Created in the Image of God

SOOP
  • 0.0 (0)
  • RELIGION
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Tune in every Tuesday for an inspiring journey on Created in the Image of God: Building Vibrant Communities. Wade Fransson and his distinguished guests explore the essence of human nature and the transformative power of unity in diversity through live-streamed discussions rooted in the Independent Investigation of Reality. This series advocates for authentic connections among individuals to foster thriving, inclusive communities. Anchored in spiritual truths and a collective quest for understanding, these conversations inspire growth and progress toward a harmonious world. soopllc.substack.com

  1. 4 DAYS AGO

    Female Future of Faith with Gina Zurlo | Created In The Image of God 244

    Most people hear “Christianity” and think of their own congregation, country, or a handful of familiar headlines. Gina Zurlo spends her days looking at the whole picture. A Senior Researcher and Lecturer in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, editor of the World Christian Database, and co‑editor of the third edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia (which she personally presented to Pope Francis), she tracks how religious and non‑religious affiliation is changing in every country on earth—past, present, and projected into the future.In this episode, Gina pulls back the curtain on how that work is done. She describes what it means to maintain a database that follows nearly every world religion and tens of thousands of Christian denominations, why she might be working on Burkina Faso one day and Brazil the next, and how raw numbers get turned into a coherent story. Along the way, she tackles common misunderstandings about “the rise of the non‑religious,” the shifting center of gravity of Christianity toward the Global South, and the surprisingly important role that gender plays in global religious life.One of Gina’s central passions is what she calls the “female future” of faith—the fact that women make up the majority of Christian believers worldwide, yet are often underrepresented in leadership and in how we tell the story of the church. Drawing on her background in history, sociology, and demography, she explains why paying attention to women’s religious lives is key to understanding where Christianity is actually headed. Throughout the conversation, she keeps bringing the data back to everyday questions: What does this mean for local churches? For mission and evangelism? For how believers relate to their secular neighbors?For anyone curious about what Christianity really looks like beyond their own country—or wondering how numbers and faith can speak to each other without flattening the mystery—this episode offers a clear, accessible guide. Gina’s work invites listeners to see global Christianity as a living, changing mosaic—and to consider their own place within it. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 7min

  2. 6 DAYS AGO

    From Survival to Sovereignty with Lela Tuhtan | Created In The Image of God 243

    Many people are raised on a simple script: work hard, get a stable job, stay loyal to one institution, and security will follow. For Lela Tuhtan, that script shaped her early life and career—and then became the very story she had to unlearn. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by second‑generation immigrant parents—an electrician father and a teacher mother—she grew up in a home where diligence, sacrifice, and external security were non‑negotiables. You found a job, ideally in a union, and you stayed. That was the American dream.Yet even as those values took root, something else was happening. At ten, Lela was hit head‑on by a car while riding her bike. She survived with a fractured skull, broken bones, and months of rehab. When she finally returned to school, she was met not with compassion but mockery; classmates held up the newspaper photo of her injured face and called her ugly. In that moment, Lela describes feeling a physical fork in the road: she could let their words become her identity, or she could transmute the pain into something else. Without having the language for it yet, she chose to “compost” the trauma—turning it into the raw material for resilience and a different kind of self‑story.For years, she still followed the expected path, earning degrees (including a master’s from Columbia), teaching in classrooms, and pursuing the kind of career her parents could easily understand. But around 2018–2019, right before COVID, a quiet dissonance grew too loud to ignore. Training in Co‑Active Coaching and eco‑psychology opened her eyes to a different way of working—one that honored her love for literature, story, and the inner lives of people. She began coaching other educators and high‑impact professionals, realizing she was, as she puts it, the “black sheep” in her family: wired not for one institution and a retirement watch, but for entrepreneurial, narrative‑driven work that helps others reclaim their own agency.In this episode, Lela and Wade explore what it means to move from survival‑based scripts to sovereignty—without abandoning community or responsibility. They talk about how stories we inherit about safety, success, and belonging can quietly imprison us, why so many people have outsourced security to institutions that no longer feel trustworthy, and how practices as simple as gardening—literally getting your hands in the soil—can reconnect a person to their own capacity, creativity, and interdependence with others. Lela shares practical examples from her coaching: how she helps clients notice the “second arrow” of self‑judgment after hardship, reframe limiting beliefs, and build lives and businesses that are both aligned and generous, rooted in mutual support rather than isolation.For anyone sensing that the life they’re living doesn’t match who they really are—or who feels torn between the stability their family prized and the freedom their soul longs for—this conversation offers both clarity and encouragement. Lela’s story is a living illustration that you can honor where you come from, compost what has harmed you, and still grow into a life that feels deeply, authentically your own. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    55 min

