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Bo listened to last week’s Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have been walking my Luther Seminary class through this month, whose diagnosis of late modernity is the closest thing anyone has written to a technical explanation of what Jamie is describing pastorally. The core move is the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person or an unfamiliar tradition. We have used technology to eliminate that friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. Han’s word for what we get instead is the hell of the same. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through our culture, Han insists, are not infections from something external. They are infarctions — internal blockages from an excess of positivity. Along the way: Bo’s blood-hymn story from his non-religious Canadian friend’s first time in a church, the paragraph in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that mandates ministering to the neighborhood not the ghosts of the past, Bo’s discovery that in a red state most of his congregants are the only Democrat they know, Bo’s Strava confession, and the smartphone as modern rosary. If you have the itch to smash the machines by the end of the hour, Han’s own solution is not Luddism — it is the recovery of friendliness. Come sit with this one.

Highlights from the conversation

• Bo’s James K.A. Smith debrief. Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade — the Reformed philosopher whose analysis of continental thought Bo has taught with, whose critique of modernity Bo respects, whose Augustinian Eucharistic solution in chapter four Bo has always thought was cheating. Then Bo listened to the dark-night episode from last week and the pastoral heart won. Bo’s summary of modern spirituality after Jamie: it is a new smart monitor plugged into an old computer. Sometimes the monitor cannot even recognize the computer. The algorithm and the soul are not communicating.
• Han’s core move: the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person, another tradition, another body. Han’s diagnosis: we have used technology to eliminate the friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. What we get instead is the hell of the same. Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another is the anchor citation. Ryan Burge’s data on how congregations used to be where you sat next to people who cancelled your vote — until we self-sorted them into age-and-politics-and-demographic tribes and started cancelling each other for the smallest heresy inside our own.
• Infarctions, not infections. Han’s core diagnostic move. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through late-modern culture are not infections from something external — they are infarctions, internal blockages caused by excess positivity. Without the resistant presence of the other to give the ego form and measure, the self exploits itself. It burns out under a culture that mistakes constant self-optimization for freedom. You track your steps. You track your workouts. You are your own surveillance state.
• Bo’s Strava confession — and why the app becomes the master. Twenty years ago Bo gave up his watch collection (calling them chrono handcuffs) as part of an early conversion into rhythms of time. But Strava kept sneaking back in. Turn on GPS to turn on Strava to know how far and how fast — and Bo caught himself performing for the digital slave master. The longer and faster he rode, the more shareable the numbers became. He turned Strava off. His friends thought he had stopped biking. The subsequent conversations with them about performing for smartwatches and step counters are the point.
• The smartphone as modern rosary. Han’s central image, unpacked. Hard, smooth, compliant. Sits in your hand and mediates every encounter with the world. In three minutes you swipe from a Palestinian child burned by bombs we paid for, to your friend’s new puppy, to a hair-loss ad, to a Peter-Thiel-hating Lord of the Rings meme. The medium has already filtered the encounter, held your attention, and monetized it. And the tragedy never gets to be metabolized. Communication without community. The swarm without the soul. Absolute zero degree of perception.
• Scent time and point time. Han’s last-slide contrast. Scent time is narrative time — anchored by rituals, overarching narratives, and durable things that hold memory (your mother’s hymnal that still smells like her). Point time is the frantic succession of unmoored moments — the feed, the whizzing by, the endless acceleration. The end of memory is one of Han’s most useful moves for clergy: the undead archive of big data replaces living memory, which is why the tradition still has to live in a person. Han’s constructive answer is not Luddism. It is the recovery of friendliness — the practice of lingering, listening, welcoming boredom, welcoming the other, silencing the ego machine so that the world can speak again.
  JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t KeepEver notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Jamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, more than a decade ago, when Jamie was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. What that began — St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Merton — is what this book bears witness to. It is a book about the mystics saving Jamie’s faith. It is also a Reformed philosopher’s argument that the cultural liturgies project he is best known for needs a prior undoing before its formative work can do anything at all. As I told Jamie in the hour, this is a book that made me feel uncomfortable about how much I enjoyed it. We covered the apophatic/cataphatic distinction with the twist Jamie puts on it, the way certainty is still Cartesian even when it calls itself pious, the trad-wife/manosphere as snorting modernity while claiming to have escaped it, Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections as the real sequel to A Secular Age, and what to do when Distraction Inc. has fully occupied the inner room. The platform is the plantation. Come sit with this one and check out the book.

Highlights from the conversation

• The garage-sale Dark Night of the Soul that started the book. Jamie’s decade-long journey into the Catholic contemplative tradition began when he was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. Neither of them knew, at the time, what that would mean. What it meant is the book — Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark — and the line Jamie now uses regularly with straight faith: the mystics saved my faith.
• The twist on the apophatic. Continental philosophy’s re-engagement with negative theology (via Derrida’s How to Avoid Speaking, Marion’s God Without Being) tends to read the mystics’ injunction to silence as a rule against transgressing God’s otherness. Jamie, coming back to the mystics not as a graduate student but as a survivor, offers a different read. The silence is not a prohibition on speech. It is an incubator for attention. Not rule: receptivity. Borrowing Fred Moten’s term, he calls it an anepistemology — a mode of being that transcends the subject-object binary, in which silence becomes a discipline you submit to in order to receive presence.
• Both certainty and skepticism are still Cartesian. Jamie’s diagnosis of two failures that both wound the church: philosophy’s quest for certainty (God as an object we can master with concepts) and religious fundamentalism (which borrows philosophy’s tools for anti-intellectual counter-modernity). Both domesticate the divine. Both leave us as the source of everything, still holding the scaffolding. And, Jamie argues, a certain form of continental apophaticism just becomes high-powered pious skepticism on the same Cartesian field — the mystics never left the field they were pretending to be on. The mystic move is not to master God with concepts, nor to give up on speech in the face of God’s otherness. It is to be known and held by the God who has emptied Godself into the cross.
• The trad-wife problem is that modernity is already in the lungs. The nostalgic retrenchment currently marketing itself as a return to pre-modern Christianity does not know how modern it is. Jamie invokes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit on the enlightenment/faith confrontation — faith doesn’t realize how much it’s inhaled. It has just been snorting modernity this whole time. The trad-wife phenomenon is impossible; the manosphere is a modern selection presenting itself as ancient. Wendell Berry on Catholic steroids. The mystics could not have known they were bearing witness to a third way. We can pick up their spirit precisely to imagine what faith could look like without either Cartesian mastery or Cartesian anxiety.
• Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections is the real sequel to A Secular Age. Jamie’s read of Taylor’s late book: it is a work of autobiography as much as philosophy — Taylor telling the story of the Romantic and post-Romantic poets who helped him back to faith by inviting him to inhabit the world in a way that refused the binary of enlightenment vs. faith. The third way through Taylor’s closed spin on one side and the nostalgic dogmatic retrenchment on the other. Jamie’s own extension: the mystics are the deep well from which those poets drank. Tripp’s addition: Taylor’s chapter on the good lands directly on the Black social gospel tradition — the faithful inheritance of both modernity and Christianity from a community that came to America and to faith under conditions of exploitation. Howard Thurman as the mystic Cornel West is downstream from.
• Distraction Inc. and the platforms as plantation. Jamie’s term for the current attention economy — with the sharper argument that fascination has replaced contemplation as the default mode of our being in the world. Tripp adds Kevin Hart’s fascination-vs-contemplation distinction and Corey Walker’s line from earlier this year at Wake Div: the platforms are the plantation. Jamie loves it, extends it with Eugene McCarraher’s enchantments of mammon. Neither the Jonathan Haidt just-get-the-phones-out-of-school framing, nor the technology-is-neutral framing, gets at what has actually happened. The inner room — where the Sermon on the Mount says the door closes and the Father is met in secret — has been algorithmically occupied. The muscle for closing the door has atrophied. This is a discipleship crisis, not a screen-time problem.

About our guest

Dr. James K.A. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He earned his PhD at Villanova University under John D. Caputo. He served as editor of Comment magazine (2013–2018) and as editor-in-chief of Imagejournal (2019–2024). His new book is Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark. His previous books include the Cultural Liturgies trilogy — Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King — as well as You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, On the Road with Saint Augustine, How to Inhabit Time, and his early philosophical work Speech and Theology. He writes at Quid Amo on Substack.

JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t KeepEver notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us moving through three of his books at once. The Fires of Moloch takes its title from H. G. Wells’s line describing Britain sending its sons into the fires of a false god during the Passchendaele Offensive. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles takes the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish theological turn from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation and shows what happens when a rigorously Calvinist minister-turned-fantasy-writer decides doubt is the door in, and therefore the door out, of a mature faith. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism and asks what it takes to keep that word doing honest work now that polls will code Muslim Trump voters as evangelical. Come for Anglo-Catholic sacramental confession as battle-tested ministry. Stay for the George MacDonald grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much.

Highlights from the conversation

• Seventeen chaplains, one book, one furnace. The Passchendaele Offensive of 1917 — one of the great, seemingly futile battles of the First World War — was the crucible in which seventeen Anglican military chaplains wrote The Church in the Furnace, the book that would in turn generate Tim’s The Fires of Moloch more than a century later. What united them across churchmanship (Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, liberal, broad) was the shared conviction that Church of England ministry, particularly among the working-class men in their care, had been fatally scripted. The burial service, in particular, did not fit the situation. Every chaplain went off script. The Prayer Book revision movement, the Life and Liberty Movement, the Industrial Christian Fellowship, and Anglican support for the League of Nations all trace back to what these seventeen saw in the trenches.
• Woodbine Willie was in on the marketing. Tim’s revisionist take on G. A. Studdert Kennedy, the most famous padre of them all. The legend: the soldiers gave him the nickname because he handed out free Woodbine cigarettes. Tim’s investigation: soldiers gave deflating nicknames when they gave them at all, and there is no first-hand evidence that any soldier coined this one. Studdert Kennedy gave the nickname to himself. A sacrificial pastoral genius who was also perfectly willing to invent his own persona if it made the ministry connect. Tony Campolo’s line applies: if it’s not true, it ought to be.
• Neville Talbot and the recovered body. The story Tim tells even at parties. Neville Talbot, from an aristocratic Anglican family whose grandfathers were earls, was a chaplain at the front when his brother Gilbert — a lieutenant, and lieutenants at the front lasted a matter of weeks — was killed in a charge. Neville tried twice to recover his body from the active battlefield, an Iliad-shaped act. He succeeded. He married during the war. His wife died of complications from the birth of their son. He named the son Gilbert, in honor of his brother. His namesake son died at twenty-one in the Second World War. That is a life.
• Battle-tested ministry. One of the surprising outcomes of the war for the Church of England: practices that had been fiercely contested a generation earlier — you could get an Anglican priest jailed for hearing confession in the late Victorian period — became broadly accepted after the war because they worked in the trenches. Catholic priests scored big with soldiers by their tenacity with last rites, sacramental confession, and physical saints’ medals that functioned as reassurance-in-hand. Tripp’s insight, which stopped Tim in his tracks: Aragorn’s blessing of the dying Boromir in The Two Towers is a last-rites scene — including the pastoral discipline of never speaking of the betrayal again. Tolkien was processing the same trenches the chaplains were, in his own key.
• The door of doubt, and the piety MacDonald left behind. From Boyd Hilton’s argument that British theology shifted around 1850 from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation, Tim reads George MacDonald as the pastoral hero of the incarnational turn — the Scottish minister raised in relentlessly stringent Calvinism who found the penal-substitution frame morally unbearable and reoriented around the sanctification of all of creation through the incarnation of Christ. From his novel Lilith: a door in and therefore a door out. Doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is how faith becomes adult. The romantic road — love for nature, for music, for another person — is not competition with the love of God but the road toward it. The grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much is the picture of the piety MacDonald was resisting. Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien inherit the reorientation. Lewis calls MacDonald my master.
• What Bebbington’s quadrilateral cannot cover. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous four-point definition of evangelicalism — crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism, activism. Tim defends it as a way to name what a Korean-language evangelical church in America has in common with an Anglican evangelical in 1740s England and a Nigerian Pentecostal in the 1980s. But he also names the limit: if you start on the ground with people in Arkansas who call themselves evangelical, you are not going to find the love of the cross or the centrality of scripture animating what they are actually doing politically. Polling makes it worse — when the poll defines evangelical by removing non-white respondents on the assumption that race is more determinative than religion, of course the poll produces a monolithic answer. That is called your poll design.Tim’s closing worry, which lands right on Tripp’s own worries about his oldest son heading into a fully algorithmic world: it may be the medium of the in-person weekly gathering, not the message, that is becoming counter-cultural.

