Faith Matters

Today we're joined by Colette Lafia, a spiritual director, poet, and author whose newest book Leaving the Shore: Experiencing Poetry as Prayer invites us into a different way of meeting the divine than we might be used to.
Much of our faith language often centers on effort—perseverance, pressing forward, fighting the good fight. Colette offers a somewhat gentler direction: the idea that relationship with God can look much more like surrender than striving.
One of the most vivid parts of the conversation is Colette's take on delight. She traces it back to relationship: the moment she stopped approaching God as someone to plead with, and started experiencing the connection as something to simply enjoy. Her point isn't that discipline or commitment don't matter—she still believes in practices that cultivate a spiritual life—but that delight can carry us there without so much of the striving we're used to.
We felt like this conversation is an invitation to loosen our grips on outcomes, on certainty, even on the idea that connection with God has to be earned, and to notice what opens up when we let delight and creativity lead instead.

Today we're joined by John White, a theologian and ethicist who is currently Research Fellow at BYU's Maxwell Institute  — and who has a fascinating and unexpected story that led him to convert to the Church just under a year ago.

For over a decade, John was a tenured professor of practical theology and ethics at Baylor's Truett Theological Seminary, where he directed the graduate chaplaincy program. His work has been at the intersection of theology, ethics, and everyday embodied life—character formation, moral agency, and the ways our institutions and practices shape who we become. Then a few years ago, an unexplainable experience at an academic conference set him on a path he never saw coming, one that eventually led him to baptism.

What made this conversation so fascinating for us, is that John brings the full weight of that background to the questions many of us have lived with our whole lives. Together we explore the theology of the body—what it means to embrace the body, not just tolerate it, and how our theology supports that idea. We wrestled a bit with the phrase “the Church is true,” and how a Christ-centered lens might free us from treating every question as a row of dominoes. And we spent some real time on the problem of agency—where our freedom actually lives, and how it might expand as we act in concert with the divine.

Again and again, John helped us see things we'd almost stopped noticing, and hear language we take for granted with fresh ears. We’re excited to share this one.

Today we’re bringing you a session we loved from last year’s Restore with Thomas McConkie.
There’s a particular overwhelm I know that often comes with learning something new—a low-grade worry that I’m already missing something, forgetting the important pieces, not going to be able to hang onto it all. When it comes to personal development or spiritual truth, that worry can feel especially high stakes.
In this session, Thomas offers what has felt to me like an antidote to all of that striving. The deepest truths, he says, aren’t hiding somewhere just out of reach — they’re woven into our actual lived experience, so close we can’t help but bump into them again and again. As Thomas puts it, “Sacred reality is so good you can’t miss it.”
There’s something incredibly freeing to me about trusting that what is most true and most sacred will keep finding us. I’ve thought about this session and his message often since last year, and I’m excited to finally share it with you.
Thomas will be back with us at Restore:Connect this September, so you’ll be able to hear more from him there. You can get your tickets now at faithmatters.org/restore!
And be sure to check out Thomas’ podcast One Heart One Mind, produced by Faith Matters, as well as his book At-One-Ment.
Available on Bookshop.org
Available on Amazon

This week, we're asking: how do you fit a full Sunday School lesson into twenty-five minutes? Our worldwide church is shifting to shorter lesson blocks, and teachers everywhere are feeling nervous. Isaiah in 25 minutes? What do you cut, what do you keep?
Today we're sitting down with Patrick and Melissa Mason to think through this transition and to really embrace it as an invitation to consider what church is actually for. We talk about the difference between content and communion, why less can genuinely be more, and get some great tips for preparing for these blocks. 
We get into the unglamorous but invaluable art of ending on time, and for anybody worried about the quick transitions, Patrick invites us to consider whether getting stuck in the hallway to catch up with a friend or hear about what’s going on in the life of a neighbor might not be defeating the purpose of church so much as fulfilling it.
Patrick is the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University and Melissa is a clinical social worker and therapist whose work focuses on relationships and personal growth. Both Patrick and Melissa spend so much of their daily lives teaching, listening, and engaging in meaningful conversation, and we couldn’t imagine better people to help us think through how these 25 minutes might become genuinely nourishing and powerful moments in our spiritual lives.
Patrick and Melissa will both be joining us at Restore:Connect this year so if you’d like to hear more from them, you can get your tickets now at Faithmatters.org/restore!

Most of us can probably recall a verse or two from the book of Psalms—something comforting, or words inside a hymn we know. But Psalms is the longest book in the Bible, and tucked inside this same book of scripture are psalms of rage, cursing, and despair that are a lot harder to make sense of.
Today, Dr. Ellen Davis joins us to talk about this ancient, essential book, and describes the Psalms as a kind of script for the full range of human experience before God. The Psalms, she says, expose “all parts of our soul for healing.”
In this conversation, Ellen, who has spent years translating the Psalms, shows us just how expansive this ancient prayer book really is. She calls the Psalms a kind of “First Amendment” for the life of faith: permission to bring everything before God. Even the shape of the book reflects that, with lament gradually giving way to praise by the book’s end. Ellen also takes us beneath some familiar translations with words like nefesh, usually rendered “soul.” Ellen says this actually probably means something closer to our whole embodied self, challenging the idea that our spiritual lives are somehow separate or at odds with our physical ones. It’s another way the Psalms widen our sense of prayer—it’s a vision spacious enough to hold our grief, our anger, our bodies, our silence, and our joy, trusting that all of it belongs in our relationship with God.
Dr. Ellen F. Davis is the Amos Ragan Kearns Distinguished Professor of Bible and Practical Theology at Duke Divinity School and the author of several books exploring scripture and the life of faith, including extensive work on the Psalms.