Season 6

Addiction has a pervasive impact on our culture, ranging from legally available opioids and alcohol to illicit narcotics; addiction even manifests itself in mundane areas of our lives as well.

The stories always come out afterward: churches fall apart, ministries fail, and congregants carry hurt with them for years. The issue of spiritual abuse in the church is both deeply painful but also relevant. We have heard the stories, listened to the podcasts, and seen or experienced the damage ourselves.

What are the challenges that female executives face in today’s business climate? What is the likelihood of female entrepreneurs finding the funding they need to start their businesses? Is it possible to lead a business when your partner is also your spouse?

Suffering is at the core of the Christian story, yet our experience of suffering as Christians creates all kinds of cognitive, spiritual, and emotional dissonance. Tim Challies, Dan’s guest on this episode of Working with Dan Doriani, explicitly identifies this tension when he asks: “When we faced this time of tragedy, it was the time to ask: what is all this theology going to do for you? In your moment of need, are you going to turn away from it, or are you going to go deeper into it?”

“Our creativity is better with seasons of rest,” says Kelly Kapic, author of “You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News” and today’s guest on Working with Dan Doriani. Rest is a reflection of our limitations, and limitations are more broadly a sign of our humanness. God made us finite, with boundaries to what we can accomplish. Our creatureliness, our dependency, and our finitude lead us toward humility, or at least it ought to. Dan and Kelly work through all the implications of being human in this illuminating conversation.

Music has the ability to comfort, to inspire, to bring us to a place of worship. Sandra McCracken has been making music that does all of that for several decades. Sandra has had a successful solo career and has been a member of several influential and well-known groups. Perhaps best known for her recent work crafting songs from the Psalms intended for congregational singing, Sandra and Dan discuss the nature of song craft in this episode. How does inspiration strike – or does it? And why the Psalms are such fertile ground to compose modern hymns.