  3. 29 APR

    Fake ID & the Search for Truth with Abdu Murray | Created In The Image of God 248

    Abdu Murray grew up certain Islam was true. The son of Lebanese immigrants in southeast Michigan, he was raised in a serious Shia Muslim home where faith wasn’t just cultural; it shaped his identity and his arguments. From an early age he absorbed both apologetics (why Islam is true) and polemics (why Christianity is false), and in 1980s–90s America—when it was fashionable to call yourself “Christian” with little thought—he found Christians easy targets. He would ask classmates why they were Christians and usually got answers like “tradition” or “we go to church on Christmas and Easter.” For Abdu, that wasn’t good enough. “Why,” he’d ask, “would you trust the destiny of your eternal soul to a system of belief someone else thought through?”Underneath the jock exterior (a 6'7"" athlete who played Division I basketball and trained in martial arts), Abdu was a natural advocate. He loved philosophy, logic, and evidence, studied psychology in college, and later earned a law degree from the University of Michigan. Questions about truth weren’t abstract; they were everything. He believed that what is true excludes its opposite, and that relativism—“what’s true for you is true for you, what’s true for me is true for me”—simply didn’t work. Islam, he thought, was that truth, and Christianity was a corrupted, lower‑grade version of original revelation. Like many Muslims, he saw Islam as “college” to Judaism’s “grade school” and Christianity’s “high school.”In this episode, Abdu tells the story of how that certainty was slowly unsettled. What began as an effort to “knock over” other people’s faiths turned into a nearly decade‑long investigation of Christianity’s historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific claims. Along the way he had to grapple with uncomfortable questions: Why does the Qur’an speak positively about the Torah and the Gospel in the present tense, yet deny the central claims those texts make about Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection? If Jesus didn’t die on a cross and rise from the dead, what do His own words about giving His life “as a ransom for many” mean? Is Christianity really a regression from pure monotheism—or the fulfillment of the story the Hebrew Scriptures have been telling from the beginning?Abdu describes the moment he realized the faith he was trying so hard not to have was the one he desperately needed—that the Trinity, the incarnation, and the cross were not insults to God’s greatness but the clearest demonstrations of it. He also talks about how his twin loves—understanding how people think (psychology) and how to marshal evidence (law)—shaped his calling as a Christian apologist and evangelist. Now president of Embrace the Truth and author of books like Saving Truth, More Than a White Man’s Religion, and his latest, Fake ID: How A.I. and Identity Ideology Are Collapsing Reality—And What to Do About It, he spends his life helping people see that questions need more than slogans, and that real freedom requires real truth.The conversation ranges from Islam and Christianity’s different views of revelation, to how identity politics and artificial intelligence are distorting our sense of what’s real, to why arguments should always be aimed at people, not just positions. For anyone wrestling with doubt, curious about Islam and Christianity, or simply feeling disoriented in a world where reality itself seems up for grabs, this episode offers both intellectual rigor and pastoral warmth—an invitation to test the big claims and, in the process, meet the One who calls Himself “the way, the truth, and the life. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    56 min

  4. 27 APR

    God’s Imperfect Plan with Steve Rotermund | Created In The Image of God 241

    From the outside, Steve Rotermund checked all the Christian boxes. He’d gone from a powerful Promise Keepers experience to volunteering, sensing a call to ministry, and eventually stepping into pastoral leadership. He served as a children’s pastor over 150 kids, directed Awana and Celebrate Recovery, planted a church, and even hosted a radio ministry. But behind the scenes, a different story was unfolding: a marriage shaken by his wife’s secret addiction to pain medication, a home full of fear and shame, and a deep anger at God for not “fixing” her while Steve worked full-time for Him.In this episode, Steve goes back further—to the soil all of that grew out of. He describes a childhood dominated by abandonment and trauma: a mother who left when he was four and disappeared until he was eighteen, a father who cycled in and out of alcoholism and told him he’d never amount to anything, and sexual abuse at age six that he carried in silence into his forties. Those early wounds left him convinced he was fundamentally unworthy, even as he “sold Jesus” to others from the pulpit. Ministry became a stage where codependency thrived: needing to be needed, feeling important, and trying desperately to control what was broken at home.When his wife began passing out on the front row of church, the shame and exhaustion finally broke him. Steve handed his congregation to another pastor, walked away from ministry, and walked away from God. The next two years were, as he puts it, “hell”—a codependent husband trying to fix an addict he couldn’t control. A trusted friend finally pushed him to see a Christian counselor. Within fifteen minutes of their first session, the counselor told him, “You’re part of the problem.” That blunt diagnosis of codependency—and the later challenge to move from “adopted son tolerated by God” to full sonship in Christ—became the turning point.Steve describes how, through years of counseling and a fresh encounter with John 14:20 (“I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you”), his identity shifted from shame and performance to union with Jesus. The journey wasn’t neat: he still had to make the painful decision to divorce in order to protect his kids, rebuild his own life, and slowly reengage with church. But out of that wreckage came a renewed call to ministry and the birth of Walk Right Ministries—a Christ-centered 12-step recovery community where he now walks with others through trauma, addiction, and codependency. His book, God’s Imperfect Plan—Is Perfect, invites readers to see that God can weave purpose even through what feels like failure.For anyone carrying hidden wounds, trapped in someone else’s addiction, or burned out on a version of faith built on performance and control, this conversation offers both honesty and real hope. Steve’s story is a living reminder that God doesn’t just rescue us from our circumstances; He meets us in them, heals the heart beneath the behavior, and invites us into a freedom where our worth is no longer on trial. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    50 min

