Restoring the Soul with Michael John Cusick

Many of us have been handed a faith of victory and failure, where the heroic are celebrated, and the weak quietly disappear from the story. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura has found something truer in the darkness. Through Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence and the bronze images of Christ that persecuted Japanese Christians were forced to step on, Mako reflects on a gospel big enough for anyone who doubts they can ever be strong.
He and Michael also talk about why beauty matters most when the world feels chaotic, how anyone can care for culture the way a gardener tends soil, and why Mako calls Silence a Holy Saturday book. And he opens up about his own ground zeros, from living blocks from the World Trade Center on 9/11 to his grandfather’s silence after Hiroshima, and the call to seek the sunrise by turning into the dark.
Makoto Fujimura is an internationally exhibited artist working in Nihonga, a centuries-old Japanese painting tradition using natural minerals and gold. He served on the National Council on the Arts, and his books include Culture Care, Silence and Beauty, Refractions, and Art and Faith: A Theology of Making.
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Many of us were taught that faith means believing the right things, and that the rest gets sorted out after we die. Dallas Willard spent decades gently insisting there’s far more available now. In this 2008 conversation, recorded in Los Angeles and one Michael counts among the highlights of his life, Dallas describes salvation as an interactive relationship with God: a life lived with him today, not a ticket held for later.
He and Michael talk about why solitude is the most radical of the disciplines, how to actually practice blessing those who curse you (traffic is a good place to start), and why grace isn’t opposed to effort but to earning. Dallas also speaks tenderly to anyone who feels too broken to begin: stop trying, he says, and learn to set the Lord always before you.
Dallas Willard (1935–2013) taught philosophy at the University of Southern California for more than four decades. His books, including The Spirit of the Disciplines, Hearing God, The Divine Conspiracy, and Renovation of the Heart, continue to shape how the church understands spiritual formation.
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Dr. Chuck DeGroat is back for his fourth podcast visit — and this time he brings a question that has followed him through his mid-fifties: why is it taking so long to grow up? His new book, Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Cultivating Character in a Narcissistic Age, grew out of that wrestling and a decade of sitting with leaders whose language had outrun their transformation.
Michael and Chuck talk about why character change is so slow, and why the answer has less to do with discipline than with a nervous system that’s stuck in chronic storm. They discuss faux vulnerability — the way people can acquire all the right therapeutic language without anything actually shifting underneath. They talk about the difference between chasing a moral standard out there and becoming who you actually are. Chuck tells the story of a pastor who, through tears, looked at his own online presence and said: I don’t know who that guy is. And they end the way you’d hope a conversation like this would end — with an ancient Celtic breath prayer, led by Chuck, that invites the listener into stillness rather than just describing it.
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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 wonder: what if this conversation could have a voice? And then a better possibility emerged. What if Eugene's words could be read by his son?
The voice you hear speaking Eugene Peterson's words belongs to Eugene's son, Eric Peterson, who recently retired after twenty-nine years of pastoral ministry of his own.
In the conversation, Eugene talks about why he's suspicious of Bible studies, what it means to live a life of prayer rather than merely say your prayers, why poets and novelists are the church's most important allies, and what it looks like to stop working from anxiety and start working from grace. At the end, Michael asks what Eugene wants to be remembered for. He laughs at the question, says it isn't a good one, and then answers it.
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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 bids for connection: the tiny, persistent movements within us that signal something needs to be seen. They discuss how trust breaks — not just through the big wounds, but through the ordinary absence of presence, the childhood of empty sunlit rooms. They get into the shadow self, the young one, and what the difference between bruised and broken might mean for people who don't see themselves in the language of shattered things. And they talk about what it looks like to train the soul — not through willpower or discipline, but through two movements: recognize and return.
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ENGAGE THE RESTORING THE SOUL PODCAST:
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