I'm sitting down with my friend of 12 years, Sara Billups, to talk about her brand new book Nervous Systems—and all the many meanings implied in its title.
We start with how anxiety gets passed down through generations. Sara shares about her wonderfully neurotic Jewish father and frequent medical “scares” that shaped her nervous system before she could even articulate a worry.
But this isn't just another Seinfeld episode or therapy session about family patterns—Sara takes us into how anxiety operates at three interconnected levels: our individual bodies, the church body that's absorbed America's cultural panic instead of offering an alternative, and our body politic that's turned every election into an apocalypse.
Sara introduces me to a counterintuitive Jesuit practice called "holy indifference" that she discovered through nine months of Ignatian spiritual exercises, which maps perfectly onto OCD treatment principles.
We wrestle with impossible questions like whether progressive Christians should keep reaching across the aisle to conservatives when the stakes feel existential and whether learning to lose—politically, personally, physically—might be the only way to stay sane in a world that's convinced every loss is the end of democracy.
Sarah's Book | Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics
Sarah's Substack | BITTER SCROLL
Sarah's Podcast | That's The Spirit
Previous Episode with Sara | Orphaned by Evangelicalism (#175)
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