For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Encore: Barbara Brown Taylor on Being the Saint of Small Things Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

Description:

Barbara Brown Taylor gave us the question that ends every episode of this show, so it feels right to hand the Sacred Work series over to her. In this encore, the New York Times bestselling author, teacher, and Episcopal priest talks with Jen about the year she spent doing almost nothing impressive: the county fair with a couple of six-year-olds, an old racehorse nobody wanted, blueberry pies for friends going through hard things, and shifts at the public library. She calls herself the saint of small things, and she is honest about how hard that is to say out loud when people want to know what big thing you are working on. They also get into why she is wary of hope that functions as an escape hatch, how she keeps her heart from going wooden in a world of terrible headlines, and why friendship is worth protecting even though nobody rewards you for it. Stay to the end for the benediction Barbara wrote for this community.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

I’ll be the saint of small things today.
Headlines give me omniscience but no omnipotence.
I’ve got to attend to the sustainability of a supple heart.
I’m real wary of hope unless it functions right here, right now.
The years are short but the days are long, and that’s a blessing not a curse.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

A Rhythm of Prayer by Sarah Bessey, which includes Barbara’s contribution
This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley, who has also been a guest on For the Love
When God Is Silent by Barbara Brown Taylor
Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor
Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor
An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://barbarabrowntaylor.com

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/authorBarbaraBrownTaylor

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Priya Parker on Fighting Well, and Why Conflict Is Not Sin Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

Description:

Think about the last real fight you had with someone you love, then think about what you did with it. Most of us swallowed it and called it peace. Priya Parker has spent twenty years walking into rooms where groups are coming apart, churches mid-split, companies that lost their founder, families with one topic nobody will name at the table. She is back on the show with a new book, The Art of Fighting, and her argument is that the peace we keep by avoiding conflict costs us the very thing we say we want most.

Jen and Priya open with a hot takes round on pineapple pizza and whether a hot dog is a sandwich, which turns out to be one of Priya's actual tools: low stakes arguing is practice for the high stakes kind. From there, what unhealthy peace looks like inside a family, a team, or a church. Priya tells the story of her grandfather's funeral, where the minister's highest praise for a fifty year marriage was that the couple never fought. Jen names the four years she let a business partnership die rather than have one hard conversation. They get into how to diagnose the fight you are actually in, why “we’re not a ___” is the sentence to listen for, and what happened when Priya went looking for the best literature on group conflict and kept landing in the Christian tradition.

Conflict is not sin. It is a skill, and every one of us can get better at it.

Part of September's Sacred Work series.

***

Thought-provoking Quotes:

Low stakes arguing helps us approach high stakes arguing. – Priya Parker
When the going gets tough, add warmth to heat. – Priya Parker
Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict. – Priya Parker
I learned from an early age that there is loss in avoidance. – Priya Parker
I invite you to think about conflict as a skill. And you can get better at it. – Priya Parker
Conflict is not sin. Conflict is actually highly functional. – Priya Parker
Fighting is about power. Avoidance is also about power. – Priya Parker
Whose mess do you want to be in? – Priya Parker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict by Priya Parker (Riverhead, out 9/8) - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Fighting-Transformative-Power-Conflict/dp/0593420225
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker - https://www.amazon.com/Art-Gathering-How-Meet-Matters/dp/1594634920
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull - https://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Inc-Expanded-Overcoming-Inspiration/dp/0593594649
If You Met My Family, You'd Understand: A Family Systems Primer by Jack Shitama - https://www.amazon.com/You-Met-Family-Youd-Understand/dp/1732009368

Adrienne Brodeur on Family Myths, Wounded People, and Honest Fiction Sep 04, 2026

Show notes

Description:

Some families run on rules nobody ever wrote down. Here is your role. Here is what we talk about. Here is who gets forgiven and who gets blamed. We accept those terms as children, and then one day we look up and wonder who exactly signed us up for the job.

August’s Jen Hatmaker Book Club pick is Little Monsters, and Adrienne Brodeur came with the whole story behind it. She spent thirty years on the other side of the pen, co-founding Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, editing at HMH Books, judging the National Book Award, and now running Aspen Words. She published one novel of her own in 2005, then waited fourteen years for the next book, a memoir that broke a silence she had kept since she was fourteen.

