmountable rifts. It’s hard not to see ourselves as “at war” with each other.
We’re not doomed to be stuck here, though. There is a twofold path out of this destructive war, out of seeing our brothers and sisters as enemies―and into a spacious place of loving each other even as we disagree.
In Loving Disagreement, Kathy Khang and Matt Mikalatos bring unique insight into how the fruit of the Spirit informs our ability to engage in profound difference and conflict with love. As followers of Jesus are planted in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit grows and bears good things in our lives―and relationships and communities are changed.
Read our full review.
The Author | Matt Mikalatos
Matt Mikalatos is an author, screenwriter, and speaker. He’s the author of Journey to Love and the YA fantasy series The Sunlit Lands, writes for the show Going Home, and cohosts the Fascinating Podcast.
He has written for Today.com, Time Magazine, Relevant, Nature, Writer’s Digest, and Daily Science Fiction, among others. He also has a long-running series on the fiction of C.S. Lewis at Tor.com. Matt’s work is often focused on his belief that all human beings are worthy of love.

The Conversation
This transcript excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Josh Olds: Give me your elevator pitch for this book. What’s it about? Why should people read it?
Kaitlyn Schiess: Yeah, so this book is most simply a book about how we read the Bible, specifically how we read the Bible in our political contexts. But my desire in writing was not just to say, “Okay, let’s just get in the weeds.” Like, you know, what does this passage about the Jubilee say to our economic life? Or does this passage from Psalms have anything to say about abortion policy? I have found in the last few years of working with a lot of churches, campus ministries, Christian colleges, that when you say we’re having a political conversation, people come with walls up, they come ready to fight, there’s a pretty high temperature initially in that conversation. And so I thought, what if we instead kind of pump the brakes a little bit and look at some examples in history in which scripture has been used, especially American history, I’m thinking about the American political context, some examples in American history where scripture was used in ways that we might find commendable or in ways that we might be quite critical of, and have examples that feel both connected to us. If we’re thinking about the American political context, and yet distant enough from us that maybe we can lower the temperature a little bit, maybe we can learn something about an issue or a biblical interpretation question that’s still very relevant to us, but without immediately jumping to current political questions to do it.
The Book | The Bible and the Ballot
How do Bible passages written thousands of years ago apply to politics today? What can we learn from America’s history of using the Bible in politics? How can we converse with people whose views differ from our own?
In The Ballot and the Bible, Kaitlyn Schiess explores these questions and more. She unpacks examples of how Americans have connected the Bible to politics in the past, highlighting times it was applied well and times it was egregiously misused.
Schiess combines American political history and biblical interpretation to help readers faithfully read Scripture, talk with others about it, and apply it to contemporary political issues–and to their lives. Rather than prescribing what readers should think about specific hot-button issues, Schiess outlines core biblical themes around power, allegiance, national identity, and more.
Readers will be encouraged to pursue a biblical basis for their political engagement with compassion and confidence.
The Author | Kaitlyn Schiess
Kaitlyn Schiess (ThM, Dallas Theological Seminary) is a writer, speaker, and theologian. She is the author of The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor and is a regular cohost on the Holy Post podcast with Skye Jethani and Phil Vischer. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Christianity Today, Christ and Pop Culture, Relevant, and Sojourners. Schiess is currently a doctoral student in political theology at Duke Divinity School. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.

The Conversation
The following is an interview excerpt that has been lightly edited for the sake of conciseness and clarity.
Josh Olds: Now I want to start and I hope this doesn’t sound confrontational, because I don’t mean it that way. But there are so many books that have been written in recent years about white supremacy and racial reconciliation from both secular and Christian perspectives. So in your mind, what makes your voice and what makes this book be different enough to stand out enough that it adds to the conversation?
Caroline Sumlin: I love this question. My book is specifically about how white supremacy culture causes us, as individuals and as a collective society, to feel unworthy as humans, and what we can do about it, and it’s an approach to white supremacy culture that has not I have never seen this been done before. We know about white supremacy culture, there’s been research done about it. And it’s not, it’s not talked about as much as systemic white supremacy is and there is a difference there. So yes, there’s a lot of books out there about systemic white supremacy. There’s a lot of books out there about how systemic white supremacy and systemic racism causes the disparities between the Black community and the white community and other communities of color, specifically in America, but also, globally.
We can go on and on about that, but who has actually talked about how white supremacy culture has impacted the way that we see ourselves and how that impacts every single one of us, regardless of what our racial identity is, or what our gender expression is, or anything, any other identity, we may, we may carry, or we may hold? So that’s where my book comes in. And it’s actually written about a lot less. It’s a lot of my story woven in there, there’s a lot of talk about healing, and how do you heal from the way white supremacy culture has impacted you as a person and the lies that you’ve believed in the standards you believe you have to uphold yourself to.
The Book | We’ll All Be Free
Discover a Better Standard of Excellence
You’re not good enough. How many of us internalize this belief before we even reach adulthood? How many of us feel unworthy and unable to live up to what seem like impossible-yet-completely-arbitrary standards? Where do these toxic beliefs about ourselves come from? And who told us there is a way we are “supposed” to be anyway?
With passion and compassion, Caroline J. Sumlin reveals the force that keeps all of us, whether we are part of a marginalized group or not, from freely expressing who we are as image bearers of God: white supremacy culture. Sharing her own story, she helps you see the wide-ranging effects of living in a culture of white supremacy. She identifies the damaging beliefs we internalize from our very earliest days and shows us how to find clarity and freedom as we dismantle the oppressive structures that hem us in and force us to conform.
If you have struggled with perfectionism, self-doubt, unworthiness, or the unrelenting pressure to pursue someone else’s version of “success,” you will find here the tools you need to silence the voices that seek to keep you down and to value yourself as never before.

The Author | Caroline Sumlin
Caroline J. Sumlin is a writer, speaker, and educator with a passion for helping all people to reclaim their self-worth and their humanity. A former foster child turned adoptee, Caroline brings awareness, healing, and liberation to the topics of toxic white supremacy culture, systemic injustice, mental health, faith reconstruction, and bold, purposeful living to her growing audience. She received her bachelor of arts from Howard University and resides with her husband and their two daughters in Northern Virginia.

