In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Kat Armas for a conversation about what “empire” actually means once you strip away the buzzword—and why decolonizing your bookshelf and diversifying it are not the same project.

Topics Covered

* How empire shifted from a ruler over his own people to an ambition that metastasized, and why the US is an imperial state even without an emperor

* Why the Bible’s language is so imperial, including Heaven itself, and what that tells us about the people writing it

* Who gets to decide what counts as wisdom, and what changes when you notice wisdom in Scripture is a woman shouting in the street

* Why empire has no imagination (it’s been running the same tired playbook since Rome) but we do

* The Quechua hummingbird story that reframes what meaningful resistance actually looks like

Timestamps:01:00 Why “Empire” and “Decolonize” Became Buzzwords04:00 A Working Definition of Empire07:00 How Imperial Ideology Gets Woven Into Faith13:00 The Bible Isn’t an Anti-Imperial Manifesto16:00 What Cuban American Formation Reveals That Western Readings Miss21:00 Empire Begins as Story, Then Calcifies Into Systems26:00 Imagine Smaller: The Hummingbird Drop31:00 Empire Doesn’t Just Live Out There, It Lives In Us37:00 Why Liturgy Is Subversive42:00 Finding Kat’s Work

In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Anna Rollins, author of Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a “Good Girl,” for a conversation about the shared script underneath purity culture and diet culture—and why knowing the promise is false doesn’t make it stop working on us.

Topics Covered

* The pattern Anna kept finding in her own private writing before she had a name for it, and what scarcity, smallness, and shrinking appetite had to do with each other

* Why “control your appetite and you’ll be safe” persists even for women who see through it, and the very real thing it’s rooted in

* What internalized fundamentalism looks like once the original system is gone, including inside body positivity

* How to tell rigidity from conviction, and where each one shows up in the body

* What “reclaiming appetite” actually looks like on a normal Tuesday, and why it’s rarely about food

Timestamps:01:00 Noticing the Pattern in Her Own Writing03:00 Why the Promise Is Durable Even When You Know Better06:00 Fundamentalism That Follows You Into New Systems11:00 Wellness Language as Code and the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders13:00 Telling Rigidity from Conviction18:00 Shame, Guilt, and Where the Hope Lives20:00 Why Healing Body Shame Shifts Your Relationship With God24:00 Reclaiming Appetite on a Normal Tuesday31:00 For Anyone Still in the Middle of It35:00 Finding the Book and Anna’s Work

In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Kristin Mockler Young, author of The Other Side of Certainty, for a conversation about what certainty is actually doing for us—and why the thing we were handed as faith might have been a tool for detachment all along.

Topics Covered

* The cynical-but-true reason certainty appeals to people who don’t know what to do with hard emotions or injustice

* Why a faith that shatters and a faith that holds questions often come down to how the hard thing arrived

* What people gain when they trade black-and-white belief for something roomier, and the loss almost nobody escapes

* How certainty gets tangled up with identity and belonging, and why your people find it easier to let you go than face their own dissonance

* The question Kristin is still sitting in, and why she’s not rushing to resolve it

Timestamps:01:00 What Certainty Is Actually Doing for People04:00 The Difference Between Rooting Yourself in God and in What You Know About God09:00 What You Gain and What You Lose14:00 The Disorienting Moment You Notice the Cracks16:00 Authority vs. Power and How We Got Out of Balance17:00 How to Practice Curiosity When You Weren’t Trained For It20:00 Sitting in Not-Knowing Without Rushing23:00 The Question Kristin Hasn’t Resolved25:00 Finding the Book and Kristin’s Work