In this episode of Honoring The Journey, Leslie interviews Dylan Naber-Cruz — a former U.S. Marine, cowboy, writer, and co-host of the God Squad Pod — about his journey through and out of fundamentalist Christianity. Dylan chats about his childhood shaped by competing denominations (Church of Christ and Southern Baptist), being baptized twice before age 14, enduring rapture anxiety well into his 30s, and living through the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. He traces the cracks in his faith to a college history class where he first encountered critical thinking, a debate assignment that exposed his inability to defend his beliefs with evidence, and reading Bart Ehrman and Thich Nhat Hanh's Living Buddha, Living Christ. The conversation also explores his religious trauma, undiagnosed PTSD from childhood abuse and a Marine Corps accident, the ways evangelicalism pathologized mental health, and the anger phase of deconstruction — before turning to how that anger can be channeled into community building, political action, self-care, and what Dylan calls "radical grace," drawing on permaculture principles and the example of Jesus as a template for envisioning a more just and compassionate world.

Today on Honoring the Journey, Leslie speaks with Jared Snyder, who spent 21 years as a "worker" — an itinerant, homeless minister — in the Two by Two church, a little-known fundamentalist sect founded in Ireland in 1897 that holds meetings in homes, sends preachers out in pairs with no permanent residence, and teaches it is God's one true way. Jared walks Leslie through the church's structure and culture, from Sunday meetings and "fundie voice" testimonies to the fear-based conformity and suppressed critical thinking that defined his upbringing, and shares how a reckless college period born of wanting to disqualify himself from the ministry paradoxically led to his submission to it. The conversation turns to his eventual departure in 2023, triggered by an overseas sex-abuse scandal and cover-up that cracked open years of quiet doubts, launching a rapid deconstruction that took him through anger, nihilism, and ultimately a liberating re-engagement with life on his own terms — a journey he now channels into writing a Substack and working as a certified non-religious spiritual director.

In this episode of Honoring the Journey, Leslie revisits a conversation with author and former pastor Colby Martin after a technical issue ruined their first recording at the Wild Goose Festival. Colby shares his personal journey from being raised in a Baptist family and sensing a call to ministry as a teenager, to pastoring at an evangelical megachurch in Arizona—where a single Facebook post celebrating the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" triggered a confrontation that ultimately led to his termination. He describes how studying the Bible's so-called "clobber passages" using rigorous evangelical scholarship led him to become fully affirming of LGBTQ inclusion, and how that conviction put him at odds with his church's leadership. The discussion also explores his evolving understanding of God—moving from a separate, personal being to a grounding presence of love—and his critique of how Christianity has reduced faith to intellectual belief rather than embodied action. Colby also introduces his forthcoming book, But What About?: The Most-Asked Questions on Faith, the Bible, and LGBTQ Inclusion, a follow-up to his earlier work Unclobbered, which addresses the common follow-up questions people still have after engaging the biblical texts on homosexuality.

In this episode of Honoring the Journey, host Leslie Nease sits down with Keith Giles — author, publisher, and co-owner of Quoir Publishing — for a wide-ranging conversation about the art of storytelling and the launch of his new science fiction imprint, Pink Beam Press. Keith shares free, practical advice for writers on crafting compelling stories, drawing on a memorable creative writing exercise that taught him the power of economy in prose: condense a four-page scene to two, then to one, and discover what your story actually needs. He explains how fiction can communicate big ideas "under the radar" without becoming preachy, why putting your most provocative points in the mouth of a villain character disarms readers and invites them to think, and how the novella format forces writers to cut the padding and get to the meat. Along the way, Keith tells the wild true story behind the Pink Beam name — a mystical experience had by science fiction legend Philip K. Dick — and makes the case that novels are "empathy boxes," connecting us to authors and to each other in ways that nonfiction simply can't.

