Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

This is a classic conversation. Michael traveled to the Ransomed Heart outpost in Colorado Springs and sat down with John Eldredge to talk about restoration: what it is, why the heart is central to it, and what the Christian life is actually supposed to do for a person. John explains why the pace of modern life traumatizes people —and why the graces available to heal the soul are closer than we think. He and Michael discuss the difference between chasing holiness as a moral standard out there...

Many of us have been handed a faith of victory and failure, where the heroic are celebrated, and the weak quietly disappear from the story. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura has found something truer in the darkness. Through Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence and the bronze images of Christ that persecuted Japanese Christians were forced to step on, Mako reflects on a gospel big enough for anyone who doubts they can ever be strong. He and Michael also talk about why beauty matters most when the wo...

Many of us were taught that faith means believing the right things, and that the rest gets sorted out after we die. Dallas Willard spent decades gently insisting there’s far more available now. In this 2008 conversation, recorded in Los Angeles and one Michael counts among the highlights of his life, Dallas describes salvation as an interactive relationship with God: a life lived with him today, not a ticket held for later. He and Michael talk about why solitude is the most radical of the dis...

Dr. Chuck DeGroat is back for his fourth podcast visit — and this time he brings a question that has followed him through his mid-fifties: why is it taking so long to grow up? His new book, Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age, grew out of that wrestling and a decade of sitting with leaders whose language had outrun their transformation. Michael and Chuck talk about why character change is so slow, and why the answer has less to do w...

In 1995, Michael sat down with Eugene Peterson for a conversation that was published in the Mars Hill Review and later in Eugene's own book Subversive Spirituality. There were no podcasts then. No one could have imagined that someday a person driving to work or sitting alone at home could put on headphones and hear a conversation recorded decades earlier. Eugene believed words were never merely information — they carried presence, they revealed, they deepened intimacy. So Michael began to won...