  5. 22 APR

    The Way of Unity with Robert Atkinson | Created In The Image of God 240

    Most conversations about peace stay either abstract and idealistic, or narrowly focused on the latest crisis. Robert Atkinson’s work refuses that split. An award‑winning author, developmental psychologist, and pioneer in life storytelling, he has spent decades helping people understand their own journeys as part of a much larger story — one in which human oneness is not a wishful slogan, but the deeper reality we are slowly waking up to. In The Way of Unity: Essential Principles and Preconditions for Peace, he brings that vision into sharp focus, asking what kind of religion and spirituality our time truly requires.In this episode, Robert explains how the original sense of religio — to bind together — offers a corrective to the fragmented way faith often functions today. Drawing on themes from The Story of Our Time and A New Story of Wholeness, he outlines a “way of knowing, being, and doing” in which religion, spirituality, social action, community building, and peacebuilding are not separate projects but facets of the same calling. Unity, in his view, must be cultivated on multiple levels: within the self, between people and communities, and across nations — especially in moments of acute tension, like the current conflicts in the Middle East.Robert also shares how his work with initiatives such as One Planet Peace Forum and StoryCommons, and his involvement with the Evolutionary Leaders Circle, have convinced him that we are living through a critical transition point. Old stories of separation are breaking down, while new, more inclusive narratives are emerging — if we are willing to embrace them. Throughout the conversation, he invites listeners to see their own lives as threads in a much larger tapestry of oneness and responsibility, and to consider what it might mean to practice a “religion for our time” that truly binds rather than divides.For anyone wrestling with polarization, longing for a faith that heals instead of harms, or simply trying to locate their personal story within a hopeful future, this episode offers a thoughtful, grounded guide into the way of unity. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 17min

  6. 20 APR

    Faith Like My Father with John Fela | Created In The Image of God 239

    Some dads pass on a lifetime of memories; John Fela’s father handed him two words: “Don’t panic.” Growing up on the north side of Chicago in a stereotypical blue‑collar Catholic home—with a truck‑driver dad who drank every day and a mom holding the family together—John watched a man he loved slowly check out of his own life, yet still show up for work and provide. As a teenager, he wrote his father off as “a drunken fool,” only to realize years later that those two words would become some of the best advice he’d ever received—especially once he became the dad of a son with severe autism.In this episode, John traces how his parents’ messy faithfulness gave him the fortitude he needed for his own journey. He talks candidly about growing up around alcoholism, late‑night medical crises, and parents who could stay strangely calm when everything was on the line. Those experiences, he says, trained him to handle big emergencies even if the “little things” still get under his skin. When his son Chris was born and later diagnosed with nonverbal autism, that training—and a later‑in‑life encounter with Christ—shaped how he chose to show up: not panicking, not walking away, but learning to love and advocate with persistence.Out of that has come John’s work as a “Swiss Army knife of disability advocacy,” with a Master’s in Education, years in the classroom, and national advocacy roles, including time with Joni and Friends. Drawing from his book Faith Like My Father, he shares what he’s learned about co‑parenting after divorce, supporting special‑needs families in the church, and helping dads move beyond shame or helplessness into real engagement with their kids. Through it all, he circles back to a simple conviction: you don’t give up on the people you love—and you learn to trust a Father whose plan is bigger than your pain.For parents raising kids with disabilities, pastors wondering how to do more than “mention inclusion,” or anyone still sorting out a complicated relationship with their own dad, this conversation offers honesty, hard‑won wisdom, and hope grounded in a God who never panics and never walks away. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 3min

