Sara Billups is a Seattle-based writer whose book Orphaned Believers is out January 24. "In the wake of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, many young evangelicals found themselves untethered, disillusioned, and—ultimately—orphaned as they grappled with the legalistic, politically co-opted churches of their youth and embarked on a search for a more loving, more biblical expression of the faith and discipleship taught by Jesus," she writes. You can order the book here:...

I talked last week with Yuval Levin about the House Speaker fight and what lessons we might draw from it. This week I've got a different angle on the problems in Congress, and how they might be fixed. House Republicans who blocked Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to the speakership repeated a mantra during the four-day leadership fight that ended after several rounds of dealmaking: Congress is “broken,” they said. It can sound like a talking point, one that’s been recycled year after year to bash...

Back in the summer of 2017 when I started this podcast, my first guest was Yuval Levin. And over the years, Yuval has been one of my most consistent conversation partners, in informal lunches and on this podcast. Levin is director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). This is his fifth time on this show now. Each time has been a really rich and deep conversation, and this time is no different. I found myself wondering what Yuval would...

Tim Schultz is president of the First Amendment Partnership, a group whose core mission is to advocate for religious freedom for all faiths and rights of conscience. Schultz and others say this bill gives something to both gay rights groups and to religious conservatives. It's a compromise, a tradeoff. On the left, there are some activists who say it doesn't do enough, but by and large they say they want it to pass anyway. On the right, there are a lot of prominent religious conservatives...

Paul D. Miller is currently a professor of global politics and security at Georgetown University, and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He worked at the National Security Council under Presidents Bush and Obama, and was a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army prior to that. Miller's book is "The Religion of American Greatness: What's Wrong with Christian Nationalism." There are all kinds of books out there on Christian nationalism. But what I like about Paul is that he's...

Journalist Bonnie Kristian joins to discuss her new book, "Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community." "We've spent forty years dramatically increasing how much information the average person encounters daily, and we've made no effort to equip ourselves to handle that shift," Bonnie writes.

James K.A. Smith discusses his new book, "How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now," which released September 20, 2022, from Brazos Press. We discuss how many Christians do not understand their times, and cannot live out their faith with integrity and faithfulness as a result, because they do not know where they are in the broad scope of history. And I talk with James about how my own faith upbringing left me searching for connections to the...

The topic of Christian nationalism has been much in the news recently. Republican politicians like Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia both have claimed the term as their own, and Boebert in particular has loudly proclaimed that she does not believe in the separation of church and state. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk,” she said. “The church is supposed to direct the government; the government is not supposed to direct the church.” Perhaps...

Christine Emba's book, "Rethinking Sex: A Provocation," is written for younger generations whose experience of sex, she argues, has been disappointing. She revisits basic questions of what sex is for, and argues that casual sex has been a bad deal for younger people because it has been devalued and minimized. Chrisrine comes from a conservative background where sex was, she says, overvalued. She's trying to find a middle ground. Christine told me she wrote the book to explore "what was ailing...

Eboo Patel has spent decades thinking about interfaith work and buildnig an institution devoted to promoting it. In this conversation, we talk about his work building Interfaith America, his new book "We Need to Build," and how America can strengthen democracy by making faith more welcome in public life, not less so, by embracing its diversity of faiths as co-contributors to the common good. Here's the piece I mention by John Inazu: "Interfaith Doesn't Mean Compromise" Support this show...

Justin Giboney is co-founder of The And Campaign, an Atlanta-based advocacy and political training organization launched in 2015, with artist Sho Baraka and Rev. Angel Maldonado. Giboney has conservative views on abortion, but also is critical of the way Republicans have often focused only on making sure women give birth, without much regard for what government can do to help avoid unwanted pregnancies in the first place and to alleviate poverty and improve women's healthcare and resources...

David French, my guest today, is senior editor at The Dispatch, contributing writer at The Atlantic, co-host of the "Good Faith" podcast with Curtis Chang. He is author of several books, most recently, "Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation." David has a long career as a lawyer who has fought for religious liberty of all faiths, but especially conservatives. He is super conservative himself, as you will hear in this conversation when he talks about his view...

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a professor of history and gender studies at Calvin University — a private evangelical college. Her book, "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation," has caused a huge stir. The argument in Du Mez's book is that the attempt to infuse Christianity with more muscle, to make Christian men in particular more aggressive, has gone badly astray. Du Mez documents the roots of this muscular Christianity rising out of a response to...

