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In August last year we had the opportunity to sit down and have a converation with Peter Enns. Peter's insights regarding certainty have inspired much of Jeff's work. We decided to share that conversation with you again. Enjoy.

Every day feels like a forced-choice quiz: left or right, religious or secular, believer or skeptic, my people or your people. We want a different way to live, so we invited Bible scholar, author, and The Bible for Normal People co-founder Pete Enns to help us name what so many of us feel but rarely say out loud: certainty can become a trap, and honesty can be the first real step toward healing.

We talk about why admitting “I don’t know” is not a failure of faith, but a move toward authenticity. Pete connects spiritual doubt to the deeper reality that the world itself is saturated with mystery, from quantum physics to consciousness to the limits of language about God. We wrestle with Pascal’s wager, the role of intuition and experience in Bible interpretation, and why treating the Bible like a simple rulebook often collapses under its own weight.

The conversation gets practical and personal: what happens when certainty-driven communities push back, and what kinds of churches or communities actually make room for questioners. Pete shares why he remains Christian after so much deconstruction, how liturgical practice can “honor the head without living in it,” and why the cross was not just painful but profoundly shameful in the ancient world. That scandal flips power on its head, and it should challenge any attempt to use Christianity as control.

If you are navigating faith deconstruction, religious trauma, progressive Christianity, agnosticism, or just trying to find common ground with people you love, this one is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who is tired of the sides, and leave a review with the question you are still carrying.

©NoahHeldmanMusic

https://livingoncommonground.buzzsprout.com

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Life can feel like it’s been chopped into rival zones: work, church, school, online, each one demanding you declare a side. We’re two friends who don’t fit the usual pairing a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist and we keep testing a simple question: can you stay close without surrendering your convictions?

We start by revisiting Stoicism, and why the modern “neo-Stoic” wave can be both useful and incomplete. Once you bring Logos back into the picture, classical Stoicism stops being mere grit and becomes a framework for meaning, virtue, and endurance when life gets brutal. From there, we pull on the thread of political labels and how “neocon” and “neolib” often operate as pejoratives that hide more than they reveal. We talk incentives, think tanks, bureaucracy, and the way power can keep the language of freedom while swapping in something else.

Then we get honest about why Atlas Shrugged can make you furious: a “free market” that isn’t free, regulation that protects insiders, and people benefiting from work they tried to block. A Steinbeck story about Junius Maltby sharpens the dilemma even more who gets to decide the right way to live, and when does “help” become harm? We end by circling back to community, inclusion, boundaries, and a Stoic challenge we’re trying to practice: letting the hardest obstacle become the path to growth.

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the show with a friend you disagree with, and leave a review. What belief or label has kept you from seeing the person in front of you?

©NoahHeldmanMusic

https://livingoncommonground.buzzsprout.com

Send us Fan Mail

Every part of life can feel like it comes with a forced choice: left or right, religious or secular, your people or their people. We sit down as a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist who are also close friends, and we ask a risky question right up front: if we met today, would we still choose each other in a culture built to split us apart?

From Holy Week and Palm Sunday to a viral clip claiming “true Christianity” will sound socialist to conservatives and fascist to liberals, we dig into why faith and politics get misheard so easily. We talk about how labels like “neo,” “neocon,” “neoliberal,” and even “red pill” can hide more than they reveal, and how the words we pick often betray the positions we think we’re neutrally analyzing. If you care about depolarization, civil discourse, and building common ground, this is a candid look at what actually derails conversation.

Then we go deeper: the historical Jesus as a Jewish apocalypticist, the problem of exclusion in theology, and the uncomfortable truth that many of us love religion most when it agrees with our instincts. We wrestle with moral intuition using slavery texts as an example, debate whether history has any arc toward justice, and connect the whole thing to Stoicism, the logos, and “transcendental values” like truth, beauty, courage, love, mercy, and inclusion. Even when we disagree about whether meaning is objective, we still ask how to live like our values matter.

If you’ve ever felt exhausted by culture war scripts but still want honesty, listen, share it with a friend who disagrees with you, and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. After you listen, what value feels most real to you right now, and why?

©NoahHeldmanMusic

https://livingoncommonground.buzzsprout.com