Adrienne and Jen get into the unspoken rules every family runs on, why estrangement takes love rather than indifference, and what Cain and Abel taught her about the gifts we give our parents. Adrienne explains why fiction can feel more honest than memoir, makes an unpopular case for Ken, and talks about writing mania with compassion rather than spectacle. Plus the stack of books a stepmother handed her that redirected her whole life, the screenplay she is writing, and the book club’s standing offer to cast the movie.

***

Thought-provoking Quotes:

He’s wounded, and wounded people wound. – Adrienne Brodeur
Understanding someone isn’t quite the same as absolving them. – Adrienne Brodeur
Fiction can sometimes feel more honest than memoir. I don’t mean factual honesty. I mean emotionally unguarded. – Adrienne Brodeur
Who the hell decided that peacemaker was my job, or golden child, or secret keeper, or difficult one? – Adrienne Brodeur
Turns out dead mothers still have an excellent work ethic. – Adrienne Brodeur
Everyone wanted a flat version of themselves. – Jen Hatmaker
We have family stories that we’re telling too, even believing, that we’re trying to believe. – Jen Hatmaker
Some of our characters landed on their feet, but they landed on their feet in a different zip code. – Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Little-Monsters/Adrienne-Brodeur/9781982198114
Little Monsters book club discussion questions - https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/little-monsters-by-adrienne-brodeur/guide
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/wild-game-adrienne-brodeur/1130010789
Man Camp by Adrienne Brodeur - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001HN38FI
Aspen Words at the Aspen Institute - https://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/adrienne-brodeur/
Zoetrope: All-Story, co-founded with Francis Ford Coppola

Guest’s Links:

Adrienne’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/adriennebrodeur/

Adrienne’s Faceboo ...

Your Life Is the Assignment: Jen Hatmaker Solo Episode Sep 02, 2026

Show notes

Description:

For twenty years, one question has followed Jen everywhere she goes: what am I supposed to be doing with my life? It comes in the comments, the voicemails, the line after every event. And for a long time, Jen answered it like a career question, as if somewhere out there was a slot with her name on it and her only job was to find it and climb inside.

In this solo episode, she puts down the word calling and picks up a different one: assignment. Not the thing waiting for you in the future, but the work already in your hands, in this season, on this street, with these people. Jen untangles work from worth, names the theology a lot of us absorbed that rewarded us for burning out, and shares the questions she uses to tell the difference between an assignment that is actually hers and one that is simply available. She also talks about the assignments that end, and why finishing one well is its own sacred work.

Ordinary, faithful, unglamorous work is not the consolation prize for people who never found their capital C calling. It is the actual thing.

This episode kicks off September's theme, Sacred Work, here on the show and over in the AWAKE Collective.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

"I have stopped asking what my calling is altogether. I started asking what my assignment is." - Jen Hatmaker
"Sacred work is not a waiting room for a more important life that hasn't started yet." - Jen Hatmaker
"The paycheck is not the assignment. The paycheck funds the life where the assignment happens." - Jen Hatmaker
"Burnout is not evidence that you are on assignment. More likely it is evidence that you have taken on someone else's assignment." - Jen Hatmaker
"A real assignment will cost you something. But an obligation costs you yourself. That's not the same bill." - Jen Hatmaker
"Something does not have to be bad for it to be over." - Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

This month's Sacred Work lineup: Priya Parker, Dr. Marisa Franco, Zibby Owens, plus encore conversations with Barbara Brown Taylor and Mary Pipher
Worth by Dr. Marisa Franco
The AWAKE Collective monthly reflection guide. September's writing prompt: The work that is mine right now is...
Your challenge this week: name one assignment you are actually on, then do the very next small thing it requires
Leave Jen a voicemail: https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast

Take the AWAKE Quiz: JenHatmaker.com/quiz

Connect with Jen!

Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen's YouTube -

Jodi Picoult on Banned Books, Buried Truths, and the Story Behind Hollow Bones Aug 28, 2026

Show notes

Description:

Jodi Picoult is back, and she brought her thirtieth novel with her.