  Very few people are happy with the way technology has come to dominate our lives, argues author Andy Crouch, and he thinks it will take a while for humans to reclaim autonomy from machines.   “I rarely meet anyone who thinks, ‘Oh, it's really working quite well,’” Crouch, the author of a new book, said in an interview. “I just don't meet anyone who thinks we're in great shape and should just keep kind of on the path we're on.”   Crouch’s book, “The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming...

Richard L. Hasen is one of the nation's foremost experts on election law. He teaches law and political science at the University of California-Irvine. He is co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center. He runs the Election Law Blog. And he has written numerous previous books, including The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown, in 2012, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court and the Distortion of American Elections in 2016, and Election...

Gillian Laub has published books of stunning photographs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and about racism in the deep South. She also produced a documentary about the killing of a young black man by an older white man in rural Georgia. For Laub's latest project, however, she got very personal. “Family Matters” is a story -- told through photos and words -- of how Laub's family nearly broke apart during the Trump presidency. But it's also a raw self-portrait. “Those years brought out...

My guest today is Katherine Gehl. She is part of the movement to protect and strengthen democracy by restructuring our election rules. Gehl is a former CEO of the food company her father started, which she sold in 2015 to focus on political reform. She founded the Institute for Political Innovation and co-wrote a book in 2020 with business consultant and author Michael Porter, “The Politics Industry,” in which they argue that political innovation is crucial to reversing the doom loop that...

2021 was a year of whiplash, of head fakes. We thought it would be a return to normal, to the way we lived before the pandemic and before our politics became completely insane. But over the second half of this past year, i think we've discovered that in many ways 2020 was the new normal. Covid is not going away. Neither is reality denial. We have to learn to live with both. Unconventional times call for a creative response and this episode is an example of trying to think deeply about our...

Robert Costa is a national political reporter for the Washington Post, and co-author with Bob Woodward of the new book "Peril." This book has made a lot of news. It is a compelling, authoritative first draft of history that covers the period leading up to the 2020 election, and into this year. The authors write that "the transition from President Donald J. Trump to President Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands as one of the most dangerous periods in American history." The details are chilling. And...

“I walked into the internet naively in 1995, thinking that it was all altruistic and going to create a better society,” Krohn said. But the Seattle native now is sounding the alarm about the web’s threat to a functioning country. Krohn maintains that he is still hanging on to optimism, but his warnings in the book are also dire. “Massive digital forces are corroding the fundamental pillars that support American social and political life. The damage seems illimitable. The endgame toward which...

I've spent pretty much all of my life fascinated by the interactions between religion and public life. I grew up in a very strict fundamentalist Christian church. I went to Christian music festivals, marched in anti-abortion protests with my parents, and watched my parents become loyal Republicans from the Reagan era on. As a journalist I've been in rooms on the upper east side of Manhattan where secular liberals hissed and booed in 2004 at the mention of religious conservatives who they...

I've been taking a little bit of a break this summer from the podcast, but I've been listening to another podcast that was so interesting to me I decided to talk with its creator. The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a new podcast that chronicles the downfall of a celebrity pastor named Mark Driscoll. I am interested in this topic because I grew up in a church that was similar to Mars Hill. Covenant Life Church, the church I grew up attending, was intense, it was insular, and it revolved...

We are in an information crisis. Viral disinformation predominates on the right, and cancel culture on the left, but Jonathan Rauch says in his new book "The Constitution of Knowledge" that both of them "share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets: confusing them, isolating them, drowning them out, deplatforming them, or overwhelming them so they give up on pushing back." The book is not primarily about media literacy. It's not a guide with tips...

I didn't plan for this episode to be about ranked-choice voting, but when I raised the topic, I was surprised at the degree to which Congressman Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota, was really gung-ho about this reform. I've done several episodes on ranked-choice voting before, but to sum it up if you're new to the idea: voters list candidates in order of preference. If no one gets above 50 percent, then the candidate with the most second- and third-place votes wins. The general idea...

Curtis is a former pastor who is now a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School and a senior fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary. And he's done a great job of putting together a wealth of resources that present facts and data, answers to the questions poeple are asking, and presenting it in a way that is informative and persuasive. He's specifically aimed his project at Christians, because white evangelicals in particular are the most vaccine resistant group probably int he country....