In this episode Annie F. Downs joins me to take John 10:10 apart. Steal, kill, destroy — we tend to read them as one sentence, but Annie treats them as three different losses asking three different things of us. Something stolen still exists somewhere. Something dead doesn't come back. Something destroyed has to be cleared before anything gets built there. We talk about courage borrowed from artists, grief that never fully resolves, why resurrection never looks like restoration, and why none of this can be worked out alone. Don't let that hold you back.

Annie F. Downs is a New York Times bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and successful podcast host based in Nashville, Tennessee. Known for her engaging and honest style, Annie makes readers and listeners feel like long-time friends. She is the co-founder of the That Sounds Fun Network, home to her flagship podcast, That Sounds Fun and host of the television talk show I Gotta Ask.

Annie's Book:

Don't Let That Hold You Back

Annie's Recommendation:

Calamity Club

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

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In this episode Sarah Stankorb joins me to talk about Damned If She Does and the sixteen million American women who have walked away from the church in the last decade. Sarah is a journalist who covers religion, and someone who left herself, and she argues that women leaving isn't a side story but a signal we have about where American faith is going. We follow the threads back decades, sort through what the numbers do and don't show, and talk about what women are finding after they go. Some have left faith entirely. Some are still following Jesus without the institution.

Sarah Stankorb is a journalist, essayist, and author. Hundreds of her pieces have been featured in publications including: VICE, ELLE, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and others. The award-winning writer tends to break taboos, offering women a platform to discuss the quiet hurts and joys that define their lives. Stankorb's beat spans religion, politics, gender, and power, but is informed by questions of basic morality.

Sarah was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and often found escape in books. She studied world religions and philosophy at Westminster College, and a chance to study abroad in Northern Ireland and then Israel further opened her eyes to how faith (and conflict) can shape people’s everyday existence. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, where she studied ethics and South Asian religion and history.

She’s more fun than all this sounds.

Sarah lives in Ohio with her husband and two children, and she writes regularly about the quirks of American faith for her Substack, In Polite Company.

Sarah's Book:

Damned if She Does

Sarah's Recommendation:

The Conspiracists

The Magicians

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

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Support the podcast and the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below

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In this episode Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces how holiness theology and New Thought merged into a faith that promised women power right where they stood, and taught them that naming what was wrong was itself the sin. We follow the thread from Hannah Whitall Smith to corporate campaigns against the New Deal, from a YMCA small group in 1910s China to postwar evangelical totalism, through MLMs and Christian bookstores to the blogosphere and Beth Moore. If confession can heal and confession can control, how do you know which one you're inside?

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University. She is a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and has been interviewed on NPR, CBS, and the BBC, among other outlets. Her most recent books include Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) and Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (September 2026).

Kristin's Book:

Live Laugh Love

Connect with Joshua: jjohnson@shiftingculturepodcast.com

Go to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.

Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky or YouTube

Support the podcast and the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link below

Support the show