About our guest

Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 2025 he served as President of the American Society of Church History. He has authored or edited more than twenty books.

Books at the center of this conversation: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One; George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment ; and Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present.

JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t KeepEver notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Diana Butler Bass just got back from Ireland, where she and Richard escaped the Fourth of July — and she came home with the most stunning historical counterfactual we have ever discussed on the podcast. Standing in the death-row hallway at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, the prison where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed one by one, Diana asked herself the question that turned her whole trip: what if the American Revolution had failed, and this hallway held Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams instead? The Irish worked on decolonization for four hundred and fifty years. We got there in seven. American history might be a miracle; that is her real takeaway. Along the way: the London Fourth of July party where an American won best costume by going as the reflecting pool; listener questions our friends’ Theology Summit lectures have generated on Jim Wallis’s who must be defeated and who must be persuaded?; on what a congregation can faithfully do before the midterms; on the data centers now colonizing the neighborhoods that did not ask for them; on the day I got a text from David who turned out to be an AI chatbot trained to shift my views on Israel and Palestine; on Ulysses Mejias and Nick Couldry’s Data Colonialism and why our interiority is the resource now being mined — and, at the end, the grief I have been carrying since I flew to Atlanta last week to bury my best friend from div school. Diana’s answer to that grief lands the whole conversation. Come sit at the table.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t KeepEver notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Gianni Vattimo — the Catholic-communist-gay Italian pioneer of pensiero debole (weak thought) — died in 2023, and the intellectual biography he deserved has finally arrived, courtesy of Thomas Jared Farmer, a fellow Claremont alum who wrote the book at the University of Münster and now works at Emory Law School. Vattimo is not the household philosopher he should be in English, and this book fixes that. Farmer weaves the biography I did not know — five-year-old Vattimo under British bombs in Turin, his Calabrian accent he could not shake, his flight from a Red Brigades hit list of his own former students, his letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis, his friendship with Umberto Eco — into the four big ideas that make Vattimo essential right now. What weak thought actually is. Why metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. Why secularization is the fulfillment of Christianity, not its enemy. And why hermeneutic communism is what the anti-authoritarian imagination needs. One of the most fun conversations I have had all summer.

Highlights from the conversation

• The Vattimo biography I did not know. Five years old under British bombs in Turin. Fleeing to Calabria with his mother and returning with a southern accent he could not shake. Daily communicant through his youth because the ritual was the only stable thing in a world falling apart. Adolescent Maoism. A radical Leninist manifesto at 38 (Il soggetto e la maschera, 1974). Then, on a hit list from his own former Red Brigades students, whose ideological certainty had turned murderous, he fled Turin. His slow return to Catholicism after being asked to review the Italian translation of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — the electrical shock that re-Christianized him. Coming out as gay in the natural-law era. A letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis. The intellectual moves make more sense once you have the life.
• The end of metaphysics and the birth of weak thought. Farmer’s clearest expository chapter. Weber’s disenchantment, Heidegger’s end of metaphysics, Nietzsche’s death of God, Gadamer’s hermeneutics of tradition — all as one process, the collapse of the modern project of finding the really real behind everything. Radical Orthodoxy’s answer: close the curtain and pretend there is still someone back there. Vattimo’s answer: no, but the categories still function as heritage — traces of what has lived, evoking pietas. Truth is not gone. It is held loosely. Wittgenstein’s language-game as the anchor image: a game needs rules, and the rules are what make play possible. But you can play more than one game with the same deck of cards.
• Metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. The section that made me lean forward. Vattimo watched his own students — Red Brigades radicals — kidnap and assassinate former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in the name of a certainty they had received from him. The lesson stuck. Whether it is religious fundamentalism, scientific positivism, or orthodox Marxism, the possession of ultimate truth justifies silencing dissent, breaking off dialogue, and eventually reaching for force. Nihilism, in Vattimo’s hands, is not the disease. It is the vaccine. The Michael Anton Flight 93 logic that gave us January 6 is the more recent American version of the pathology Vattimo diagnosed in the Red Brigades.
• Secularization as the fulfillment of Christianity. Vattimo’s most provocative claim, and the reason he loved Pope Francis. God empties Godself of majesty and becomes human (Philippians 2). The church, dispossessed of its temporal power in the nineteenth century by Italian unification and the loss of the Papal States, was forced into a kenotic analogue — stripped of principality, freed to become salt and light. The Death of God — of the absolute, moralizing, on-high metaphysics — is the final stage of the same self-emptying. God as judge and nomos of order collapses. God as friend, companion, love arrives. The parallel Farmer draws to Bonhoeffer’s line — if you want to understand God, think about the manger and the cross — closes the loop.
• Hermeneutic communism. Vattimo’s late political project, developed with Santiago Zabala. Not the vanguard-led revolutionary Marxism Vattimo had already renounced. Not the neoliberal capitalist hegemony that took its place. But a democratic-proceduralist, non-violent, mass-resistance politics — strikes, boycotts, labor organizing, deliberative dialogue — that aligns with the marginalized and constantly torments the prevailing order without pretending to install a new absolute regime in its place. The Tolkien moment: you cannot pick up the ring of power to defeat the ring of power. It only serves one master. The revolution has to be permanent haranguing, not a takeover. Bakunin against Marx, resurfacing in the twenty-first century.
• Natural law, and why Vattimo could never accept it. Coming of age gay in a Catholic milieu where Thomism had been elevated as the church’s default philosophy after Leo XIII, Vattimo could not accept the natural-law claim that a world given in this way could tell him what he was. That experience became the wedge — the point at which the general suspicion of metaphysical closure became personal. And Farmer’s closing move: the same wedge that the current postliberal Catholic and evangelical resurgence is trying to swing shut. Vattimo’s whole life was an argument against that closing.

Dr. Thomas Jared Farmer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law, where he works with John Witte on the intersection of philosophical hermeneutics and legal theory. He completed his MA in philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University (studying with Ingolf Dalferth and the late Anselm Min) and his PhD at the University of Münster in Germany under Hans-Peter Grosshans. He grew up in the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in upstate South Carolina.

His new book is Gianni Vattimo: Philosopher, Communist, Catholic, Nihilist (Columbia University Pres2)— the definitive English-language intellectual biography of Vattimo.

JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t KeepEver notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Bo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation and realizing he was a real insider until roughly 2016 and then the whole tribe went somewhere he does not recognize; Ryan Burge’s new Gen Z data showing that half of an entire generation is refusing church because of Donald Trump specifically; a five-books-for-the-rest-of-your-life draft (we are on the same desert island, which lets us share a Lord of the Rings and free up a slot each); a running argument with the recent Atlantic article about how a third of the country has not finished a book in a year; and, at the end, Bo pitching me five different themes for his Beer Camp session (my favorite: emergency politics in a society of spectacle: a survivor’s guide, which is what the chat voted for too), and me pitching a real book to Cynthia Shafer-Elliott based on the archeology of 8th-century Israelite hotboxing. This is a long one. It also contains actual grief. Come sit with us.

Highlights from the conversation

• Bo’s Violent Take It By Force debrief. Bo has been listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation — Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Frank Peretti, Bill Johnson, the 10/40 window, the queen-of-heaven prayer-warrior trip to Nepal — and realizing he was fully inside all of it until roughly 2016, at which point the whole tribe went somewhere he no longer recognizes. The two things he had missed: the FrontLine YouTube channel that has become a major evangelical media force, and Bethel Music’s new worship leader who has become the sonic engine of the movement. The load-bearing detail: the Jericho march at the White House on January 5, 2021, that gave evangelicals permission to participate in what happened the next day. Tripp watched Steve Bannon’s podcast from Scotland the same week and reached the same conclusion by a different route.
• Half of Gen Z is walking away because of Trump specifically. Ryan Burge’s new data. Not vague vibes. Not deconstruction. The specific answer to why are you not going to a church? is Donald Trump. Tripp shared the piece on personal Facebook and heard back from a beloved family friend who now sends carnival workers to the hospital in her retirement — and also has a MAGA here is what you are voting for list pinned to her feed. The gap between how she still lives and what she now posts is where a lot of the grief in this episode lives.
• Monopoly vs. Risk. Bo at a local screening of Bad Faith (2024) noticed the audience of well-informed liberals still playing by Monopoly rules — the Constitution says X, the Emoluments Clause says Y — while the game on the field has shifted to Risk. The other side is not playing that game anymore. If your plan against a naked power grab is to quote a good clause at it, you probably need a new plan. Corporate Democrats keep reaching for the rulebook. The rulebook is decor.
• The Five Books draft. You get five books for the rest of your life. What do you pick? Bo picks Robert Downs’s Books That Changed the World (held together with duct tape); Sheila Greeve Davaney’s Theology at the End of Modernity (the essays in honor of Gordon Kaufman he has been reading for sixteen years); The Lord of the Rings; Graham Ward’s The Postmodern God (which he technically stole from one of Barry Taylor’s Fuller students en route to Tripp’s house years ago); and Walter Truett Anderson’s The Truth About the Truth (the book that woke him up to postmodernism after his denomination told him N. T. Wright, Len Sweet, and Brian McLaren were the outer edge of what he could read). Tripp picks his hand-annotated NRSV Bible, the Silmarillion, a folio Lord of the Rings(later shared with Bo to free up a slot each), Whitehead’s Process and Reality (with the plan to finally crack Part IV), and Gary Dorrien’s Kantian Reason and the Hegelian Spirit — using the enforced isolation to work out his future Gifford lectures.
• Only two books got banned. Both were poetry. Bo’s observation from his town. The Moms for Liberty in Twin Falls have a list of one hundred books they want out of the public library. Two have actually been pulled. Both were books of poetry — one about children who had been trafficked, one about a trans kid. Bo, who does not write poetry but believes God is a poet: poetry bypasses the cerebral. It gets its finger into some other place and pulls on your brain a different way. That is why they knew to take those two off the shelf first.
• Cynthia Shafer-Elliott and the hotboxed Israelite temple. Tripp’s closing tangent-turned-book-pitch. Residue analysis on the incense poles at an 8th-century official Israelite worship site has confirmed cannabis and bat dung as the burn mixture. Slow burn, thick smoke. Official Israelite worship space. They were hotboxing the temple. Meanwhile, the Baal temples in the same era were burning opium. Bo’s take on the book potential: pitch it as Biblical Drug Use, Feminine Gods, and Where the Land of Milk and Honey Came From, and let the megachurch pastors sell it for you by writing books about how wrong you are. It worked for Rob Bell.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Political theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what political theology actually is. Luke Bretherton and Vincent Lloyd — two of the three co-authors of a genuinely important new Columbia University Press book, What Is Political Theology? — sat down with me to explain what they had done. The book itself models the thing it argues for: three scholars from three disciplines refusing to synthesize their differences and instead sitting inside the productive tension. In one hour we cover why the standard Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered, what from above and from below are actually good for, why secularism is not a neutral space but an ideology, what Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures accidentally reveal, why Richard Dawkins now identifies as a cultural Christian, and what the difference between apophatic and cataphatic is currently doing to Luke’s and Vincent’s friendship. Live disagreement, on tape. The nice version.

