Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Andy Crouch's The Tech-Wise Family isn't about keeping pornography out of your home. It's about building the kind of home where you know what you actually want — and where technology doesn't quietly replace it. In part two of this conversation, Michael and Andy get into the ten commitments at the heart of the book, and they're not what you'd expect.
They talk about why the goal is wisdom and courage rather than limits, and how untethered access to technology quietly reinforces the fear of being known. They discuss what Sabbath actually looks like — not collapsing on the couch but feasting, playing, worshipping, and resting — and why Andy thinks it's the most broken commandment. They get into what kids say they actually want help with when it comes to devices, which turns out not to be pornography but sleep. And the episode ends somewhere no one expects: at the bedside of the dying, and what it means to be a family that knows how to show up, put the phone down, and stay.
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Andy Crouch didn't set out to write a parenting book. But when he'd mention offhand that his family had no screens in the house until his kids turned ten, young parents would rush to him afterward with what he described as hungry desperation in their eyes. The Tech-Wise Family came out of that hunger — and out of original research with Barna that helped quantify what most people were already sensing: something has shifted, and it isn't just about the kids.
In part one of this two-part conversation, Michael and Andy discuss why the real problem isn't screen-time limits but the entire posture of a life shaped around "easy everywhere." Andy makes a surprising case that the quest for effortless technology is, at its root, the same quest as alchemy, and that something spiritually dangerous coils around devices that promise to make us like God. They also talk about boredom: what it actually is, why creativity lives on the other side of it, and what we lose when we never have to sit still long enough to find out.
Part two continues next week.
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Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold — not to hide the damage, but to make the fractures the most beautiful part. Mako Fujimura, one of the world's leading contemporary artists, and his wife Haejin, an attorney and founder of Embers International, have built their lives and work around that image. This conversation is about what it actually looks like to believe it.
Mako talks about his own experience of 9/11 as a Ground Zero resident, and why he sees making — painting, writing, building an organization — as an act of invoking new creation in the middle of darkness. Haejin talks about the women and children her team serves in Mumbai's red light district, and why Kintsugi is the only metaphor honest enough for what restoration means there. They also talk about what the pandemic revealed about who a society actually depends on, why Jesus chose to appear after the resurrection as a wounded human, and what it means that the Kintsugi master doesn't begin mending until he can see beauty in the fragments.
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This is the second half of Michael's conversation with Dr. Dan Allender, and it's the more personal of the two. Dan opens by talking about his mother, her death earlier that year, the borderline unpredictability, the way she triangulated him into a surrogate role he never asked for and couldn't escape. He shares it not as a confession but as a map: here is where the wound began, here is how long it took to see it clearly, here is what it cost and what it gave.
From there, they talk about what the healing process actually looks like — not as a program, but as a decades-long practice of reading your own life with new eyes. Dan's closing answer is one of the most quietly powerful moments in ten years of this show: write your story, read it to someone, and then face the unsaid. The fear, he says, isn't really that we'll discover how broken we are. It's that we'll discover how beautiful we are.
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Dan Allender has spent thirty years doing work most people would rather not look at — and in this first of two conversations, he and Michael go there together. Dan is a psychologist, professor at The Seattle School, and the author of The Wounded Heart, among many others. Michael first encountered his work in 1989, at one of Dan's conferences, in a season when his own double life had just come undone. That history is present in every minute of this conversation.
They talk about why sexual brokenness isn't a category that belongs only to people who've experienced abuse — it belongs to all of us. They explore what lust actually means: not just desire, but desire as relief and as revenge. They discuss the ways women bear the image of God differently than men, and what that has to do with misogyny and the #metoo movement. And Dan talks about shame not as the wound, but as the thing that — when we stop running from it — leads us back toward God.
Part two continues the conversation.
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ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST:
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