Zac Davis and Ashley McKinless, co-hosts of the podcast Jesuitical from America Media, are pictured with Sebastian Gomes, the show’s producer, March 15, 2022. (CNS photo/Keara Hanlon, courtesy America Media)
By Anna Capizzi Galvez
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON — A “young, hip and lay” podcast, Jesuitical, from America Media is celebrating five years.
Co-hosted by Zac Davis and Ashley McKinless, podcast episodes focus on three main segments — Catholic news, an interview with a guest and faith-sharing — “often over drinks,” as the podcast tagline puts it, and through the lens of Ignatian spirituality.
With over a million total downloads and about 40,000-50,000 downloads per month, Jesuitical has reached listeners globally, grown an online community, found financial supporters and is even hosting a pilgrimage to Italy in September.
From its founding in 2017, the podcast has sought to fill a gap in the Catholic podcasting world.
While there were prayer apps, apologetics resources and “theology nerd” podcasts, “we didn’t see a Catholic podcast that was more outward looking,” said McKinless, who is an executive editor at America Media.
“We wanted to create a space where there could be conversations about topics in the church that are contested in the modern world and to not be afraid of bringing on people who weren’t 100% certain in their faith or 100% in the church or were struggling with questions of Catholic teaching and their relationship to God and what it means to be a Catholic in the world today,” McKinless told Catholic News Service.
Building a space of encounter with a diversity of viewpoints, not simply Catholic ones, is a point of pride for McKinless these past five years. “We’ve made it a point to talk to Muslims, Jewish people, atheists, spiritual seekers,” she said. That’s a unique contribution to Catholic media, she added.
Another factor that contributed to Jesuitical’s initial success was narrowly defining its target audience.
Listeners could be young people who had recently graduated or finished a year of service work. Perhaps they had been involved in campus ministry, theology or youth group and are now living in a new city, where they are struggling to fit into parish life or Catholic life and “don’t feel like they have an outlet to talk about these things,” Davis said.
“We wanted to create a space to invite people in where we weren’t assuming that they didn’t know anything about the church or that they had questions about the church,” he told CNS. But “they just wanted to hang out and learn some new things, talk about spirituality in an inviting way. I think we’ve hit that market,” he said.
Today, the podcast has reached beyond that audience and attracts older listeners who want to know what young people “actually think” outside of formal church settings, added Davis, who is an associate editor and director for audience engagement and analytics at America Media.
For listeners, no matter their age, the draw to the podcast is the Ignatian spirituality the show strives to cultivate.
The last segment in the podcast, called “As One Friend Speaks to Another,” is the faith-sharing part in the show where the co-hosts talk about where they’ve found God during the week.
“I’ve heard Jesuits come up and tell us, ‘You guys are modeling Ignatian spirituality in an entirely new way,’ which is great to hear because Ashley and I will be the first to admit we’re not experts in it. We’re not Jesuits. We’ve not done the Spiritual Exercises (of St. Ignatius Loyola). We are just trying to use this tradition in a modern, contemporary context,” Davis said.
Apart from their faith-sharing segment, Davis and McKinless said the way they select guests and examine news brings a Jesuit perspective to the show.
“Keeping our eyes wide open, reviewing (the news) the way the Examen reviews every day the lights and the shadows and trying to take that same approach to how you look at Catholic news is something we keep in mind,” Davis said.
Their innate curiosity about the world informs how they choose what news to cover and whom to interview.
“There’s really not a corner of the church or culture or politics that we don’t think there’s a way in for us for and a way for us to find God working through God’s people in those spaces,” McKinless said.