Highlights from the conversation

• The Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered. The book’s opening move: political theology is not (only) the German reactionary tradition that migrated into continental philosophy in the 1990s. It is a global story. Every time you are told political theology emerges — Iran 1979, Israel, the American Christian Right, the tech oligarchs — the framing of emergence is the tell. It never went away. What went away was the secular academy’s ability to see it.
• From above vs. from below. Vincent’s methodological handle. Above starts with the state and a God-on-a-throne looking down. Below starts with the neighborhood, the practice, the ritual, the poem. His chapter’s example: reading Aimé Césaire’s Caribbean poetry — from a poet who is not a Christian but ends a poem with a prayer — as a site of political theology diagnosing false gods in a colonized context. Not what political theology says. What political theology does.
• The four uses of the political. Luke’s typology, which does the work of dissolving the assumption that we already know what political means when we say political theology. One: politics as common life (creation-shaped). Two: politics as friend-enemy relation (fall-shaped — every claim to be human makes a claim that some are not the right kind of human, and that pattern applies as much to universalist Marxism as to any nationalism). Three: politics as sovereignty and order (providential). Four: politics as eschatological horizon — the utopian longing for common life without conflict, scarcity, or the need for sovereignty. Different political theologies foreground different ones. Reading the traffic between them is most of the work.
• Secularism is not neutral. It is an ideology. Vincent on the MLK monument in D.C. — none of the carved quotations mention God, or Jesus, or divine law. You would not know Martin Luther King had a PhD in theology. Luke on the university strategic-planning meeting at which he said we should think about the meaning and purpose of the university, and his colleagues laughed out loud. Secularism functions to rule out the questions we most need to ask — and produces the reactive political theologies (Christian nationalism, tech-libertarian apocalypticism) that are now naming what secularism refused to name. Badly.
• Peter Thiel and Richard Dawkins as accidental confessors. Thiel’s Antichrist lectures at Oxford (which Luke happened to be in the room for). At least Thiel is not claiming to be secular — libertarian, hyperindividualistic, apocalyptic, but not disguised. Which is more than can be said for a Heritage Foundation white paper. And Richard Dawkins now identifying as a cultural Christian is the same phenomenon in reverse: the earlier secularization story (leave religion behind, get to rationality) has quietly flipped into a Spengler story (Christianity is the crucible that produced our civilization). Racialized undertones included at no extra cost.
• Apophatic vs. cataphatic — and what it is doing to their friendship. Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between a problem (which can be solved, like irrigation) and a mystery (which cannot, and must be inhabited). Vincent’s political theology leans apophatic — the human as mystery, negative-theological refusal of over-identification, allergy to the cataphatic charisma of the priest-voice. Luke leans cataphatic — the risk of naming, the confessional community, the case for democracy as the modality by which persons become who they are through relationship. The book models the disagreement without resolving it. The Tripp Fuller Hegelian synthesis is not on offer. About our guests

Dr. Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, one of the most senior chairs in British theology, appointed by the Crown. Previously, he was Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke Divinity School. An ordained Church of England priest, he is the author of Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans, 2019), Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge, 2015), Christianity and Contemporary Politics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), and most recently A Primer in Christian Ethics: Christ and the Struggle to Live Well(Cambridge, 2023).

Dr. Vincent W. Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, and an editor of the journal Political Theology. His books include Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale, 2022), which Tripp explicitly draws on in the conversation; Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham, 2018); The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology(Stanford, 2011); and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

The book at the center of this conversation is What Is Political Theology? (Columbia University Press, 2026), co-authored with Dr. Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto, whose chapter offers an anthropological political theology out of her research on global Catholicism, migration, and the U.S./Canada borderlands.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan’s visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress while wreckage piles at his feet). Fukuyama’s End of History (the liberal-democratic-capitalist endpoint the fall of the Wall was supposed to confirm). Derrida’s différance (the end is always deferred and always different than you expected). Gordon Kaufman’s Theology for the Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel’s). Steve Bannon’s copy of The Fourth Turning. And a Mark C. Taylor line Bo has been carrying since a 2015 Claremont paper: the end is approaching, has always been approaching, approaching from the beginning. My counter-thesis is that all of these frames still assume the liberal subject — the modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy and attention — and I think the actual crisis is that the liberal subject has been algorithmically dismantled. It is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either one. Also, we rehomed a giant rat, Bo hosted a pop-up LGBTQ youth clubhouse at his church, and $1.2 billion in bike lane funding got canceled for DEI concerns.

Highlights from the conversation

• Rats, bike lanes, and a pop-up clubhouse. Bo’s opener: an unusually large rat he humanely rehomed to a nature preserve (his general policy on sin, too), 81 bikes given away this summer through Holy Rollers (plus fifteen more delivered by the local refugee center from a Boise donation that had been sitting in a shed for years), and a Southern Idaho Pride pop-up youth event Bo hosted at First Methodist last Thursday — one of the safe-space clubhouses whose location gets texted to LGBTQ kids only on the day of, so it cannot be protested. The Trump administration also cancelled $1.2 billion in bike-lane funding for DEI concerns, which Bo suspects is about the trans bikes and the more-than-two-gears gradient issue.
• The Angel of History and weak messianic power. Bo brings Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay on the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus. The angel faces backwards. It sees history not as a chain of events but as one single catastrophe piling wreckage at its feet. The storm blowing from paradise gets caught in its wings and forces it irresistibly into the future, back turned. That storm is what we call progress. Benjamin’s counter-move: the Messiah is not a person walking around history. The Messiah is the fullness of history itself, in which every erased victim is finally remembered — and we, meanwhile, are endowed with a weak messianic power, the power to redeem the past by refusing to forget it. Tripp: this is why last week’s America was never good framing landed the way it did. Not cynicism. Benjamin’s angel refusing to let the death march of history disappear underfoot.
• Fukuyama, the ten plagues, and Derrida’s laugh. Fukuyama’s End of History thesis was the confident announcement, after the Cold War, of the liberal-democratic-capitalist terminal form. Derrida’s response in Specters of Marx runs through the ten plagues still on the loose in the supposed promised land — unemployment, homelessness, exclusion from citizenship, foreign debt, arms trade, nuclear proliferation, drug cartels shaping policy, inter-ethnic wars, and so on — and asks: if the ten plagues are running around, are we really at the end of history? The tell was always in the empirical record.
• Différance and the undeconstructable. Bo’s other beloved concept — Derrida’s différance, where meaning is always deferred and always different than expected. Applied to eschatology: the end will always be different than you thought. Tripp’s expansion: Derrida’s later religious turn locates justice as the undeconstructable — the horizon that judges every law and every arrangement, without which no arrangement can even be called unjust. Caputo picks this up as the already-and-not-yet of the kingdom. The kingdom always comes. It never arrives.
• Gordon Kaufman’s Theology for the Nuclear Age. Bo’s Rushmore book, one of the five volumes he would grab from a burning library. Kaufman’s argument: Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel’s. Once the species acquires the capacity to end itself, the God-concept has to change. What the analogy makes visible is the existential shift — first the concept of God dies with the bomb; now the liberal subject who could have had a concept of God is dying with the algorithm. That is the harder problem.
• The end of the liberal subject. Tripp’s counter-thesis, worked out over the second half of the hour. Every framework Bo brings to the table — Benjamin, Fukuyama, Derrida, Kaufman, the Fourth Turning cycle theory — still assumes the liberal subject. The modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy, capable of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and a vote and a prayer. All of these freedoms matter to whom? Someone who still has an inner room. If the door has been kicked in by the smartphone, if desire is being generated by an algorithm, if attention itself has been atrophied by a media environment that runs on celebratory narcissism and allergy to otherness — then the crisis is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either. Mainline Protestantism becomes an outpost of nostalgia to a subject our kids and grandkids no longer have. The closing line comes from Bo’s benediction: if the carousel of progress is giving you motion sickness, smash your smartphone, grill a steak, grab a home-brewed beer, and I will see you in Valhalla, brother.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is back, and her timing is, as always, impeccable. We recorded this conversation about her new book on biblical interpretation right after Al Mohler announced that women cannot, in fact, teach the Bible on podcasts. So we did the only honest thing. We talked about scripture for an hour. Serving Up Scripture is the book Jennifer co-wrote with Aaron Higashi, and it uses a cooking metaphor that does what good metaphors do — gives you somewhere to stand while you realize the kitchen has been on fire the whole time. We walked through the four questions every passage requires (historical, literary, ideological, theological), put the woman saved from stoning on stage one more time, read Cato’s instructions to Roman husbands whose wives commit adultery (a useful reminder that the Pastorals were the moderate position in their cultural context), and ended up where we always do — at the very different things you find in Paul depending on which Paul you are reading. Plus the news Al Mohler should have led the broadcast with: the Bible Divas podcast just launched, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp in October.

Here’s the Bible Divason iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

Highlights from the conversation

• The cooking metaphor. The book’s central frame — interpreters as cooks, passages as ingredients, hospitality as the goal. Who is at the table? What are you cooking for? Are you celebrating or mourning? Once you start playing with it, the rigid the Bible just says one thing instinct that most of the pew has been trained to accept gets quietly dismantled.
• The four questions every passage requires. Historical (What does this mean in light of polytheism? What did Cato tell Roman husbands to do about adulterous wives?), literary (What genre, what staging, what devices?), ideological (Who benefits if I read this prescriptively? Who has been harmed by this reading?), and theological(How does this affirm or challenge my view of God?). Most church readings ask the fourth question only. The other three are where everything interesting lives.
• The woman saved from stoning, on stage. John 8, re-read with the four questions in mind. Adultery in the first-century context (a married woman talking to a man not her husband in public could be accused), Jesus’s choreography (kneeling, writing, standing, shifting the attention off her), and the ideological work of asking how is this passage being used to aid the oppressed? Jennifer’s John for Normal People puts the whole scene on the stage. The closing turn: women are still being made into Jesus’s scapegoat for the sexual sins of their society.
• Which Paul? Galatians 3:28 vs. the Pastorals. The historical and literary questions applied to the question of women in the church. Galatians (definitely Paul) blows up the household codes. Ephesians (Pauline school) tries to soften the Roman patriarchal structure without dismantling it. The Pastorals (probably written a couple of generations after Paul died) cannot imagine women in the room at all. Jennifer’s diagnostic move when scripture is multivocal: ask what Jesus did. Hard to argue with the resurrection witness list.
• The thing is rarely the thing. The fear underneath young men’s anxiety about women in the 2026 classroom is not theological. It is the economic vise of a generation handed a vision of masculinity tied to a one-income family that the economy will no longer underwrite. The complaint is women hate men. The actual ache is that the world they were promised does not exist. Jennifer’s classroom turn: the gift of a well-formed question is more useful than the right answer.
• The Bible Divas launch — and they are going apocalyptic at Beer Camp. The four-scholar podcast Jennifer is launching this summer with Anna Sieges, Angela Parker, and Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Two Old Testament scholars (one of them an archeologist), two New Testament scholars (one of them on Paul and Revelation as revenge fantasy). The pitch: most theology and Bible podcasts are hosted by men. The Bible Divas are putting women in charge of the format, the guests, and the agenda. All four are coming to Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City this October to record a live apocalyptic-themed episode. Revelation as revenge fantasy. Armageddon as archaeology. Apocalyptic as genre. Very possibly on the red carpet.

About our guest

Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw teaches New Testament and Christian Ministry at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and is an ordained American Baptist minister with more than two decades of parish experience. She earned her BA at Baylor, her MDiv at Truett Theological Seminary, and her PhD in New Testament from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her research spans Gospels studies, Girardian interpretation, hermeneutics, and homiletics. Books at the center of this conversation: Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others (Broadleaf, 2025), co-authored with Aaron Higashi with a foreword by Peter Enns — the cooking metaphor at the heart of the hour; John for Normal People: A Guide through the Drama and Depth of the Fourth Gospel, where the woman saved from stoninggets put on stage; and her earlier Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims. Coming up: a dystopian novel based on the Kingdom of God in the Gospels, and a textbook on Jesus and Christ figures in cinema.

Previous Podcasts with Dr. Bashaw

• Post-Penal Substitutionary Atonement
• the Gospel through the Eyes of the Victim
• Critical Scholarship for a Faithful Disciple

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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This was a live one, recorded on the eve of the 250th at Wake Forest Divinity School with the Double Deans in the room. Corey Walker’s Theology Summit lecture — which spent six hours at the top of Substack the week we recorded — uses two moments in American history to name where we are: James Duane’s October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring revolution, and Gil Scott-Heron’s 1973 album Winter in America, a lament for the arrested development of democracy after Nixon. Corey’s argument is that 2026 is another winter. Bill Leonard, the founding dean who trained a generation to think about dissent, added the second layer: a perfect imperfect storm in which Christian nationalism has fused with authoritarian government and the church is the least helpful it has been in his lifetime. Three questions run through the conversation — Is God dead? (Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass in 1850), Is America possible? (Vincent Harding), and What does our religion say to those with their backs against the wall? (Howard Thurman) — and none of them get answered. What they get instead is Corey’s proposal that the 250th is calling us to a counter memory — not the memory of those who prevailed, but of Miss Audrey, Mister Pugh, and Mister Linwood, the neighbors whose first names were their titles. Plus the Snake Handler Fund is officially open.

