Okay, so here’s a question that sounds simple until it isn’t: why is prayer so hard? Not hard like “I need a better technique” hard — hard like something has gone structurally wrong with the way we even think about it. Wes Ellis, practical theologian, pastor, and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, joins Tripp to diagnose what’s actually going on — and it turns out the problem isn’t your prayer life, it’s the framework you’ve been handed. In a world shaped by achievement culture, algorithmic distraction, and the modern obsession with controlling outcomes, prayer has been quietly turned into a self-optimization project, something you master, measure, and feel guilty about not doing enough of — and Wes wants to blow that whole thing up. Drawing on Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa, Henri Nouwen, and yes, the Big Lebowski, Wes makes the case that prayer is not something you do toward God but something God initiates toward you — and our job is less about clamoring upward and more about learning to abide, to wait, to say amen and actually mean it: let it be so. If the inner room Jesus talked about is being colonized by data extraction and constant evaluation, this conversation is a genuinely counter-cultural act. Come sit in the wasted space for a while.

Dr. Wes Ellis is a practical theologian who actually practices — meaning he doesn’t just write about congregational ministry from a distance, he does it, currently serving as a pastor while holding down serious academic theological work at the same time. He’s the author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age and a previous book on youth ministry that develops a theological anthropology beyond the developmental lens — the idea that what makes us human isn’t our capacities or achievements, but the fact that we are addressed, held, and seen by the living God. Wes has been shaped deeply by Moltmann’s relational theology, the apophatic tradition, and the kind of pastoral honesty that comes from years of asking people how their prayer life is going and watching them respond exactly like they do at the dentist when asked about flossing. He’s one of those rare theologians who has let his scholarship change how he actually prays — and that, it turns out, is the whole point.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.