Shame & Certainty

Mark Roskowske
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Shame & Certainty is a podcast about the inner life — where faith, doubt, art, work, and the stories we tell ourselves collide. Each episode explores how spirituality, creativity, culture, and modern life shape who we are becoming. Drawing from myth, scripture, music, and lived experience, this show doesn’t offer easy answers, but a space to stay present with the questions. For anyone caught between shame and certainty, longing and meaning, this is a place to think, wonder, and breathe.

Episodes

  1. 4D AGO

    Faith Beyond Belief

    In this episode of Shame & Certainty, I return to a moment from college that quietly changed everything — the first splinter that made it impossible to hold my faith the same way again. We talk about how post-Enlightenment Protestant Christianity came to define faith primarily as mental agreement: believing the right doctrines, affirming the right propositions, passing what sometimes feels like a cosmic “Jesus quiz.” In that system, belief becomes cognitive assent — something you think rather than something you live — and compassion, empathy, and transformation can become secondary or even optional. But that isn’t how Jesus used the word belief. In the Gospels, belief is closer to faithfulness, loyalty, devotion — the kind of trust that binds spouses, soldiers, and servants. It’s staking your life on a way of being, not just agreeing with a set of statements. Jesus describes it as treasure hidden in a field — something you stumble upon in ordinary life, something so compelling that joy, not coercion, reorients everything. From there, the episode explores the difference between reading scripture literally and reading it mythically. Not “myth” as fairy tale or falsehood, but myth as a story that breaks us open — one that speaks to the deepest layers of human experience. When scripture is reduced to literal problem-solving or cosmology, it becomes thin and forgettable. But when it’s allowed to function mythically, it connects to shame, longing, self-awareness, love, and the universal human experience of hiding and being seen. We reflect on creation, not as a scientific explanation, but as a story grounding humanity in goodness — a radically different starting point than the familiar narrative of not being enough. Adam is not just one man, but humanity itself, awakening to self-awareness, comparison, nakedness, and shame. The story mirrors our lived experience — in relationships, in intimacy, in the quiet loneliness we sometimes feel even beside the people we love most. The episode also names the discomfort this kind of reading creates. Mystery offers depth, but not control. Institutions want certainty, programs, and guardrails. Mystery resists being managed. And yet, the question remains: Are we becoming more loving, compassionate, merciful, and kind? That may be the truest measure of faith. Ultimately, this episode is about leaving behind a version of belief that no longer bears fruit — and choosing instead to swim in the mystery, even when others would rather pull us back to shore. May you find the questions that don’t close things down, but pull you deeper.

    34 min

  2. 5D AGO

    Headlines & Mad Farmer

    This episode is a pause in the middle of a loud week. It begins with the feeling many of us share lately — that every news cycle contains a decade’s worth of events, outrage, and contradiction. Instead of chasing the latest headline, this episode walks back through a handful of political and cultural moments from the past few years to notice the through-lines: how power speaks, how fear is framed, how “freedom” and “order” are invoked when convenient and discarded when not. We revisit moments that were treated as existential threats when they served one narrative, and quietly reframed or ignored when they no longer did. Mask mandates once labeled tyranny. Federal authority once rejected in the name of states’ rights. Gun culture defended as necessary order — until it isn’t. The same language, reused. The same logic, inverted. The same concentration of power, increasingly exposed. This isn’t an episode about partisan outrage or predicting election outcomes. It’s about attention — about how easily our moral imagination can be shaped by repetition, selective memory, and exhaustion. When everything feels urgent, nothing feels coherent. And that disorientation is not accidental. After tracing these patterns, the episode turns toward something quieter and older: Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. In contrast to the noise of profit, speed, and compliance, Berry offers a different kind of resistance — one rooted in patience, care, place, and imagination. A long game. A refusal to let our inner lives be flattened into transactions or talking points. In a moment when it’s tempting to believe that everything meaningful must be loud, fast, or immediately effective, this episode suggests another posture: keep acting according to conscience, keep resisting where you can, but don’t surrender your attention, your joy, or your capacity for wonder. Some forms of faithfulness don’t compute. Some forms of resistance look like planting trees you’ll never see grown. This episode is an invitation to step back from the churn, notice the patterns beneath the headlines, and remember that not all power announces itself — and not all hope does either.

    16 min

  3. FEB 1

    Imposter Syndrome & Broken Hips

    In this first episode of Shame & Certainty, we sit with two voices most of us know too well: the inner critic and the deeper longing beneath it. It starts in a quiet basement on a Sunday morning, with the familiar soundtrack of impostor syndrome playing in the background — You don’t belong here. You don’t have anything to say. You’re too late. You’re a fraud. These thoughts are so constant that we often mistake them for truth. But what if they’re just stories we’ve learned to tell ourselves? The episode reflects on a moment from musician Tom Bukovac, a Nashville session guitarist whose playing has shaped countless hit records. Even after decades of success, he noticed that the harshest voice in his life wasn’t coming from critics or the internet — it was coming from inside his own head. His inner monologue sounded eerily like failure, loss, and obsolescence, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a reminder that even those who “make it” still carry the same invisible battles. From there, we explore what happens when we name that voice instead of silently obeying it. Shame thrives in isolation. When we speak it out loud, when we admit we’re afraid, uncertain, or feel like impostors, its grip begins to loosen. We discover we aren’t broken or uniquely defective — we’re human. The episode then turns to one of the most mysterious stories in the Hebrew scriptures: Jacob wrestling with a stranger through the night before finally meeting his estranged brother Esau. Jacob’s whole life had been shaped by manipulation, fear, and the belief that love was something he had to earn or steal. Alone in the dark, he wrestles not just a man, but his own identity — who he has been, who he’s pretending to be, and who he might become. When the stranger touches Jacob’s hip, he is wounded. He will walk with a limp for the rest of his life. And yet, this is also the moment when Jacob receives his blessing and a new name. The injury isn’t a punishment — it’s a marker of transformation. The place that hurts becomes the place where he met God. In Impostors & Broken Hips, we reflect on how many of us carry our own limp — a loss, a failure, a fear that never quite goes away. We want those wounds erased, but often what we receive instead is something deeper: a changed way of walking through the world. The inner critic may never fully disappear, but it doesn’t get to define us. This episode invites you to notice the voice of shame, to question the stories it tells, and to consider whether your own broken places might not be signs of weakness — but the very places where something sacred has already begun to grow.

    29 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

Shame & Certainty is a podcast about the inner life — where faith, doubt, art, work, and the stories we tell ourselves collide. Each episode explores how spirituality, creativity, culture, and modern life shape who we are becoming. Drawing from myth, scripture, music, and lived experience, this show doesn’t offer easy answers, but a space to stay present with the questions. For anyone caught between shame and certainty, longing and meaning, this is a place to think, wonder, and breathe.

Information

  • Creator
    Mark Roskowske
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Mark Roskowske
  • Show Website
    Shame & Certainty