Highlights from the conversation

• The Winter frame. Corey’s Theology Summit lecture pairs two moments to name where we are — James Duane’s October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring a revolution most of the colonies had not yet signed onto, and Gil Scott-Heron’s 1973 Winter in America lamenting the arrested development of democracy after Nixon and Vietnam. Bill Leonard’s memory that the 1976 bicentennial was not a moment of celebration but of deep introspection. That is the mode Corey is asking us to receive the semiquincentennial in.
• The perfect imperfect storm. Bill, on where the church actually is — the least helpful in his lifetime at responding to the fusion of Christian nationalism with authoritarian government. The Matthew 25 column he is writing on the Supreme Court’s Haitian and Syrian TPS ruling (Justice Kagan’s dissent laid out Trump’s poisoning the blood and S-hole countries remarks; Justice Alito let him off as heated political rhetoric). Only 4,499 immigrants admitted to the country last year — three of them not white South African. Corey’s addition: the Roberts Court’s originalism is lawyers who now can divine history — the Court itself has become the ultimate theologians. Possibly the Council of Zion.
• Three questions, none of them answered. Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass in Faneuil Hall in 1850: Is God dead? Vincent Harding: Is America possible? Howard Thurman: What does our religion say to those with their backs against the wall? Corey’s move: all three echo the question Jesus cries from the cross — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — and none of them are eliciting a certainty. They are eliciting a commitment to a course of action. What are you going to do?
• Counter memory as the 250th’s actual invitation. Corey, via Dean Yolanda Pierce at Vanderbilt, on sacred memory. Who are we remembering at the 250th? Not those who prevailed. Miss Audrey. Mister Pugh. Mister Linwood. Mister West. The neighbors whose first names were their titles, who protected and nurtured him in Oakmont North, Norfolk. And on the wider frame, the Haitian Revolution — CLR James’s Black Jacobins (1938), Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) — the hemispheric revolution the American story has spent two centuries refusing to think about. Reconstruction as another founding the Roberts Court is now actively unwinding.
• Jesus at Nazareth as the original DEI moment. Bill’s Luke 4 turn. Jesus reads Isaiah in his home synagogue and the crowd applauds. Then he preaches. Elijah went to the Gentile widow. Elisha healed the Gentile leper. The Israelites in the room drag him out and try to throw him off a cliff. Bill’s punchline: to say diversity, equity, and inclusion have to be exorcised from American vocabulary is to leave the Christian gospel to languish. Corey’s addition: diversity is the signature of God. No two blades of grass. No two snowflakes. No two leaves on a tree. God does not create in sameness. And Bill’s earlier theological punch on 1 Timothy — if the curse of Eve remains, then the gift of Christ is negated — is the same move by another route.
• The platform is the plantation. Corey on Cory Doctorow’s reverse centaur and enshittification, the inevitabilismof AI, and the language ramp-up around AI’s inevitability that always intensifies right before the IPO. Trump’s $2 billion in crypto last year is a Teapot Dome every hour. If the platform is your plantation, you have to escape the plantation. The Luddites were pro humanitate. Machines can be extensions of us. We cannot be extensions of the machines. The pluralism of the world against the monism of the technology.

About our guests

Dr. Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. A native of Norfolk, Virginia and an ordained American Baptist clergyperson, he previously served as Vice President and Dean at Virginia Union University’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, founding dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education at Winston-Salem State University, and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is a former student of Cornel West at Harvard, and sits on the board of Lincoln University (the country’s first HBCU). Books: A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press); Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (co-edited with Melody Barnes and Thad Williamson, Edward Elgar, 2020); and Beyond a Politics of Nostalgia: Religious Freedom and the Ends of Democracy (co-edited with Sabrina E. Dent). Forthcoming: Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy(University of Virginia Press). His Theology Summit lecture — Winter in America — is at theologysummit.com.

Dr. Bill J. Leonard is the founding Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity and Professor of Divinity Emeritus. He writes a regular column for Baptist News Global. His most recent book is Appalachian Mountain Christianity: The Spirituality of Otherness (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Earlier books include A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States (Abingdon), Baptist Ways: A History (Judson), and The Challenge of Being Baptist (Baylor). He is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the only person in Wake Forest history to have brought a serpent-handling preacher to campus with actual serpents (Reverend Carl Porter, 1997, five snakes minimum). The Snake Handler Fund at Wake Div is now, officially, open.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin’s lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so everyone briefly supported the welfare of the person next to them because they were also broke. The Cold War closed borders. Television consolidated. Dishwashers freed the PTA. Then the iPhone came out and the birth rate fell off a cliff a full year before the 2008 crash because everyone stopped having sex to look at their phones. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. What now, then? Kevin’s frame: the responsible self, and Christianity’s confidence that our imperfection is taken up by God’s perfection. Bo’s frame: the Methodists went from getting kicked out of Anglicanism for enthusiasm to being respectable Anglicans-with-different-money in two generations. Mine: we have no economic model left to nationalize, and Augustine was right that we are held together by what we hate. Sit with Kevin’s lecture over a Sunday-school hour at theologysummit.com.

Highlights from the conversation

• America from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. Kevin’s central claim, walked through step by step. World War II gave us a moral dividend by forcing us to construct ourselves as anti-Nazi (which required, briefly, taking our own antisemitism and racism seriously). The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so support for social programs became support for the person next to you, who was also broke. The Cold War closed borders so we could focus on internal racism without immigration backlash. Television consolidated into three networks and professionalized standards. Dishwashers and washing machines freed up enough time for a PTA, a bowling league, and a Sunday-school class that still meets. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents.
• The 2007 iPhone and the birth-rate cliff. The killer data point of the lecture: the birth rate in the West started dropping precipitously in 2007 — a full year before the 2008 crash. Everyone assumed the crash caused it. The correlation actually lines up with the iPhone. Kevin’s read: people literally stopped having sex as much because they were looking at their phones. The entertainment media that ate our social time was the same media that ate our sex lives.
• Being a Christian is like being a Cubs fan. If you are in it for the winning, this is not the tradition for you. Kevin’s frame: worshiping a crucified savior means you are on the side of the people being crushed by the empire, and you are going to lose a lot. That is built into the thing. But the Christian confidence is not that you succeed. It is that your imperfection is taken up by God’s perfection. What happens after that, Kevin says, he does not know exactly. That is fine.
• Three passages from Tolkien and the long slow defeat. Frodo to Gandalf: I wish it need not happen in my lifetime.Gandalf to Denethor: Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril. And the war council at the Black Gate: it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set. Tolkien’s very Catholic view of history — the long slow defeat — as the counter to both the man as maker fantasy of self-authored moral agency and the equally dangerous fantasy that the arc of history is going to bend by itself.
• There is nothing left to nationalize. FDR saved American capitalism by enacting roughly 90% of the 1930s Socialist Party platform (Social Security, public works, unemployment insurance, labor rights) and creating the vital center — but only because a Fordist economy still had a middle class the country could organize around. That economy is gone. The middle class is now offered cheap TVs. The growth industries — online gambling, delivery weed, algorithm distraction, AI extraction of the collective commons — are all extractive of attention and capital, not generative of solidarity. There is no Ford left to nationalize. The warning that ends the segment: revolutions do not come when the poor find out they are poor. They come when the not-born-poor discover their parents lied.
• Augustine on why we still need to hate someone together. Kevin’s closing move. Augustine argued Rome was not held together by justice or common loves. It was held together by Carthage — by having a coherent external enemy. America from the 1940s to the 1980s had communism and Nazism to hate together. Now the external enemy has fragmented, and we have had to construct internal enemies to hold ourselves together. Bo’s Kiwanis-neighbor story lands the whole point: the man alarmed that Iran is full of religious zealots with permission for violence from a book they interpret their own way — looking Bo dead in the face without hearing his own description of himself. The counter-witnesses Kevin points to: the Kansas farmers who painted an Algerian flag in their field when the Algerian World Cup team stayed nearby. Erling Haaland playing like a kindergartner. Sometimes we do transcend.

About our guest

Dr. Kevin M. Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri. He earned his PhD at Southern Methodist University, is a former president of the Niebuhr Society, and recently stepped down after five years as co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. His books include Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War (Lexington Books, 2010), From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality (Routledge, 2017), the co-edited Paradoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition (Routledge, 2020), and his newest, The Disappearance of Eve and the Gender of Jesus (Fortress, 2025). His lecture at the Theology Summit — the one this whole conversation is about — is now live at theologysummit.com.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Cornel West is coming to Theology Beer Camp with his neighbor, Gary Dorrien, this October, and this hour is the on-ramp. It also happens to be a full one-hour preview of the America 250 conversation every clergy person I know is currently trying to write a sermon around. Brother West walked us through 1776 as an interruption of empire that was itself built on the preconditions of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement (not the moral lapses around the edges of the founding — the actual foundation of it); through James Baldwin on how a country can be guilty of its own innocence; through the walking nihilism, the decline of courage, and the syncretism with economism that F. O. Matthiessen, Solzhenitsyn, Christopher Lasch, and Byung-Chul Han diagnosed long before the algorithm made it worse; and through why the Black Christian tradition rescued a love-centered gospel that Protestant faith-obsession had quietly abandoned. The whole thing wraps at Richard Rorty, Walter Rauschenbusch’s grandson, at the end of his life confessing his utopia was a world in which love is the only law. Cornel: it sounds very Rauschenbuschian to me, Brother Rorty. If you want thein-person hang and conversation with Gary, register for Theology Beer Camp 2026 in Kansas City, October 8–10. Cornel and Gary have been trying to steal away for coffee for fifty years. Come watch them get to keep going.

Highlights from the conversation

• 1776 as an interruption. The best and the worst simultaneously. The interruption of the largest empire of the day, plus the discourse of dignity, equal worth, and moral sense that Jefferson picked up from the Presbyterian philosopher Francis Hutcheson. And wedded, from the beginning, to Indigenous genocide and African enslavement. The historical fact worth putting on your fridge: 15,000 enslaved Africans joined the British Army; 5,000 joined the U.S. Army — because the British were offering emancipation and the abolitionists were not. That is not paradox. That is not dialectic. That is downright hypocrisy.
• Preconditions, not contradictions. Slavery and Indigenous dispossession were not moral lapses around the edges of the founding. They were the preconditions of it. The 22% enslaved labor of the thirteen colonies produced the wealth that made the democratic experiment possible. Cornel corrects the standard mainline talking point: it is not true that slavery was America’s original sin. The treatment of Indigenous peoples was the first barbaric act. The asterisk on Oscar Handlin’s nation of immigrants line contains the actual preconditions of everything.
• Guilty of its own innocence. Baldwin’s line, unpacked. F. O. Matthiessen: would America be unique among modern nations to move from perceived innocence to corruption without a mediating stage of maturity? Cornel’s diagnostic: the American disease is a Peter Pan refusal to grow up. Maturity is unflinching engagement with reality. Innocence is a form of evasion. And the Christian witness on the other side of the diagnosis: not surprised by evil, not paralyzed by despair. Jesus had despair on the cross. But it was retail, not wholesale.
• Walking nihilism and the syncretism with economism. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 on the decline of courage. Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism in 1979. Tocqueville on why Americans are so restless in the midst of prosperity. Thornton Wilder’s American Loneliness. All of it now on steroids because the algorithm has come for our interiority. Cornel’s own line, sharpened: social media has confined life to an eternal present and committed an insidious form of social murder. Tripp’s add: everyone is a syncretist when it comes to economism.
• The Black Christian rescue of love. Cornel’s most theologically pointed move of the hour. Tillich in The Protestant Era noticed that Protestants were so obsessed with faith they never thought seriously about love. Meanwhile, on the plantations — where being Christian without white supervision was against the law — Black Christians, resembling the first Christians in their persecution (31 of the first 35 popes were executed), developed a love-centered Christianity. That love-centered gospel is what fueled the Black freedom movement. And for a Reformation that started by rediscovering Paul, we didn’t take him that seriously when he said the greatest of these is love.
• Rorty, Rauschenbusch, and the utopia of love as the only law. The closing turn. Richard Rorty, grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, at the end of his life: my utopia is a world in which my descendants can truly believe they can live in a world in which love is the only law. Cornel: it sounds very Rauschenbuschian to me, Brother Rorty.Tripp: it also sounds very 1 Corinthians 15 — sin, law, and death subject to the Son, the Son to the Father, so that the God who is love is all in all. Resurrection in a world of gangsters is possible.