If you have been in a book club at any point in the last thirty years, you know the name. Forty million copies in print. Thirty four languages. And, as of this year, the fourth most banned author in America, which Jen considers a five star review.

Jodi and Jen get into all of it: what thirty years of publishing actually teaches you (start with the underwear), why she refuses to coast when she could easily phone it in, what she believes AI will never do to a reader, and the career she never asked for as an advocate against book banning. Then they turn to Hollow Bones, out September 15, a novel that began with an anonymous postcard and a letter from a jail cell and carried Jodi deep into postpartum psychosis, the dismissal of women by medicine, and the long shadow of 9/11. She also brings back a character you have wondered about since My Sister's Keeper.

One heads up before you press play: this conversation includes discussion of postpartum psychosis, suicide, the death of a child, and school shootings. Please take good care of yourself. Support resources are linked below.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

If I'm not challenged by a book, why should you be?
AI will never be human. Novels work because an author is reaching deep into the heart and soul of a reader and finding a chord to pluck that resonates. AI can imitate that. It can never really do it.
It's fine for a parent to decide what his or her child should be reading. I advocate that. It is not fine for that parent to decide what everyone else's child should be reading.
When we remove books from schools, we are not protecting children. We are taking away resources that help them deal with an increasingly complex world. And that is the opposite of protecting kids.
Women are failed at every turn of their lives by the medical industry.
The more you lie, the easier it gets to lie. And we are living in a time right now when lies are being peddled as truths.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Hollow Bones by Jodi Picoult (Ballantine, September 15)
Pre-order signed copies plus an exclusive overlay from Still North Books
Pre-order from Barnes & Noble for the sweepstakes and a letter
Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and Mad Honey (with Jennifer Finney Boylan) by Jodi Picoult
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, adapted for the stage by Jodi Picoult
PostSecret
PEN America on book bans
Postpartum Support International
National Maternal Mental Health Hotline: call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: call or text 988

Guest's Links:

Website - https://jodipicoult.com/

Instagram - https://instagram.com/jodipicoult

TikTok - https://tiktok.com/@jodipicoult

Facebook -

Your House Is Talking to You with Myquillyn Smith Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

There is a specific kind of overwhelm that hits when you walk into your own living room and everything in it seems to be asking you for something. Finish this puzzle. Put me away. Read the rest of me. Myquillyn Smith, better known as The Nester, says your house is talking to you. It is not shaming you. It is telling you the truth about your stuff.

Myquillyn is back in the guest chair, this time on her own, and her new book House Hushing is out now. She walks us through backwards decluttering (pull the loose stuff out of one room, stash it somewhere else, live with that room for 48 hours, and let it prove its case), the threshold where a room tips from fine to too much, and why so many of us cross it earlier than our mothers did.

We also get into the confession she hears most from women about their homes, the difference between a room that is quiet and a room that has no soul, how pattern and contrast work like volume dials you can turn up or down, and why she owns seasonally instead of just owning less. Plus a dead butterfly hot glued into a frame, and the ten minute fix for anyone whose house is currently yelling at them.

We are in our Say the Quiet Thing Out Loud series, and there is plenty most of us never say out loud about our own homes. This one gives you permission and a plan.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

Whenever you feel friction happening in your home, that is your house actually talking to you. And it is not shaming you. (Myquillyn)
Less stuff leads to peace, that is what the minimalists say. But I would say intentionality leads to peace. (Myquillyn)
More begets more. But the opposite is also true, which is so hopeful for us. Less leads to less. (Myquillyn)
Of all the places in the world, wouldn’t it be nice if we created a home that quietly welcomed us? (Myquillyn)
It is not a mystery, that feeling you get of just a little bit of overwhelm and a lack of joy. (Jen)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

House Hushing by Myquillyn Smith (Baker Books), at https://thenester.com
Simplicity Me Course https://shop.jenhatmaker.com/products/simplicity-for-the-rest-of-us

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://thenester.com

Instagram - https://instagram.com/thenester

Connect with Jen!

Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker

Jen’s YouTube - https://www. ...

