A lively dialogue with Dr. Ruth Haley Barton about forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God. Dr. Ruth Haley Barton is the Founder of The Transforming Center, which exists to create space for God to strengthen leaders and transform communities.
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Category: Religion & Spirituality › Christianity
Description
A lively dialogue with Ruth Haley Barton about forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God in the midst of leading. Learn more at www.transformingcenter.org.
Summary Welcome to season 30! In this season, titled Journeying Through Stages of Faith in the Family of God, we will be exploring the stages of faith as a model for our own growth and our ability to support our communities in their growth. Looking through the lens of faith and human development, as well as biblical stories, Ruth will share four distinct stages of faith and provide listeners with support for themselves as well as thoughts on how leaders can...
Summary In this episode, Ruth closes our podcast season on “becoming human,” reflecting on an incarnational spirituality that is lived in the God-ordained reality of our bodies rather than bifurcated from them. She invites listeners to notice what they now know, what questions have surfaced, and how suffering and honest inquiry shape theology and spiritual leadership, calling leaders to stay present to bodily experience in themselves and those they shepherd. Ruth closes with four practices—paying attention to the body, caring for...
Summary This week, Ruth is joined by retired pastor and spiritual director Bill Shereos for a conversation about aging and diminishment as God-ordained realities. Prompted by the deaths of close friends and family, Bill reflects on accepting physical limitation, resisting a cultural bias that sidelines older people, and learning dependence as a spiritual practice. They discuss transitions as “running with the baton,” the importance of grieving (especially for leaders who officiate funerals), and how accompanying parents in death awakens daily awareness...
Summary This week Ruth welcomes writer Jonathan Merritt for a conversation on the intersection of our sexuality and spirituality. Jonathan describes growing up at the center of conservative evangelical culture as a Southern Baptist leader’s son, internalizing damaging stories about homosexuality that produced shame, secrecy, and hiding. He recounts experiences of God’s presence, guidance, and “shattering” as the great iconoclast, including being publicly outed in 2012, leaving his church context, and entering a wilderness of discernment. Both Ruth and Jonathan connect...
Summary Today’s episode explores sexuality and spirituality as God-ordained realities. Ruth is joined by Rev. Dr. David Hughes and producer Colleen Powell, to discuss church and cultural distortions—repression, purity culture, objectification, and abuse—while affirming sexuality as a “very good” gift meant for joy, love, and generativity, including for singles and those not sexually active. In conversation the three share formative experiences as they relate to sexuality, observations on ministry power dynamics; purity culture’s impact, and more. Season 29 is titled...
Summary Ruth welcomes Tiffany Childress Price and her husband, Bobby Price, into a conversation focusing on their experiences with neurodivergence as a physiological reality and place of encounter with God. Tiffany explains neurodivergence and “twice exceptional” (2E) brain differences in her sons, describing asynchronous development and the advocacy burden when children are misunderstood, labeled, excluded, or shamed in school. Bobby shares receiving an autism spectrum diagnosis in his 50s after his sons’ evaluations, naming lifelong masking, the grief of not feeling...
Summary This week Ruth is joined by TC Alum Jake Partridge for a conversation on mental health. Jake shares his story of three major depressive episodes and ongoing anxiety, describing depression as prolonged, reality-coloring despair, isolation, languishing, and a loud inner critic, and anxiety as obsessive, control-seeking mental overdrive. Together they discuss biopsychosocial-spiritual integration, the role of medication in “raising a baseline,” and the influence of transitions and attachment insecurity on faith. Jake describes learning to “rest the mind,” make peace...
Summary This week we have a special episode with two people very close to the hearts of our Transforming Community. In our first conversation Ruth welcomes TC alum Christine Boye in a conversation that was recorded in January of 2025 about illness and mortality as part of the experience of being human. Christine was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer in June 2019, discovered she was pregnant the same week, and learned in September 2022 that the cancer returned and spread...
Summary Ruth welcomes Rev. Dr. Prince Rivers to discuss becoming human with God in our bodies through the complicated embodied realities of race and ethnicity in the United States. They reflect on current events in May 2026, including a Supreme Court ruling challenging Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, racial profiling, and immigration fears, and Prince describes the heightened anxiety, hesitation, and economic insecurity he sees in his congregation. As a parent, pastor, and leader, he shares concerns for his...
Summary This week Ruth welcomes Donna McIntosh, a spiritual director and hospital-trained chaplain and TC alum, to speak to the experience of when our body betrays us. Donna describes experiencing a stroke while in seminary and the primary and secondary losses that followed—health, confidence, work, reading tolerance, gait, balance, clapping, speech, and fine motor skills—along with ongoing physical challenges and the need to slow down and accept care for herself. She shares wrestling with healing expectations and blame, finishing seminary despite...
Summary With longtime friends and ministry colleagues Glenn and Margo Balsis, Ruth introduces a spiritual conversation on grief and loss. Margo and Glenn recount their daughter Kristen’s cystic fibrosis diagnosis, 28-year life, and death, and their journey with God through grief. Glenn describes the pressure to “defend God,” and the loneliness of others trying to fix their pain. Together all three reflect on marriage, debunk divorce statistics after child loss, and share the formative role of contemplative practices and Transforming Community...
Summary Welcome back for our twenty-ninth season of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast. This season is years in the making. We’ve long wanted to bring a season full of Spirit-directed conversations on the experience of being human, in all its complicated glory, but the timing was never quite right. And now, it’s finally here: Season 29 | Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies. Our goals this season are to confront the dualism between life in the body...
Summary Here we are on the threshold of another Lenten season! Since the Paschal mystery is the culmination of the Lenten season, we are going to "begin with the end in mind" by exploring this great mystery of our faith and where it might be playing itself out in our own lives. Relying on Fr. Ron Rolheiser’s description in The Holy Longing, Ruth identifies the five movements of the Paschal mystery and the inner dynamics that can help us enter more...
Summary In this final episode of the Advent season Ruth and Marilyn discuss the unique spiritual invitations and soul work of the winter season. They touch on the inward journey of self-examination, processing grief, and embracing the transformation in life's dormancy. They conclude with a deep discussion on themes of letting go, living in the present, and the spiritual significance of endings and new beginnings. The episode also features a poignant poem by Robert Hayden and an Advent-themed prayer by Ted...
Summary In this week’s episode, Ruth and Marilyn discuss the themes of winter and vulnerability. They explore the metaphorical storms of winter, praying beyond safety, and infinite longing. The conversation also touches on the challenges posed by climate change, the significance of collective humility, and the importance of grappling with complex, real-world issues within church communities. Marilyn concludes by reading her poem 'After the Fire,' reflecting on loss, renewal, and the essential nature of vulnerability in the spiritual journey. Questions...
Media
Duration: 3146 seconds · Size: 96 MB
Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership
A lively dialogue with Ruth Haley Barton about forging and maintaining a life-giving connection with God.
