Long Steep: It's Giving Thanks - An Episode on Gratitude

Long Steep: Saint-Healers and the Canonization of Public Health

Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2453669/fan_mail/new] Someone survives the unsurvivable, the scans look clean, the symptoms vanish, and the doctors can’t give a satisfying reason. That single gap in explanation is where faith often rushes in and where the Vatican builds a case for sainthood. We take you inside the strange, fascinating overlap of religion and health where prayer, medical records, and institutional investigation collide.  We introduce nine newly canonized Catholic saints and the lived histories behind their reputations: martyrs who refused to renounce their faith, founders and nuns who built care systems for the poor and sick, a physician celebrated for treating people who couldn’t pay, a social justice Catholic activist, and Carlo Acutis, the first millennial saint who used technology to track Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions. Their stories aren’t just religious biography, they’re a map of how communities decide who counts as a healer, protector, or advocate even after death.  Then we break down the canonization process step by step, with special focus on Vatican miracles and miraculous healing. What qualifies as a miracle, why the cure must be rapid and lasting, and why doctors being unable to offer a plausible scientific explanation carries so much weight. We also bring in the science side: spontaneous remission, uncertainty in medicine, and the difference between correlation and causation. To close, we connect plague history, old theories of disease like divine punishment and miasma, and the modern reality that many hospitals still hold space for chapels, clergy, and saint imagery, especially where health care access gaps leave people reaching for any kind of hope.  Subscribe for more on faith and public health, share this with someone who loves medical mysteries, and leave a review with your take: when medicine can’t explain a recovery, what do you think it really means? Follow me on Instagram and Threads: @ReligiosiTea You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!

A Tall Boy and a Pack of Smokes

Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2453669/fan_mail/new] Content Note: This episode touches on mental health, religious disaffiliation, family stress, and folk healing practices, including a brief discussion of an attempted exorcism. Ever wonder what happens when a devout Catholic upbringing meets a restless, science-first mind? In this episode, we sit down with Isela—a self-described fronteriza raised in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands—to talk about stepping away from church, finding grounding through therapy, and what “spiritual health” can look like when you don’t subscribe to a single creed. The conversation moves easily from holiday foods and Guadalupe processions to panic attacks, somatic stress, and the quiet relief of letting go of religious guilt without letting go of cultural roots. Isela shares stories from a goth adolescence, her parents’ separation, and a moment of family crisis that led her mother to seek help from a folk healer in the hills of Juárez. What followed wasn’t a dramatic exorcism, but something far more ordinary: limpias, tarot cards, incense and herbs—and payment in cigarettes and a tall beer. Years later, a card reading from that visit would map uncannily onto Isela’s shift away from bench science and toward public health and community work. Together, we talk about agnosticism as a posture of curiosity rather than certainty, how to respect personal experience without turning it into doctrine, and why cultural humility matters when engaging spiritual practices that don’t belong to us. We also get practical—what well-being looks like when mental, physical, and financial health are all in play, how chronic stress shows up in the body, and why therapy, grounding skills, and safe relationships can matter as much as any ritual. If you’re reevaluating faith, sitting with doubt, or figuring out where science and spirit meet in your own life, this conversation offers clarity without clichés—and permission to keep asking better questions. If this episode resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway. Follow me on Instagram and Threads: @ReligiosiTea You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!

Long Steep: It's Giving Thanks - An Episode on Gratitude

Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2453669/fan_mail/new] In this Long Steep, we brew gratitude slowly and intentionally—through theology, psychology, and lived experience. No buzzwords, no toxic positivity, no “be grateful for your trauma” energy. Just real tea. We start with what gratitude actually is: a state, a trait, an act of reciprocity shaped by context and choice. From there, we trace how gratitude shows up across traditions: * Christianity, through prayer and gift-of-life theology * Islam, through shukr of heart, tongue, and action * Buddhism, through mindfulness, interbeing, and katannuta * New Age practice, through ritual, shadow work, and personal agency We honor Indigenous cultures without speaking over them, acknowledge harm without reframing it as “growth,” and explore how gratitude practices—from candle offerings and prayer, to journaling and daily reflection—can help reorient attention without denying pain. We also get real about the science: gratitude can support wellbeing, habit change, and resilience (Emmons & McCullough, Seligman), but results are mixed. Context matters. Autonomy matters even more. If all you take from this episode is one honest moment of peace, that’s enough. Gratitude doesn’t need to fix everything—it can just soften something. Sip along, share it with someone rebuilding their grounding, and tell us what you’re grateful for today (or not). We’re listening. Follow @ReligiosiTea everywhere it appears. Follow me on Instagram and Threads: @ReligiosiTea You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!

