Shifting Culture

In this episode, Scott Cairns talks about certainty and mystery and getting glimpses of the unknowable God. Scott has spent forty years wrestling with, investigating, navigating words to help make meaning in our lives. In this conversation, we talk about words as things rather than labels, about reading a text the way the rabbis did - layer on layer, meaning that never closes - about prayer as communion rather than petition, and about what a culture loses as it stops reading. Underneath it all is a God who is endless, which means the knowing is never fully attained, but it's a beautiful pursuit.
Librettist, essayist, translator, and author of multiple poetry collections, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and many other venues, and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His recent poetry books include the recently released Against Certainty (2026), Correspondence with My Greeks (2024), Lacunae (2023), Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), and Idiot Psalms (2014). His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, first appeared from HarperSanFrancisco in 2006, and has been translated into Greek and Romania. His Endless Life (translations and adaptations of Christian mystics, appeared in 2014, and his book-length essay, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, was first published in 2009, and has also been translated into Greek. He wrote the libretti for two oratoria, The Martyrdom of Saint Polycarp and A Melancholy Beauty. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014. His current projects include Descent to the Heart, verse adaptations of selections from the homilies of Saint Isaak the Syrian, and a new poetry collection, Ways of Not Knowing.
Scott's Book:
Against Certainty
Scott's Recommendations:
Lauras
A History of the Island
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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In this episode, Ian Morgan Cron and I talk about Chasing Francis, the novel he wrote twenty years ago (before anyone called it deconstruction) about a megachurch pastor who loses his faith mid-sermon and goes looking for St. Francis in Italy. We get into a 13th-century church that looks a lot like ours, beauty as a doorway back to God, why Francis walked across a battlefield to meet a sultan, the difference between spotlight attention and lantern attention, and why the sermon on the mount should be read as instructions.
Ian Morgan Cron is a bestselling author, Episcopal priest, trained psychotherapist, Enneagram teacher, Dove Award-winning songwriter, and one of the most sought-after voices in American spirituality today. His Enneagram primer The Road Back to You has sold over one million copies and launched a global conversation about self-knowledge and spiritual formation. But Chasing Francis is where it all started — and where it still leads. Ian’s work spans psychology, theology, the arts, and pastoral care. He speaks from lived experience: he has sat with the burned out, the doubting, the spiritually shipwrecked — and he has been all three himself. He is the host of the widely popular podcast Typology and has appeared on media across the country.
Ian's Book:
Chasing Francis
Ian's Recommendations
The Master and His Emissary
The Myth of Normal
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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In this episode with Natalia Terfa we talk about her book It All Counts, why questions deepen faith instead of eroding it, how to tell human authority from God's, what love looks like when a protest turns ugly, and why the prosperity gospel falls apart at a child's funeral. We get into loneliness and the risk community asks of us, the incarnation as an argument for the goodness of bodies, and how breath and creation return us to who we are.
Natalia is a Lutheran pastor, podcaster, and author who lives in Minneapolis with her her loves, Sam and Layla, and kitty babies. When she’s not working or writing, you’ll find her reading in her couch nest, ideally with a cat on her lap, watching Turkish television, taking walks in the neighborhood, looking at trees, or making good food for the people she loves.
Natalia's Book:
It All Counts
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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In this episode with Scot McKnight, we ask whether the perception that the Pharisees were hypocrites, legalists with a religious spirit is the right way to view them. We move the conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees from one of theological debate to one in response to charisma, the crowds, and power. We talk about what charisma actually is, why economic justice sat at the center of Jesus' movement, the seven things the Pharisees really were, and what it means to stop weaponizing the word against anyone we disagree with.
Scot McKnight (PhD, Nottingham) has been a Professor of New Testament for more than four decades. He is the author of more than ninety books, including the award-winning The Jesus Creed as well as The King Jesus Gospel, A Fellowship of Differents, One.Life, The Blue Parakeet, Revelation for the Rest of Us, and Kingdom Conspiracy.
Scot's Book:
Jesus, People, Pharisees
Scot's Recommendation:
Furious Minds
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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In this episode with Matthew Soerens and Issam Smeir, we touch on something that has shaped my faith - sitting across a table from refugees until a statistic became a person with a name. A decade after the first edition of Seeking Refuge, the number of forcibly displaced people has doubled to roughly 120 million, yet care for the vulnerable has become one of the most politicized issues in American culture and the American church. We work to untangle fear and misinformation from biblical conviction, dig into the parable of the Good Samaritan, and ask what it looks like to stop, come closer, and respond.
Matthew Soerens is the Vice President of Advocacy and Policy for World Relief. Dr. Issam Smeir is a psychologist focused on trauma treatment for victims of persecution and torture who also works at World Relief. They're coauthors, along with Stephan Bauman, of the newly updated book Seeking Refuge: The Human Face of the Global Refugee Crisis (Moody Publishers, 2026).
Matthew and Issam's Book:
Seeking Refuge
Matthew's Recommendation:
The Faithful Innkeeper
Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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