Flirting With Enchantment

What if God’s exact location is a Dollar General? My friend Andy Squyres finds glory in strange and mundane places. We work through all four tracks on his EP Praise Songs, talking about finding God in everyday life, unanswered prayer, and learning to live without a breakthrough. Andy shares how grief changes his songwriting and why he still wants his most Pentecostal friends praying for him. Along the way, we talk fishing, Buc-ee’s billboards, and worship songs that make room for what people...

What if you’re so busy trying to fix your life that you forget to live it? We spend a lot of energy trying to understand ourselves, make better decisions, avoid pain, and gain some control over where our lives are going. But painter and therapist Josh Jensen wonders if we’ve begun to mistake thinking for doing—and knowledge for wisdom. Josh and I talk about overthinking, our illusion of control, and the parts of life that can only be known by actually experiencing them. We explore the differe...

Wine tastes like people. It tastes like the soil, the weather, the altitude, the years—and the hands that tended it. Because wine doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from a particular place, at a particular time, made by particular people. We’re like wine. We come from places, from times, and from people. Families, friendships, traditions, neighborhoods. We’re shaped by the ground beneath our feet and by the people who have known us and loved us. But in a world where it’s increasingly possibl...

Human beings are storytelling creatures. Whether we realize it or not, we all live by guiding stories and those stories shape thousands of small decisions that eventually shape our lives, our culture, and the world we’re making together. So what happens when our guiding stories become cynical, defined more by what we’re tearing down than what we’re building? And could cultural and spiritual renewal begin by telling better stories? John Mark sits down with cultural theologian Paul Anleitner to...

What do you do when singing has been your whole life and suddenly you can’t sing anymore? For Strahan Coleman, chronic illness and the loss of his voice forced him to slow down and discover an inner life he hadn’t known how to access before. In losing the primary way he had always connected with God and the world, Strahan found himself entering what he calls the “interior wilderness” and discovering a deeper life of prayer. We talk about suffering and desire, the attention economy, why we bec...

What if the life you’re longing for isn’t somewhere out there waiting for you, but hidden inside the life you already have? Poet, songwriter, author, and community builder Joshua Luke Smith joins me for a conversation about suffering, limitation, freedom, creativity, and learning to find God in the life that’s actually in front of us. Joshua shares what more than a decade of working with incarcerated men has taught him about belonging, prayer, and the strange freedom that can emerge inside li...

Conversations about the search for meaning in modern life through the lens of Christian spirituality. Exploring the deeper longings beneath the surface of faith, art, culture, and the stories that shape the way we see the world. Hosted by artist and author John Mark McMillan. New episodes every other Tuesday starting September 1st, 2026. Have you ever stopped to wonder how we've built a world our great-great-grandparents would have mistaken for magic, and yet we find ourselves more anxi...