The Habit

Singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken released her first book in 2021. Send Out Your Light: The Illuminating Power of Scripture and Song is a memoir of a creative life and a meditation on the creative process.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad is a collection of "newly discovered" tales of the Arthurian knight's adventures in the Wild Forest. In this episode of The Habit Podcast, husband-and-wife editorial dream team Pete Peterson and Jennifer Trafton discuss their work in bringing this work to life.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Leslie Bustard is a writer, a teacher, a conference organizer, a publisher, and a museum-goer, among other things. She recruited forty writers to contribute essays to Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for your Children, a book she curated and edited with her daughter Carey Bustard and editor Thea Rosenburg.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mitali Perkins has been a nominee for the National Book Award. She was born in India, but has lived all over the world. So it comes as no surprise that her books for young readers all explore the crossing of borders of one kind or another. Her newest book, Bare Tree and Little Wind, is a picture book that tells the story of Holy Week. In 2021, she published her first nonfiction book for adults, Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh our Tired Souls. In this episode, Mitali and Jonathan Rogers discuss the benefits of being an outsider, the transmission of morality and hope, and literary "aunties and uncles."Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Tom Douglas is a country songwriting legend and a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. He recently released a movie—a one-man show called Love, Tom: A Letter of Hope to a Desperate World, streaming on Paramount Plus. It's a beautiful, wise, and honest meditation on the creative process. In this episode, Tom Douglas and Jonathan Rogers talk about harnessing hurt and rejecting idolatry in the creative process, and steering a middle course between apathy and anxiety.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jessica Hooten Wilson is the Louise Cowan Scholar in Residence at the University of Dallas. She has written books about Flannery O’Connor, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Walker Percy, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Her most recent book is The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints. In this episode, Dr. Wilson and Jonathan Rogers talk about the ways that reading great works of literature cultivates an imagination that moves us toward holiness.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Habit Podcast, Jonathan Rogers talks with author and pastor Russ Ramsey. Russ is a pastor in the Nashville area, a masterful storyteller, and Jonathan’s go-to resource for all art-related questions. His love of art and story come together in his new book, Rembrandt Is In the Wind: Learning to Love Art Through the Eyes of Faith. It’s an art history book, but more importantly, it’s a book about the beauty that comes out of stories of human brokenness. Beauty matters; nobody makes that case better than Russ Ramsey.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Caroline Cobb is a singer-songwriter from Texas. In 2011, she decided to write a song for every book of the Bible in one year. That ambitious goal set her on a path that she’s still on, more than ten years later. She has said, “That year, I discovered that I love writing songs from the Bible: delving into a passage, putting myself in each character’s shoes, trying to understand how this one small story connects with the whole, then coming up with a way to communicate that story through song.” That project has led to four studio albums so far: The Blood and the Breath, A Home and a Hunger, A Seed, a Sunrise, and, most recently, A King and His Kindness. In this episode, Caroline speaks with Jonathan Rogers about producing without striving, the upside-down-ness of the Gospel, and the reasons she decided to take a sabbatical.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week on The Habit Podcast, we invite you to listen in on a conversation between poet Dana Gioia, former Poet Laureate of California and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Cherie Harder, President of The Trinity Forum. They discuss the ways that poetry works as a kind of enchantment, creating a state of heightened consciousness and heightened receptivity, and Dana Gioia makes the case that beauty is a way of knowing the world as it really is. He also reads a couple of poems. This interview was recorded in 2020, relatively early in the pandemic, as part of the Trinity Forum’s Online Conversations series. If you don’t already know about the Trinity Forum, we hope you’ll seek them out. They’ve been good friends to the Rabbit Room, and we love the work they do to contribute to the renewal of society by cultivating and promoting the best of Christian thought, and helping leaders to think, work, and lead wisely and well. Find them at TTF.org & tune into their Lenten podcast series by searching “Trinity Forum Conversations” wherever you get your podcasts.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Curt Thompson is a psychiatrist and founder of Being Known, an organization that develops resources for hope and healing at the intersection of neuroscience and Christian spiritual formation. His books include The Soul of Shame and The Soul of Desire. In this episode, Curt and Jonathan Rogers discuss the left brain and the right brain, the power of beauty to awaken us to goodness and truth, and Andy Gullahorn.Support the show: https://therabbitroom.givingfuel.com/memberSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.