Advertise on podcast: The Ezra Institute Podcast for Cultural Reformation

We're continuing our series of interviews with the Fellows of the Ezra Institute. This week we're going back to a conversation Dr. Joe Boot recorded with Ezra Fellow Jeff Durbin at Apologia Studios in Phoenix.   They ask whether Christianity and the West are doomed. Joe argues that the West's moral collapse isn't a warning of God's judgment but the judgment itself, and that it's also an hour of opportunity for the faithful. They cover the political implications of Christ's kingship, God's covenant dealings with nations, the Marxist attack on the family, and the West's "culture of death." Joe also explains why a faithful remnant can still plow in hope.

Politics seems to reach into every part of life, even as trust in government continues to erode. How should Christians respond without retreating from public life or expecting politics to solve everything?   On this episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Pastor Nate Wright speaks with Ezra fellow Professor Zane Richer about the crisis in modern political thought. They examine the false choices Christians are often asked to make, the proper role of government, and why Scripture must shape the questions we ask as well as the answers we give.   Their conversation offers a call to patient, faithful work: raising families, strengthening churches, developing Christian political thought, and building institutions that can serve future generations.

The Puritans are often caricatured as grim, joyless and disconnected from modern life. In reality, they offered a rich and deeply practical vision of the Christian faith—one that applied the lordship of Christ to the heart, the home, the church, our work and the wider culture.   Nate Wright is joined by Ezra Institute Fellow Jacob Tanner to explore what Christians today can learn from figures such as John Owen, John Bunyan, William Perkins, Richard Sibbes, Jeremiah Burroughs and Samuel Rutherford. They discuss the mortification of sin, joyful contentment, faithful pastoral ministry, resistance to tyranny, the Christian’s vocation and the Puritan hope for the transformation of society through the gospel.

What does it mean to think Christianly about economics? Dr. Joe Boot is joined by Ezra Institute Fellow David Bahnsen to explore how Scripture shapes our understanding of work, wealth, capital, markets, debt, and human flourishing.   Beginning with the creation mandate, they discuss work as an essential part of humanity’s God-given calling—not a necessary evil—and explain how capital and labour can work together to cultivate creation and serve others. They also examine the dangers of socialism, state intervention, consumer debt, class resentment, and the growing hostility toward productive enterprise.   Finally, David offers practical principles for building wealth faithfully: rejecting covetousness, embracing productive work, living within our means, creating more than we consume, and seeking not merely to survive, but to thrive for the glory of God and the advancement of his kingdom.

In this episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Dr. Joe Boot is joined by Dr. Stephen Lloyd and Paul Garner of Biblical Creation Trust to discuss the importance of biblical creation for understanding the Christian faith and the gospel. They explore the relationship between creation and redemption, the historical Adam, the origin and meaning of death, and the challenges posed by theistic evolution. They also consider how abandoning a biblical doctrine of creation can affect the church’s understanding of Scripture and the coherence of the biblical story. The conversation then turns to the wider implications of creation for Christian engagement with contemporary culture, including questions of human identity, gender, sexuality, artificial intelligence, and the nature of scientific knowledge. Joe, Stephen, and Paul discuss the need for Christians to recover a confident and intellectually rigorous engagement with science, developing positive models of creation that take both biblical revelation and the evidence of the natural world seriously. At the heart of the discussion is the conviction that creation is not merely the backdrop to redemption, but a foundational part of the Christian worldview and the gospel itself.

In this episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Dr. Joe Boot and Pastor Nate Wright reflect on this summer’s Worldview Youth Academies and the importance of equipping young Christians to think and live biblically in every area of life. They discuss how rigorous teaching, personal mentorship, Christian fellowship, and practical discipleship are preparing the next generation to serve Christ faithfully in their families, churches, vocations, and communities.   They also respond to a recent media article portraying the Ezra Institute and public Christianity as extremist and politically dangerous. Joe and Nate address its claims, explain why biblical Christianity cannot be confined to private belief, and contrast political coercion with the transforming power of God’s Word. At the heart of the conversation is the foundational Christian confession that Jesus Christ is Lord over all things—and that faithfully living under his lordship is not extremism, but Christianity.

What happens when a society rejects its Christian foundations? Nate Wright is joined by Dr. David Haskell to discuss his new book, Christ or Collapse: The Case Against Godless Government. Drawing on extensive sociological research, Dr. Haskell makes the empirical case that Christian beliefs produce stronger families, greater generosity, higher social trust, and flourishing nations. They also explore the myth of government neutrality, the consequences of abandoning Christian principles, and why Christians must confidently bring biblical truth into public life.

In the final episode of this series, we explore why Christians can face the future with confidence rooted in Christ’s victory. Cultural reformation begins with worship, repentance, discipleship, and obedience—and grows through ordinary faithfulness in families, churches, schools, workplaces, and communities. The calling is not to change everything tomorrow, but to reject withdrawal and despair, bring every area of life under Christ’s reign, and build faithfully for generations to come.