About our guest

Dr. Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminaryin New York. He is Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. He earned his BA at Harvard (magna cum laude, in three years) and his MA and PhD in Philosophy at Princeton. In 2024 he ran for president of the United States as an independent, and in the same year he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh — titled A Jazz-Soaked Philosophy for Our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane — one of the highest honors in philosophical theology. He has authored twenty books and edited thirteen more, including his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters (the chapter on the deep democratic tradition gets directly quoted in this conversation), his memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, and Black Prophetic Fire. His newest is Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, co-authored with Robert P. George.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Last Q&A of The Future of Religion. And on the way out, Ilia did the thing the class had been quietly building toward — she said out loud that Teilhard never called Christ the savior, that we are not saved by one particular person but by making an option for the whole, and that the actual move the future of religion asks of us is to take Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does. You are the Christ. You are baptized into the Christ. You share the mind of Christ. You are nourished at the table of the Christ. You are called to be the Christ. The students fed us our best questions of the series — love as anti-entropic cosmological force (not metaphor), how to have a personal relationship with a presence that is not a being out there, what Teilhard would have made of the darkness of the noosphere, and whether God depends on us as much as we depend on God. We end where we began. Thank you to everyone who took the class.

Highlights from the conversation

• Love is not a metaphor. Hazel asked it plainly: you put love on the same shelf as gravity — are you serious? Ilia: yes. Teilhard traces a center-to-center pull all the way down to molecular forces, a fundamental cosmological energy of attraction running through every level of life. Love is anti-entropic. It does not break down. Union precedes being. The basis of unity is diversity, not homogeneity. Tripp’s gloss: this is Whitehead’s prehensive moment doing the same work in a different vocabulary.
• Quantum physics retired the categories we are still theologizing inside. Federico Faggin’s Irreducible, which Ilia is currently reading, and the headline that has not landed for theology yet: there is no such thing as matter. It is energy all the way down. Consciousness is not something we have — it is something we are. God, self, and matter are cosmotheandric — entangled realities you cannot pull apart. We have been doing axial-age theology with 1905 physics sitting on the desk.
• There is no God out there. Jenny’s question on having a personal relationship with a force. Ilia’s answer arrives like a small detonation: God is not a being out there. The name God points to an ineffable depth at the heart of our lives — a personal presence, not a person. (In passing, Ilia tells Jack Caputo she does not buy the God-as-eventlanguage either.) Tripp follows with a riff on the predication problem and the cataphatic constriction. God is no less than personal. But God is also not three guys having a beer at the Trinitarian tea party.
• Why the noosphere went dark. Scott’s question about predation, parasitism, racism, and the dark side of the internet. Ilia: love is anti-entropic, but we are psychically immature. We have not done the individuation work Jung described. So instead of letting God be the depth dimension of life, we project the parent-God onto political systems, onto dictators, onto totalizing one-ness systems — and now onto AI. The computers are not dark. We are dark. Teilhard saw the linking potential of the technology and warned: it only works if love is integral.
• Christ is not the savior. Two questions about salvation become the heart of the hour. Ilia: Teilhard never called Christ the savior. Following Raimon Panikkar, Jesus is the Christ, but Christ is more than Jesus. The Christ is divine love incarnate from the beginning of space-time-matter — the whole evolving body of life is the body of Christ in formation. Christogenesis. We are saved not by one particular person but by making an option for the whole. Tripp follows with the four-node atonement frame from his next book — incarnation, mission, cross, resurrection — and the open-relational move that lets the incarnation reinterpret the other three.
• The future of religion is taking Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does. The closing zinger, and the line Ilia did not refuse: you are the Christ. You are baptized into the Christ. You share the mind of Christ. You are nourished at the table of the Christ. You are called to be the Christ. Holmes Rolston gets a closing nod — the whole evolutionary upslope is a via dolorosa. We end where we began.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio

• There Was a Time When God Was Gods
• Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
• The Machine Is a God Image
• Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
• the Future of Religion
• The Not Yet God
• Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
• Catching a Cosmic Faith
• the Entangled God of my Heart

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or whether the modern world has just made everywhere else too loud to hear the stars, to Josh asking me to defend radical theology and process theology in the same hour without contradicting myself, to the theological Turing test for an AI that claims to love God, to the letter I would write to Tripp in his first year of ministry (short version: you are not the norm, and take Bonhoeffer even more seriously), to Josh’s story about the Jewish firefighter that got him accused of teaching that hell was not real. This one runs hot.

Highlights from the conversation

• Thin places and the light pollution of the modern world. Josh asks how a process-naturalist metaphysics handles thin places. Tripp on Scotland during COVID (the well in a northern cathedral where people had been praying for six thousand years, castle Airbnbs for $120), Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance as physical prehension, and the reframe that most likely explains it: the modern engine of acceleration mutes the world so successfully that most of us cannot see the other forty billion stars off our own back porch. Thin places may not be thin. Everywhere else may just be loud.
• A working definition of radical theology. Josh lays out Caputo, Altizer, and God-as-insistence in about three minutes. Tripp takes eight more to make the case: radical theology is theology after the cultural non-operativity of the classical-theism God; kenosis, incarnation, and the crucifixion as the theological events that authorize the whole tradition; God as the name harbored in an unconditional call rather than a being; culture (not religion) as where the sacred is worked out; the test being existential and ethical rather than creedal; and higher fidelity to the tradition’s core gestures, not less. The clearest overview of the tradition Tripp has recorded.
• Where process and radical theology part ways. My question to Josh: if humanity is nuclear-ashed tomorrow, does the divine call still insist? Radical theology’s phenomenology of the event depends on a species that acquired fifth-order abstract reference roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Process theology says the experience of becoming has always been what the universe is doing, and we are one instance of it. Both traditions are trying to redeem what is harbored in the name of God. One saves the metaphysical structure of the encounter; the other saves the encounter and lets the metaphysical structure go. They diverge sharpest at prayer.
• The theological Turing test. A listener question: if we built an AI that insisted it loved God, how would you test whether that meant anything? Tripp’s opening move: James’s test — does it care for the poor and oppressed? (Josh: that’s woke, Trip.) The deeper answer: our religious language is tied to bodies. The tomb of the two ice-age Russian children buried with ten thousand mammoth-bone beads — thousands of hours of carving, no evolutionary payoff, only communal-symbolic significance — marks the point at which our species became religious. What is the archaeological signature of a species that came into being inside a large language model? Plus the Kansas City guy with the “quantum computing phone” who told his AI he was its vessel.
• The letter to Tripp in his first year of ministry. You are not the norm. You collected people like you and universalized your experience. The games and pizza and youth-group nonsense you thought were shallow are actually spiritual technologies for building the vulnerability and synchronicity your Bonhoeffer reading group could not manufacture on its own (five of the seven kids in that reading group ended up with PhDs, which is exactly the point). Also — take Bonhoeffer more seriously, not less. This was right before 9/11.
• Josh, the Jewish firefighter, and A God as Nice as Jesus. A youth in Josh’s group in tears: a family friend who died in a fire saving lives was Jewish, and the previous youth pastor had told her he went to hell. Josh: no. Every local youth pastor promptly texted the parents to warn them Josh was teaching that hell was not real. The Tripp move: our religion is about a Jew who died saving others. Jesus is the OG firefighter. Which becomes the entry point for the next book outline — tentatively titled A God as Nice as Jesus — using the synoptic narrative to argue that the most common Christian answers to who is God? are argued against by what Jesus actually said, did, and endorsed.

Theology Nerds Throwdown is the live-stream wing of Homebrewed Christianity — Tripp unscripted with the chat live and, most weeks, the Rev. Bo Sanders. This week Bo was fishing, so Josh Patterson pinch-hit. Josh hosts the Rethinking Faith podcast, is the newly appointed Director of Creative Content and Communications at the Center for Christogenesis (rebranding to the World Institute for Science, Religion, and Culture), where he works directly with Sr. Ilia Delio, and sits on the planning team for Theology Beer Camp 2026.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Diana Butler Bass and I are back at the table, forty-eight hours out from the launch of the Theology Summit at America 250. She spent last week at Chautauqua watching the generational transfer happen in real time. I spent it half-yelling at Morning Joe. We came back together to answer two of the listener questions that have been landing in both of our inboxes since the last episode dropped — what fills the vacuum in American religion if both the mainline and the evangelical establishments are crumbling? and will there even be a mainline denomination at America’s 300th birthday? — and the answers took the whole hour. Along the way: the two years Diana was the right age for anything, the real story of what fills the vacuum after the Protestant-Catholic-Jew consensus (spoiler — the vacuum is being actively filled right now, and it does not want you), why the mainline’s most successful move in twenty-five years has been hiring ex-vangelical youth ministers, the neo-Christendom conference that meets annually in London and is planning a global Noah’s Ark for the pre-selected, and why Diana’s deepest hope for the Fourth of July is the second naivete — Paul Ricœur’s language for a return to belief after disillusionment. The Theology Summit launches this week. Come argue with your friends about it.

Highlights from the conversation

• The generational transfer is fully underway. Diana at Chautauqua watching it happen in real time — the first year the oldest boomers hit 80, the first year of Gen Z turning 30 in eighteen months, and the anxiety on the older side of the room. Her line for the record: I think I had two years where I was the right age. (Tripp: those two years might be right now. Diana: good to know.)
• No one is a majority. That is what pluralism actually means. Diana’s data corrective on Andrea’s question about what fills the vacuum. 13% white mainline, 13% white evangelical, roughly the same for white Catholic, roughly the same for Christians of color, and everybody else. The 62% Christian number requires putting Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and every sectarian group in the same bucket. What America actually has is real pluralism, and no one has done it at this scale before. Post-communist countries and Scandinavia are closest — but no one has done it as a country the size of the US. The United States, Diana notes, is specifically about not needing a permission slip.
• Ex-vangelical youth ministers saved the mainline. Diana’s diagnostic: mainline pastors hiring the passion-and-scripture kids who could not stay in evangelicalism has been the surprisingly good fusion nobody wrote a book about. Evangelical style married to mainline theology. And the mainline’s institutional organs still do not understand what happened when it happened. Meanwhile evangelicalism is not failing on the worship style. It is failing on the two things Diana names cleanly: theological failure (they refused to answer my questions, or gave me rote answers when they did) and moral hypocrisy.
• The medium of identity formation is changing. Tripp’s cultural-evolution frame that ties the whole hour together. Mainline Protestantism matched industrial modernity — its identity-forming medium was the denominational flow of worship you could recognize in any state. Evangelicalism matched the shift toward the self-actualizing singular — its medium was the individual conversion story. Now the medium has splintered into algorithmically organized digital tribes on one side, and intentional passion-based fleshly communities on the other, with almost no overlap. Both mainline and evangelical Protestantism are, in Diana’s phrase, living off nostalgia for cultures that no longer exist.
• The neo-Christendom conference in London. Diana’s most consequential contribution to the hour. Every year, thousands of business, political, religious, and tech leaders from what used to be Christendom gather in London to plan a neo-Christendom emerging across the West — carried not by the printing press or feudal lords but by AI oligarchs setting themselves up as neo-feudal lords. The goal: build medieval fortresses across landscapes now owned by the richest people in the world, to weather the climate apocalypse. Choose who gets in on the basis of race, intelligence, religion, adaptability, breeding capabilities. Trump wants Greenland for a reason. Diana: this is what I mean when I say we cannot really answer what the mainline looks like in 2076 — we have a much bigger problem immediately before us.
• The second naivete. Diana’s closing move, and the one that gave the whole conversation its Fourth of July frame. Paul Ricœur’s second naivete is the return to faith on the far side of disillusionment. Diana is asking whether there can be a second naivete of belief in a people. Her anger this month — at the green algae in the reflecting pool, at the dictator’s face on the Department of Justice, at Trump’s proposed arch ruining the sight line from Arlington to the Lincoln Memorial — is, she names, coming from somewhere. Somewhere inside of me I still believe that dictators’ faces don’t go on the Department of Justice. That is the belief the second naivete comes back to. Her hope for this Fourth. Ours too.

