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For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Jen Hatmaker
For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast
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  • For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

    Encore: Barbara Brown Taylor on Being the Saint of Small Things

    11/09/2026 | 36 mins.
    Description:
    Barbara Brown Taylor gave us the question that ends every episode of this show, so it feels right to hand the Sacred Work series over to her. In this encore, the New York Times bestselling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest talks with Jen about the year she spent doing almost nothing impressive: the county fair with a couple of six-year-olds, an old racehorse nobody wanted, blueberry pies for friends going through hard things, and shifts at the public library. She calls herself the saint of small things, and she is honest about how hard that is to say out loud when people want to know what big thing you are working on. They also get into why she is wary of hope that functions as an escape hatch, how she keeps her heart from going wooden in a world of terrible headlines, and why friendship is worth protecting even though nobody rewards you for it. Stay to the end for the benediction Barbara wrote for this community.
    Thought-provoking Quotes:
    I’ll be the saint of small things today.
    Headlines give me omniscience but no omnipotence.
    I’ve got to attend to the sustainability of a supple heart.
    I’m real wary of hope unless it functions right here, right now.
    The years are short but the days are long, and that’s a blessing not a curse.
    Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
    A Rhythm of Prayer by Sarah Bessey, which includes Barbara’s contribution
    This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, who has also been a guest on For the Love
    When God Is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor
    Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor
    Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor
    An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor
    Guest’s Links:
    Website - https://barbarabrowntaylor.com
    Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/authorBarbaraBrownTaylor
    Connect with Jen!
    Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
    Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
    Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
    Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
    Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker
    The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.
  • For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

    Priya Parker on Fighting Well, and Why Conflict Is Not Sin

    09/09/2026 | 1h 6 mins.
    Description:
    Think about the last real fight you had with someone you love, then think about what you did with it. Most of us swallowed it and called it peace. Priya Parker has spent twenty years walking into rooms where groups are coming apart, churches mid-split, companies that lost their founder, families with one topic nobody will name at the table. She is back on the show with a new book, The Art of Fighting, and her argument is that the peace we keep by avoiding conflict costs us the very thing we say we want most.
    Jen and Priya open with a hot takes round on pineapple pizza and whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which turns out to be one of Priya's actual tools: low stakes arguing is practice for the high stakes kind. From there, what unhealthy peace looks like inside a family, a team, or a church. Priya tells the story of her grandfather's funeral, where the minister's highest praise for a fifty year marriage was that the couple never fought. Jen names the four years she let a business partnership die rather than have one hard conversation. They get into how to diagnose the fight you are actually in, why “we’re not a ___” is the sentence to listen for, and what happened when Priya went looking for the best literature on group conflict and kept landing in the Christian tradition.
    Conflict is not sin. It is a skill, and every one of us can get better at it.
    Part of September's Sacred Work series.
    ***
    Thought-provoking Quotes:
    Low stakes arguing helps us approach high stakes arguing. – Priya Parker
    When the going gets tough, add warmth to heat. – Priya Parker
    Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict. – Priya Parker
    I learned from an early age that there is loss in avoidance. – Priya Parker
    I invite you to think about conflict as a skill. And you can get better at it. – Priya Parker
    Conflict is not sin. Conflict is actually highly functional. – Priya Parker
    Fighting is about power. Avoidance is also about power. – Priya Parker
    Whose mess do you want to be in? – Priya Parker
    Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
    The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker (Riverhead, out 9/8) - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fighting-Transformative-Power-Conflict/dp/0593420225
    The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920
    Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649
    If You Met My Family, You'd Understand: A Family Systems Primer by Jack Shitama - https://www.amazon.com/You-Met-Family-Youd-Understand/dp/1732009368
    For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