Storytelling is much more than writing. In fact, for most of human history, storytelling has come through the spoken word. How can we get back those oral storytelling roots in modern communication? In The Art of the Tale, storyteller Steven James and speechwriter Tom Morrisey combine their expertise to craft a book all about storytelling in public speaking. Whether you’re a teacher, preacher, business executive, motivational speaker, or just someone who wants to become better at social conversation, there’s something in The Art of the Tale for you. Listen in as Steven James and I talk about the book.
The Conversation | Steven James
This transcript excerpt has been edited for clarity and content. Listen to the full interview at the audio player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: What am I going to learn when I read this book?
Steven James: I think that one of the things this book approaches a little bit differently and uniquely is the idea of what a story is. A story is not just a list of things that happen. We really unpack the six aspects of all great stories. Basically, the first few are obvious. I’ll say them and you’ll be like, well, of course that seems super obvious, like character. Yeah, a story needs a character. Of course, that seems super obvious. But then also a setting and time and place. Setting is not just the location, but it’s when and where…The next thing a story needs is a struggle. You can have a list of things that happen, but without a struggle, you don’t have a story. You just have an account, a report maybe. You need to struggle to have a story. The fourth is a pursuit where the character wants something, tries to get it, things get in the way, that’s where the struggle comes from.
You can actually have a story that just has those four—character, setting, struggle, pursuit—but it won’t necessarily be a great story. It can be predictable. For a story really be elevated, it needs what I call a pivot. Pivot is where there’s a moment where things you expect them to go in one direction, but they don’t. They change, they alter, into a new direction. But when it happens, you’re like, that totally makes sense…And finally, payoff. Payoff is where if it’s a funny story, we laugh; it’s a heartwarming story, it really impacts us. So it’s not just the same as a theme, but it’s more like the overall impact of the story.
The Book | The Art of the Tale
Unleash the power of storytelling to transform your talks, speeches, and presentations—whether your audience is a boardroom of executives, a classroom of students, or an auditorium full of eager listeners.
Everyone, regardless of their background and training, can improve their storytelling abilities. But what is a story? How can you tell it in a way that delights and informs your listeners? Take a journey into the keys to great storytelling with two of the country’s top experts on story presentation and speech writing.
In The Art of the Tale, expert storytellers Steven James and Tom Morrisey team up and tap into their lifetimes of experience to show you how to prepare stellar presentations, tell stories in your own unique way, adapt your material to different groups of listeners, and gain confidence in your ability as a speaker. In this book, you’ll learn why:

* practice doesn’t make perfect.
* you should never tell the same story twice.
* there is no right way to tell a story.
* it’s best to avoid memorizing your stories.

You’ll also find helpful hints on:

* gaining confidence in your ability as a storyteller.
* connecting with your audience.
* matching your expectations with those of your listeners.
* understanding what makes a good story.
* drawing truth out of stories you wish to tell.
* crafting and remembering stories.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, it accelerated something that I had been seeing in churches. People were leaving and they weren’t coming back. When COVID forced people out of the normal routine, they were able to step back from church and found that…well…they found that it started them on a walk away from God. Or the church. Deconstruction, some call it. These people still loved Jesus but found their churches promoting policies and politics that didn’t seem very Christlike. So what now? In The Road Away From God, Jonathan Martin uses the Emmaus story in the Gospels to talk about how God remains with us even as we walk away. Join Josh Olds and Jonathan Martin as they talk about this journey.
The Conversation | Jonathan Martin
This excerpt has been edited for clarity and content. Listen to the full interview in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: So let’s get back to the book, The Road Away from God. Give the listener some idea of what this book is about? Who were you writing it to?
Jonathan Martin: This book feels like a love letter to my friends. I feel like almost everybody that I care about has had some sort of really significant shift in their religious and their spiritual experience last few years. And for most people that feels violent, and scary, and alienating. Especially since they’ve had some kind of a shift in terms of their faith community and our community is so often are connected to our identity. Our communities tell us who we are, we know who we are, because of how we exist in relation to them. So I think when we shift in terms of our identity within a community, it makes sense that then all of a sudden, it can feel like everything shifted. Has my relationship with God shifted? How we relate to human communities or authority can be how we relate to God. So really, I hoped it would be a book that would bring some comfort and perspective for people who are very much in the in the thick of that. And again, my sense is a lot of people are in the thick of it in some way or another.
Josh Olds: What do you feel like has been the impetus for the change? You know, what made churches and certain church denominations and faith strains sort of make that slide toward maybe being more overt about the types of people that they didn’t want to include? Or the opposite of that is what made people begin to say, “I can’t do this anymore. I have to step away?”
Jonathan Martin: This is such a great question. I’m loving this conversation so much already, because I can’t even think of when someone’s asked me a version of that. So I think the thing is that certain kinds of figures in America in political power, and then a lot of church leaders actually held in common, was not so much a shared ideology, but more a shared pragmaticism. That it’s kind of like whatever it takes to win, whatever rises to the top. So I think like a certain kind of politics started working. And the folks who engineered those kinds of politics, were saying to people of faith, “Hey, we’ve got room for you here.” “We’d love to have you pray at our prayer breakfast.” “We’d love to have your church participate in this thing” or whatever. And so suddenly, they have more proximity to power than they had before. They’re at the place of power. And so I think a lot of it wasn’t even so much, like directly ideological. It is more like, “Oh, hey, well, now we have this opportunity.” Now we have someone who, at least in terms of lip service, says that that we matter, and that we can have more of a kind of a formal seat at these at these tables of power. And I feel like that’s the thing that became kind of intoxicating, is that, well, if going more in this direction, gives us more access, gives us more influence in this way, then maybe that’s the maybe that’s what God is doing.

Gender identity has recently become part of the “culture war” battles that play out in the media, in our culture, and in our churches. How should Christians respond? How should we talk about the concept of gender identity? How do we have substantive and helpful dialogue and not fall victim to the culture war? How are Christian clinicians supposed to handle issues of gender identity? Gender Identity and Faith offers a blueprint for people to navigate gender-identity questions. In this podcast interview, Dr. Julia Sadusky talks about the book and about how to understand those with diverse gender identities.
The Conversation | Julia Sadusky
This excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and content. Listen to the full interview at the link above.
Josh Olds: So the book is Gender Identity and Faith. Tell me a little bit about what the book is about, who it is written for, and what you hope to accomplish through it?
Julia Sadusky: Yes, so Gender Identity and Faith is really a book for clinicians. So, if you’re listening and you know therapists, or you yourself are a therapist, this is your book for how we effectively meet the needs of clients coming in for, whom faith is a very important facet of their life, or has been a part of their life for some time, and they’re trying to figure out what it looks like to integrate my experience of gender in keeping with my beliefs and values? And how do I do that in a balanced kind of gradual way, as opposed to believing that there’s only one way to resolve my experience of gender identity. And so that’s more of the framework of the book.
What we’re hoping to accomplish is give clinicians who are well-meaning, who are working with conventionally religious people and their families, concrete tools to develop more of a posture and a confident approach to how they’re engaging with gender minorities in therapy. What we were seeing and continue to see a lot—Mark Yarhouse and I, when we do trainings—is just a real trepidation and fear among clinicians of how do we do right by people in this space, and especially people who may have questions about some of the socio-cultural shifts that we’ve seen in the last 20 years. And so really, equipping clinicians is the goal, and doing so in a balanced psychologically-minded way that is ethical, which doesn’t always happen when clinicians have their own anxieties about how to how to do right by people.
Josh Olds: It’s difficult because the way in which we talk about gender identity or sexual minorities as a society—it comes in the context of what we call the culture wars, and that never foments good discussion. It’s an issue we’ve seen politicized, a gets so much so—bathroom bills, sports participation, and pronouns is like the trifecta. And just if you mentioned the word pronouns, you’re going to get a whole section of Twitter angry at you for that. And you’re like, we’re not having any discussion of meaning or substance, and the humanity of people, regardless of their gender experience, is being lost in the middle of this. What can we do to get rid or push away those less helpful conversations and begin to cultivate more helpful conversations?
Julia Sadusky: Well, I think the first step is what you’re doing right there, Josh, which is recognizing how easily we can get swept up in that. And I think on the front end, it will be catching ourselves when we start to feel ourselves get angry about some debate. So, somebody talks about their own gender identity, or that of a friend, maybe your child comes home from school and says, “Oh, Mom, my friend today said they’re non-binary.” And you start to feel that activation happening, the anger, the frustration, the fear response, what does this mean about the culture and where we’re moving? And we need to really slow that down and think “Oh, my gosh,