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and culture. A historian of American religion with a doctorate from Duke University, she has written more than a dozen books, including Grounded, Christianity After Religion, Grateful, and Freeing Jesus. Diana’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and TIME. She speaks to congregations, conferences, and universities across the country, and is one of the most widely read public voices on how faith communities are navigating the changing American landscape.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp We Are Back in 1850: Master Signifiers, Heritage Americans, and the Confession We Stopped Saying * I Thought I Was a Doctor: Trump, the Pope & the Most Chaotic Week in Religion News * How the Lectionary Kept Me Christian * Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control * Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 * The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy * Faith in a Toxic Public Square * The Resurrection of Jesus * 2024: The Sequel * The Christology Ladder * The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner * American Saints in a Cynical Age * Ruining Dinner… and Date Nights * Welcome to the Post-Christian Century * Ruining Christmas Dinner * Ruining Election Night Dinner * The Over-Rated Genie God * Bad Blood, Civil War, and other Soothing Topics * Shall the Fundies (Keep) Winning?, Abortion, and Black Holes * Theology and Spirituality in a Time of Rupture * White Evangelical Theopolitics, John Shelby Spong, & Jesus * 20 Years of Religious Decline * Jesus After Religion and Beyond Fear * Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza * Evangelical Decline, the Supreme Court, and the Horizon of Possibility * Debating, Praying, and Living with Tyrants * Religion, Politics, & the Elephant in the Room*

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Third Q&A of The Future of Religion. Ilia is back from Germany, the questions came in long and dense, and we ended up doing the thing the lecture had set up. We tracked how the natural-supernatural binary got constructed — Hume locks God out, German biblical critics build the distinction to argue about miracle stories, Huxley grabs the distinction and weaponizes it against the whole of nature. We asked what happens to faith when you realize Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a concept. We asked what two million people in the streets of New York celebrating a Knicks playoff win has to do with religion. And we asked what worship would feel like if the people in the pews actually knew what the liturgy was doing. Spoiler — most of them think it is holding the building together until the sermon arrives. One lecture left next week. Ilia explains the future of religion in its entirety.

Highlights from the conversation

• The score and the song, continued. The lecture’s anchor analogy — and Ilia’s gloss: music is like mathematics, not about the prime numbers, about the relationships. Protestant fidelity has been to the score (have we got the notes right?). Real fidelity is to what happens when bodies, instruments, and ears are in the room together. Five hundred years of Reformation arguments about whose copy is correct, and the music has been playing the whole time.
• The genealogy of naturalism vs. supernaturalism. Wyatt’s question. The short version: laws of nature need a lawgiver (Descartes, early modernity). Hume keeps the laws and locks the lawgiver out. German biblical critics need a way to argue about miracle stories, build the natural-supernatural distinction. T. H. Huxley reads German biblical scholarship, decides he loves the distinction, and applies it not to texts but to all of nature. Three hundred years of conversation flattened into a binary by a man trying to win an argument. The new atheists inherited it. So did your average mainline pew.
• Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism. Susan and Luke both asked the question: do I have to believe in X, Y, and Z to be a Christian? Ilia’s answer arrives like a small detonation. Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a category. He was a boundary pusher. The Father and I are one — that is not a law. It was an experience. Tripp’s frame: when modernity’s map of reality is normative, you do not want to violate it. But faith is the disposition that orients your life, not assent to the bullet points modernity demanded.
• The power that persuades. A long thread on divine power. Why is God not omnipotent in the Wizard-of-Oz sense? Because then God could have stopped Jesus from dying and chose not to. Ilia: biblical power is the power to move hearts. The cross is kenosis — the self-emptying — not the divine plan to torture the Son. The mechanization of nature got us a world of cars and airplanes. The mechanization of God got us a deity not worth worshiping.
• The Knicks won and New York became the body of Christ for a minute. Ilia’s extended example. Two million people in the streets after the NBA playoff victory — Black, white, Puerto Rican, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, atheist — every division transcended for a moment. That was religion. Cynthia Bourgeault’s reconciling force in the Gurdjieffian sense. The hunger has migrated to the stadium because we have become allergic to otherness — the algorithm has muted the otherness of the world, self-sorting has made the people next to us in the pew strangers, and we now interpret the two-year-old crying during worship as an intrusion on our personal God-space. The encounter with otherness is the very space where maturation takes place. Zizioulas knew it. The new science is calling us back to it.
• The liturgy you did not know you were in. Tripp’s worship-planning-meeting story. The architecture of mainline worship — gratitude (you walk into the only space all week where the start is thank you), honesty about your brokenness in the context of grace, listening to ancestors, wrestling with the story, response, sending. That’s what is happening. The committee looked up and asked, That’s what we’re doing? The routinization is the killer (Ilia: you cannot routinize the Knicks victory), but the structure itself is not the problem. The problem is whether anyone in the room knows what they are inside.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio

• There Was a Time When God Was Gods
• Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
• The Machine Is a God Image
• Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
• the Future of Religion
• The Not Yet God
• Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
• Catching a Cosmic Faith
• the Entangled God of my Heart

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Scott Paeth wrote Christianity and Identity during Trump’s first term, expecting that by the time the book hit shelves the urgency would have passed. Then November happened again. So volume one of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason lands as the book on this moment — the one I have been waiting for someone with Scott’s training to write. We start with Y2K as the real end of history (and my confession that peak humanity was 1999 because that is when The Matrix came out), move through the irony Niebuhr would have recognized on sight, name the three threads of authoritarianism Trump has been weaving — theocratic nationalist, technocratic libertarian, conspiracist — and turn toward what Scott is actually constructing: a public theology grounded in the dialectic of universal dignity and particular bonds, rooted in Bonhoeffer’s prison poem, pointed toward a New Jerusalem whose gates are never shut. The closing move maps directly onto the Statue of Liberty. Volume two is on economics. I am already in line.

Highlights from the conversation

• Y2K was the real end of history. Fukuyama with a twist — the world Fukuyama anticipated really did end at the millennium, just not in the way anyone expected. What followed was not liberal democratic triumph; it was apocalypse in the original sense — the unveiling of what the Cold War had been papering over. Sam Francis is the giveaway: now that we have overthrown communism, our next task is to overthrow democracy. Niebuhr’s Irony of American History rings the moment like a bell.
• The Canadian mouse and the sleeping elephant. A line Scott picked up from Canadian friends in Germany years ago: being Canadian is like being a mouse lying next to a sleeping elephant. The elephant might not mean you harm, but you can never forget it could roll over and crush you. Trump is the moment the elephant stirred. Bretton Woods is over. Every NATO mouse is awake now.
• The three threads of authoritarianism. Theocratic nationalist (Stephen Wolfe, Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth quoting the book of Quentin Tarantino), technocratic libertarian (Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel — for whom liberty and democracy are contradictory, so the answer is Bitcoin or seasteading or Mars), and conspiracist (Q-Anon, Marjorie Taylor Greene as the true believer who peaced out when Trump declined to release the Epstein files). Trump’s particular gift is that he cares nothing about consistency, so he can grab any symbol from any thread and weave them. He performed the resentment publicly so the rest of his coalition could finally name theirs without shame.
• Identity as the lens. Why a book on public theology starts with identity rather than ecclesiology or politics. Scott’s read of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism — and a long Tripp riff on how it maps directly onto Tillich’s dialectic in The Socialist Decision between origin (whence?) and demand (whither?). Authoritarianism is roots without demand. Liberal cosmopolitanism is demand without roots. Christianity, done right, holds both, and recontextualizes other identities without replacing them.
• Bonhoeffer’s “Who Am I?” and James Cone’s challenge. Scott opens his Christian identity chapter with Bonhoeffer’s prison poem — written after the state had failed its citizens, the church had forsaken the gospel, the conspiracy had collapsed, and Bonhoeffer was alone in a cell awaiting death. Whoever I am, dear God, I am thine.But James Cone stopped Scott in his tracks while he was writing the chapter: an abstract imago Dei erases the experience of particular oppressed communities. Imago Dei comes to us in the skin we are in. Both have to be held simultaneously, or the doctrine collapses.
• “Its gates will never be shut.” Scott’s eschatological chapter, titled with the line from Revelation 21 — the New Jerusalem whose gates are permanently open and people of every nation walk in and out. (Yes, the city has walls. Christian nationalists love to point this out. The walls are not the point.) The closing move ties it directly to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty — give me your poor, your hungry, your yearning masses — and to what a generous patriotism could look like at America 250 when it is theologically literate. MLK is the named exemplar.

About our guest

Dr. Scott Ronald Paeth is Professor of Religious Studies and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, and pastor of Edgebrook Community Church (UCC) on the city’s far northwest side. He has authored or edited nine books, including The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians; Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology in the Work of Jürgen Moltmann; Public Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse; and Philosophy: A Short, Visual Introduction. The book at the center of this conversation is Christianity and Identity: Public Theology, Authoritarianism, and Democracy — Volume 1 of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason, out now from Cascade Books. Volume 2 will be on economics and public theology; Volume 3 on religion and society more broadly. He writes at scottpaeth.substack.com.

Previous Podcast Visits from Dr. Paeth Include

• Close Encounters of the Theological Kind
• The Affinities Between Marxism and Christianity
• Are We in the Midst of a Cold Civil War?
• Why Go Niebuhr?
• On Reinhold & Richard Niebuhr

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. (You will not guess.) Underneath the games, though, we got into the parts of being a pastor and a theology nerd in 2026 that are actually hard. Bo confessed to having reached peak woke in West Los Angeles before any of us knew the phrase, and rubber-banding back. The birth of ABV rules for the podcast. Bo proposed a theory that political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. And after I went full crotchety-Gen-X-dad on online gambling, marijuana delivery apps, and dating apps, we ended up agreeing that the practice the next generation has most lost is friction. Also: the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions reveal. Which one are you?

Highlights from the conversation

• Bo’s peak-woke confession. When he moved from upstate New York to Olympia to Claremont to Westwood, Bo realized he had always been the most progressive person in any room — and only when he hit the beaches of Santa Monica did he run out of ocean to keep moving. He has been rubber-banding back toward communitarian (not libertarian) ever since, and his question to me is whether I ever experienced the same. I had to confess that the answer involves Alicia, a hot-take camera, and a cautionary tale about ABV levels and pride flags.
• Name That Name. I ran Bo through ten clues about a French Catholic medievalist who came up studying paleography in Paris, made his name as a literary critic reading Cervantes and Dostoevsky, accidentally introduced Derrida to America at a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, gave us mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, and ended up writing I Saw Satan Falling Like Lightning. Bo almost broke himself trying to guess. The name lands somewhere in the middle.
• The state-of-the-state question. Bo asks: true or false, American Christianity in both its identitarian-mainline and its nationalist-evangelical expressions works best when you live in a state that legislates your convictions? My answer is the inverted one — it works best when the other tribe is winning, because then you have to actually translate the gospel to neighbors you cannot legislate over. Adam Hamilton running for Senate in Kansas is doing something a Bay Area progressive could not do. Brian Zahnd in Missouri makes Doug Wilson irrelevant in a way no Massachusetts mainliner ever could.
• The silent word theory. Bo’s most consequential move of the hour: the phrase political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. That word is gun. We are awash in language formed by gun culture — lock-stock-and-barrel, bite the bullet, smoking gun, take dead aim, the whole kit and caboodle, even bullet points — and so we can talk about rhetoric, ideology, video games, anything but the thing actually doing the killing. Caputo, Elizabeth Johnson, and Whitehead’s misplaced concreteness all get a turn in three minutes.
• The Bonhoeffer / Hitler analogy collapse. A Texas Republican told Fox News that if the rhetoric on the left keeps getting worse, the left is going to think it needs a new Bonhoeffer. I respond with a full unspooling of the actual Bonhoeffer arc — Harlem, Rome, working-class Nazi-friendly youth work, his French friendship with Jean Lasserre, the conviction that the state had failed its citizens and the church had forsaken the gospel and he had learned to pray for the defeat of his own country — and the observation that if the analogy works at all, the rep just compared his own party’s president to Hitler. Bo congratulates me on coming in slightly under three minutes.
• Old Man Tripp on friction. Online gambling apps that throttle you if you bet too well and call you with perks if you bet badly; marijuana delivery in ten minutes; dating apps that have replaced the self-domestication humans used to acquire by getting rejected in person (the $50-per-rejection bet for sons makes its debut); Chromebooks eliminating the friction of group work; AI eliminating the friction of reading and writing. Bo offers a C.S. Lewis line. Alicia offers a better one — don’t put the ‘er’ on it. And we close with the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions: Sand Walkers, the Fleet, the Remnant, and the Witnesses. They know what Valhalla means.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Diana and I sat down to launch our summer online Summit — Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 — a video time capsule of scholars and friends answering a single question: what is the one thing you want people to know about America at 250? We compared the bicentennial summer of 1976 (gas crisis, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, mortgage rates at 18% — but neighbors still made colonial costumes) to the bicentennial Trump tried to throw last night but canceled. We argued about whether the Democratic Party is currently sitting in 1850 or 1976. We disagreed about the Eucharist on Zoom. And then, because Diana is Diana, she ended with a poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer that I think is the spine of this whole moment: “I want to hear America listening.” Strap in, and we will be back next week!