    Adrienne Brodeur on Family Myths, Wounded People, and Honest Fiction

    04/09/2026 | 48 mins.
    Description:
    Some families run on rules nobody ever wrote down. Here is your role. Here is what we talk about. Here is who gets forgiven and who gets blamed. We accept those terms as children, and then one day we look up and wonder who exactly signed us up for the job.
    August’s Jen Hatmaker Book Club pick is Little Monsters, and Adrienne Brodeur came with the whole story behind it. She spent thirty years on the other side of the pen, co-founding Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, editing at HMH Books, judging the National Book Award, and now running Aspen Words. She published one novel of her own in 2005, then waited fourteen years for the next book, a memoir that broke a silence she had kept since she was fourteen.
    Adrienne and Jen get into the unspoken rules every family runs on, why estrangement takes love rather than indifference, and what Cain and Abel taught her about the gifts we give our parents. Adrienne explains why fiction can feel more honest than memoir, makes an unpopular case for Ken, and talks about writing mania with compassion rather than spectacle. Plus the stack of books a stepmother handed her that redirected her whole life, the screenplay she is writing, and the book club’s standing offer to cast the movie.
    ***
    Thought-provoking Quotes:
    He’s wounded, and wounded people wound. – Adrienne Brodeur
    Understanding someone isn’t quite the same as absolving them. – Adrienne Brodeur
    Fiction can sometimes feel more honest than memoir. I don’t mean factual honesty. I mean emotionally unguarded. – Adrienne Brodeur
    Who the hell decided that peacemaker was my job, or golden child, or secret keeper, or difficult one? – Adrienne Brodeur
    Turns out dead mothers still have an excellent work ethic. – Adrienne Brodeur
    Everyone wanted a flat version of themselves. – Jen Hatmaker
    We have family stories that we’re telling too, even believing, that we’re trying to believe. – Jen Hatmaker
    Some of our characters landed on their feet, but they landed on their feet in a different zip code. – Jen Hatmaker
    Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
    Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Monsters/Adrienne-Brodeur/9781982198114
    Little Monsters book club discussion questions - https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/little-monsters-by-adrienne-brodeur/guide
    Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wild-game-adrienne-brodeur/1130010789
    Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001HN38FI
    Aspen Words at the Aspen Institute - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/adrienne-brodeur/
    Zoetrope: All-Story, co-founded with Francis Ford Coppola

    Guest’s Links:
    Adrienne’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/adriennebrodeur/
    Adrienne’s Faceboo ...
  • For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

    Your Life Is the Assignment: Jen Hatmaker Solo Episode

    02/09/2026 | 56 mins.
    Description:
    For twenty years, one question has followed Jen everywhere she goes: what am I supposed to be doing with my life? It comes in the comments, the voicemails, the line after every event. And for a long time, Jen answered it like a career question, as if somewhere out there was a slot with her name on it and her only job was to find it and climb inside.
    In this solo episode, she puts down the word calling and picks up a different one: assignment. Not the thing waiting for you in the future, but the work already in your hands, in this season, on this street, with these people. Jen untangles work from worth, names the theology a lot of us absorbed that rewarded us for burning out, and shares the questions she uses to tell the difference between an assignment that is actually hers and one that is simply available. She also talks about the assignments that end, and why finishing one well is its own sacred work.
    Ordinary, faithful, unglamorous work is not the consolation prize for people who never found their capital C calling. It is the actual thing.
    This episode kicks off September's theme, Sacred Work, here on the show and over in the AWAKE Collective.
    Thought-provoking Quotes:
    "I have stopped asking what my calling is altogether. I started asking what my assignment is." - Jen Hatmaker
    "Sacred work is not a waiting room for a more important life that hasn't started yet." - Jen Hatmaker
    "The paycheck is not the assignment. The paycheck funds the life where the assignment happens." - Jen Hatmaker
    "Burnout is not evidence that you are on assignment. More likely it is evidence that you have taken on someone else's assignment." - Jen Hatmaker
    "A real assignment will cost you something. But an obligation costs you yourself. That's not the same bill." - Jen Hatmaker
    "Something does not have to be bad for it to be over." - Jen Hatmaker
    Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
    This month's Sacred Work lineup: Priya Parker, Dr. Marisa Franco, Zibby Owens, plus encore conversations with Barbara Brown Taylor and Mary Pipher
    Worth by Dr. Marisa Franco
    The AWAKE Collective monthly reflection guide. September's writing prompt: The work that is mine right now is...
    Your challenge this week: name one assignment you are actually on, then do the very next small thing it requires
    Leave Jen a voicemail: https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast
    Take the AWAKE Quiz: JenHatmaker.com/quiz

