My guest this week is Mark Gregory Karris. We discussed his recent book, Religious Refugees (affiliate link), which describes the process so many of us will go through of losing our faith, and needing to reconstruct it in a new way. Mark is intimately familiar with this process having gone through it himself, and he guides other religious refugees as they wrestle with issues of faith.

Mark and I had a lot of overlap in our backgrounds, having left fundamentalist Christian denominations, and also a shared history of speaking in tongues which we talked about. We also talked a lot about the love of God, which is sadly missing in so many people’s religious experience, and how to shift our unhelpful beliefs. Topics we touched on included:

• My guest’s religious background and the Oneness Pentecostal Church
• Mark’s profound experience of transcendent love
• My background in the Assemblies of God denomination
• The process of deconstructing and reconstructing one’s religious faith
• The challenging beliefs we often internalize from our religious upbringing
• Religious Disorientation Growth Syndrome and accompanying symptoms
• Spiritual core beliefs like black-or-white thinking
• The belief that God can’t be less loving or wise than we are
• Mark’s shift in understanding passages about divine violence
• My anger and sadness about the loveless dogma that often passes as Christianity
• Making room for both compassion and indignation
• The evil of using ideas about God to terrorize people
• The phenomenon of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia
• The “Seinfeld” episode about “faking it”
• The relative lack of messages about self-kindness in the Bible
• The message of love many discover through Buddhism
• What stopped my guest from becoming an atheist
• Writers my guest found helpful in his development:
  • Contemplative writers: Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr
  • Deconstructionists: Bryan MacLaren, Rob Bell, Pete Enns
  • Meditation/Mindfulness: Thich Naht Hahn, The Dahli Lama, Tara Brach, Sharon Salzberg

Mark is a licensed marriage and family therapist, adjunct professor, ordained pastor, husband, bestselling author, and recording artist.

In addition to Religious Refugees, he’s the author of Divine Echoes: Reconciling Prayer with the Uncontrolling Love of God (affiliate link).

Find Mark online on Twitter, at his website, and on the Conspiring Prayer website.