Resilience for the Spiritually Weary, with Tish Harrison Warren
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Release Date: 05/19/2026
Spiritual Formation at Global Scale, with Gary Haugen and Kevin Jenkins
Conversing with Mark Labberton
How can a Christian humanitarian organization keep Christ at the center of its mission while working in the world’s most difficult places, with thousands of staff spread across dozens of countries and cultures? Gary Haugen, founder and CEO of International Justice Mission, and Kevin Jenkins, former president and CEO of World Vision International, both understand their organizations to be foundationally Christian. But even in ministries where you would expect spiritual formation to be at the center, it takes work to help large global teams live up to their mission. Speaking with Mark...
info_outline
Permanent Questions: Celebrating Ten Years of Conversing, with David Brooks
Conversing with Mark Labberton
What if the deepest problems in American life were pre-political? It’s often said that “culture is upstream from politics”—meaning that what we see in political news, speeches, ads, debates, and elections is symptomatic of a deeper cause. The conflicts, troubles, injustices, and sufferings that many people experience as political are more likely rooted in moral and spiritual crises. This week’s episode marks ten years of Conversing, which launched on October 8, 2016. To celebrate, Mark Labberton is joined by David Brooks, a staff writer at The Atlantic and presidential fellow...
info_outline
A Ukrainian Pastor on Faith, Hope, and the Terror of War, with Fyodor Raichynets
Conversing with Mark Labberton
War has wracked Ukraine for 1,678 days—outlasting both World Wars. In this conversation with Mark Labberton, Fyodor Raichynets—a theologian at Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, pastor of a church in Bucha, and a military chaplain serving on the front lines in Kyiv—explains what it is like to be under near-constant drone and ballistic attack and how that has affected his faith, memory, and experience of time. War has reshaped the way he loves, forgives, and serves; it has induced a fear even to hope. Together, they discuss trauma as a national condition and the temptation...
info_outline
Attention, Agency, and Power, with David French
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In a country splitting apart over so much, three words point toward a better way to live: attention, agency, and power. David French returns to Conversing to take up all three. A New York Times opinion writer since January 2023, French writes from a conservative theological background about law, culture, religion, and armed conflict, and has found himself writing directly into the middle of divided hostilities. French comments on how attention, agency, and power took shape in him, and how each gets distorted by partisan fundamentalisms (on both the right and left) built to shut conversation...
info_outline
Reclaiming Civic Agency, with Michael Wear
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Underneath all the political polarization, rage-baiting, punditry, and aggression, there is a crisis of civic agency. American citizens feel politically disempowered and undermined. And the effect, over time, will be that we lose our ability to self-govern. What is needed is a path between belligerence and withdrawal. In this episode, Michael Wear (Center for Christianity and Public Life, author of The Spirit of Our Politics) joins Mark Labberton to discuss provocation and political effectiveness; the value of gentleness in public life; concrete signs of hope in local political action; the...
info_outline
Loud Justice, with Sharon Cohn Wu
Conversing with Mark Labberton
“It is not just that God has a heart for justice,” says Sharon Cohn Wu (International Justice Mission), “it is that it is inextricably his character and cannot be otherwise, and that it is so perfectly married with mercy and grace that we somehow survive.” Sharon Cohn Wu has served for more than twenty years with IJM, where she is now regional president of North America. A lawyer (JD, Harvard Law), she has spent her career calling for “loud justice”—that is, visible, swift, community-wide accountability—using the criminal justice system and political will to help IJM achieve...
info_outline
Win or Lose, Run for Something, with Jeanelle Austin
Conversing with Mark Labberton
In February 2026, Jeanelle Austin filed for Minnesota Senate District 62. She started canvassing her district during a polar vortex, and persisted through triple-digit summer heat. And in August she lost in the Democratic Primary. In this episode, she sits down with Mark Labberton to reflect on what this experience has taught her about power, democracy, and what citizenship and neighbor-love means in the South Minneapolis neighborhood where she grew up. The executive director of Rise & Remember—the nonprofit that preserves the memorial at George Floyd Square—Austin followed a...
info_outline
Women, Misogyny, and the Bible, with Beth Moore
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Growing up, Beth Moore was taught that 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 were the whole of what scripture had to say about women: submissive and silent. The founder of Living Proof Ministries and one of the most widely read Bible teachers in America, Moore objects to a hermeneutic limited to those passages. In this episode, Mark Labberton revisits his 2018 conversation with Beth Moore, recorded in the months following her viral open letter, “A Letter to My Brothers.” Almost 10 years later, debates over women in leadership and whether women are free to use their full gifts in the full...