    Connect with Jen!
    Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
    Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
    Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
    Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
    Jen's YouTube -
    For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

    Jodi Picoult on Banned Books, Buried Truths, and the Story Behind Hollow Bones

    28/08/2026 | 51 mins.
    Description:
    Jodi Picoult is back, and she brought her thirtieth novel with her.
    If you have been in a book club at any point in the last thirty years, you know the name. Forty million copies in print. Thirty four languages. And, as of this year, the fourth most banned author in America, which Jen considers a five star review.
    Jodi and Jen get into all of it: what thirty years of publishing actually teaches you (start with the underwear), why she refuses to coast when she could easily phone it in, what she believes AI will never do to a reader, and the career she never asked for as an advocate against book banning. Then they turn to Hollow Bones, out September 15, a novel that began with an anonymous postcard and a letter from a jail cell and carried Jodi deep into postpartum psychosis, the dismissal of women by medicine, and the long shadow of 9/11. She also brings back a character you have wondered about since My Sister's Keeper.
    One heads up before you press play: this conversation includes discussion of postpartum psychosis, suicide, the death of a child, and school shootings. Please take good care of yourself. Support resources are linked below.
    Thought-provoking Quotes:
    If I'm not challenged by a book, why should you be?
    AI will never be human. Novels work because an author is reaching deep into the heart and soul of a reader and finding a chord to pluck that resonates. AI can imitate that. It can never really do it.
    It's fine for a parent to decide what his or her child should be reading. I advocate that. It is not fine for that parent to decide what everyone else's child should be reading.
    When we remove books from schools, we are not protecting children. We are taking away resources that help them deal with an increasingly complex world. And that is the opposite of protecting kids.
    Women are failed at every turn of their lives by the medical industry.
    The more you lie, the easier it gets to lie. And we are living in a time right now when lies are being peddled as truths.
    Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
    Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine, September 15)
    Pre-order signed copies plus an exclusive overlay from Still North Books
    Pre-order from Barnes & Noble for the sweepstakes and a letter
    Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and Mad Honey (with Jennifer Finney Boylan) by Jodi Picoult
    The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, adapted for the stage by Jodi Picoult
    PostSecret
    PEN America on book bans
    Postpartum Support International
    National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA
    988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988
    Guest's Links:
    Website - https://jodipicoult.com/
    Instagram - https://instagram.com/jodipicoult
    TikTok - https://tiktok.com/@jodipicoult
    Facebook -
About For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast
New York Times bestselling author Jen Hatmaker has arrived in the middle years, and she couldn't be happier about it.Jen has navigated the ins and outs of life, from career to parenting, marriage (and divorce), spiritual evolution, and the joys of being a hardcore Gen Xer.With each weekly episode, Jen serves as our "everywoman" guide to all the seasons, past, present, and future, as she walks excitedly and tenaciously into the second half of life.Some weeks, Jen brings her perspective straight to you, just her and the mic, talking through the things we're all navigating. Other weeks, she pulls up a chair for some of the most interesting and accomplished guests around, plus a few of her favorite friends, bringing insight, expertise, and a whole lot of heart to the most relevant topics of our time.While Jen has plenty of wisdom to share (and some pretty hilarious stories, too), she doesn't claim to know it all. From her honest solo reflections to her compelling conversations with guests, she's here to reassure you that you're not alone in this game of life.It's "For the Love" of all that is good, justified, exasperating, exhilarating, real, fun, and so much more.

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