It’s not normal for books that I read to be the subject of conversation before I read them. When I shared on social media that I was reading Jonny Rashid’s Jesus Takes a Side, reaction was swift. “Isn’t it amazing that Jesus is always on your side?” (Umm…not really, because if I truly thought Jesus was on the other side, I’d be changing camps to side with Jesus…something I’ve actually done a few different times in my faith journey.) In an increasingly polarized world, many Christians are calling for an end to politicization and for there to be a third way that unites both sides. Rashid takes exception to that, writing clearly about how Jesus never sacrificed care for the marginalized for the sake of unity. I recently caught up with Jonny to talk about Jesus Takes a Side.
The Conversation | Jonny Rashid
This excerpt may be edited for content or clarity. Listen to the full interview at the video or audio links above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: What do you mean when you say Jesus takes a side?
Jonny Rashid: I mean, Jesus takes the side of the oppressed and when it comes to making political commitments, we should align with uplifting and liberating the oppressed, and giving them as much a life and dignity as we can in our collective battle against death, which is what Jesus opposes. So where death exists, oppression exists; and where life flourishes, liberation exists, Jesus wants everybody to be liberated. And so we look at the least liberated and imagine Jesus working with them, relating to them, loving them.
Josh Olds: When I first got this book, it was the title that sold me on it, because it is so different than what we hear in a lot of Christian conversation. If you come out and you just say “Jesus takes a side,” then everyone sort of reacts against that. Do you feel like that there are people who are just like, “Hey, we shouldn’t take sides. We got to stay in the middle.” Or especially now, do you feel like people would read this and say, “You know, Jesus takes sides and that’s the conservative evangelical Republican side”?
Jonny Rashid: What we see in what was called the Moral Majority, what’s become the far right, we do see a lot of political commitments among those groups, but, they don’t really say they take a side, what they say is that they’re right. What they say is that God is on their side. What they say is, “We are in the right position,” as opposed to Jesus taking the side really meaning Jesus sides with the oppressed. So I don’t hear from the religious right, from the far right, that Jesus makes political commitments. Instead, what I hear is a sort of Christian supremacy, that this is the right way to do things. Not doing that is going to ruin our families, it’s going to destroy our kids, this is why we have to do it, they engage in a culture war in a different way than I am. Because what I’m talking about is actual explicit political commitments, as opposed to self-righteous ones, you know, ones that that protect me, my personal and religious interests, but rather ones that uplift the most vulnerable. So I do see a difference there. But I understand that a lot of people resist political commitments because they see the Republican Party being co-opted, or the Republican Party co-opting evangelicals…And so the instinct is to say, No, we’re not political, because being political is bad. In my viewpoint, it isn’t being political that’s wrong. It’s being allied with forces of deaths such as racism, such as homophobia, sexism, patriarchy, greed, environmental degradation. These are the things that are wrong, not politics.
The Book | Jesus Takes a Side
Jesus sides with the oppressed. Will you?
In a world divided by left and right, red and blue, many Christians have upheld a “third way” approach in pursuit of moderation, harmony, and unity.

If God is calling women to lead, what’s holding them back? Susan Harris Howell has spent her academic life investigating this question and the answer that she’s come to is gendered socialization. That is, society has preconceived ideas about what toys, jobs, behaviors, and clothes fit which gender. The result has been that, societally, men are more likely to lead because society has socialized them to be leaders. To get a better idea of this, I had a conversation with Dr. Howell.
The Conversation
This transcript may be lightly edited for clarity and content.
Josh Olds: The big term to make sure that everybody understands is “gendered socialization.” Half the book is dedicated to explaining what that means, what that looks like in childhood, adolescence, adulthood—there’s a chapter for each of them. So to make sure everyone is clear, what does that term mean?
Susan Harris Howell: Gendered socialization can mean a lot of things. It can mean anything that is as overt as our parents, or teachers or the media telling us, “You’re a boy, you’re a man, you need to be doing these things, or you shouldn’t be doing those things.” Or because you’re a woman or girl, you should or shouldn’t be doing a variety of things. But it also can be things that are very subtle, and this is really what my book focuses on. Because we’re typically aware of those overt ways. But I look at very subtle gendered socialization. Like, for instance, the way our language very often will use the word he or him when referring to people whose gender is not known. That would be a very subtle way that we might be communicating to girls and women that they’re second class, that they’re not the main attraction, that this is a man’s world, and that we’re just here on the sidelines. So my book looks at gendered socialization as anything that happens, that tends to channel us in a certain way, simply because we’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman.
Josh Olds: What sort of inequalities do we find coming out of gendered socialization?
Susan Harris Howell: Well, for one thing, the mindset that it creates in men and women and boys and girls, and then later men and women. For instance, one of the lines of research that I talked about in the book is some research that shows parents and teachers are more likely to believe that if a boy does really well, say on a math or a science test—something that is very often stereotypically seen as a boy thing—whenever he does really well, they’re more likely to tell him, “Wow, you’re really smart.” And then if their daughter does well, on one of those math or science tests—something that is stereotypically thought of as a guy thing—they’re more likely to tell her, “Wow, you really worked hard.” And while both of those are compliments, and both are probably true, most of the time, usually, if we do well, on any kind of a test, it’s partly because we’re smart, and partly because we’ve worked hard, but the fact that they give different messages to boys and girls is very telling.
Because if you tell someone that they did well because they’re smart, what that communicate is that they’re doing well is part of who there is part of their essence, part of who they are. And then it’s very likely to be repeated. Because if you’re smart today, you’re likely going to be smart, tomorrow, next week, and next month, and so on. But when we tell a little girl that she did well, because she tried hard, it communicates to her, that it’s not so much who she is. But what she did in this one situation. And so it communicates to her that the next time. For instance, if she doesn’t have as much time to study, or if the subject is just a lot harder, that her inborn intelligence, the essence of who she is, might not be enough to get her through.
So for instance,

On January 6, 2021, Senate Chaplain Dr. Barry Black spent several hours in an undisclosed location with many United States Senators as they took shelter from insurrectionists who had overrun the Capitol building. In the wee hours of January 7, the legislature reconvened to finish its work and Dr. Black closed with a prayer for the country: “Use us to bring healing and unity to our hurting and divided nation and world. Thank you for what you have blessed our lawmakers to accomplish in spite of threats to liberty.”
From that prayer came the book A Prayer for Our Country, an illustrated prayer published by Zonderkidz. Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Rev. Dr. Black about the book, his nearly two-decade tenure as Senate Chaplain, and how he walks the line between serving God and empire. It’s a fascinating conversation you do not want to miss.
The Conversation
This excerpt may be lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.

