Christian faith for the hard questions.
The Sacred Slope treats difficult Christian questions as ground for careful conversation rather than certainty. Recent episodes move through reproductive rights, cancer, Catholic identity, queer belonging, peace, and the cost of harmful theology.
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The Sacred Slope is a Christian conversation show for people who still care about faith but no longer trust simple answers. Its recent episodes stay close to stories where theology has consequences in real bodies and real communities. One thread follows Valerie's experience with pregnancy, stage three breast cancer, and a medical decision made under extreme pressure. The show handles that story as grief, care, survival, and conscience at the same time. It does not flatten reproductive rights into a slogan. It asks what Christian love and freedom mean when a person's life and future are both in the room. With Rev. jessica young chang, the conversation widens into power, history, and the church's role in controlling reproducing bodies. The critique is direct. Christianity is measured against love, freedom, justice, and the vulnerable people it claims to serve. Another episode with Justin Telthorst turns toward Catholic identity and queer belonging. There, the pain of exclusion sits beside love for Catholic liturgy, history, and hope. The show is strongest when it lets tension remain visible. It can sound pastoral, but it is not soft on institutional harm. It can be devotional, but it is not afraid of politics. War, peace, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, abortion, cancer, and church gatekeeping all appear as spiritual subjects rather than side issues. Alexis Rice is a recurring named voice in the excerpts, guiding these conversations with warmth and clarity. The show suits listeners who want Christian faith treated as global, contested, embodied, and still worth wrestling with. It makes sacred space out of questions many churches taught people to avoid.
Made for: For spiritually tender Christians, ex-Christians, and church-adjacent listeners who want honest conversations about justice, conscience, grief, and belonging. It especially suits people rethinking inherited theology without losing interest in love, prayer, and community.
What sets it apart: The show pairs pastoral intimacy with direct critique of church power, letting personal stories and theological questions inform each other. Its conversations hold devotion and dissent together instead of forcing listeners to choose one lane.
Where the slippery slope becomes sacred ground.For the spiritually tender — those searching for healthier expressions of our global Christian faith and deconstructing harmful theology.Listen to conversations with pastors, priests, reverends, scholars, artists, and public voices from multiple denominations, cultures, backgrounds, and genders.Come to be challenged, healed, and begin again.
The Bible leaves the devotional shelf for ancient Corinth, and your inherited certainty gets a courteous stress test.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Pregnancy, cancer, and church power collide in a blunt look at reproductive rights.
The Sacred Slope makes reproductive rights feel immediate by centering a pregnancy during stage three breast cancer, with lymph node involvement and doctors warning that waiting to treat it would drop survival odds below 10 percent.
A Christian abortion conversation that stays with the cost of delay.
The Sacred Slope makes Val's story feel immediate, turning abortion, cancer, and the strain of waiting into an urgent moral and medical reckoning.
A gay Catholic argues for peace, belonging, and staying in the church anyway.
Alexis Rice centers the conversation on a hard, specific tension: what it means for a gay Catholic to stay with a church that has often given him reasons to leave.
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Lisa Sharon Harper says Christianity was not a “white faith,” pointing to its Afro-Asian and Levantine origins and images of biblical figures before Constantine.
Alexis Rice interviews Rev.
The Sacred Slope host Alexis Rice interviews pastor and author Brandon Robertson about interpreting the Bible, queer Christianity, and the use of scripture against LGBT people.
Alexis Rice and Rev.
Valerie Ruschka tells Alexis Rice how a 14-week pregnancy, a stage 3 HER2-positive breast cancer diagnosis, and Cedars-Sinai’s tumor board forced a rapid medical decision.
Justin Telthorst says he built Empty Chairs because he could not wait '200 years' for the Catholic Church to be ready for LGBTQ people.