Untidy Faith

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


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In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Kristin Mockler Young, author of The Other Side of Certainty, for a conversation about what certainty is actually doing for us—and why the thing we were handed as faith might have been a tool for detachment all along.
Topics Covered
* The cynical-but-true reason certainty appeals to people who don’t know what to do with hard emotions or injustice
* Why a faith that shatters and a faith that holds questions often come down to how the hard thing arrived
* What people gain when they trade black-and-white belief for something roomier, and the loss almost nobody escapes
* How certainty gets tangled up with identity and belonging, and why your people find it easier to let you go than face their own dissonance
* The question Kristin is still sitting in, and why she’s not rushing to resolve it
Timestamps:01:00 What Certainty Is Actually Doing for People04:00 The Difference Between Rooting Yourself in God and in What You Know About God09:00 What You Gain and What You Lose14:00 The Disorienting Moment You Notice the Cracks16:00 Authority vs. Power and How We Got Out of Balance17:00 How to Practice Curiosity When You Weren’t Trained For It20:00 Sitting in Not-Knowing Without Rushing23:00 The Question Kristin Hasn’t Resolved25:00 Finding the Book and Kristin’s Work


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kateboyd.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Tyler Hill for a conversation about what changes when you start your story with belovedness instead of brokenness—and why the exhaustion so many of us carry comes from chasing something we’ve had in our pocket the whole time.
Topics Covered
* The breathwork session that gave Tyler a visceral image of the womb, and what it revealed about his very first knowing
* Henri Nouwen’s three biggest lies (I am what I have, what I do, what others say) and how they become the raw material for a false self
* Why belovedness isn’t spiritual bypassing, and what Tyler learned about it from people in prison who can’t hang their hat on their morality
* The unexpected first spiritual practice Tyler prescribes, and why it involves $100 and an outfit you actually love
* What’s hardest to let go of when you awaken to your true self, and it isn’t the theology
Timestamps:03:00 The Six Months When Everything Fell Apart05:00 “Nothing to Prove, Nothing to Lose” and Why It Felt Like a Lie11:00 Baseball Tyler and the Making of a False Self18:00 The Practical Cost of Living from the False Self22:00 Belovedness That Isn’t Cheap Grace or Positive Thinking26:00 On-Ramps That Don’t Feel Like Obligation30:00 The Burning Bush and the Practice of Curiosity38:00 What You Have to Let Go Of46:00 Why Belovedness Requires a Feminine God47:00 How to Know You’re Living It, Not Just Believing It53:00 Finding Tyler’s Work and Monday Morning Blessings


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kateboyd.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Kristel Acevedo, author of Liberated at the Cross, for a conversation about what we lose when the cross gets flattened into a single transaction—and why a theology that has been used to justify suffering, silence, and submission might actually be the one that sets us free.
Topics Covered
* Why picking one atonement theory and calling the rest trash doesn’t square with a God who pursues relationship over and over
* What it means that Jesus wasn’t a victim of the cross, and how that reframes the whole event for people who’ve been handed it as guilt
* How liberation theology’s systemic lens challenges the individualism of Western evangelicalism without abandoning personal faith
* Why Kristel spent years downplaying her Latinidad in white-majority spaces, and what changed when someone asked her to write from her culture
* The one thing the church would stop doing if it took liberation at the cross seriously (hint: it involves looking away)
Timestamps:02:00 Beyond Transaction: Meaning and Method at the Cross05:00 When the Cross Has Been Used Against You10:00 Catholic Guilt and the Crucifix That Said “You Did This”13:00 Why “Liberated” and Not Some Other Word18:00 What a Latina Perspective Reveals About the Cross22:00 What the Church Would Stop Doing23:00 What a Cross-Shaped Life Actually Looks Like24:00 Finding the Study and Kristel’s Work


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In this episode of the Untidy Faith Podcast, I sit down with Elizabeth Berget, author of Love Like a Mother, for a conversation about what happens when we take maternal metaphors for God as seriously as paternal ones—and why the church’s exclusion of feminine language for God isn’t just theologically incomplete but leaves women spiritually homeless in motherhood.
Topics Covered
* What gets quietly excluded when “God the Father” is our only or primary image
* How the Hebrew word for God’s compassion (rachum) in Exodus 34:6—God’s first self-description—is tied to the word for womb (rechem)
* How motherhood becomes a spiritual desert when your brain changes more than any other point in life (including puberty) but nobody tells you to expect your faith to change, and churches assume laziness instead of recognizing you’re doing a lot
* The disconnect between how motherhood is emphasized in church circles but under-resourced spiritually
* What’s at stake if we keep handing people a God who can only be described in paternal terms

Timestamps:
01:00 What We Describe and Exclude with “God the Father”
06:00 All God Language Is Metaphor (We Forgot That)
10:00 Why Motherhood Feels Like a Spiritual Desert
16:00 Rachum: God’s Maternal Compassion Lost in Translation
23:00 Embodied Verbs and the Incarnational God
29:00 What Spiritual Formation Actually Looks Like for Mothers
35:00 What’s at Stake When We Exclude Feminine Language
37:00 Finding the Book and Elizabeth’s Work


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit kateboyd.substack.com/subscribe