In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with KJ Ramsey, trauma therapist and author of The Place Between Our Pains, for a conversation about what happens when the faith language you’ve published books about stops working—and why joy might still be available in the middle of a medical crisis that isn’t resolving.

Topics Covered

* What happens to us spiritually when every complaint has to come with a caveat, and why that splits us in two

* Why being a trauma therapist didn’t spare KJ from trauma, and why she thinks that’s actually good news for the rest of us

* How to be in your body when your body is the site of the pain, starting with how you’d talk to a five-year-old who skinned her knee

* Why she stopped judging her own silence when she lost the ability to pray or describe God at all

* A definition of joy that doesn’t require your life to get better, offered from a seat where things are actively not better

Timestamps:01:00 When Hope Functions as a Gag Order04:00 Why It’s Still Hard to Let People See You10:00 Having the Language and Still Being Battered by It15:00 Embodiment When Your Body Doesn’t Feel Safe17:00 Your Body Is a Person, Not a Problem to Fix24:00 When the Words for God Stop Working28:00 Forsaken as Loosened for the Sake of Expansion33:00 Joy as the Presence of Love37:00 For Anyone in Something They Never Would Have Chosen40:00 Finding the Book and KJ’s Work

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