In the Season 4 premiere of the Hard Faith Podcast, host Spencer Folmar welcomes back the show’s only recurring guest across every season, Nathan Clarkson, for a wide-ranging conversation on faith, honesty, and storytelling.

The episode centers on Nathan’s new book I’m the Worst: Freedom Is Found in Admitting Our Faults, which explores the personal and cultural consequences of refusing to acknowledge our own brokenness. Nathan shares how years of maintaining a polished Christian image hid deeper fear, doubt, and pain—and how facing that darkness became a bridge to healing rather than the end of his story.

Together, Spencer and Nathan discuss why Christians should be the first to admit their need for a Savior, how denial fuels division in culture and politics, and why much faith-based art fails when it avoids the reality of sin, suffering, and moral complexity. Drawing from Scripture, personal experience, filmmaking, and theology, they argue that honest art has the power to confront darkness while still pointing toward redemption.

This episode sets the tone for Season 4 by affirming a core Hard Faith conviction: life is hard, God is good, and truth-telling—both in art and in life—is essential to freedom and faithfulness.

On the Season 3 finale of the Hard Faith Podcast, Spencer Folmar is joined by his wife and Hard Faith COO, McKenna Folmar, for a candid end-of-year reflection that closes out 2025 and looks ahead to what God may be preparing in 2026. Together, they unpack a year marked by both deep suffering and unexpected fruit—sharing openly about loss, perseverance, and why Hard Faith continues to exist for artists who feel unseen, constrained, or displaced by traditional faith spaces.

The episode recaps major milestones from the past year, including the first-ever Hard Faith regional event in New York City, which sold out theaters, overflowed its awards show, and confirmed a growing hunger for honest, unfiltered faith-driven storytelling on both coasts. Spencer and McKenna reflect on the leap of faith it took to pull off the NYC festival in just a few months, the supernatural sense of unity that marked the event, and how Hard Faith has become a gathering place where filmmakers find community, collaboration, and courage.

Looking forward, they announce key plans for Hard Faith Fest LA 2026 (June 25–28)—a four-day event in Hollywood themed “Do Not Fear,” featuring expanded workshops, live music, worship, commissioning, and new artistic categories. The conversation also previews upcoming books, original Hard Faith film projects, additional regional and international events under prayerful consideration, and the continued growth of the podcast into Season 4.

More than an update, this finale is an invitation—to pray, to partner, and to step into a movement committed to telling stories that liberate and bringing the Gospel to the lost sheep through art. As the year closes, Spencer and McKenna share their hearts, their gratitude, and their hope for what lies ahead, trusting God’s direction one step at a time.

On this episode of the Hard Faith Podcast, Spencer Folmar sits down with filmmaker, director, writer, and educator Sam Sorich for a wide-ranging and deeply honest conversation about faith, art, envy, conversion, and the spiritual cost of creating meaningful work in a volatile cultural moment. Sam reflects on his connection to Hard Faith Fest, where his visually striking anthology feature Eight Beats—eight short films inspired by the Beatitudes—won the Audience Awardand emerged as one of the festival’s most talked-about films.

Sam shares his unconventional journey into filmmaking, including an early artistic calling, a dramatic turn toward the Catholic seminary, a season of atheism, and a hard-won return to faith shaped by cinema, philosophy, and the work of René Girard. He unpacks how watching thousands of films during seminary became both an escape and a form of spiritual and artistic formation, eventually leading to a vision for Eight Beats as a Catholic answer to Kieslowski’s Decalogue—bold, incarnational, and unafraid of complexity.

The conversation also explores Sam’s international life (from Chicago to Colombia to California), his recent season teaching film, documentary, mimetic theory, horror, and AI at John Paul the Great Catholic University, and how mentoring young filmmakers became an unexpected source of healing for wounds formed earlier in his faith journey. Sam reflects candidly on envy, rivalry, and comparison in the creative life—especially watching close friends succeed—and offers a powerful spiritual framework for resisting the “Luciferian light” through humility, prayer, and identification with the blind beggar crying out for mercy.

Finally, Sam previews his new documentary project exploring UFOs, extraterrestrial phenomena, and the Catholic imagination, asking provocative questions about incarnation, reality, and how faith traditions can interpret a world that feels increasingly re-enchanted and unstable. It’s a thoughtful, theologically rich, and emotionally vulnerable episode that speaks directly to artists, filmmakers, and believers navigating doubt, ambition, and calling in real time.