Listener Voicemail Day: Five Women Say the Quiet Thing Out Loud Aug 19, 2026

Show notes

Description:

There is no guest on the mic today. There is you. It is Listener Voicemail Day, one of Jen's favorite episodes to make, and it lands in the middle of our permission series, right after Jen asked you to find your one true sentence and say it out loud. You did. This episode is what came back.

It comes in two halves. First, the women who called about Jen's mom, Jana King, who, as Jen puts it, a genre.

Have something you need to say out loud? Head to JenHatmaker.com/Podcast, look for the Send Voicemail button, and tell us the quiet thing you finally said, or the one you are still working up to. We are listening.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

"It is real work as moms to not take our own burdens and gently pick them up off of our own shoulders and place them on the shoulders of our kids." - Jen Hatmaker
"Hearing your mom describe a different way of loving and existing was incredibly freeing for me." - Stacy, listener voicemail
"It's just a new terror every day." - Sena, listener voicemail
"I betrayed myself to keep everyone comfortable." - Gina, from her poem "Backfire"
"The truth is, I'm sad because I've given up on myself." - Courtney, listener voicemail
"You do not have to have the answer, or even the path, in order to say the true sentence." - Jen Hatmaker

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

The Sacred Yes: What My Mom Taught Me About Courage, Curiosity, and Starting Again (Jen and her mom, Jana King) - [EPISODE LINK]
Say the Quiet Thing Out Loud, Jen's solo episode and the one true sentence assignment - [EPISODE LINK]
https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast
Letters from the Middle, Jen's Substack, where the honesty conversation runs all month - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com/
The AWAKE Collective, Jen's subscriber community on Substack - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com/p/the-awake-collective
Tell us your story. Leave a voicemail at https://jenhatmaker.com/podcast, look for the Send Voicemail button.

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Substack - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/

Jen’s Facebook ...

Encore: The Conversation You Have Been Avoiding for Years: Dr. Rick Hanson Aug 14, 2026

Show notes

Some of us will sit in years of low grade misery rather than have one uncomfortable conversation. Jen will be first to raise her hand. She has put off a confrontation so long that the frustration outlasted the thing she was frustrated about. Saying the quiet thing out loud is not only about the truths we tell ourselves. Sometimes it is the sentence we owe another person, the one we have been rehearsing in the shower for eight months and still have not said.

Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times bestselling author of Making Great Relationships. He reframes the whole problem in a way that took the air out of Jen’s dread: confrontation is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is a skill, which means it can be learned and practiced.

In this episode, Jen and Rick explore:

Why relationships are built out of small back and forth interactions
The difference between what comes at you and what you send back, and where your real power lives
Rick’s five part checklist for wise speech, plus the optional sixth
What to do when a conversation goes sideways, and how to know your own lines
The permission to resize a relationship instead of ending it

If you have been carrying something for months waiting for the right moment, consider this a nudge and a toolkit.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

“Relationships are made from interactions. The gradual weight of interactions, for better or worse, over time shapes the relationship.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“What comes over the net is out of our control in the moment. But what we do at that point, how we respond, what we choose, that is under our control.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“Most arguments are about the past. They will never see it your way. The best you can get them to do is agree to something different from now on.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“I never get free until I identify whatever I was responsible for, which sometimes is zero.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“I will walk around with a conflict in my brain and heart and bury it until it comes out sideways. Because it does. It will find a way out.” (Jen Hatmaker)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Making Great Relationships by Dr. Rick Hanson
Mother Nurture by Dr. Rick Hanson
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
Being Well Podcast with Dr. Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson
Global Compassion Coalition - https://globalcompassioncoalition.org/
Greater Good Science Center - https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/

Guest’s Links:

Website - https://rickhanson.com/

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd

Podcast - https://rickhanson.com/being-well-podcast/

Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/

Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitte ...

Amena Brown on Getting All the Way Free Aug 12, 2026

Show notes

Description:

Nine years is a long time between visits. When Amena Brown was last on the show in 2017, she was a spoken word poet booked solid inside white evangelicalism, doing one poem at a time between worship songs and quietly wondering how much longer she could keep walking back in. She came back to tell Jen what happened next.

