Welcome to the pilot episode of Slipping Up, Season 1 of the Theodivergent Podcast.
This is a podcast about theology, failure, and the divine mess of being human. Season one is called Slipping Up, and in this pilot episode, I tell the story of how I blew an interview at an apiary. A bee landed on my glasses, I flinched, and the CEO ended the interview on the spot. Apparently, I was a threat to the hive.
That moment? It didn’t teach me anything—except maybe that sometimes we just fail. As Dwight Schrute once told Ryan in The Office, "There’s not always a lesson." And that’s the point. Not every failure comes with a tidy moral or spiritual takeaway. In this episode, I unpack why failure isn’t the opposite of success—not trying is. We'll talk false comparisons, dating disasters, and the pressure to extract divine meaning from every flop.
This is a season for anyone who’s tried, flinched, and gotten stung (literally or metaphorically). If you've ever felt ashamed of your failures because they didn't lead to some heroic bounce-back moment, you're in the right place.
In the next 10 weeks we’l be talking to experts in various fields discussing failure.
In a culture obsessed with productivity and perfection, failure is often treated as shameful: something to be corrected or quickly overcome. Yet Open and Relational Theology provides a better framework that is grounded in love, freedom, and becoming. Failure, then, is not a state of being. It is not fixed and is not concrete. Failure is not antithetical to flourishing. It is, in many cases, integral. Rather than interpreting missteps as evidence of divine absence or human worthlessness, we might view them as part of the divine-human process of creative transformation.
God does not control the future or predetermine outcomes, but instead lures creation toward love, novelty, and overall well-being. This means that misfires, mistakes, and mishaps are not exceptions to God’s plan, they are expected components of a universe grounded in possibility. The risk of failure is the price of genuine freedom. Hopefully the Slipping Up series offers a liberating theological account of failure that aligns with what artists, entrepreneurs, and reformers have long known: failure is inseparable from innovation.
I argue that rethinking failure through ORT not only relieves the shame associated with it but also affirms our identity as creative, finite beings co-creating with God. I draw from biblical narratives (e.g., Peter’s denial, Jonah’s refusal, Moses’ hesitation), the creative arts, and vocational practices to explore how failure contributes to spiritual growth and theological imagination.
Join me on Thursdays at 7pm EST.
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I write for the ones who don’t fit and for teachers, poets, wanderers, and sacred misfits trying to live with integrity in a world that prefers easy answers.
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Theodivergent is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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