Meet Erin H. Moon
Author of the newly released, I've Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God
Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore Austin, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, will release on August 12, 2025. All of the content available at Public Theology is for those who identify as Christian, as well as those who might be interested in learning about a more inclusive, kind, thoughtful Christianity. We’re glad you’re here.
I (Amy) first heard of
on Kendra Adachi’s The Lazy Genius Podcast in 2021. I was a weekly listener and appreciated Kendra’s approach to things, summarized by her tag line: “Be a genius about the things that matter, and lazy about the things that don’t.”I needed this kind of support. At that time, I was a stay at home mom and Kendra’s content served two main purposes in my life:
Providing practical tips on how to manage everything from organizing my kitchen and managing my time, to making vegetables taste good by cooking them in chicken fat (highly recommend this recipe)— and all in a way that felt warm and accessible, what she refers to as her “kind big sister energy.”
Giving me some kind of rhythm, however small, to help keep every day from feeling exactly the same (which was mostly the case with two young kids). I had a few podcasts on rotation, and this was one of my favorites.
I’m assuming that I listened to Erin’s episode when it dropped on February 15, 2021, because I was almost never late (and we were still pretty holed up at this point during the pandemic). Episode 197, titled “How to Navigate a Faith Crisis,” introduced Erin, “the resident bible scholar” and host at Faith Adjacent, Senior Creative at the Popcast Media Group, and Substacker at The Swipe Up: A Newsletter from Your Internet Friend.
I need to stop here to share that I was not engaging with anything overtly Christian in 2021. Restore was meeting online and I was thankful for the break. I had been on a gradual journey of deconstruction which was throttled into high gear after three very difficult cases regarding foster children who left our home without much hope for their futures. I was touched out, sleep deprived, anxious, and overstimulated by everything that was going on around me— except for my brain, which felt like it was slowly dying from disuse. Podcasts were a lifeline.
But why was Kendra— who I knew was a Christian but did not usually proselytize— talking about faith? To be honest, I was annoyed; however, Kendra had earned my trust over time, so I listened.
What followed was 56 minutes of discussion around faith that didn’t make me feel like I was going to a) yell, and/or b) cry. I’ve included a bit of the conversation below.
Kendra, in discussing deconstruction:
“I received, actually, several suggestions around this topic. People struggling with their faith or having somebody in their life who is struggling with their faith and things are different than they used to be, and just like how to ‘lazy genius’ that. And I was like, ‘Well I can’t ‘lazy genius’ it because it feels weird to ‘lazy genius’ laundry and then also you’re not an Evangelical anymore. Like it just felt a little weird. But at the same time I feel like this is a conversation that is happening in the periphery with our friends— sort of, maybe— who are kind of talking about their discomfort about certain things. You hear really intelligent people who are maybe preachers or former preachers— you just hear people sort of talking about things loosely, but it’s like no one has actually said, ‘Hey you guys, it’s super normal to go through a faith crisis. Here are some steps or here are some things to expect.’”
She goes on to talk about how she did not feel comfortable tackling this topic until she thought to ask Erin to join her.
Kendra introduces the conversation with this question:
“In terms of how we know who to let in, who to tell— how do we set these boundaries? How do we open these doors in sharing about our faith expedition with our people?”
And Erin replies:
“Okay, so this is actually something that I feel really confident in explaining because my spiritual director helped me understand this. Her name is Fran. She’s amazing… So we were walking through a session together and I was talking about how I feel like I am walking on ice, I’m walking over a huge lake that’s covered in ice and what happens if this cracks? And her question to me was, ‘Imagine yourself breaking through and I want you to see who’s on the shore yelling for you to just swim harder, I want you to see who is trying to get you out, and I want you to see who is swimming with you.’ And that picture was so powerful to me, and it really helped me understand.…
I think that question of who is swimming with you is crucial because there are some people, especially if they have not gone through deconstruction… this is going to make them very nervous and very uncomfortable. And we just have to be careful who we trust with this. This is deep soul work and I just don’t think everyone gets to know….
I think what is hard is that in this there might be people who you think will swim with you and they choose to get out. But I also think that in that there are also people who you put on the shore that might jump in with you.”
I re-listened to the podcast to prepare for this article, and I think I appreciate this analogy more now than I possibly could have in 2021. I hope it resonates deeply with you, as well.
After listening to this episode and stewing on it for a few days, I decided that I needed a spiritual director. You may be asking, “But what is a spiritual director?” That’s a great question. I didn’t know either. I told Zach I needed him to message some random girl (I was not on any socials) and tell her that his wife listened to her podcast episode and needed some direction on how to find a spiritual director.
And do you know what Erin did? She responded, with all of the sincerity and care for which she is known. I did my research and began to meet with the most wonderful woman, Denise, who eventually told me that she thought I probably didn’t need spiritual direction— I seemed to be very comfortable with where I was and that God was, too. For the first time, I accepted that I was okay, just as I was, on my slow and steady path to a healthier understanding of faith.
I’m still on that path, and I am forever grateful to Erin (and Kendra!) for their part in my story. I appreciated Erin so deeply that I talked Zach’s ear off about her and suggested that he include her in our Summer Mixtape interview series the following year, and she agreed (find it here)!