Josh Olds: Prayer is something that is central to your ministry. I think it’s appropriate that your latest book is a children’s book is about prayer. How did the idea for this book—A Prayer for Our Country—come about?
Barry Black: I was in the Capitol on January 6, I watched the entire day unfold. I arrived at the Capitol at 7am on January 6 and I left the Capitol at 5am on January 7. During that time, I had an opportunity to spend nearly four hours with senators—90% of our senators—at an undisclosed location. I had an opportunity to pray with them, and to minister to them. And at the end of the day, Vice President Pence asked me to close the entire Senate session with a prayer. And in that prayer, I talked about what we had experienced that day, the shedding of innocent blood, the loss of life, the quagmire of dysfunction, the threats to a democratic process.
An editor from Zondervan—and no doubt an insomniac—was listening and watching and said to herself, “We need to help our children learn to pray for their country as this Chaplain is praying for our country.” I’ve always had a passion for children, my mother taught me how to pray. So I got a call from Zonderkidz asking me if I would be interested in doing something like that, and I was enthusiastically interested. And that’s how I ended up writing A Prayer for Our Country. One of the primary motivations was something Billy Graham once said, he said, “We are one generation away from agnosticism.” In other words, if we don’t teach our children, a way to connect with the transcendent, with God, we are one generation away from no memory of God’s mighty acts in our history. No George Washington in the snow of Valley Forge, no Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention, saying, “Scripture says, Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it. Psalm 127.” Oh, Franklin, at that same convention, quoting from the Sermon on the Mound, I believe he said, “I’m an old man. But I believe that if a sparrow cannot fall without God, knowing it, that a republic cannot rise without his aid. And so I believe we should pray about this.” And they invited in clergy after as you could expect it, interminable debate, they invited in a clergy person to begin to pray on a regular basis. So the idea of the conception came after that horrific experience on January 6, and then an opportunity offered me by one of the editors from Zondervan kids.
Josh Olds: You’re writing it for a children’s book context, but as I was reading it, you know, you can you can read it, and see what children will take from it. But you can also read it and see what adults can take from it as well. It’s not a children’s book. It is a book that is my children’s publisher, with this is, you know, it’s not a childish prayer. But it is a prayer.

Have you ever read some of the stories of women in Scripture and thought that the traditional interpretation of their narratives just didn’t seem quite right? Eve bears the blame for all sin? Bathsheba complicit in David’s adultery? Mary DeMuth takes a look at the Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible, redeeming and reclaiming their stories from bad interpretations. Recently, I caught up with Mary to talk about the book.
The Conversation | Mary DeMuth
Josh Olds: Now, I’m very interested in the title, the title is very clear, you know what you’re getting into right from the beginning, but give me a little bit more than that—give the listeners sort of an overview of what this book is about.
Mary DeMuth: So a couple of years ago, I went through a kind of a valley of misunderstanding with a friend, and it was so painful. And I realized, as I shared, you know, just with a close circle of friends that a lot of people have had that same experience throughout their lives. We’ve all been misunderstood. And then a couple of years ago, I started reading the Bible rapidly every two or three months. And I was realizing that a lot of these women in the Bible I had heard sermons about, but they were different from just a boring, plain reading of Scripture. And so I combined the two ideas of the idea of being misunderstood and then misunderstanding these women, both in their context, but also in history. I put on my fiction hat, because I’m also a novelist, and I wrote their stories as close to the biblical narrative as I could with good research. And then I unpack those stories for the readers who have been walking through misunderstanding like we all have.
Josh Olds: Why do you think the value is in the fictional aspects? How does that help the reader gauge the cultural—all of the context that goes along with that—that you might miss out, if you’re just reading something that’s nonfiction?
Mary MeMuth: I think part of that is just as a storyteller, the question that I ask is, “What is it like to be in the sandals of that person?” And so placing the reader in the sandals of that person through the power of a story helps them to empathize a little bit more, and to actually ask some good questions that a story would bring up, versus just me telling you this is the story…
Josh Olds: Can you give us some examples of some of the figures that you’re talking about?
Mary DeMuth: Yeah, so obviously, Eve is a really important one. She’s kind of the groundbreaking one. And we often think that everything rests on her shoulders. And actually, if you look at the narrative, it’s equally placed upon hers and Adam’s shoulders for the fall of humankind. So she was just like a, you know, a linchpin, you have to talk about her. But there were more, there were several sexual abuse victims, one of which was Bathsheba, and then jumping to the New Testament, Mary of Magdala. She has long been misunderstood in historical context as a prostitute. But she’s actually a woman who is demonized and delivered from demons. But there’s, it’s a…it’s a pope error. One of the earlier Popes said that she was the same woman that put her hair on Jesus and washed his feet, but there’s not a good case for that. But that has been going on for years and years and years, people still believe it. And then, you know, just some of the one of the ones I thought was interesting was Naomi, who she doesn’t get a lot of play in the book of Ruth. Ruth is like the heroine of that book, but I wanted to look and see what it’s like to be a grieving person. And to give my readers permission that grieving is okay, and you can be sad and mad and all those things.
The Book | The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible
Understanding Isn’t Overrated.
Ask any woman—most of us know what it’s like to be misheard, mischaracterized,

