Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   Who hasn’t felt like giving up when the going got, not only tough, but tough for a really long time. We love the idea of what perseverance can ultimately lead to; we would often rather arrive at what we want without having to persevere. Because to be sure: perseverance is not easy. But as...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   Finally, we’re here. We’ve reached the topic that this series is about. It’s just that, now that we’ve arrived, we don’t want to be here. Nobody wants to suffer. We want less of it, or none of it at all, not just some tired old story of how to grin and bear it.   The good news is that,...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   Who would ever imagine that glory and suffering would have anything to do with each other? As it turns out, a great deal. So much so, in fact, that when we consider a particular aspect of God’s glory (one that we rarely do), we see how, when we take it seriously, it utterly transforms and...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   For Jesus followers, as we approach the topic of suffering, we can’t bypass the body. Fortunately, neither does Paul in Romans 5, or what we know from neuroscience. For indeed, the more we pay attention to how the body works, the more the texts of scripture make sense in our world, a world...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   Although the bible doesn’t begin with violence, it gets there pretty quickly, beginning with a snake, then a brother killing his brother, and on and on it goes. And as it turns out, as much as we are at war in so many ways with so many others, we are more at war with God than anyone, and...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   If you pick up a book on suffering, you might hope it will tell you how you can learn to suffer less, or even not at all. That’s not what we’re doing here. Instead, we will discover that before we even get to suffering, we must, as Christians, begin long before that, just as Paul does in...

Welcome to Being Known Podcast. This season we are discussing Curt's latest book, The Deepest Place as we carefully cover each chapter to deepen your understanding of suffering and the formation of hope.   To be human is to suffer. To be transformed does not deliver us from it. In fact, a great deal of what we do in life is dedicated to avoiding so much of the suffering that inhabits our stories. I only want to read a book that tells me how I can suffer less, or even not at all. But that’s...

There’s nothing quite like an encounter with beauty to remind us that we are temporal—and, temporary—creatures. Who hasn’t wanted the gorgeous sunset to just go on and on and on? Who has listened to Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, and not desired it to go on indefinitely?   Beauty is like that. It transports us into states of timelessness that remind us that we were made, not for this world—but for the world that is coming.   Join us for the last episode of this season that will remind us of...

Beauty is not just something that sits there and waits for our reaction. It is something that, should we allow ourselves to be open to it, actively draws our attention not only to it, but draws us to draw others’ attention to it as well. In this way, beauty’s purpose serves to engage us with each other—so that we can create and curate even more beauty.   Join us as we discover how beauty reveals the inescapable reality that we were made for connection, and that beauty is one of God’s most...

So much of what shapes our perceived distress or joy in life is related to how we transition from one state of mind to another. Our willingness to place ourselves in the path of oncoming beauty does many things, not least slowing our pace in life, such that we become much more aware of when and how we are making a transition from one to another state of mind.   This slowing of our pace makes it possible for us to be aware of so much more that is going on in that very transition—and respond to...

During Curt and Pepper’s recent trip to El Salvador, they each found themselves surprised by beauty in various ways. Surprise can lead to any number of emotional reactions, depending on what, exactly, it is that surprises us. When it is beauty that is doing the surprising, we are opened to joy, goodness and even greater beauty than we would expect out of life.   Join Pepper and Curt as they explore surprising stories of beauty, and along the way introduce you to Shaun Groves, a pastor and...

Like no other creatures, humans are storytellers. Moreover, our stories all have a beginning, a middle and an end. And the way we tell stories has to do with the end in mind.   So, think of it: the stories we tell about our lives—not least the parts that we hate the most—will be governed by where the story is ultimately going. Despite the carnage that we see all around us, the God of the bible is intent upon telling a story of beauty. He does not intend to have us waiting until the very end...

Pepper and Curt had the privilege of spending five days in El Salvador as part of a Compassion International team of visitors. Join us as we share about the extraordinarily durable beauty that is emerging in some of the hardest stories we could imagine—and how all of this is pointing to the emerging kingdom of God.   . . . . Episode Links and References Artistic Offering discussed today: Gustav Holst; "Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity" Artistic Offering for next week: Dave Wilcox: "How Did You...

