Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

Second-time-around spirituality: 'To Rebehold the Stars' (Tiffany Yecke Brooks)

·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Yecky-Brooks links wonder to desire, saying the object of wonder becomes an object of desire.

Tiffany Yecky-Brooks joins Will Small to discuss her forthcoming book, To Re-Behold the Stars. He opens by pointing to her PhD in English and MA in Spiritual Formation, which gives the conversation both literary and pastoral weight. Brooks traces a faith crisis she did not plan for. She says purity culture left her with no workable way to stay inside its claims. What followed was not a dramatic rejection, but a hard recognition that something she had been told was true simply was not. The episode spends time on the claim that eternal conscious torment has no real biblical grounding. Brooks treats that conclusion as part of a wider ethical question about what the church has normalized. She and Small ask what it would mean to decolonize church structures rather than just rename them. The book and the conversation both lean toward honesty over polish. They also lean toward kindness, even when the subject is anger. Brooks insists that dismantling is easier than building. That observation turns the discussion toward co-creation, responsibility, and the slow work of making something better. Wonder becomes a central theme. Not a vague escape hatch, but a disciplined openness to the scale and strangeness of God. Brooks wants room to say, I don't know, without pretending that mystery cancels responsibility. She frames that openness as part of maturing faith, not as a failure of belief. The conversation touches Aristotle and the way wonder can become desire. Curiosity, in her telling, is what keeps faith moving instead of freezing into answers. Small and Brooks keep circling the same invitation: stay with the questions long enough for faith to become more honest and more spacious. By the end, the episode feels less like a verdict than a doorway.

As heard by us

A reflective conversation about faith after certainty, with room for honesty, mystery, and repair.

This conversation follows Tiffany Yecky-Brooks and Will Small as they move from a faith crisis shaped by purity culture into wider questions about decolonizing church structures and making room for honesty, kindness, and mystery.

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Why you'd press play

If purity culture cracked your faith, this offers a gentler path forward grounded in honesty and kindness.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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