The Joshua S. Porter Podcast

My new novel, The Great Georgia Dirt Dragon, is out on Tuesday, October 1st. Of all the things I've written or made, this is my favorite. You can order a paperback, audio, or digital copy wherever you prefer to buy books.   What follows is chapter one of the audiobook version, read by the amazing Rickel Hayes.  

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more. Jeff "Suffering" Bettger has been an integral part of controversial acts like Ninety Pound Wuss, Raft of Dead Monkeys, and Suffering and the Hideous Thieves. We have a conversation about his philosophy pf art, inspiration and influence, and whether or not Jeff regrets any of the outrageous art he's made.

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more. Matt Hughes works in advertising, but he's also a voracious reader, a music lover, a cinephile, and he wrote a novel for the fun of it. After a terrible season of depression, Matt found healing and renewal, and he decided to rethink the way he approaches art and entertainment.

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more.   Tyler Hanns has been doing design, illustration, filmmaking and creative carpentry for years—many of which he spent working with Christian non-profits and megachurches. He and I are about talk about compromise, communication, and the toll “branding” can take on creativity.

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more.   Christian Dawson is the pastor of worship at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon. He and I are about to have a conversation about musical influences, what qualifies as worship music, and pushing up against church expectations with art.

With All Its Teeth: Sex, Violence, Profanity, and the Death of Christian Art is out. Find out more.   Whitney DePaoli is famous for Sugar and Sparrow, a cake-baking and decorating blog that has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, eventually leading to the bestselling cookbook Anyone Can Cake. But what her cake-loving social media fans might not realize is that before Whitney was famous for her culinary creativity, she led worship bands in church and has since quietly written and released music in experimental punk rock bands—and she didn't arrive at any of those gigs painlessly. We talk about the way tragedy affects creativity, reinventing yourself in new mediums, and living in radically different creative spaces.

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more. Chad Johnson was a prominent figure in underground music before he became a big wheel in the Christian music industry. He's seen his fair share of deconstruction, but it was a secret battle against addiction that brought him to the precipice of his own deconversion.

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more.   Gavin Bennett is a pastor of communities in Portland, Oregon who has experienced a lot of pain and confusion and has walked with others through even more of it. But he can't seem to shake this thing called the church.

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more.   Jarin Oda is a youth pastor in Portland, Oregon, who somehow survived both youth groups and Portland without losing his faith. Barely.

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more.   Stephen Christian (of Anberlin and Anchor & Braille fame) has not only survived the pitfalls of the Christian music industry with his faith intact but has become a pastor. How?

Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more. Evan Wickham was a worship leader who became a pastor but not before some painful undoing of the theology with which he was raised. How did he not undo all of it?

Hakeem Bradley was raised in what he calls a black identity cult to understand the Bible as a tool for oppression. But, somehow, he became a youth group leader, a pastor, and now works with the Bible Project out of Portland, Oregon. He's seen the best and worst of church and hasn't bailed.   Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold. Find out more.

Today, Bethany Allen is a pastor of Spiritual Formation & Leadership Development, but it's been a rough road getting here.   Death to Deconstruction: Reclaiming Faithfulness as an Act of Rebellion is out now wherever books and audiobooks are sold.

Conversations with people who have plenty of the great building blocks for a classic deconversion story: Abandonment, misogyny, hypocrisy, racism, doubt, disillusionment, and failure—but, all of them continue to follow Jesus. I'm going to ask them why.   Order Death to Deconstruction, by Joshua S. Porter, wherever you prefer to buy books.