The Podcast
Conversations with people who've sat with uncertainty long enough to learn something from it—ministers and therapists, writers and researchers… anyone who's discovered that the questions matter more than the answers.
Episode 4: “A Shrine to Something” | Alison Dilworth
Alison Dilworth is a Philadelphia-based artist, muralist, and shrine-maker. We talk about what it means to hold things — grief, love, other people's stories, a kid running toward traffic — and what it costs to be genuinely present to any of it. A conversation about bearing witness, rites of passage, and the broken girl who got her here. See also: https://www.instagram.com/brainsoulface/.
Episode 3: "On the Other Side of Boredom" | Adam Ekberg
Photographer Adam Ekberg spent two and a half years launching a lawn chair with a homemade catapult, thirty consecutive nights photographing a disco ball on a mountaintop, and hours watching ants with his neighbor. We talk about what happens on the other side of boredom — and why the experience of being there might be all the stuff.
[Read the companion essay: “On the Other Side of Boredom”]
Episode 2: "Everything Is Relational" | Kanwal Singh
Kanwal Singh is a cornea surgeon, Fulbright scholar, and global health educator who has spent his career building connections between American academic medicine and under-resourced communities around the world. He's also a friend — we met when he was a freshman at Princeton and I was working in residential life, and I've watched him navigate the distance between idealism and institutions ever since. We talk about what it means to align your work with your faith, what he learned about strategy and relationships as a young trustee on Princeton's board, and why he's come to believe that "soft relations carry so much more weight" than procedural wins. Also: the day everything went sideways in Cairo and he found himself sitting cross-legged in borrowed slippers, practicing patience because there was nothing else to do.
Episode 1: "Companionable Silence” | Lynn Casteel Harper
Lynn Casteel Harper is a minister, hospital chaplain, and author of On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear. She spent years sitting with people living with dementia — past the edge of language — and learned something there that couldn't be learned anywhere else. We talk about what silence looks like when it isn't empty, why gentleness turns out to be a harder kind of strength than it sounds, and what the trees in Biosphere 2 have to do with learning to bend without losing yourself. A conversation about presence, power, and what stays when certainty is gone.