Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

In 1995, Michael sat down with Eugene Peterson for a conversation that was published in the Mars Hill Review and later in Eugene's own book Subversive Spirituality. There were no podcasts then. No one could have imagined that someday a person driving to work or sitting alone at home could put on headphones and hear a conversation recorded decades earlier. Eugene believed words were never merely information — they carried presence, they revealed, they deepened intimacy. So Michael began to won...

Dr. Alison Cook is a psychologist, host of The Best of You podcast, and the author of The Secure Soul — and the first line she wrote for that book was: a part of me doesn't like God very much. She assumed her editor would cut it. Her editor said it was staying. That moment — a prayer walk in London, an eight-year-old part of her that didn't want to be there — opens a conversation with Michael about what it actually looks like to pay attention to the inner life. Alison and Michael talk about b...

Seven spots remain for the October men's weekend — and Michael wanted the men (and women!) who still needed to hear about it to hear it from two men who've been there. Matt found out about the Restoring the Soul podcast from a therapist in 2018, listened for a few months, heard an ad for the men's weekend, and signed up. He showed up to the airport terrified, texted his therapist from the gate, flew to Denver, and left four days later with something he'd never had before: the sense that he wa...

Dr. Jim Wilder has been thinking about the relationship between brain science and spiritual formation since before most people knew the question existed. He trained under one of the inventors of the EEG machine, spent years working alongside Dallas Willard, and has spent decades building what he calls the Life Model — a unified account of what it looks like to grow up into the likeness of Christ, neurologically and spiritually. This conversation is an hour inside that work. Michael and Jim ta...

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 bei...