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If you’ve ever felt like “being faithful” meant getting smaller, staying quiet, or handing over your God-given authority, this conversation is for you. We’re joined by writer, lay theologian, Christian mystic, and meditation teacher Chelsea Kim Long as she shares the heart behind her book Faithfully Dissident Daughter and a definition that stops people in their tracks: staying rooted in the love of God and the way of Christ while dissenting from distorted expressions of faith that harm, exclude, and diminish human dignity.

We dig into how women are trained, in both culture and church, to distrust their bodies and intuition, and why belonging can become a weapon when institutions decide who is “in” and who is “out.” We keep returning to a grounding question that helps untangle inherited shame: “Who told you that?” From there, we explore what happens when we stop organizing Christian faith around hierarchy and start imagining communities built on collaboration, shared leadership, and mutual care.

Chelsea also describes a real-life alternative: a neighborhood faith community with no building, no paid staff, and no belief tests, where meals, discussion, children’s formation, and honest spiritual practice count as church. We talk discernment, deconstruction, progressive Christianity, feminist theology, and the divine feminine, using the fruit of the Spirit as a practical way to evaluate what actually brings life, healing, and deeper connection with God.

If this resonates, listen, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with faith and belonging, and then subscribe, rate, and leave a review so more people can find these conversations. What part of your faith are you ready to reclaim?

For more information about our guest visit her website at chelseakimlong.com

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Mary Magdalene has been called a lot of things over the centuries, but the labels most people remember are often the ones that shrink her. We’re getting ready for her feast day by widening the lens and asking why so many of us feel, deep in our bones, that there’s more to her story and more to ours too.

We talk about Mary Magdalene as a tower of wisdom, an initiate, a mystic, and an apostle whose spiritual authority keeps challenging the old rules about who gets to speak for God. Along the way, we name the patriarchal smear campaign that blurred her legacy, and we share how reading beyond the usual script through the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and fresh scholarship (including conversations around Mary, Martha, and the Gospel of John) can feel less like “making something up” and more like taking years of grime off a beautiful icon.

The heart of the Magdalene tradition, for us, is inner authority and a return to love. We explore “Christ consciousness” as something that calls every body and every gender toward oneness, equality, and freedom, because until we’re all free, none of us are free. We also share a vivid story about red cardinals as a sign of presence, and how paying attention to nature can become a practical spiritual practice, not just a poetic idea.

If this sparks something in you, listen, share it with a friend, and subscribe so you don’t miss what we’re posting around her feast. After you listen, leave a review and tell us: where are you being invited to tell a better story?

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A rose petal on a walking path feels small until you realize it’s a practice of witness. We start with a Mary Magdalene feast day ritual, praying names into petals, anointing with oil, and letting ordinary beauty become a sign that love is still alive and moving through our days. From that grounded place, we ask a destabilizing question: what if the story we inherited left out more than we knew?

We talk about Elizabeth Schrader’s textual criticism research on the Gospel of John, including the claim that a scribe may have scratched out Mary’s name in John 11 and inserted Martha. That single manuscript detail opens up big conversations about biblical translation, authority, and the long history of women being minimized in Christian tradition. Holy imagination becomes our tool for truth telling, not as make-believe, but as a spiritual practice that helps us see the people pushed to the margins and imagine a more honest, more generous gospel.

From there, we widen into the divine feminine, the power of language, and the work of decolonizing scripture so it becomes good news for all people. We keep coming back to a practical takeaway: the kingdom of God is not just coming someday, it’s here right now, and the measure of our theology is whether it expands us into compassion, justice, and real belonging.

If this conversation challenges you, share it with a friend who’s hungry for inclusive Christianity and a bigger faith, then subscribe and leave a review so more listeners can find this path of “only more love.”