It is easy to be amazed, even astonished in the presence of beauty. But it is just as easy to forget it, given how easily distracted we are by so many things. If it is true that what we pay attention to, we remember; and what we remember becomes our anticipated future, then we don’t just recall beauty for the sake of itself, we do so in order to shape the futures of our lives that we anticipate. And this is as much true for the parts of our stories that are traumatized as those for which we...

Once we sense beauty, we begin to tell a story about it. We make sense of it. We pay attention to it. We sometimes analyze it. But beauty often reveals things about us. In sensing things, we become aware of feelings and memories that before we were unaware of. In this way, we are enabled to tell our stories more truly. And all of this employs the horizontal domain of integration—the relationship between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Listen in as Curt and Pepper explore how the...

First, we sense. And then we make sense of what we sense. Beauty is not first something we think about. It is first something we behold with our senses. And our senses necessarily involve our bodies. For indeed, even when we imagine beauty in our mind, we use our brains to do so. This follows the sequence of creation in Genesis 2 when God first formed a body, and then breathed life into it.   Join Pepper and Curt as they explore the role of the body in encountering beauty, and how paying...

In the path of oncoming beauty. Given that we are wired to pay attention to danger for the sake of protection, purposefully attuning to beauty can at times feel risky. But when we make it our intended purpose to create space for beauty, we find ourselves seeing any number of things that we didn’t before. Some of those things include our wounds that we have covered for longer than we know. But that only gives us the chance to imagine the emergence of beauty from parts of our lives that...

In the path of oncoming beauty. Sure, we have talked about this notion over many seasons of The Being Known Podcast. But of what practical value is it? How does it speak to our longings, our grief or the renewal of our relationships, communities and institutions? Is it merely an intellectual exercise, divorced from making a difference in my real life? Join Pepper and Curt as they answer with a resounding, “No!” Instead, journey with them into the deeper recesses of what it means, exactly, to...

Thank you for joining us this season to learn about confessional communities. In this final season episode, Curt, Pepper and Amy answer listener questions to draw you closer to finding and creating your own community.   . . . . Episode Links and References The Center for Being Known New Story Behavioral Health Connections Conference 2023 - Register today for this incredible Oct. 27 event on the theme of Emergence. PLUS, access to the Being Known Podcast LIVE on Thursday, Oct. 26 The Deepest...

Welcome to season 7 of Being Known Podcast were we are continually looking at what it means to be truly known. This season we are exploring confessional communities.   How do we end anything well—and especially those experiences that have become so significant in our growth? Moreover, how do we say goodbye well in a culture that gives us very few resources in knowing how to do that? Pepper and Curt explore how bringing a confessional community to close—either for an individual who is leaving,...

Welcome to season 7 of Being Known Podcast were we are continually looking at what it means to be truly known. This season we are exploring confessional communities.   This week we are continuing the conversation we started last week to "love doing the work"   Over the course of time that a confessional community gathers, many things will be learned, including the process of growing in your awareness of what the process is actually doing to provide the opportunity for growth that you are...

Welcome to season 7 of Being Known Podcast were we are continually looking at what it means to be truly known. This season we are exploring confessional communities.   Over the course of time that a confessional community gathers, many things will be learned, including the process of growing in your awareness of what the process is actually doing to provide the opportunity for growth that you are experiencing.  Pepper and Curt talk about that process of what happens in a confessional...

Welcome to season 7 of Being Known Podcast were we are continually looking at what it means to be truly known. This season we are exploring confessional communities.   This week, Pepper and Curt walk you through the early stages of starting a confessional community, the questions that might come up, and what is necessary to get yourself ready to be part of one. How does a Confessional Community get started? What are the fundamental requirements, and am I ready to dive in? Who are the people...

Welcome to season 7 of Being Known Podcast were we are continually looking at what it means to be truly known. This season we are exploring confessional communities.   There are multiple forces in play that are part of what forms us. That is no different in the confessional community. What are the realities that we encounter in confessional communities that set them apart from other relational and social encounters—and, as a result, then set us apart to be formed into the image of...