Crosswalk Talk: Celebrity Christian Interviews

Alex Kendrick and his brother Stephen went to Brazil to train 65 young Christian filmmakers. They came home with a Sony-funded feature film shot in Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro, starring a husband and wife who got pregnant during production and welcomed their baby two weeks before this interview. The new film is Flywheel: Ignition of the Soul, a remake of the very first movie the Kendrick brothers ever made, updated fo...

Bear Grylls has built a career taking people into the places where the real conversations happen — not the two-minute chat show slot where nobody asks about faith, but the mountaintop at sunset, the canyon at dusk, the forest trail where walls come down and people start talking about what actually matters. His new Prime Video series Chosen in the Wild takes the cast and crew of The Chosen into exactly those place...

Ben Peterson, founder of Engage Your Destiny and former military chaplain's assistant, has led more than 8,000 sailors, airmen, marines, and soldiers to Christ in the last three years. He works with the most faithless generation in American history — only 3% of Gen Z holds a fully biblical worldview — and he is watching them turn to AI chatbots for spiritual advice, emotional support, and the sense of belon...

John James was the voice of Shine, Breakfast, Take Me to Your Leader, and Not Ashamed — the songs that defined the Newsboys' most creative era and introduced a generation to Christian music that was quirky, bold, and unlike anything else on the radio. He spent 16 years with the band. Then his world fell apart. He lost his marriage, his ministry, his career, and eventually flew back to Australia not to start over ...

Willie and Korie Robertson have been watching how entertainment shapes culture since Duck Dynasty first aired on cable. They have seen cable give way to streaming, watched the iPads appear in their grandchildren's hands, and decided that the answer to bad content is not just criticism — it is a better option. EKKL Entertainment is their answer: a faith and family streaming platform that also houses podcasts and devotionals, b...

Jon Erwin has been dreaming about the story of George Washington for over a decade. He read approximately 30 books, brought in historians obsessed with the subject, and set out not to photograph history but to paint an accurate portrait of a young man raging against an unfair world who decided to build a better one. Young Washington finished third at the box office over the Fourth of July weekend, making it the only film about Amer...

Steven Curtis Chapman grew up watching his grandfather Ruble Rudd — a Purple Heart World War II veteran who came home with shrapnel permanently lodged in his leg, the only survivor of his platoon — live out a quiet, grateful patriotism that never left him. That legacy is at the heart of a new song Steven wrote for America's 250th birthday, a reimagining of America the Beautiful with the same chorus and new verses, recor...

Tenroc has spent his life making hits for other people. Grammy nominated producer and songwriter, he has worked with Rihanna, Jonas Brothers, Julia Michaels, Renee Rapp, and others — building songs, polishing them, handing them off, and going back to do it again. He never wanted to be the one out front. Then, about a year ago, he was driving a church van full of youth with his wife in the passenger seat when he heard God say ...

Dr. Jay Richards, philosopher, senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and vice president at the Heritage Foundation, has spent his career dismantling one of the most persistent myths in modern culture — that science and Christianity have always been at war. The founders of almost every sub-discipline of modern science, from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton, were either conventional or devout Christians. The warfare narrative...

Anne Wilson is 24 years old, has a K-LOVE Award for Hey Girl, a debut country album called Rebel, a new book by the same name, and no social media on her phone. In 2023 she bought a flip phone, used it for a year, and has not looked back. She is one of the boldest Christian voices in country music right now, and she will tell you that boldness did not come from strategy — it came from watching her five-foot-tall, opinionated ...

Leanna Crawford writes songs the way other people write journal entries — because she needs them first. Her sophomore album Thank God, releasing July 26, is the most personal thing she has made, built around gratitude for unanswered prayers, the freedom that comes from forgiveness, and the simple conviction that sitting at the feet of Jesus is better than any to-do list she could ever complete. She did not plan for it to be c...

Todd Nettleton has spent more than two decades working with Voice of the Martyrs, and he has sat with enough persecuted Christians around the world to know that what happened in a Roman coliseum in 203 AD is still happening today — just in different arenas. On this year's Day of the Christian Martyr, June 29, Voice of the Martyrs is spotlighting Perpetua, a 22-year-old woman from a noble family in ancient Carthage who kept a ...

Bella Taylor Smith was 17 when she got saved at a summer camp during a worship service and realized that singing was not just something she could do — it was what she was made for. Years later, when a Voice Australia application popped up on her computer during Covid lockdowns, she felt the Lord prompting her to apply. She won. And then, rather than chasing the biggest mainstream opportunity that win could have opened, she an...

Bethany Wohrle has been with Bethel Music since she was 17 years old. Her voice is on All Hail King Jesus and Living Hope, songs with tens of millions of streams that have been sung in churches around the world. But when her niece Junie died unexpectedly at 18 months old in February 2023, Bethany nearly didn't show up to the Nashville writing camp she had scheduled for her debut solo album just weeks later. She went anyway, and wha...

Anike grew up with a Muslim father, a conviction that some of the music she was listening to was wrong, and no idea she would one day be the first female artist signed to Reach Records. She looked up Christian remixes, found Lecrae, convinced her family to let her go to a church summer camp by calling it an internship program, and gave her life to Jesus on day three. Two days later, Lecrae showed up at the camp. She had no idea wha...

Dr. Thomas Kidd, professor at Midwestern Seminary and author of biographies on Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and George Whitefield, has spent his career at the intersection of American history and Christian faith. He is one of the most careful historians working on the founding era today, and when he says the debate over whether America was founded as a Christian nation has enough to offend both sides, he mean...

Sam Eaton grew up hiding under tables in kindergarten because he was afraid of the world. His father's alcoholism left deep roots of trauma, and years later, after watching four people in his school community die by suicide, he could no longer stay silent about the pain he had carried alone for years. Sam is the founder of Recklessly Alive, a suicide prevention ministry, and the author of the new book You Can Do This: Daily Affirma...

Kristian Stanfill has been part of Passion Music for over 20 years. He has seen a lot. But what he is witnessing right now among Gen Z, he says, is different. Not hype. Not emotional. Students showing up at Globe Life Field in Arlington at 3am, lining up around the building with their physical Bibles, just to make sure they could get into the room. Forty-five thousand of them. All hungry for the same thing.

Repentance, revival, and...

Dr. Michael Behe, biochemist and professor at Lehigh University, has spent his career making a case that most scientists would rather not hear. The concept he became famous for, irreducible complexity, argues that the molecular machinery inside living cells is so intricately assembled that removing a single part causes the entire system to collapse. Darwin thought the closer you looked at biology, the simpler it would get. The oppo...