In this episode, we continue our conversation with Army Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Kerstin Hedlund. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, we recommend starting there for context.

Kerstin has spent years serving alongside soldiers in moments of grief, trauma, transition, and deep personal struggle. Her work isn’t about offering easy answers. It’s about presence, listening, and holding space for real human complexity.

This conversation is for anyone who has wrestled with suffering, loss, or disillusionment. It’s also for those who care deeply about someone who has served.

Kerstin’s insight offers a grounded and deeply humane perspective on what it means to stay present with one another through the hardest parts of life.

If you’d like to explore more about topics mentioned in this episode:

• “Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War” – Rita Nakashima Brock & Gabriella Lettini
• The Moral Injury Project – Syracuse University
• VA National Center for PTSD: https://www.ptsd.va.gov
• Military Chaplaincy Overview: https://www.goarmy.com/chaplain

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In this two-part conversation, John sits down with Pastor Kerstin Hedlund, a U.S. Army Chaplain whose story offers a rare window into what faith looks like when it’s lived out in the hardest and most human places.

From her path into military chaplaincy to the deep questions that arise in the presence of trauma and moral injury, Kerstin’s perspective brings theology down to earth — into barracks, hospitals, and battle zones — where hope, compassion, and grief often collide.

Together they explore what it means to serve others in a system defined by hierarchy and discipline, how empathy and faith can survive amid loss, and why doubt and mystery might actually make us more compassionate people.

Pastor Kerstin’s story reminds us that faith isn’t tested in seminaries or sanctuaries — it’s tested in the trenches of real life. Her honesty about doubt, fatigue, and renewal challenges the neat formulas we often attach to belief and invites us toward something deeper, more embodied, and more human.

🎧 Available wherever you get your podcasts.

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Episode: Hell, the Devil, and Atonement Theories

What exactly do Christians mean when they talk about hell? Where did the idea of the devil come from, and why does it look so different across the Bible? And why are there so many different theories of atonement—Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection—when most of us only ever hear one?

In this episode, we dig deep into the history, language, and theology behind three core ideas that have shaped Christianity for centuries:

• Hell – from Sheol and Gehenna in the Hebrew Bible to Dante’s Inferno and modern evangelical preaching.
• The Devil – tracing the figure from the Hebrew Bible’s “accuser” to the cosmic enemy of God in later Christian thought.
• Atonement Theories – surveying models from Christus Victor to Moral Influence to Penal Substitution, and asking how these different views reveal the diverse ways Christians have tried to understand salvation.

This conversation explores how these concepts developed over time, why they remain so influential, and what happens when we step back to ask whether we’ve been handed the whole story.

If you want to dive deeper, here are some books and articles we recommend:

• Edward Fudge – The Fire That Consumes
• Robin Parry – The Evangelical Universalist
• Jerry L. Walls – Hell: The Logic of Damnation

• Elaine Pagels – The Origin of Satan
• Henry Ansgar Kelly – Satan: A Biography
• Archibald Robertson – The Devil: His Origin and His Fall

• Gustaf Aulén – Christus Victor
• N.T. Wright – The Day the Revolution Began
• Fleming Rutledge – The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ
• Tony Jones – A Better Atonement (shorter, accessible resource)

• Bart Ehrman – Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife
• C. S. Lewis – The Great Divorce (a classic imaginative take, though not academic)
• The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on “Hell,” “Satan,” and “Atonement” (for an open-access scholarly overview).

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Special music by Forrest Clay from the Recover EP