“God was a word I had spoken but I hardly knew,” Katie Pruitt sings in “Normal,” a track off her 2020 debut album Expectations. Raised Catholic, the singer-songwriter peppered her record with specific references to a Catholic school childhood (which she navigated as a closeted gay girl) and broad allusions to faith in general. Now, Pruitt is digging deeper into religion in the new podcast The Recovering Catholic.
“Like many people in the LGBTQ+ community, I’ve had a falling-out with religion as an institution, but not necessarily with the idea of god,” Pruitt, who came out at 20, says in the first episode of The Recovering Catholic, which she says explores “the intersection of homosexuality and religion.”
Streaming via Osiris, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, the podcast features interviews with guests like Julien Baker, Leslie Jordan, Ruston Kelly, and Jaime Wyatt. “There are parts of my religious upbringing that have never left me and other parts that have left me a little broken,” Pruitt says in a release. “In attempt to heal some of that religious trauma, I reached out to some of the most enlightened and inspiring individuals I know and recorded our conversations.” Christian singer Semler is Pruitt’s guest in the first episode.
“I love the concept of thinking there is some force, but I never quite thought it was a man floating in the sky guarding a gate,” Pruitt told Rolling Stone in a 2020 profile. “I think god is anything good.”