Spiritual Misfits Podcast

What if the way many of us were raised in faith (be good, obey, memorise, stay on God’s good side) was setting us up to fall apart later? Pastor, researcher and author Meredith Anne Miller (Woven: Nurturing a Faith Your Kid Doesn’t Have to Heal From) joins Will and Caro to talk about raising kids in faith from a place of trust rather than fear.Meredith started out on the Sticky Faith research at the Fuller Youth Institute, following “really good” Christian kids into adulthood and watching their faith crack under the weight of performing. She now pastors a small, delightfully alternative dinner church in Southern California, and parents two kids who refuse to fit any formula.We talk about:Swapping an obedience-training paradigm for a trust-based oneWhat to do when your kids don’t want to be prayed for at bedtimePassing on faith when your own is hanging by a threadThe “skip and save” approach to hard Bible stories, and a great question for kids: if it seems bad to us, why might it have seemed good to them?Why it’s never too late to start talking about faith with your teenagersFamily warmth as the “silent curriculum” that matters mostTalking to kids about the cross without fear, guilt or goreMeredith's website: https://www.meredithannemiller.com/Meredith's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meredithannemillerWant to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Caro and Will had been talking about wanting more younger voices on the pod. That same week, Emelia Haskey filled out the Spiritual Misfits listener survey and offered to come on.Emelia is 25. She grew up Catholic in Adelaide, went to a high school run by Dominican nuns, and walked away from the institution as a teenager. Then, at the end of a journalism degree, while organising with left-wing groups on campus, she came across liberation theology, reread the gospels, and had her heart strangely warmed by the Beatitudes. Five years on, she’s a candidate for ministry in the Uniting Church and works with both teenagers and young adults.So what do young people actually want from church? Emelia gives us her perspective on this question and others in this wide-ranging conversation about Gen Z spirituality, different expressions of church, and the cultural moment we find ourselves in. Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Poet and host of Poetry Unbound  Pádraig Ó Tuama joins Caro for a conversation we're sharing on the same day his new collection, Love Between Men, is released.Pádraig and Caro talk about being a misfit across Catholic, charismatic and ecumenical Christianity, and about why belonging isn’t always a good thing. They discuss reading the Bible as art and argument rather than rulebook, and why the word “nothing” has become a loving word for God in Pádraig’s writing. Pádraig reflects on the exorcisms and reparative therapy he went through in his twenties, and on the poems he later wrote in response. He also talks about learning to make friends with anger, and about how to write, or simply notice, when the world and your own life both feel like a polycrisis.Along the way he reads poems, including “F*cked Up Families of the Bible,” “The Exorcist,” and “Our Lady of the Garden.”Content note: this episode includes discussion of conversion therapy and exorcism, and contains strong language.Connect with Pádraig's work here:https://www.padraigotuama.com/Get Pádraig's new book 'Love Between Men' here:https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/love-between-men-by-padraig-o-tuama/Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

How do you know when it’s time to leave a community you love but no longer believe in? And what happens when your body knows before your mind does?Steve Schallert grew up the child of missionaries in a quiet, Quaker-ish corner of Germany, found Jesus through the radical peace activist Daniel Berrigan at 19, and then spent a decade inside YWAM, an organisation he says he never really agreed with. In this honest and generous conversation, Steve shares why he never “deconstructed,” what it cost him to finally walk away, and how he’s learning that the healing of the world and the healing of ourselves are the same work.Mentioned in this episode: Daniel Berrigan, the Catholic Worker movement, the Plowshares movement, Ched Myers, Dom Hélder Câmara, Community Peacemaker Teams (formerly Christian Peacemaker Teams), Parker Palmer, St. Stephen’s University, and Steve’s podcast, Good on Wood.Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

What does a 2,000-year-old book about a talking statue have to say about ChatGPT? And can AI form us, or only perform for us?Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the subject of his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and presented it with Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, at his side. What do we make of this unique moment? In this episode, Will is joined by biblical scholar Robyn Whitaker and professor of Learning Informatics Simon Buckingham Shum to dig into what this moment is revealing about the machines and us. GuestsRev. Assoc. Prof. Robyn Whitaker is Associate Professor of New Testament at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, and Director of the Wesley Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Policy. She is an ordained Uniting Church minister and author of Even the Devil Quotes Scripture.https://victas.uca.org.au/faith-in-the-public-square/Prof. Simon Buckingham Shum is Professor of Learning Informatics and Director of the Connected Intelligence Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. His work sits where human-computer interaction, learning and AI meet. He is part of Meeting Ground (the community behind Spiritual Misfits).https://simon.buckinghamshum.net/Mentioned in this episodePope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.htmlYuval Levin, “Idols of the Valley,” The New Atlantis: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/idols-of-the-valleyVanessa Andreotti and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, Burnout from Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI (free): https://burnoutfromhumans.netWalter Brueggemann, The Prophetic ImaginationWant to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

In the latest episode of our Future Church Series, Will and Caro listen to two short excerpts from Rev Dr Sally Douglas’s keynote: one on silence and prayer as listening, and one on the names we use for God.Sally argues that much of what passes for prayer is us talking at God, and that our busyness can be a quiet way of keeping God at a distance. She also makes a bold claim: addressing God only as male is a form of idolatry. And the tradition gives us plenty of other alternative ways of addressing God. You can listen to Sally's full keynote from Future Church Conference here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RnZX5PQefI&list=PLDqN433ivCxY&index=3Connect more with Sally and buy her books here: https://www.sallydouglas.netWant to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Will, Caro, Mitch and Becca unpack the purity culture they grew up in: Focus on the Family books, True Love Waits banquets, journals of letters to a future spouse, and the very real fear of dying in your sleep after masturbating.But this isn't just a look back. They explore what changed their minds, what (if anything) was worth keeping, and what might a better sexual ethic look like now? Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Wes Crawford is a church historian and pastor of twenty years, currently vice provost and associate professor of church history at Abilene Christian University.His new book One Nation Over God names what sociologists call "civil religion" — the way a nation, in the absence of a shared faith, starts borrowing the shape of one: sacred texts, rituals, symbols, calendar days, revered people — and traces how that borrowing, in American life, has tangled love of country with love of God to the point of idolatry.We also talk about what this looks like translated into an Australian context — Southern Cross tattoos, January 26, and Pauline Hanson's recent talk of a "Judeo-Christian monoculture" — and ask what it actually means to love a country enough to critique it.Learn more and order the book here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802885470/one-nation-over-god/Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Will Small is joined by Steff Fenton, Kelly Woods and Jono Ingram to discuss the complex nature of hope, the work of cultivating an alternative imagination and a vision of how it might look in community. With beautiful opening words from Alisha Fung and Paul Banks, and a closing benediction from Matt Cutler this was a rich and memorable evening that may just restore a little hope where it's needed.Presented in partnership with Simba Sessions, Sonderverse, Beyondering Podcast and Northcote Uniting Church. Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com

Chelsea Kim Long grew up inside a world that had an answer for everything — until her body didn't cooperate with the script. A traumatic birth, postpartum depression, infertility, and eventually an impossible decision during a quadruplet pregnancy each cracked open a theology that had no room for what she was actually experiencing. In her new book Faithfully Dissident Daughters: Reclaiming Christian Womanhood Beyond Patriarchy, and in this conversation, she traces how patriarchy in the church has limited our understandings, and points towards a more expansive approach to faith and community.Connect with Chelsea's work here: https://www.chelseakimlong.com/Want to reach out and let us know your thoughts or suggestions for the show? Send us a message here; we’d love to hear from you.The Spiritual Misfits Survival Guide (FREE): https://www.spiritualmisfits.com.au/survivalguideSign up to our mailing list:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/Join our online Facebook community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/spiritualmisfitspodcastSupport the pod:https://spiritualmisfits.com.au/support-us/View all episodes at: https://spiritualmisfits.buzzsprout.com