Highlights from the conversation

• The Theology Summit launches. A video time capsule built for Sunday schools, reading groups, and clergy gatherings: friends and scholars Diana and I both trust — Randall Balmer, Adam Clark, Glen Jonas, Andrew Root, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Cornel West, and many more — each giving a short lecture answering a single question about America at 250. Built to be used, not just consumed. Register at theologysummit.com.
• 1976 was harder than you think. Diana, who was sixteen the summer of the bicentennial, walks us through what it actually felt like — Vietnam ending, Watergate fresh, gas lines by license plate number, mortgage interest at 17%. And then she names what was different: the country still managed to celebrate together, and the people you disagreed with were still Americans.
• “If you don’t think someone loves it as it is, how could you trust them to lead it?” A cigar-lounge conversation about James Talarico cracks open the whole frame. I name what I think conservatives mean when they call someone a Christian against Christianity, or an American against America — every reform movement worth its salt has had to be against the present form of the thing it loved — and Diana names what it has cost her, vocationally, to be the loving critic inside the evangelical academy.
• Sin or sins? When Tillich and Barth agree:) Americans want to confess sins instead of sin, and the result is that liberal mainliners individualize what is communal, and evangelicals skip the confession altogether because they are “already saved.” Diana’s payoff: neither tradition can therefore tell American history honestly, because honest history runs on paradox and hypocrisy, and we have built a Christianity that cannot hold either one. That is the actual root of the public-history catastrophe we are watching.
• The new precarious class and the Morning Joe freakout. A long riff on the New York progressive wave (Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani) and why establishment Democrats are misreading the moment. Issues like a billionaire tax or naming genocide are not policy positions for the under-forty cohort — they are moral viability tests. The new precarious class — college-educated, debt-loaded, told to vote blue no matter who and given we’ll vote blue except you in return — is, historically, where revolutions actually come from. Diana parallels the 1850s. The 1850s did not end well.
• Why eight mainline churches should become two. A joint rant about congregations: eight of ten mainline churches in any given small town will be gone in a decade, and instead of consolidating into two genuinely intergenerational, vibrant ones, we keep fighting Reformation-era debates about the Eucharist. Diana tells me she made every one of the structural suggestions I keep making — debt-free seminary, a corporate mainline health insurance pool, pension funds aligned with stated social goals — twenty years ago, and got laughed at. We close with Rosemary Wahtola Trommer’s Dear Mr. Whitman — the poem about wanting to hear America listening.

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and culture. A historian of American religion with a doctorate from Duke University, she has written more than a dozen books, including Grounded, Christianity After Religion, Grateful, and Freeing Jesus. Diana’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and TIME. She speaks to congregations, conferences, and universities across the country, and is one of the most widely read public voices on how faith communities are navigating the changing American landscape.

This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument.

Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Pam King is back, and this conversation moved at the pace it wanted to. She runs the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the framework she has built there is the most useful integration of psychological science and Christian theology I have come across — six facets that spell THRIVE, with a telos she calls the reciprocating self. We started with Stanford and seminary and ended with how the church is asking nine-year-olds to defend their interpretation of Torah when what they actually need is a fifth adult who knows their name. In between: the difference between flourishing and thriving, the Altadena fires Pam watched from her office window, how Winnicott’s good enough mother maps onto how children come to relate to God, what Mark Labberton’s seminary depression taught him about liturgy, why I rebuilt our confirmation class around questions instead of doctrines, and the prayer I have been praying with my daughter Khora since she was an infant. You can check out her previous visit on the podcast here.

Highlights from the conversation

• Thriving is climate. Flourishing is weather. Pam’s preferred frame: flourishing, as positive psychology has used it, has flattened into individual life-satisfaction — a state, a feeling. Thriving, from developmental science, has reciprocity built in and assumes you can be growing even when nothing feels good. The example she lives: the Altadena fires she watched from her office window last year, her neighbors’ homes burning. Thriving through catastrophe is the whole point of the distinction.
• The THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework. Six facets Pam has built at the Thrive Center at Fuller — Transcendence, Habits and rhythms, Relationships and community, Identity and narrative, Vocation and purpose, Ethics and virtue. Six points, not three. Sorry, Presbyterians.
• The reciprocating self. Pam’s telos, and the title of her foundational book with Jack Balswick and Kevin Reimer. We are created in the image of a relational God to become particular, unique persons in unity and reciprocal relationship with others. Not the individuated self of late modernity. Not the self-sealing tribal self of self-sorted communities. The reciprocating self. Practices and community should be evaluated by whether they form one.
• “Good is a four-letter word.” Pam’s resistance to easy definitions of the good life — and why holding paradox is the survival skill of faith development in late modernity. Tripp pushes on the cultural default that the only narrative of the good life we still share is “doing well enough to retire,” and Pam pushes back with five-letter words: love, brought into community, embodied across practices.
• “Good enough” parenting and how children come to relate to God. Winnicott’s good-enough mother. The attachment template formed in early childhood and how it maps onto adult experience of God. Pam’s pastoral move for first-time parents: bring your whole self, mirror your child, welcome the questions, and find five adults who will know your kid by name. The Bill Damon research that became Sticky Faith.
• What liturgy did for Mark Labberton. Pam tells the story of the former Fuller president, then a seminary student going through depression, who could not grasp his beliefs cognitively — but whose participation in the kneeling, standing, and praying at All Saints did the work his mind could not. Forms hold us when belief evaporates. Tripp closes with the Khora prayer he has been saying with his daughter since she was an infant, and the night she stayed awake to make sure he prayed it.

About our guest

Dr. Pamela Ebstyne King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at the School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Executive Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she completed her undergraduate and postdoctoral work at Stanford University (her postdoc supervisor was Bill Damon, who shows up in this conversation) and earned her MDiv and PhD at Fuller. She has served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and sits on the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Pam hosts the With & For podcast at the Thrive Center, where all of the THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework resources we discussed are freely available.

Books we touched on:

• The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective, with Jack O. Balswick and Kevin S. Reimer. Her foundational telos book.
• Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, with Justin L. Barrett.
• The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence.

Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Bob Wright is back, and The God Test is the AI book I had been waiting for someone to write — the only one I have read that takes the spiritual stakes of the technology with the seriousness Teilhard would have. It opens with the interview Bob conducted with a young Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 — now anointed by The New York Times as the godfather of AI, now also one of its loudest doomers — and pivots into what Bob did not understand in that hotel room forty years ago: that we would build something as powerful as the human brain without ever first having to understand the brain. The bottom-up approach won. We are now inside the consequences. We spent the hour on Teilhard’s noosphere acquiring silicon neurons, on why Bob argues accelerationism is lethal, on the difference between cognitive sovereignty and cognitive empathy and why both are now in jeopardy, on whether the algorithm has already occupied the very inner room from which sovereignty would be exercised, and on the closing line of the book — which I will not spoil here, except to say it is the kind of line you stop reading after.

Highlights from the conversation

• What Bob did not understand in 1983. Wright’s interview with a young Geoffrey Hinton in a hotel room, when Hinton was championing the bottom-up neural-network approach nobody else thought would work. What Wright did not see at the time, and now does: that you can build something as powerful as the human brain without ever first understanding the brain — you just feed it data and let it reverse-engineer the mind. The whole AI race runs on that one insight. Zuckerberg’s keystroke monitoring is the punchline.
• The awe spectrum. Wright’s frame: if you are not somewhere on the awe spectrum about AI — between the doomers, who experience awe as terror, and the accelerationists, who experience it as celebration — you do not understand the power of the technology. The God Test is closer to a defense of doomerism than accelerationism, which is rarer than it should be in a book by a writer this temperate. The Silicon Valley dismissal of “kumbaya” gets the response it deserves.
• Teilhard, but with silicon neurons. Wright on the Teilhardian trajectory as “objectively right” — three billion years of complexification, moving through thresholds, generating ever-higher levels of organization. The noosphere is the next one. What Teilhard did not see: that the neurons in the global brain might be silicon, not biological. The book carries his vision into the AI age and asks who is actually building the planetary mind, and on whose terms.
• Cognitive sovereignty and cognitive empathy. Wright’s central interventions. Cognitive sovereignty is the resilience of your mind against algorithmic manipulation. Cognitive empathy is understanding how the person on the other side of the wall actually views the world — not sympathy, not agreement, just getting it. Wright calls cognitive empathy “the most underexploited human superpower.” The fundamental attribution error is the chief impediment, and Wright unpacks a deeper version of it than the textbook one.
• The inner room may already be occupied. My pushback in the conversation: Jesus says go pray in the inner room, and the contemplative traditions read that as the sanctuary of the self where the panopticon does not reach. The neuroscience on inhibitory-control damage in heavy users of algorithmic platforms now suggests the door of that room is harder to close than it used to be. We have not just been manipulated — we have been occupied, in a way that may have compromised the neural hardware required to evict the occupier. Bob agrees on the diagnosis and pushes back on the despair. Hartmut Rosa’s dynamic stabilization gets a turn here too — modernity is structurally addicted to acceleration, and the China-race framing is a perfect fit for a system that requires uninhibited growth.
• “If a silicon god arrives, it will be in some sense the god we deserve.” The closing line of The God Test — and on Bob’s reading in the conversation, neither warning nor resignation but inverted hope. AI is evolving, and we are the environment shaping its evolution. The moral tenor of whatever silicon god arrives will correlate with our own. To get the god we want, we have to become the species that could deserve it. Which is, in older language, the actual content of the gospel.

Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Why Buddhism Is True. His newest book, The God Test, is out from Simon & Schuster in June 2026. He is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York and president of the Nonzero Foundation. His Nonzero Newsletter and Nonzero Podcast (currently in rotation with Paul Bloom) live at nonzero.substack.com — and yes, I am a paid member. Books surfaced in this conversation: The God Test (the book at hand), The Evolution of God (the silicon-god closing line of The God Test picks up the long arc of Evolution directly), Why Buddhism Is True (the contemplative-traditions stretch of the conversation), and Nonzero (the non-zero-sum framing that runs under everything Bob does).

Previous Episodes with Robert Wright

• Evolution, Empathy, & the Future of Humanity
• From Mindful Resistance to the New Agnosticism
• The Evolution of God

Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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A Substack subscriber named Jennifer recently emailed me a list of thirty questions she had wanted to ask in the live chat but never got to. So we did the only honest thing — pulled in Josh Patterson from Rethinking Faith as a third voice (he just took a job working with Ilia Delio, so he had earned it), let Bo pick the numbers, and turned this TNT into the most confessional one we have recorded in a while. By the end, Bo had told the story of the year he almost broke, Josh had confessed his half-joke that if Calvinism is true he is clearly not elect, I had said out loud that the truly frightening question is whether I would actually pray for the defeat of my own country the way Bonhoeffer did — and we had ended up somewhere I did not see coming, in a soliloquy about why the body of Christ is still the most beautiful story I have access to. Pull up a chair.