  7. 15 APR

    Good Samaritan Medicine with Kosti Psimopoulos | Created In The Image of God 238

    Healthcare conversations easily drift into policy, budgets, and systems. Constantine “Kosti” Psimopoulos insists the place to begin is with a wounded traveler on the side of the road. An Orthodox Christian, Harvard‑trained kinesiologist, and bioethicist, Kosti works at the intersection of medicine, spirituality, disability, and ethics—shaping training for scientists and clinicians at Harvard Medical School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and directing the Division of Bioethics at the Orthodox Academy of Crete. For him, Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan is not just a Sunday‑school story; it’s a template for reimagining what medicine and public health are for.In this episode, Kosti unpacks why that parable is, in his words, “the crux of all medicine and healthcare.” Jesus answers the question “Who is my neighbor?” by centering the one who stops, sees, and attends to the injured man’s full humanity—body and soul—at personal cost. Kosti contrasts this with modern tendencies to reduce patients to data points, time slots, or cost–effectiveness calculations. Drawing on the legacy of his mentor, the late Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners In Health, he argues that any ethic of care that does not begin with the person in front of us—especially the poorest and most vulnerable—is already off course, no matter how efficient it looks on paper.From there, the conversation widens to global questions of access, AI in medicine, and how disability justice reshapes the way we think about “flourishing.” As a disability advocate and director on the board of the Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance, Kosti emphasizes the principle “nothing about us without us,” insisting that those most affected by medical and technological decisions must have a voice in shaping them. Throughout, he returns to a simple, demanding conviction: if every human being is created in the image (and, in Orthodox language, called to the likeness) of God, then bioethics cannot remain an abstract discipline. It must become a lived, hopeful vision of care that honors dignity, resists dehumanizing systems, and takes seriously Jesus’ call to love our neighbor—whoever is in front of us—well. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 28min

  8. 13 APR

    Peacemaking in a Polarized World with Najeeba Syeed | Created In The Image of God 237

    Before she held titles like “executive director,” “chair,” or “professor,” Najeeba Syeed was a little Muslim girl on a school bus in southern Indiana whose family simply needed halal meat. Her father, a grad student at Indiana University, struck up an unlikely partnership with her Christian bus driver, Mrs. Anderson, who invited him to her farm so he could perform ritual slaughter in line with Islamic dietary law. For Najeeba, that story has become a lens on what real interfaith life often looks like: not lofty dialogue in conference halls, but neighbors quietly meeting each other’s needs out of ordinary kindness.In this episode, Najeeba traces the deeper roots of her peacemaking vocation—from being naturalized as an American and raised to see this country as a place “welcoming to all religions,” to the first time she returned to Kashmir as a teenager. Stepping off the plane in Srinagar, she wept as she recognized her mother’s features in a relative’s arms for the first time—only to notice, moments later, armed soldiers posted every few dozen feet along the road. Confronted with the beauty of belonging and the reality of militarized conflict, she found herself praying that her Muslim faith would make her an agent of peace. That prayer eventually led her to choose a Quaker college, drawn by a tradition known for its consistent witness against violence and its role in movements for abolition, human rights, and reconciliation.From there, Najeeba’s path has woven together scholarship, mediation, and grassroots practice. As a professor and as the inaugural El‑Hibri Endowed Chair and Executive Director of Interfaith at Augsburg University, she has designed and led initiatives that reduce school violence, address interracial and gang conflict, and strengthen Muslim–Christian partnerships. Yet throughout the conversation, she keeps returning to the same core: neighborliness, courageous listening, and a refusal to let any one community’s story stand alone. For listeners weary of polarization but unsure what peacemaking looks like beyond slogans, this episode offers a grounded, hopeful picture of justice‑rooted interfaith work—born not in theory, but in the everyday crossings of real lives. Get full access to SOOPMedia on Substack at soopllc.substack.com/subscribe

    54 min
See All (243)

About

Tune in every Tuesday for an inspiring journey on Created in the Image of God: Building Vibrant Communities. Wade Fransson and his distinguished guests explore the essence of human nature and the transformative power of unity in diversity through live-streamed discussions rooted in the Independent Investigation of Reality. This series advocates for authentic connections among individuals to foster thriving, inclusive communities. Anchored in spiritual truths and a collective quest for understanding, these conversations inspire growth and progress toward a harmonious world. soopllc.substack.com

Information