This conversation traces the whole arc: the green rooms where she was told her grief was divisive, the healing circle where a Black woman looked her dead in the face and said you have to get out, the three months of panic attacks that followed, and the call from Tracee Ellis Ross that showed her a bigger world was possible. It is a story about leaving before you have a new boat built.

Then there is the book. Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl started as a poetry collection and became something wilder, funnier, and more free. Amena talks about Black Girl as a verb, the essay she cried writing, her list of qualifying reasons for a Black Woman Day Off, and why the audiobook has a live Black girl audience hollering back. Bring your cheekbones. They are going to be sore.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

You can't keep re-entering that space. Every time you re-enter, it re-traumatizes you. (Amena Brown, quoting the leader of a Black women's healing circle)
Whatever a Black girl does is Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to fry chicken, then that's Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to play the cello, that is Black girling. (Amena Brown)
Save nothing for the swim home. (Jen Hatmaker, quoting literary agent Margaret Riley King)
I love about Cardi B that she gives me permission to be mad as hell. (Amena Brown)
Joy is a part of how we survive, it's a part of how we resist. (Amena Brown)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl by Amena Brown (Tiny Reparations Books)
How to Fix a Broken Record by Amena Brown
Awake by Jen Hatmaker
Bookshop.org, plus your local indie and Black-owned bookstores and your library
The Together Live tour with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach
PATTERN Beauty and Tracee Ellis Ross
Lemonade by Beyonce
New Blue Sun by Andre 3000
Austin Channing Brown, Jeff Chu, and Sarah Bessey

Guest's Links:

Website - https://www.amenabrown.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/amenabee/
Podcast - https://www.amenabrown.com/her-with-amena-brown

Connect with Jen!
Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Bonus Book Club edition. Guest: Annie Hartnett, The Road to Tender Hearts. Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

Description:

In this Book Club edition of For the Love, Jen sits down with novelist Annie Hartnett to talk about The Road to Tender Hearts — a book Jen calls heart-wrenching, heartwarming, weird, hilarious, and deeply satisfying all at once.

They open with a very funny catch-up from Me Camp, the solo month Jen takes every July. This year she’s in a tiny lake town in Canada, cooking, meeting neighbors, reading on the deck at sunset — and buying blueberries for scones instead of checking her calendar.

From there, Annie traces her path from high-school art major to novelist, and the two teachers whose offhand comments redirected both of their lives. She unpacks the real backstory behind the novel: a Providence rental house that delivered basement floods, gas leaks, black mold, vicious rats, a falling tree, and a neighborhood tragedy — all in 2020 — and the anxiety that followed her to a new town anyway. Her answer was to write down every bad thing she feared could happen to her family, then make it as funny as she possibly could.

Jen and Annie also get into:

PJ Halliday, built from Annie’s dad and grandfather — lottery dreams, storytelling, lollipop trees and all
Pancakes the death-predicting cat, inspired by Oscar, a real Rhode Island nursing-home cat
Why Ivy and Fred keep loving PJ, and what that tells us about him
How a talking cat in chapter one bought Annie the freedom to go very dark
Writing grief, addiction, and fear without losing the comedy
The “year of floundering” that starts every new book
Why readers mourn whichever character they want, no matter what the author intended

Jen closes by asking what Annie’s reading, and Annie makes a hard case for Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

“Life is suffering and joy.” — Pancakes, The Road to Tender Hearts
“I realized in that class that I could be exactly who I am. I could be weird and I could be really accepted.” — Annie
“Your words are not wasted. The stuff that you say into our little ears when we are formative and searching can absolutely set me on a path.” — Jen
“She took my face in her hands and said, Jennifer, you have a gift for words and you should use it.” — Jen
“I will put every bad thing that I think could happen to my family in a book, but I will make it as funny as possible.” — Annie
“That’s how I feel like that’s the only way you get through bad things — to talk about them. But also to make them funny.” — Annie
“I love people despite their flaws, sometimes because of their flaws.” — Annie
“He has to be loved before he can really… he wants to be in the family.” — Annie, on PJ
“The year of floundering, when you spend a year just flopping around like a fish out of water.” — Annie

Resources Mentioned in This Episode: