Complexified

A year after his death, the Catholic Church is moving forward—and revealing what Francis actually changed.

While he was alive, Francis' papacy was interpreted in real time: praised, criticized and debated. It was difficult to separate what was truly changing from what simply felt different because of him.

Now, the Church moves forward, and this movement offers something new. A chance to see what was durable.

What still feels like Francis? What has been absorbed into the Church’s way of operating? And what, if anything, has already begun to fade?

In this episode, we step back from the moment-to-moment reactions and take a first real look at Pope Francis in hindsight. Not to revisit his papacy, but to understand it differently—through what we can now see.

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The playbook for dismissing a pope just stopped working.

Trump called Pope Leo weak. Catholics — including some of Trump's own — aren't buying it. Vatican reporter Claire Giangravé joins Amanda Henderson to explain why Leo, a Chicago-born American pope, can't be dismissed the way his predecessors were, what his quiet first year was actually building toward, and whether the unlikely Catholic coalition forming behind him can hold.

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Tim Schrader Rodriguez spent eight years trying to "pray out the gay". He modulated his voice. He stopped listening to music with female lead singers. He sat weekly with a therapist who watched him come apart — and said nothing.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that therapists have a First Amendment right to pursue conversion therapy with their patients, upending a Colorado ban on the practice.

This isn't history, nor is it a Colorado-only case. Bans that advocates spent years winning in state after state will unravel.

The number of LGBTQ youth being engaged in conversion practices nearly doubled in the last year alone — from 10 to 20 percent.

What Tim's story makes clear is how ordinary this harm looks from the outside. It's not electroshock. It's not boot camps. It's a weekly therapy appointment. It's a trusted relationship. It's the promise that if you pray hard enough and want it badly enough, God will change you.

And when it doesn't work, the program tells you that's your fault too.

Amanda Henderson talks with Tim this week about what eight years inside that world actually felt like — and what it means that the one protected space survivors thought they still had is now gone.

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When Sarah Mullally was installed as Archbishop of Canterbury, it looked like a breakthrough. It was. But it didn't happen by accident.

In this episode, Amanda Henderson talks with Catherine Pepinster, a journalist who reported on Mullally's rise and the network who helped make it possible. Before women could even become bishops in the Church of England, a small group of clergy saw a gap: being allowed to lead and actually getting there are two very different things. So they built Leading Women, a mentoring organization designed to prepare female candidates for leadership inside one of the world's oldest institutional churches — one still embedded in British parliamentary life and still navigating deep divisions over sexuality and abuse.

Pepinster traces Mullally's path from chief nurse of Britain's National Health Service to the most powerful seat in Anglican Christianity — a woman who has reached the top of two professions in one lifetime. She also maps what Mullally is walking into: an institution in numerical decline that still sits at the center of British public life, now led by a woman who will serve only six years and inherit two unresolved crises her predecessor couldn't survive.

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Inside a growing spiritual movement built around awakening, ascension, and the search for something bigger

At a packed conference in Los Angeles, thousands of people gathered to explore a different way of understanding reality—through crystals, energy healing, and the belief that some humans didn’t originate on Earth.

They’re called starseeds: people who believe they were sent here from other planets to help humanity “ascend” to a higher dimension.

According to our guest RNS reporter Kathryn Post, it might sound fringe. But the deeper you go, the more familiar the underlying search begins to feel.

Because the people drawn to this world aren’t so different from anyone else. They’re looking for meaning, for purpose, for a way to make sense of suffering. And increasingly, they’re finding those answers online—through influencers, shared language, and communities that have no central authority.

But as these beliefs spread, they’re also evolving. In some cases, blending with conspiracy theories about hidden elites, cosmic battles, and the end of the world as we know it.

So what happens when belief becomes entirely personal—but still somehow shared?

And how do you tell the difference between a spiritual search… and something more dangerous?

RELATED: Starseeds, government plots and an alien mantis: Inside New Age spirituality's new age
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