What’s it like to lose everything, leave your home country, and step out in faith with no safety net? What about raising (and homeschooling!) seven creative children? How about being the middle of the contemporary Christian music movement and having three of your children be well-known artists? In her debut memoir, Helen Smallbone gives you the answers. But I had more questions and wanted to hear it directly in her voice. Listen in as Helen and I talk about the story of her life.
The Conversation | Helen Smallbone
This interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness.
Josh Olds: Now, this is sort of your memoir, it’s your story from all the way back starting in with your younger years on Australia. Then moved to the States, and Behind the Lights takes us all the way up through your current ministry and work. But just to begin, if you can just sort of compress that into just a couple of minutes and let the listeners know what they can expect when they read this book.
Helen Smallbone: This book is really a little bit of a life story. We’ve been given a fairly dramatic life story. My husband and I left Australia in 1991 with six kids, 16 suitcases, and me pregnant with number seven. After a business reversal back in Australia, we actually lost a quarter million dollars on a tour that David was promoting. And we knew that life was never going to be quite the same. We came here he was 42 and knew that this was a new start, basically.
We had no nest egg to fall back on because we’d lost everything back in Australia, coming here to start afresh. And then he lost his job. So really, we had nowhere to turn, but to sort of bunker down with each other. And then to pray. And it was really through prayer that we saw God take us step by step and lead us into some new ways. David did pick up a job a couple of months after, and then we lived pretty hand-to-mouth for the ensuing couple of years. We learned to work together in those early days we learned to do all the jobs that people don’t really love to do—rake leaves, mow lawns, babysit, clean houses. And it was really the kids working , particularly Rebecca and Daniel working, that helped put food on the table.
We saw God provide as well. We got given a car. We got help with paying some of the bills for our daughter to be born. We were given groceries by friends, people who knew us in the neighborhood. And so we just saw God really care for us. And then later from that, we ended up working together, or the kids end up working as Rebecca’s crew during her time as Rebecca St. James. And then from that the boys sort of emerged as her background vocalists. And then eventually, God gave them their own career. So it’s really following the gamut. Back in Australia, our normal life, then losing everything, dramatic life change. And then God’s slowly being faithful in giving us everything back.
Josh Olds: You co-founded a ministry for mothers called MUMlife. That’s what you’re doing now. What is your purpose in that ministry? And what led you to that?
Helen Smallbone: I’ve been a full-time mom, I call it active mothering, for 32 years. Between the time Rebecca was born to the time my youngest daughter graduated from high school. And so I did nothing else other than mother for those years. So I feel like my career is being a mum. And I know what being a mum sort of looks like. And so I just saw the opportunity—God actually opened the opportunities—for me to start mentoring younger mums. I was asked by some mums in a local church group if I would come in and mentor and I don’t do women’s groups. I’m not a real girly girl. I wouldn’t have done a ministry to women per se. But mums are my heart. Mums are what I know. Families. Kids. And so I thought, “You know what, this is probably a great place for me to serve in ...

For forty-five years, Joni Eareckson Tada’s memoir of the years after the diving accident that left her paraplegic has remained in print and read by millions. Reading the latest anniversary edition, I wondered if Joni’s thoughts on her injury had changed since they were first put into print. A half-century of perspective will certainly change someone. I also wanted to talk with her about disability advocacy and what churches can do to be inclusive, empowering, and welcoming. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have done just that, and to be able to share it all with you. Watch the video version for an exclusive peek at an original piece of art painted by Joni!

The Conversation | Joni Eareckson Tada
This interview transcript has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity. A full transcript of the interview is available here.
 Josh Olds: You speak very openly about the struggle that it was that, you’ve kind of gotten to a point where you talk about suffering and God’s glory, but those early days, those early days were really hard for you. And how important was it for you that people understood the realities of your struggle?
Joni Eareckson Tada: Well, let me correct something that you just said. It’s still hard. It is still very hard. In fact, the older I get, it gets harder. I deal with chronic pain. And so, I look back on that book, Josh, and I’m just so grateful that the insights I shared from the Word of God still apply. I still wake up in the morning, even after so many decades of paralysis. I still wake up in the morning, saying, “Jesus, I need you desperately. I cannot do quadriplegia today. I am so tired of the pain and the challenges, but I can do all things through you, Jesus, if you would but strengthen me.” Now that’s a principle that everybody can grasp.
And that’s why I felt it would be important too, you know, when I wrote the book Joni, with my co-author Joe Messer, I thought it would be very important to be as honest and visceral and gutsy and open and transparent as I possibly could be. Because not everybody’s a quadriplegic, and I knew that the average reader probably wouldn’t even have a disability, but handicaps come at us in all shapes and sizes. And so I just wanted to focus on the Word of God in that book, so that the reader dealing with whatever his challenge might be, would grasp those biblical anchors and just run with them. And that’s why I’m, I think it might still be, you know, it still might be a book that people want to read. Because those biblical insights, indeed, are timeless. Those anchors are applicable, even to me, the author, so many decades later, I’m still waking up in the morning needing Christ desperately. And shouldn’t we all be in that position? Right? Just needing Jesus?
Josh Olds: Obviously, you you’ve lived with this for decades. What…have you ever imagined or thought about how your life would be different if your injury had not happened?
Joni Eareckson Tada: I might be on my second divorce. I don’t know what I’d be doing. I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here, Josh, talking to you about biblical anchors and the promises of God and the hope in His Word. I really don’t think I would be. I mean, I broke my neck in 1967. That was the year, it was the summer I was heading off to college. I am shamed to admit this, but I was sleeping with my boyfriend in high school. I was living a life of sexual impurity and immorality, and I knew it was going to get worse, and in college wasn’t going to get better. And I remember praying a prayer and I think it was like April or May of 1967, I’d come home from a sordid date with my boyfriend, and I felt so guilty.

Attachment science is both revolutionary and simple. Basically, it states that humans were created for relationships, or, as attachment science founder John Bowlby called it “lasting psychological connectedness between humans.” Of course, this is what we find reflected in Scripture. Creation is good…until God looks at man and determines that his aloneness is “not good.” So, God creates woman. But does attachment go beyond that? What relationship exists between God and us? Using attachment science, Krispin Mayfield explores our attachment to God—specifically, he lists three insecure forms of attachment and one secure form of attachment. It was such a revolutionary book, I had to have him on the program to talk more about it.
The Conversation | Krispin Mayfield
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and content.
Josh Olds: I want to start—for those people who are like, “I don’t know what this title means and I don’t know that I want to spend the next 45 minutes of my life figuring it out”—can you give us your nutshell summary? What is this book about? Who is it for?
Krispin Mayfield: Yeah, basically, attachment science is the study of relationships. So it’s looking at what are the ways that we are trying to get relationship with God or trying to connect with God or do relationship with God? And what ways are there insecurity in that relationship? What are the, typical ways we can expect that we will deal with that insecurity through these different attachment styles? So basically, if you’re not feeling totally secure with God, you might feel really anxious about it. Or you might shut down your emotions, or you might beat yourself up and basically be like, you know, there’s something wrong with me. And if I can just continue to criticize and beat myself up, then maybe I’ll get a better connection with God. So that’s my best shot at summarizing it.
Josh Olds: Your experience with attachment science is as a therapist. You use this not necessarily to talk about clients’ relationship with God, but talking about marriage relationships, all sorts of human relationships. At what point were you like, “Oh, hey, this thing that I’m doing here also applies very much to the relationship between God and people.”
Krispin Mayfield: Right? Attachment science really start started out as a very scientific way of looking at what are proximity seeking behaviors, which is basically like, what are the ways that that primates try to get connection with their loved ones? And so, you know, they actually looked at monkeys first, but then also looking at infants and looked at what are the ways that babies who need their mothers try to get close to their mothers to get protection and get nurturance? You know, that sort of thing. And then we basically looked in as a field and realized, oh, this plays out in marriagesvwith adults? And so then recognizing there are these just patterns of behavior of like, “How do I get how do I get close to you?” And for some people, it’s, like, really clingy. For some people, it’s like, you know, I’m gonna kind of be standoffish, but that’s kind of how I know how to do relationship. And I started sitting in church services and looking around and kind of being like, “Oh, I can see these same sort of behavior patterns playing out with people. And, you know, if you were sort of like a scientist, just sitting in the back of a church or looking at a faith community and taking notes on what are the ways that people try to get close to God, what observations would you make?
The Book | Attached to God
Read our full review of Attached to God here.
Why does God feel so far away? The reason–and the solution–is in your attachment style.
We all experience moments when God’s love and presen...

