For our 200th episode, host Jean Geran welcomes Anglican priest and award-winning author Tish Harrison Warren for a conversation about the spiritual practices that sustain faith over a lifetime.

Drawing on her new book, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience, Tish shares how she fell in love with liturgy almost by accident, why she resists dividing life into "spiritual" and "non-spiritual" practices, and what the strange, wholehearted desert fathers and mothers can teach a busy, distracted church. She tells the story behind the opening line of Prayer in the Night, when praying Compline carried her and her husband through a medical emergency, and explains why practices built in ordinary seasons are still there for us in crisis.

Jean and Tish also talk about silence as the orienting goal of a day, the role of elders and mentors in a long life of faith, the Madison editor who first told Tish she had a voice, and how patience means learning to meet God in the life we actually have rather than the one we imagine.

IN THIS EPISODE

· How Tish found her way into Anglicanism and the liturgy during a season of transition

· Liturgy vs. spiritual practices, and why napping can be a spiritual practice

· A sacramental view of reality: prayer as stepping into a river that is already flowing

· Who the desert fathers and mothers were, and why the church could stand to be a little weirder

· Silence and solitude as an orienting goal, not an add-on

· Compline, suffering, and practices that hold when we have no words of our own

· Mentorship, elders, and naming the gifts we see in others

· Constraint, patience, and the three responses to suffering: flame out, numb out, or go deep

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

· What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience by Tish Harrison Warren (Convergent, 2026)

· Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren

· Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren

· James K. A. Smith, Dorothy Bass, Fleming Rutledge, C. S. Lewis, Kaitlyn Schiess

· The desert fathers and mothers, St. Benedict, and the office of Compline

· The Well (InterVarsity) and editor Marcia Bosscher

ABOUT OUR GUEST

Tish Harrison Warren is a writer and a priest in the Anglican Church in North America. Her books include Liturgy of the Ordinary (Christianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year) and Prayer in the Night (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year and the 2022 ECPA Christian Book of the Year). She formerly wrote a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum, and serves as C. S. Lewis Theological Writer-in-Residence at Baylor University's Truett Seminary. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and three children. Learn more at tishharrisonwarren.com.