A Podcast exploring the Sources of Faith, Hope, and Healing
At Headwaters Journal, we believe there is more to health than blood pressure readings or lab results.
True well-being flows from deeper sources — meaning, purpose, connection, and the wisdom of traditions that have sustained people for millennia.
Our work brings together insights from the world’s great faith traditions — Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Indigenous perspectives, and more — to explore how they speak to human suffering, courage, and healing in today’s world. Through podcasts, interviews, and reflections, we invite seekers, caregivers, and communities to discover these living sources together.
Why “Headwaters”?
The name evokes both a place and a purpose: the quiet beginnings of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca, and the timeless invitation to return to the sources. Here, waters are fresh, still, and reflective — yet already moving toward change and connection.
Our logo captures this vision: the serene lake, the flowing river, wild rice recalling ancestral harvests, geese flying in community, and a distant city reminding us that insight is for everyday life, not escape from it. It is a symbol of reflection, movement, and the shared journey of seeking healing.
“We do not see each other as competitors, but as colleagues. The truth will authenticate itself.”
What We Do
Headwaters Journal is both a podcast and a growing online library of stories, interviews, and teachings. We present real-life cases and questions — moments when faith and health intersect — and invite practitioners from different traditions to respond with wisdom, compassion, and honesty.
Our Guiding Principles
Our work is shaped by three guiding commitments:
HEALTH IS MORE THAN PHYSICAL METRICS
True health encompasses meaning, purpose, faith, and community as much as it does blood pressure or lab results. Healing involves the whole person.HONOR DIVERSITY WITHOUT ERASING DIFFERENCE
Instead of reducing all traditions to abstract “universal truths,” we listen to each tradition in its particularity—exploring where they intersect and where they diverge. Healing words and practices are inseparable from the communities and stories in which they are rooted.MODEL A HEALTHIER PUBLIC SQUARE.
Our conversations seek to build understanding and cooperation across traditions, offering an alternative to conflict, suspicion, or exclusion. By engaging one another with respect, we hope to enrich the shared life of our communities and society.
Our Invitation
Headwaters is for anyone — from caregivers and faith leaders to those quietly searching for hope. Whether you are rooted in a tradition or questioning it, we invite you to listen, reflect, and join the conversation.
Come to the source.
Drink deeply.
Be renewed.
Our Team
Headwaters Journal is hosted by Arndt B. Braaten, MD, MDiv, a physician and Lutheran pastor with decades of experience at the crossroads of faith and healing. Arndt serves as facilitator and guide, inviting practitioners, healers, and wisdom-bearers from many traditions into conversation.
Our presenters include voices from diverse faiths and healing traditions—clergy, chaplains, physicians, nurses, elders, scholars, and community leaders—who bring their lived experience of healing into dialogue. Together, we are building a community of storytellers and practitioners who care deeply about health, meaning, and hope.
Arndt Braaten, MD, MDiv.
Host & Guide
Arndt Braaten is a board-certified family physician who practices in emergency departments around the Twin Ports of Duluth, Minnesota and Superior, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago in 2000 and completed residency at the Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in 2003. Since then, he has practiced in rural hospitals and clinics in Deer River and Bemidji, Minnesota before moving to the Twin Ports in 2013. This experience has given him a love for the headwaters region.
He is also an ordained Lutheran pastor who graduated from Luther Northwestern Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1988. From 1986 to 1987 he studied at the Theologisches Seminar in Leipzig, East Germany, under scholarship from the Lutheran World Federation, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. His first call was to serve as assistant pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois. Subsequently, he has served congregations in Gardner, Illinois and across northern Minnesota.
Arndt is the son and grandson of Lutheran missionaries who served the church on the island of Madagascar for more than 50 years combined. He left the island at the age of seven and has only recently returned as a health consultant for Global Health Ministries. These early experiences generated a life-long interest in the role of religion and faith in the health of individuals and in society.
Arndt is married to Daisy Braaten, also a family physician. Together they have raised four children: Katie, Finn, Kai and Leif.