From the first pages of Recovering Racists, I was transfixed by Idelette McVicker’s authenticity and vulnerability as she shared about the liberating nature of declaring oneself a recovering racist. Her book is mind-opening and paradigm-shifting for those desiring to truly do the work of reconciliation.
The Conversation | Idelette McVicker
This excerpt may be edited for conciseness and clarity. For the whole interview, see the audio player above or visit us wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Tell me about your journey in being a recovering racist.
Idelette McVicker: In some way, I was born into the story, right? Like, I write about that, but just to be born right into the story of apartheid in South Africa. I was born into the white side, literally the white side, of the hospital and my birth certificate was stamped with a racial declaration that was created by the apartheid government, which was a violence in itself. And so for me, this race consciousness was there. Right? Like, it wasn’t spoken about by white people, but it was there. So I can say it started in my birth. Or I can say it started when I was 16 when I, at that time books were starting to get unbanned in South Africa, and I remember walking into the library, and I’m like, “Banned books? Can they be so bad?”…And I remember I just kind of went for that turnstile…I started reading this book and it was describing a relationship with a white man and a black man in a way that I hadn’t seen.
And then there was a moment when I lived in Taiwan. I worked as a journalist in Taiwan. South Africa had gone through this political euphoria of its first democratic elections, like a vote in that first democratic elections. I remember it was like this euphoric day, and everything, like political freedom, calm at that time, right? And, and yet, three years later, I stood in Taiwan, and we’re celebrating this Freedom Day. That day is called Freedom Day now in South Africa. And we were celebrating that I was covering the story. And as I was thinking about our standing in that room, in a global context, and I heard my own accent, my Afrikaans accent, it was like, I am not the good person in the story.
And I just, I, I was just like, I have to deal with this, I have to figure out who I am in this world. Do I have a place to belong? Do I belong in the story of humanity? Can I create a new story? Or is there something else? And I didn’t know how to move forward. And there were no models for me really, to be honest with you, of how to move out of that shame. And so I just started walking, and I was in a, you know, like, an intimate relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit and just kind of like walking with God and like, helped me what does this mean? Like, how do I get out of the story? And so, my faith has, from that minute become an anti-racist faith. Because racism and race and my story and my faith were so deeply interconnected.
And so for me, there was no question I had to wrestle with the story of apartheid…but then this whole recovering racist piece, you know, that was Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, and I was sitting at the Festival of Faith and Writing, and she was speaking. And I remember just like, sitting there, I wanted all the tools. I wanted all the information, because I was so hungry, for more understanding and language of how we recover and how we write a different story. And, and she stood there, just so gracious, and she said one of her friends had said that the only thing my people can ever be are recovering racists. And I was like, “Did she just say that?” And it was like, “Did I hear that correctly?” And then I was like, “That’s it. That’s the language I’ve been looking for.” To own this and to acknowledge it, and not to run away from it, but to actually run towards it and say, “I acknowledge it. Now, what do we do?”
The Book | Recovering Racists

Racial issues have rightfully been at the forefront of Christian conversation for the past several years. Not that the racial is just now an issue but that, just now, the church in America is finally beginning to reckon with its history of racism and racial division. How do we overcome that division? Derwin Gray takes us back to the book of Acts and the ministry of Jesus for the answer.
The Conversation | Derwin Gray
This excerpt may be edited for conciseness and clarity. For the whole interview, see the audio player above or visit us wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: One of the things that really struck me about How to Heal Our Racial Divide was how biblically grounded it is. Not that other books that have been written on this topic haven’t been, but you really get to the heart of the matter when you point out that the main challenge of the early church was also navigating racial division.
Derwin Gray: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, you can’t even understand the New Testament if you miss that reality. And I want to thank you for saying that because I am a pastor and a theologian—so I believe the answer is biblical. I believe the answer is Gospel. And what I’m trying to do is get people to return to the Scripture and actually learn to live it out by faith. But when you look at the early church, for example, let’s start with Jesus. So when Jesus goes to Samaria, that’s a statement to break down racial division and create unity. When Jesus tells a story about the Good Samaritan, it’s the same thing. When Jesus feeds 5000 Jews on one side of the Sea of Galilee and 4000 Gentiles on the other side of the Sea of Galilee—one side was Jews, the other side was Gentiles—that’s a portrait into the future of Abraham’s banquet.
And then when you look at the apostle Paul, every one of his letters was written to show how the gospel of Jesus Christ breaks down ethnic walls of sin and division to create the new people of God. I think that, deliberately, Satan has blinded the church’s eyes to that reality. And so it’s almost like we’ve created a gospel that says, “Yeah, God can forgive your sins. But you can dislike your brothers and sisters.” No. First John 4:20 says, “How can you say you love God whom you’ve never seen and say you love your brother and sister who you’ve seen.” To love God means to love our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. What I wanted people to see is that the Gospel—the Bible—is the answer. When people read this book, How to Heal Our Racial Divide, they will not see scripture the same and they will be the better for it.
Josh Olds: One of the things I want you to just take me through a little more in depth is Jesus, I’m thinking specifically of John chapter four and the interaction with the Samaritan woman. This is huge. Because Jesus is a Jewish rabbi, and even to go through some area was itself a major flaunting of the religious rules of the time. So there’s, there’s this division, and Jesus is working to bring that together. We might look at that and we say, well, yeah, that was 2000 years in the past. Context was different; culture was different. How is that relevant to the situations that we find ourselves in today?
Derwin Gray: Yeah, you know, the one thing that human beings have been able to do very well is to divide based on color, based on culture. We have been experts at doing that. And so the same principles that Jesus used to break down the barrier between Jews and Samaritans, he can do so today. And even if we just take a look around the world like…apartheid in South Africa was based on race. When we think about Bosnia and Croatia, that’s an ethnic feud. When we think about Jim Crow, and slavery in America, that’s on ethnicity. So this isn’t a problem that is simply an American problem. This is a human problem.