Ghosts, Gods, and Gratitude

Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2453669/fan_mail/new] Content Warning: This episode includes discussion of parental death, grief, childhood emotional hardship, spiritual disappointment/anger toward God, anxiety, depression, and references to ghosts/hauntings and spirit work. Please listen with care and step away if you need to. In this episode of ReligiosiTea, Adren sits down with his lifelong friend Raven to sip through a decades-long journey of grief, gods, ghost hunting, and the quiet kind of magic that helps you keep going. Raven shares how losing both parents cracked her world open and pulled her toward the underworld—toward Hades, shadow work, and a spirituality that holds both darkness and light. We talk about being a kid begging God for happiness, feeling betrayed when prayers seem unanswered, and what it’s like to move from bitter to better without pretending the hurt was “for a reason.” Raven shares how loss pulled her toward the underworld’s symbolism—endings, wealth, and what grows unseen—and why a raw plea at an altar felt like the first time she was truly heard. We unpack core values of kindness and community, then dig into shadow work as a practical way to face jealousy, fear, and anger without flinching. She explains how ghost hunting became spirit work, why protection is non-negotiable, and what respect looks like when you’re dealing with the dead. If you’ve ever wrestled with God after unanswered prayers, her journey from resentment to gratitude offers a grounded, compassionate map. The episode also gets specific about mental health tools. Affirmations—used as daily glamour magic while doing makeup—shift self-talk and rewire behavior, helping with anxiety, routines, and care for the body. We connect belief to better habits, gratitude to resilience, and boundaries to peace. Expect real stories, a few laugh-out-loud ghost moments, and clear takeaways you can test today: set protection, research before you open any door, and speak to yourself like someone you’re responsible for. It’s candid, funny, a little spooky, and deeply human—like sharing a pot of tea with a friend who’s survived the storm and is finally ready to tell the story. If this resonates, follow and subscribe, share it with a friend who’s navigating loss or rebuilding their faith, and leave a review with your biggest insight or question—we’d love to hear the practice that changed you. Follow me on Instagram and Threads: @ReligiosiTea You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!

Long Steep: Psycho - Sacred Delusions and Holy Madness

Spill your ReligiosiTea directly with the show host! Let us know your reactions, stories, and more! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2453669/fan_mail/new] Content Warning: This episode discusses symptoms and impacts of psychosis, including hallucinations, delusions, cult dynamics, moral panics, religious trauma, and references to mass suicides and violence. It also touches on stress, trauma, and contemporary political upheaval. Please listen with care, and step away if you need. What if a single vision could ripple through millions of lives? In this Long Steep, Adren takes you to the uneasy edge where faith becomes certainty, certainty becomes prophecy, and prophecy collides with a hyperconnected world hungry for meaning. With warmth, rigor, and a pinch of irreverence, we steep in the phenomenon of religious psychosis—what it is, what it isn’t, and why the line between sincere devotion and sudden fracture matters. This isn’t just diagnosis; it’s interrogation. Along the way, we move through Jerusalem Syndrome and India Syndrome, the mechanics of charisma and cult formation, godspousing, moral panics, and even the dancing plague of 1518. RaptureTok becomes our case study: one pastor’s dream-whispered date, failed prophecy, and the viral movement that sold possessions and courted ascension. Through it all, we ask: are we watching psychosis, or witnessing a social epidemic dressed in prophecy? Highlights in this steep: * Defining psychosis versus sincere spiritual experience * Hallmark symptoms, novelty, and impairment thresholds * Differential diagnosis and ruling out substances * Stress, trauma, and place as triggers for visions * Charisma, cult logic, and godspousing distinctions * Skepticism, isolation, and family fractures * Social epidemics, moral panics, and contagion (the dance plague) * RaptureTok analysis: prophecy, spread, and aftermath * Politics of salvation and Christian nationalism * Crisis response, red flags, and grounding practices At the heart of it: faith can heal and anchor, but it can also fracture under pressure. Learning the signs—and cultivating compassion—helps us safeguard both belief and well-being. So pour your tea, enter the CaTeadral, and steep with us. If this conversation challenges or helps you, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review. Your stories shape future episodes—drop a comment or find Adren on socials @ReligiosiTea. Between vision and delusion lies the thinnest veil—sometimes holy, sometimes broken, always human. Follow me on Instagram and Threads: @ReligiosiTea You can use the link at the top of the show notes or email me at religiositea@gmail.com to share your stories, thoughts, insights, reactions, and much more! I'm waiting for you to spill your ReligiosiTea!