info_outline
The Human Heart, with David Anderson
Conversing with Mark Labberton
Our hearts are restless, says Saint Augustine, until they find their rest in God. The biological science and the spiritual metaphor are in agreement here. Over the course of billions of beats, our hearts never stop to rest. Your magnificent heart exchanges or pumps your entire blood volume, just over a gallon, every single minute. (Athlete hearts can pump up to 10 gallons per minute!) In this episode, Mark Labberton discusses matters of the heart with his close friend Dr. David Anderson, a cardiologist of four decades who trained at Johns Hopkins and helped launch one of the first...
info_outline
The God of the Unfinished, with Walter Brueggemann
Conversing with Mark Labberton
The Old Testament, Walter Brueggemann said, is an old text that simply refuses to stay old. “It reads like it was written yesterday.” For him, God offers no artificial closure, but is active in the meantime, and at peace with the “unfinished.” Walter Brueggemann died on June 5, 2025, at the age of ninety-two, and his own influence is unfinished. This episode is from the Conversing archives: a conversation Mark Labberton hosted with Brueggemann at Fuller Seminary for the 2015 Fuller Forum “Justice, Grace, and Law in the Mission of God.” Brueggemann was an Old Testament scholar for...
info_outlineWe tell conversion stories. We tell deconversion stories. But where are the stories of the long, complicated, and faithful middle? Author and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren joins Mark Labberton on her new book What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience—a vision for faith that endures the long, often dry middle of life. Drawing on the Desert Mothers and Fathers, she names a quiet crisis many believers know but rarely speak: spiritual weariness, prayer that goes silent, and the cultural pull to blow up your life rather than stay in it.
"Grit is an essential ingredient of grace, and resilience is indispensable if we are to become who we are made to be."
In this episode with Mark Labberton, Warren reflects on her own burnout as a writer, mother, and priest, and what the ancient monks taught her about how to keep going. Together they discuss revivalism's distortions, stability of the heart, the church in exile, patience as resistance to consumerism, communal hope, and what it means to stay in your cell.
Episode Highlights
"What our culture and what the church tends to lack are stories of a long, steady continuation in faith."
"Grit is an essential ingredient of grace, and resilience is indispensable if we are to become who we are made to be."
"We meet God in the midst of that, not on the other side of that."
"If the moral majority was kind of dressing Jesus up and putting him in a red tie, it didn't seem like a solution to just, for then, to me, put Jesus in a blue tie."
"Our primary exile isn't a political state, it's that we're in sin."
About Tish Harrison Warren
Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and Anglican priest in Austin, Texas, and the author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year), Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year), and her newest, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience. She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for the New York Times and was a columnist for Christianity Today. She serves as the C.S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence for the Anglican Episcopal House of Studies at Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminary, a senior fellow with The Trinity Forum, and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church.
Helpful Links and Resources
What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Tish Harrison Warren https://tishharrisonwarren.com/whatgrowsinwearylands
Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren https://tishharrisonwarren.com/liturgy-of-the-ordinary
Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work, or Watch, or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren https://www.ivpress.com/prayer-in-the-night
The Deepest Place: Suffering and the Formation of Hope by Curt Thompson https://curtthompsonmd.com/books/
Immanuel Anglican Church, Austin https://www.immanuelatx.org
Tish Harrison Warren online
https://tishharrisonwarren.com
https://www.instagram.com/tishharrisonwarren/
Show Notes
- Award-winning Anglican priest, author, and former New York Times newsletter writer
- Origins of What Grows in Weary Lands—a season of mid-career weariness
- Sandwich generation: young kids and a mother with Alzheimer's
- "It felt like I told my husband, like the line went dead."
- Reading from chapter one—revivalism, deconversion, and the missing middle
- "What our culture and what the church tends to lack are stories of a long, steady continuation in faith."
- Perseverance—the "eat your vegetables" of the spiritual life
- "Grit is an essential ingredient of grace, and resilience is indispensable if we are to become who we are made to be."
- Reconversion, not deconstruction
- Stabilitas cordis—stability of the heart
- The eat-pray-love trap and mid-life self-reinvention
- Striving, and treating God like an app or an Uber driver
- Desert Mothers and Fathers, third through fifth century
- "Stay in your cell"—a holistic call far beyond quiet-time advice
- Benedict's vow of stability, drawn from desert wisdom
- The American church as a church in exile, not a promised land
- "If the moral majority was dressing Jesus up in a red tie, it didn't seem like a solution to put Jesus in a blue tie."
- "Our primary exile isn't a political state, it's that we're in sin."
- Charlie—incandescent joy after a long, hard middle
- Hilda—fifty-eight years of daily prayer for her father's conversion
- "Impatience is what keeps you buying things. Patience doesn't make anybody any money."
- Resilience is communal—Curt Thompson on brains that cannot hope alone
- The long view: small repair, slow institutional change, hope carried together
#ChristianResilience #TishHarrisonWarren #WhatGrowsInWearyLands #DesertFathers #StabilityOfTheHeart #SpiritualFormation #AnglicanFaith #FaithAndCulture #ConversingPodcast #MarkLabberton
Production Credits
Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.