Marriage books. Ever since the LaHaye’s The Act of Marriage, Christian marriage books have been come and gone and almost all of them have been from a conservative, complementarian, how-to perspective. In Choosing Us, Brian and Gail Song Bantum reframe the conversation by simply telling their story. A few weeks ago, Brian joined me on the podcast to talk a little more about that story.
The Conversation | Brian Bantum
This interview excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Listen to the full interview in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Now, I want to start off, this is a marriage book, but it’s not what you might think of when you think of a marriage book. What sets this apart from other books that might be considered in that genre?
Dr. Brian Bantum: Yeah, well, the book really began when Gail—she prays and fasts the beginning of every year, and at the end of this praying and fasting she woke up one day and said, “We need to write a book together.” And, I’ve written books before, and Gail has some books that she wants to wants to write. So we’ve kind of been in ministry together tangentially. We haven’t always served in the same church, but we’ve always had a sense of call together. And that’s always been part of our journey. When we started thinking a little bit about the book that we would write together, initially, it was maybe leadership, or maybe race, or kind of intercultural realities. But the more we started really thinking about it, we realized that there were so many couples, young couples especially, in our lives who were both trying to help each other flourish but didn’t know what that looked like. And inevitably, the woman was kind of having to slow down a little bit. And then a lot of couples that we taught, were dealing with realities of race in the midst of all of the kind of the protests and violence in the United States. And that was having an effect on their relationship.
We realized that there isn’t, there actually isn’t a book out there, that talks about marriage apart from some of those kind of old complementarian kind of viewpoints, where there are very specific roles for the man and very specific roles for the woman, books that actually presume that marriage is between a man and a woman and doesn’t imagine other possibilities of what marriage and covenant life could look like. And we started to realize, you know, this is actually a lot of our story, both our own stories, kind of thinking about what racial life means, as well as trying to think a little bit about what the different ways of imagining how gender shapes our relationship, and how it shapes our imagination going forward. So the idea was let’s offer our story, not necessarily as a kind of, oh, if you do these five things, you’ll have a successful marriage. More just as a sharing of our story. And we hope that people find a different way to imagine what their lives could look like along the way.
Josh Olds: I’ve met so many people over the course of the past few years that have sort of gone down this path of moving away from their more conservative evangelical upbringing to a more progressive faith. They’re deconstructing, but their spouse hasn’t. So they find themselves…they’re the one who moved…and that creates a conflict in the household because those areas can be very contentious. And it manifests itself politically as much as it does theologically. Do you have any advice for people who are in that situation? On how to sort of navigate those conflicts?
Brian Bantum: Yeah, I guess there’s probably maybe two two levels of conflict. So one is the ideological and theological. We have very different beliefs about who God is or about what the Bible is or how to read it. I think to some extent, you could say, you know, “I’ll let God speak through the way that you read,

Singer, songwriter, Bible teacher, television host, children’s author…Sheila Walsh has done it all. And the latest thing she’s done is a beautiful children’s book meant to teach kids about the comforting nature of God’s presence. Listen in to a thoughtful conversation about the book, Is God Still Awake?, and learn about Sheila’s motivation and inspiration for it.
The Conversation | Sheila Walsh
This transcript excerpt has been lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Listen to the full podcast episode at the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Before we start, you’ve had such an eclectic career. You’ve done so many things. I think people might know you or know your name from one area or another, but maybe not know in full scope everything you’ve done. So can you give us a little background on your life and your ministry?
Sheila Walsh: Sure, yeah, that’s really true. I mean, I’ll often meet someone who says, oh, gosh, I didn’t know you wrote books. I know you from your music. I grew up in Scotland, as you can probably tell by my accent and I went off to seminary in London when I was 19. And after I graduated from that, I worked with Youth for Christ in Europe for a year. And then in the UK for a year I also hosted a show on BBC Television called the Rock Gospel Show. I did that for five years. And then I was doing a concert in London somewhere. It wasn’t a huge event but someone called Billy Ray Hearn, who used to be head of Sparrow Records at that point was there. He invited me to come to America and open for one of his artists…I kind of fell in love with America and felt as if God was really calling me to relocate here. Initially, I came as a contemporary Christian artist and I would sing at Billy Graham events.
While I was actually on a show called Good Morning, Canada, because the Crusade was in Canada, someone from the 700 Club saw me and said to Pat Robertson, “I know you’re looking for a new cohost, what do you think of this girl?” So I was invited to come in for five days to Virginia Beach and cohost with Pat. And the idea of being on a contemporary Christian program talking about faith was just foreign to me. But I really felt God say, “No, this is where I want you to be.” And so for five years, I did that. Then I went back to seminary, and then for 20 years, I worked with Women of Faith where we did these large women’s events, maybe thirty a year in arenas. And now I work with James and Betty Robison on a show called Life Today, which I absolutely love. So, most of my days, I’m a couple days a week in the TV studio, I go up most weekends and speak at women’s conferences. And in between that I hang with my husband and our dogs.
Josh Olds: Yes. And somewhere you find time to write. What was your journey into writing as part of your ministry?
Sheila Walsh: I honestly never saw it, Josh, as something that would be published. I mean, I wrote to kind of help process my own life. Some people write because they’re experts in a particular area. I never write that way. I write because of what I’m questioning, of what I want to understand at a deeper level. I wrote a book two years ago called Praying Women because I felt like that was the one area I struggled with most. I wrote a book called It’s Okay Not to be Okay because I spent the first 35 years of my life trying to be perfect until I realized that wasn’t actually what Christ was asking.
At the moment, I have a Bible study going on my Facebook Live every Sunday night.

It seems like news media everywhere are talking about “The Great Resignation.” In the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns, workers realized that they didn’t want to go back to “normal.” Normal wasn’t working. And business leaders committed to that normal perspective have been floundering. Into all that comes Tom Ziglar. Tom is the CEO of Ziglar Corp. and son of one of the original leadership gurus, Zig Ziglar. His latest book is 10 Leadership Virtues for Disruptive Times and is designed to help leaders change their outlook toward delivering employees a better quality of life. Interesting in hearing more about the book—and his take on “The Great Resignation”—I knew I had to have him on the podcast.
The Conversation | Tom Ziglar
This interview excerpt is lightly edited for clarity and conciseness. Listen to the full interview in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Normally, I like to begin by asking authors about their inspiration and why they wrote the book they did, but yours seems pretty obvious. We’re two years into the COVID-19 pandemic and it seems like many work environments are going back to normal. What makes this book relevant now?
Tom Ziglar: My first book was Choose to Win and I did it as part of a two book deal with Thomas Nelson. When we agreed, I said, “I don’t know what the second book is.” And they said “Don’t worry about it, you’ll have a year.” And so the end of 2019, I started writing that book, and then 2020—everything changed. Like everybody, I got really fascinated with all the business changes that were going on and started studying kind of the dominoes that fell when we went home from work. And there were lockdowns and remote and hybrid work—all these trends started happening. So I began to write the book really around this focus in April or May of 2020.
One of the components of the book is that not only are we in disruptive times, but it’s only going to increase in frequency and intensity. And looking at the world stage: the convergence of technology, the supply chain, and the great resignation. It just keeps going on and on. And the fact of the matter is, is that the world is just rapidly going through these disruptions. I mean, the book would have been great six months ago or a year ago. But I think it’ll be even more powerful and more appropriate six months or a year from now, just because the frequency and intensity of change is going up. And the way people are deciding on where they work and how they work and the way leadership needs to adapt in order to meet those needs. That’s a big deal. And it’s going to take a generation to figure this out.
Josh Olds: I know that, you know, right when everything shut down, you know, almost immediately within months, there were dozens of books about how to live in the era of Coronavirus and from business standpoint, spiritual standpoint, and so on. It was just sort of like everyone’s trying to figure out how to navigate this. This is something that is born out of COVID, but it’s meant for something much larger than that. We are not going back to normal in what the old normal was in the business world. What are some good things that you’ve seen come out of those changes that we’ve had to make?
Tom Ziglar: Yeah, well, here’s the first one and, and I’ll just—I’m showing you my fist if you’re listening to this, just imagine I’m making a fist—this is prior to 2020. The fist represents work, it was your career, it’s what you did. It’s where your identity was. And then everything kind of revolved around that you know: your physical health, your mental health, your relationships, your family, even faith, a lot of times. Work took center, that was the priority, and everything else revolved around that. When the pandemic happens,