Today we welcome Jason Becker, host of the podcast “What the Hell Do I Know? with JB,” for a powerful conversation about faith, doubt, deconstruction, and spirituality. Jason shares growing up Southern Baptist, being taught fear-based salvation and repeatedly praying the salvation prayer into his 30s, and how that coercion fueled later questions about hell, control in the American church, and conflicting doctrines. He describes moving into ministry, challenging treatment of LGBTQ+ people, planting an inclusive church in an LGBTQ+ theater in Atlanta, and later shifting to online conversations amid political and religious polarization. Together we discuss letting go of certainty, prioritizing the teachings of Jesus and present-day “bringing heaven here,” women’s roles in church, interpreting scripture through the lens of Jesus, and making space for empathy, accountability, and inclusion.

What happens in our bodies when the beliefs we grew up with begin to unravel? In this episode of Honoring the Journey, I talk with Dr. Shaleen Kendrick, author of Your Three Brains, about her experience growing up as a megachurch pastor’s daughter and how understanding the brain and nervous system helped her make sense of religious trauma. We explore fear, curiosity, and what it can look like to find wholeness as we make room for a new story.

On today's Honoring the Journey, Leslie sits down with Kallie Klug a somatic practitioner, yoga instructor, and author of Tired of Being Good, to explore the concept of "fawning" as a biological stress response rooted in people-pleasing. They discuss how growing up in religious environments can wire the nervous system for chronic fawning by coupling goodness with salvation and stigmatizing anger as sinful. Kallie breaks down the physiology behind the fawn response and how it layers freeze and appeasement on top of suppressed boundary expression, leading to physical ailments like jaw tension, neck pain, thyroid issues and more physical symptoms. They share personal stories of religious deconstruction, the guilt of leaving faith, and the liberating realization that the body's signals—including anger—carry intelligence rather than sin. Kallie guides listeners through a somatic practice to notice what fawning feels like in the body, offers practical tools for coming out of freeze by inviting small amounts of mobility and self-orientation, and reflects on her own journey of un-shaming her inner experience and embracing the fullness of being human.

This conversation with Vernique Esther went so many places, and I loved every minute of it! Vernique grew up in a beautiful and sometimes chaotic mix of denominations, cultures, and ideas about God, shaped by her Haitian and West African roots. Her journey eventually led her into a legalistic campus ministry that she now describes as “culty,” an early marriage that ended in devastating infidelity and divorce, and the political upheaval of 2016 that caused the cracks in her faith to break wide open. We talked about purity culture, patriarchal church systems, and the impossible burden so many women were taught to carry—the idea that we were somehow the “moral vessels” responsible for holding everything together. We were expected to suffer well, forgive endlessly, stay faithful, remain quiet, and somehow keep everyone else from falling apart, even when we were the ones being deeply harmed. Today, Vernique describes her faith as a Jesus-centered, non-religious spirituality. We had such an honest conversation about separating the character of Jesus from some of the violent and troubling portrayals of God we encounter elsewhere in Scripture, and what it looks like to keep following Jesus after so much of the religious framework around him has fallen away. Vernique also shared her powerful concept of “trauma languages”—the patterns our pain can create in relationships, including control and rejection sensitivity—and opened up about who holds space for her while she continues doing her own healing.

Today, Leslie has a conversation with Rob Zahn, a Lutheran pastor and author of LSD to Galilee. The episode weaves together Rob's unconventional path into ministry, the story of discovering his estranged father on his deathbed and uncovering his father's ties to a 1960s drug-smuggling countercultural movement (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love), and a deeply theological conversation about certainty, deconstruction, and where the divine can be found — including surprising historical and academic parallels between psychedelics and early Christian/religious practice. Together they explore themes of doubt, humility, religious trauma, freedom in faith, and staying curious rather than certain.

In this episode of Honoring the Journey, we hear from the lovely Promise Backlund (Eve Was Framed), a former worship leader in Charismatic Churches, to discuss her deconstruction from an evangelical upbringing to eventual atheism. We explore themes like the fear of hell and losing salvation, the loss and rebuilding of authentic friendships, navigating family relationships after leaving the faith, and the difference between dogmatic belief and lived kindness — all tied to her new book, The Gospel of Lies: Surviving and Resisting Evangelical Extremism.