Last year, Erin asked Zach to be an early reader of her book, I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God, in consideration of an endorsement. Here’s how the book is described:
“Your openhearted path to reclaiming what you love about your faith--and lighting a match to the rest
When your faith as you know it has been commodified, nationalized, scandalized, and rebranded beyond recognition, is it even possible to recover?
If you feel iffy, conflicted, or downright devastated by spiritual disconnect, Erin Moon wants you to know that she's got questions too. With empathy, insight, and some healthy meme therapy, Erin maps out a faith topography that's comfortable with hard questions, dichotomies, and maybe not getting the answers we wanted.
Because, as it turns out, God is not afraid of your questions.
Consider this your open invitation to get gut-level honest about where it started, and heart-level hopeful about where it can go from here.”
Zach read it. He loved it. He compared her to Rachel Held Evans— which, if you know Zach, is high praise. And here’s his endorsement:
In celebration of her book launch yesterday, we asked Erin if we could share her work with our readers. We are huge fans of Erin’s, and we think you will be, too.
The following is an excerpt from I’ve Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God, by Erin Hicks Moon.
Dear Erin,
I hope this isn’t presumptuous, but why the eff are we even doing this anymore?
Regards,
Liv
I do appreciate an email that gets right to the point.
Because I am a Person with a Faith Podcast, sometimes I get Internet Frangers (these are strangers who become friends) who are in the midst of also trying to figure out why this whole faith thing is so hard, and since it is, is it even worth it? And they inevitably ask some form of this question: Why on earth are we still trying to do this? Why are we still trying to be Christians?
Hope is a reckless investment: the stakes are high and if things go south, you’re in a bad place. And it is beyond easy to sink into the feather bed of hopelessness. To disconnect my heart and my spirit and my body from this flaming garbage truck of a world, to unhitch myself from the risk of faith at all and put my energy into protecting myself and my people from the truth of the matter: no one is coming to save you, and you can only trust yourself.
But then.
But then, but then, but then.
We can sink as far as we want, but the flaming garbage truck is never the end of the story. As much as the ache of the world is true, there is also resuscitating hope putting its breath in the lungs of truth and watching them inflate. And I think when Christians talk about hope, we tend to think they mean the pearly- gates- New- Jerusalem- future kind. But Jesus didn’t say “abundant life when you get to heaven” or “abundant next life.” Just “abundant life.” Here. Now. And no one will be honest about the fact that telling the truth and walking in active hope is damn near impossible.
Because as a global faith, particularly in Western cultures, we’ve stopped telling the truth. The truth about what Jesus said, about who we are, about how we are supposed to take care of people, about what we’re supposed to stand for, about what we’re supposed to love. We’ve ignored, gaslit, rejected, or buried the truth and asked everyone to just be hopeful in a fantasy ungrounded in reality. Or we’ve decided to stay sitting upright at the cold table of judgment, criticizing anyone who dares to imagine a different way.
I get trapped in these patterns when I forget the actual bonkers nature of what we’re saying we believe in here with Jesus. Like he told the crowd in John 8, he’s saying he’s offering a life without death, and besides that, a way of living that speaks to the humanity of every single person. When I really remember this is not about budget meetings or interpretations of Scripture, when I go back to pre- empire, weird Jesus who said strange things like “drink my blood and eat my flesh” and wanted us to love our enemies, I cannot shake it. Maybe you can, Liv. I’m not the one who can decide that for you.
I would love more than anything to extract myself from what feels like a fruitless exercise in longing expectation for love to triumph over hate. It would save me a lot of emotional capital at the very least. But dammit, I cannot shake the way the Gospels systematically blow up the idea that only the put- together and the fully articulate can be with God. How only the well or the rich or the powerful have access to God. I cannot look away from Jesus touching people considered to be unclean, Jesus inviting those that society deemed unfit, Jesus defying space and time and physics to show his love. The story of an expansive God compacting every bit of God’s nature into a fragile, vulnerable infant. How it’s true that love matters when it’s honest, or to quote Paul, “No matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love” (1 Cor. 13:3). How there’s no denying that when you see someone, even yourself, in their belovedness, it can change who they are, how they live, and their purpose in the world. I cannot stop looking at the cracks where the light breaks free.
That’s why the eff I’m even doing this anymore, Liv.
No matter how hard it tries, bleak, despondent truth cannot kill hope. And it does try, Liv. You need to know it’s going to try really hard.
Okay, friends! Please support Erin by purchasing I’ve Got Questions, subscribing to her Substack, The Swipe Up: A Newsletter from Your Internet Friend, and/or sharing this post. She is the real deal, and we are grateful for her work.
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Amy! 🥹 Thank you so much for sharing this with your people. I am SO EXCITED we're going to finally be IRL friends in a couple of weeks. I have so much respect and admiration for the work you and Zach do. Thrilled the internet brought us together thank you Al Gore.
Thank you for introducing us to Erin, Amy! I'm going to read her book and subscribe to her Substack. You and Zach are a lifeline to me. I began deconstructing in 2015 when I began reading while recovering from a major health issue. My first book, "Disarming Scripture," began to calm my brain about things that bothered me about the Bible. From there, RHE (of course) and Sarah Bessey, Pete Enns, Brian McLaren and many others. Then more church hurt to come. Now I live in a very small little town (1000) and there's really no one I've met on this path so it's a lonelier journey. You've become companions. Thank you.