I picked up God Gets Everything God Wants because I didn’t think I agreed with the title’s assumption, but by the end of the book I found myself nodding along with Katie Hays and murmuring my agreement. I quoted the book in a church leader’s group and, if the people in those groups are trustworthy, got Katie a few sales out of it. The quote in question…well…Katie actually repeats it in the podcast so see if you can figure it out. I knew I had to talk with her and she was kind enough to schedule a time with me. So I present to you know, the Rev. Dr. Katie Hays and God Gets Everything God Wants.
The Conversation | Rev. Dr. Katie Hays
This excerpt has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity. Listen to the full interview on the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Tell me about you, your church, and your book.
Katie Hays: You bet. So I’m a church planter. Galileo Church, my church on the outskirts of Fort Worth, Texas, is just about eight years old. And our main reason for being is to seek and shelter spiritual refugees. Spiritual refugees are people who have felt they’ve experienced the kind of collapse of their Christian faith. I’m here in the Bible Belt: everybody here has met Jesus at some point or another. And they felt the collapse of that for all kinds of reasons. And they’re working through that sort of process of deconstruction and maybe kind of concussed sitting in the rubble of what used to be their faith and sort of wondering what to do next. And you can make an amazing community of Beloveds out of folks exactly like that.
Folks, who for a little while, need to talk about what they don’t believe anymore. They’ve worked so hard to get to the place where they can with some clarity say, Yeah, you know, some of these things I was given as a child I inherited from my parents or the church of my youth. I don’t believe that stuff anymore. And we’ve worked pretty hard to get to a place of honesty about that. The next step, then, for those of us who have been through that experience, is to try to say in the positive, okay, then what do we believe? I say now about my own Christian faith, that I believe a lot less than I used to—meaning a lot fewer things—but that the things I believe, I believe real hard, like there is just a couple, and they’re really deep in me. And I have sort of settled with those things. And from there, our church together is doing this sort of theological rehabilitation to rebuild something that’s just much more inclusive and beautiful and generous to all of us. And this book is a distillation of that.
Josh Olds: I like the point that you make about being spiritual refugees, because there are so many people that are going through this. I even I know even for myself as a pastor, as someone who, right around COVID hit, stepped out a formal ministry. And I started going, what, “What do I want out of church?” Just because there had been a way that I had done church for so long. And I think for a lot of people that was true, they may have just felt like, well, this is what I’ve done on Sundays for my entire life. And then when they were pushed out of that pattern, even if we just moved online, they started to be rethinking of why, why am I here? You know, what am I doing? What do I want from this experience? I’m not really getting it, or even I’m not missing it. You know, I had friends who, who just like, you know, faithful, committed Christians and continue to be but just found out they did not miss the church experience they had been a part of.
Katie Hays: Josh, you’re not supposed to say that out loud! Don’t you know that we clergy have a code where we don’t say that out loud? *laughs* No, it’s absolutely true. People found that they weren’t missing it. And why? Why weren’t they? Well,

The murder of George Floyd seemed like a watershed moment. More people than ever before were protesting, calling for justice, and ready to dismantle unjust systems. With that came an influx of a lot of people who maybe had good intentions but didn’t really know what to do it. To counteract that, Jemar Tisby wrote How to Fight Racism, a practical handbook that utilizes his ARC (Awareness, Relationships, Commitment) model to guide readers toward building a better world. A year later, Tisby has returned with How to Fight Racism: Young Reader’s Edition. Aimed at kids ages 8-12, Tisby takes the same model and commonsense practicality and adapts it for kids just becoming aware of and seeking to counteract injustice. I had that chance to talk to Jemar about the book and it was a wonderful and enlightening conversation.
The Conversation | How to Fight Racism
This interview excerpt may be lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Listen to the full podcast interview at the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.
Josh Olds: Probably the number one objection that I hear whenever we try to educate children on racism, like you’re doing here, is that they’re too young for these kinds of conversations. Obviously, you don’t believe that, but how do you how do you handle that sort of objection to even begin to get the conversation going?
Jemar Tisby: I think we’ve got to realize as adults that kids are aware of a lot more than we think they are. And they’re often aware—a lot more aware—of the topics we hoped they weren’t aware of. So it could be anything from sex to racism: they know a lot more than we think they do.
There’s a famous experiment called the Doll Test where scientists showed five-year-olds white dolls and black dolls, and asked them, which was prettier, which was uglier, or which was smarter, or, you know, all of this. And then—even at that age—kids, both black and white, exhibited preferences for or more favorable attitudes towards the white dolls and had more negative associations with the black dolls. And these are kindergarteners, first graders—so it’s already happening. Our kids are already being socialized to think in racial terms.
The other thing is, when kids ask questions, that’s the perfect time to talk about it. And kids can ask questions about skin color, and about why things are the way they are at a very early age. And it’s best to respond to those questions as best you can have rather than sort of ignoring them or shuffling them off to the side because it’s “inappropriate.” So our young people are a lot more prepared, or a lot more curious, or a lot more exposed than we realize they are. They probably heard of something like Black Lives Matter. They’ve understood the necessity of protests, as high schoolers are marching in the streets to protect themselves and their classmates from shooting sprees inside their own schools. They’re mad about te earth burning up and climate change and us adults just leaving them holding the smoldering remains of what was once a beautiful earth. So they’re already sort of tuned in to these broader issues of social justice and racism is a part of that.
Josh Olds: It seems like they are able, they’re willing; they need to learn, they need to be focused. It’s like any issue in life. But I think that if we can really train this generation and give them practical things to do, beyond just social media activism—actual practical things—they can make a difference, and that that’s where your book comes in.
Jemar Tisby: Absolutely. And I just want to make another point real quickly…I do think it’s important that as adults, we don’t buy into this idea that racism is really generational,...