Most of us were raised to think of the public square as religiously neutral territory. School is just school. Law is just law. Science reports the facts and leaves the value judgments to us. Joe, Michael, and Nate spend this episode arguing that none of that holds up, and that Christians have paid a heavy price for believing it.   They start with what a worldview actually is and why nobody gets to opt out of having one. Underneath any reading of the world sit answers to a few unavoidable questions: who God is, what a human being is, where morality comes from, what history is for. Those answers don't vanish when a culture stops going to church. They get relocated. Secularism has its own answers, and it enforces them.   A good stretch of the conversation goes to where this shows up in practice: curriculum, legislation, news coverage, research funding, family life, politics, the arts. Along the way they draw a distinction that's easy to miss. Christians can and should use tools that unbelievers built. The trouble starts when they take on the foundations along with the tools.   The objections get their turn too. Can't we just meet on common ground? Isn't this too black and white? Does it mean Christians can't cooperate with anyone? And the one that comes up most often: isn't secular government neutral by definition? The answer to that last one is that every legal order enforces some moral vision. The only question is whose.

In this episode, we explore why Scripture is the final authority for every area of life. The Bible is not a technical manual for politics, economics, or science, but it provides the authoritative framework for understanding them rightly.   We discuss what the sufficiency of Scripture truly means, the conflict between God’s revelation and human autonomy, and the consequences of allowing culture to define ethics, family, education, law, sexuality, and identity.   Christians must do more than add Bible verses to secular ideas. We are called to think Christianly, interpret all of life through God’s Word, and ask where the world is setting the terms instead of Scripture.

The gospel is deeply personal, but it is never merely private. Jesus did not come only to forgive individual sinners; He came announcing the kingdom of God and was enthroned as King over all creation.   In this episode, Joe, Michael, and Nate explore what Scripture means by the kingdom of God, why Christ’s ascension and present reign matter, and how the gospel transforms every area of life—from personal holiness and family life to vocation, justice, worship, and public life. They also address common objections surrounding the already-and-not-yet nature of the kingdom, the continued brokenness of the world, and the difference between biblical confidence and triumphalism.   The Christian life is not about waiting to escape the world. It is faithful service under the reigning Christ—building, discipling, teaching, planting, and reforming with confidence that obedience will bear fruit across generations.

In the opening episode of The Mission and Message of the Ezra Institute, Pastor Nate Wright is joined by Dr. Joe Boot and Dr. Michael Thiessen to explain why the Ezra Institute exists and why Christ’s lordship extends over every area of life.   Originally recorded for Ezra’s new radio program in Atlanta, the conversation explores the false divide between the sacred and secular, the modern tendency to privatize Christianity, and the calling of believers to bring every thought, institution, and vocation under the authority of Jesus Christ.   Where have we accepted the idea that Christ has nothing to say about a particular area of life?

Author and pastor David Forsythe joins the Podcast for Cultural Reformation to discuss his new Ezra Press book, Reformation, Not Revolution: Why God’s Law Matters for Society.   In this episode, David shares how his time in missions, pastoral ministry, and politics shaped his conviction that Christ’s lordship extends to every area of life. He and Nate discuss the difference between Christian reformation and revolutionary politics, the abiding authority of God’s law, sphere sovereignty, the distinction between sins and crimes, and why no society can ever be religiously neutral.   This conversation challenges Christians to reject both retreat and reactionary revolution, and instead recover a biblical vision for faithful cultural engagement under the crown rights of Christ.

On this Canada Day episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Dr. Michael Thiessen is joined by Dr. Joe Boot and Dr. Aaron Rock for a wide-ranging conversation on the state of Canada in 2026.   Is Canada a nation to celebrate, lament, or both? They reflect on the spiritual and cultural condition of the country, the continuing relevance of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, the dangers of progressivism and statism, and the urgent need for Christians to recover a biblical vision of law, liberty, nationhood, and public life.   From church leadership and Christian education to government overreach, surveillance, and the question of whether Canada will live under God’s law or man’s law, this episode calls Christians away from despair and toward faithful, hopeful, generational obedience under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

In this episode of the Podcast for Cultural Reformation, Dr. Michael Thiessen and Dr. Joe Boot continue their discussion on the sanctity of human life by tracing the modern culture of death from the sexual revolution to today’s expanding embrace of abortion and euthanasia.   They argue that these are not merely private medical issues or isolated policy debates, but expressions of a deeper religious worldview: the worship of autonomous man and the all-powerful state. From ancient Molech worship to modern abortion clinics and assisted dying regimes, they expose the same underlying logic—the sacrifice of the vulnerable for the sake of convenience, control, and false compassion.   But the Christian answer is not merely opposition. It is the proclamation of the God who is life, who creates life in the womb, sustains it until the final breath, and offers new life through Jesus Christ to all who repent and believe.