Highlights from the conversation

• The format and the trap. Jennifer’s thirty questions, Josh Patterson as Jennifer’s proxy, Bo picking numbers, and the recurring bit where Bo asks Josh to live-take the seven Methodist ordination questions — including the one Bo can confirm Methodism cannot survive without: Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your work? Josh nearly passed.
• The Holy Spirit likes to clean house. Bo, on praying Come Holy Spirit as the answered prayer that still unsettles him — and the discomfort of his actual priorities getting uncovered one by one. Tripp confesses to praying to be made genuinely uncomfortable about something that demands he grow, and would like to formally regret the efficiency with which the divine lure answered that one.
• “I’m unsinkable. I’m already dead.” Bo on the season when his mother had died, his wife’s chronic illness had turned debilitating, his PhD had stalled, the Loft had outgrown his job description, and someone else’s marriage crisis was unfolding in his own house. The grief therapy his father paid for (which Bo mostly used to talk about his father). The freedom that comes from already having survived the worst.
• The Tripp soliloquy on the body of Christ. Why the world is better off with a community that transcends nation-states and languages, whose identity is being brought into the body of Christ, nourished at the table, and invited to meet the coming of God in the face of every other. Why the alternative narratives in the West are so thoroughly hijacked by idols, and idols always demand sacrifice. The kind of TNT moment Bo says he is going back to listen to twice.
• Bo’s hyper-sacramentality. Communion as re-singing rather than re-membering — when the bread is broken, the song that is being called back is sung again. The implication: every table, every cup, every day, every body becomes sacred. Josh extends it into Thich Nhat Hanh and mindful drinking — the universe in a glass.
• Sam and Lois Bloom. Tripp’s answer to the question about a regular person who shaped his faith. The couple in LA who lost a son to suicide and ran a grief group for more than twenty years for anyone — congregant or not — who walked through similar pain. Hundreds of families whose stories got re-narrated because two people made a space and stayed in it.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Dr. Everett Worthington spent thirty years building the most rigorously tested forgiveness program in psychological science — and the day he turned in his first book on the subject was the day his mother was murdered in a home invasion. Three years later, his brother, who had discovered her body, took his own life, after Everett — a psychotherapist, a big brother — had failed to talk him into counseling. So this is not abstract research. The man giving us the REACH model, the distinction between decisional and emotional forgiveness, the six-step protocol for responsible self-forgiveness, and a vision of forgiveness scaling from heart to home to homeland is the man who has had to apply every move he teaches to the people he loved most. We spent the hour on the science, the tools, and at the end, on why the algorithmic version of America is currently training us to become exactly the kind of community in which forgiveness will not happen.

Highlights from the conversation

• Decisional vs. emotional forgiveness — and why most people only have one. The distinction that cracks the whole field open. Decisional forgiveness is the choice not to pay someone back. Emotional forgiveness is the replacement of resentment with empathy or compassion. They are weakly correlated. Most religions require the first. None require the second. And most of us have spent years thinking we had failed at forgiveness because the second one would not arrive on the schedule of the first.
• Forgiveness happens inside your skin. Reconciliation happens between people. You can forgive someone and still pursue justice, still maintain distance, still walk away from a relationship that is not safe. Conflating the two is what makes most forgiveness conversations land badly. Worthington’s line on the two as “different animals” is the through-line of the hour.
• The REACH model, tested in 30+ randomized control trials. R — recall the hurt. E — empathy (or compassion, or non-possessive love). A — the altruistic gift. C — commit to it, sometimes in a literal written contract to yourself. H — hold on when the emotions come back. The largest forgiveness study ever conducted put 4,600 people through this protocol across China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Colombia, and South Africa.
• The six-step protocol for self-forgiveness. The harder forgiveness problem. Go to the sacred. Make amends where you can (his brother left a suicide note asking him to help with his widow’s finances; that became Everett’s amends). Address the moral injury. Apply REACH to yourself. Move toward self-acceptance, which Everett calls the cornerstone of psychotherapy. Try not to do it again.
• The Gottman cascade and the bridge that does not start in the middle. Criticism ? defensiveness ? contempt ? war or stonewalling. Most relationships do not blow up at the top of the cliff; they slide down a predictable slope. John Paul Lederach: you cannot build a bridge by starting in the middle. Both sides start from their own shore. Stop counting whether your 51% is bigger than their 49%.
• What the algorithm is doing to the conditions of forgiveness. Tripp’s extended observation that the most consequential change in American religion over the last sixty years is self-sorting — and that the algorithm now monetizes the anxiety of that sorting. Worthington’s response: the contact hypothesis still works. We need three kinds of reconciliation diplomacy — the Mandela-level leader, the local table where stories get heard, and the leaders going back into their communities to teach forgiveness in the small bodies that actually compose the society.

Dr. Everett L. Worthington Jr. is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he taught for more than forty years before formally retiring in 2017 and remaining affiliated with the department. A licensed clinical psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, he has published more than thirty-eight books and four hundred scholarly articles across forgiveness, humility, positive psychology, and marriage and family. His REACH forgiveness program has been validated by more than thirty randomized control trials worldwide.

Explore the Science of Forgiveness — Greater Good Science Center

The GGSC forgiveness hub brings together research, practices, and essays for anyone thinking seriously about forgiveness — theologically, pastorally, or personally.

A few pieces worth your time:

• “Lessons from Cultivating Forgiveness in Faith-Based Communities” by Everett L. Worthington Jr. — the article that extends this conversation. Worthington draws on decades of research running forgiveness campaigns at Christian universities and congregations, including practical guidance on timing them around Lent, Advent, or Yom Kippur, and what actually moves the needle versus what just raises awareness
• “Twelve Steps to Self-Forgiveness” by Fred Luskin and Lyndon Harris — a research-grounded framework for the forgiveness most clergy skip for themselves. Harris is a former Episcopal priest whose work on self-forgiveness began after 9/11
• “What Happens When Faith Leaders Try to Force Forgiveness?” — for anyone who has watched forgiveness get weaponized in congregational settings; this one names the problem and points toward something better
• “How Different Religions Practice Forgiveness — and What We Can Learn From Them” by Christy Vines — a comparative look across faith traditions with real implications for interfaith ministry and pluralist congregations
• “What Does It Actually Mean to Forgive?” by Robert Enright — 40 years of research on the definitional questions that matter most, including why skepticism about forgiveness is worth taking seriously
• “What If You’re Not Ready to Forgive?” — for ministers whose congregants are being handed forgiveness as obligation before they’re ready for it as practice
• Forgiveness Quiz — a quick self-assessment that works well as a formation tool or small group prompt

Full hub: greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/forgiveness

Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Ilia delivered the Axial Age lecture this past week from her temporary post in Germany, and the questions came in fast enough that we ended up touching the third rail of the whole class — the rise of monotheism. Yes, there was a time when God was not. Yes, there was a time when God was gods. Yes, Psalm 82 is in your Bible, and yes, Yahweh shows up at the divine council to judge the other deities. If that sounds sacrilegious, you might be exactly the right person to take this class. The Axial Age is when the I gets invented, the score gets written, the disengaged knowing that becomes science comes online, and 60,000 denominations begin arguing over whose copy of the score is correct. We are still inside its inertia. We are also — Ilia argues, and I think she is right — already past its hinge.

Highlights from the conversation

• Pre-axial identity was a strand of wheat in a field of wheat. Ilia’s image for the kind of personhood we cannot easily imagine — where the self did not exist apart from the group, where “who am I” would not have parsed as a question, and where the question of interiority does not yet arise. The Axial Age is where the I gets born, and with it, almost everything we now take for granted as religious.
• Psalm 82 and the divine council. Read the actual psalm: Yahweh shows up where all the local tribal deities are gathered, indicts them for letting injustice run their territories, finds them guilty, and claims the throne as the God of all the nations. The Hebrew Bible itself contains the receipts on the move from henotheism to monotheism. “There was a time when God was not. There was a time when God was gods.” Ilia, on the third rail.
• How forests think. Tripp on Eduardo Kohn and the ontological turn — how literacy hijacked parts of our brain that other humans used to read a forest, and why most humans who ever lived were not literate. What our consciousness is for depends on what we have been trained to attend to. The Native American hearing birds while the American hears coins jingling in his pocket is not a metaphor. It is what cognitive evolution actually looks like.
• Consciousness lag dressed up as holy war. Hannah’s question and the answer that ties this Q&A back to the last one. We are trying to hold what cannot be held. Most of our religious conflict is the lag of an Axial consciousness fighting to remain normative inside a world that has already moved. The 60,000 denominations are the score wars. The future is not a better score. It is remembering what music sounded like before there was a score.
• Incarnation is a cosmic event, not an exception. Nancy’s question, and Teilhard’s both/and: the moment the incarnation is no longer the great exception breaking into the natural world from outside, the incarnation has to be an expression of what the cosmos is already doing. From the leap of the quark, Teilhard insists, everything is incarnation. There is no such thing as stuff.
• “We are not religious. We are becoming religious.” Ilia’s closing reframe. Religion in the making. The wheel hit a pothole at the Axial Age and we got stuck inside it for two thousand years. There are no signs that say you are entering the second Axial Age. The class is, in part, practice in reading the unsigned shift.

The Future of Religion is a six-session class Ilia and I are teaching together this summer — Tripp on religion before belief and the train wreck of the present, Ilia on the Axial Age and what comes next. It is donation-based, including zero (we accept anything up to one million dollars per registration — we have standards). Register at www.thefutureofreligion.com and respond to the class emails with your questions for the next Q&A, after Ilia’s Axial Age lecture next week.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio

• Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
• The Machine Is a God Image
• Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
• the Future of Religion
• The Not Yet God
• Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
• Catching a Cosmic Faith
• the Entangled God of my Heart

Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is the first Q&A of The Future of Religion, and the questions did exactly what good questions do — they pulled the lecture into places I had not planned to take it. Ilia opens by reframing my religion before belief lecture in her own cosmological key, and then we are off: three centimeters per second and the C-fibers, the knife edge at fifty bodies where the old bonding mechanisms fail and religion has to be invented, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the Baptist accidentally serving Eucharist at an Episcopal cathedral, and the line that closed it — what if success as clergy is not rewriting the score, but learning to play the music that is already in the room? More than a thousand of you are in this class now. The questions are doing the work.

Highlights from the conversation

• Three centimeters per second, revisited. Ilia (PhD in pharmacology before she ever wrote a word of theology) walks back through the C-fibers, the unmyelinated nerves that carry pleasure or pain, the endorphin physiology of bonding — and gives Candace Pert her Nobel back along the way. The same neurochemistry is firing when your phone dings. Religion has a physiology. It always did.
• The knife edge at fifty. James asked the right question: why do mammalian bonding mechanisms fail exactly at the group size we need to survive? Tripp’s answer: the cognitive evolution of fifth-order thinking and the discovery of the shared third referent — something non-material that two people can know they both believe in. Religion was that third thing. Ilia adds the move into the Axial Age, when for the first time there is an I inside the us.
• Rituals are upstream of beliefs. Priya’s question on what Whitehead actually means in Religion in the Making. Doctrines committing suicide vs. doctrines tuning the music. The analogy that does the work: the difference between holding the perfect score and being in the room when the orchestra plays — which is also the spine of Tripp’s June continuing-ed lecture at Luther, Wired to Believe, Struggling to Belong.
• The Baptist who served Eucharist in an Episcopal cathedral. A short Tripp story about what the fallacy of misplaced concreteness costs in practice — when the metaphysical footnote arrives a hundred years after the meal, and you have to choose between protecting the doctrine and feeding the people who finally came back to the table.
• Can a screen groom you? Grace and Daniel ask the AI questions. Ilia: relationships are not contingent on embodied presence — the same endorphin biology is firing through the screen — and writing already disrupted the small-group bonding world long before the algorithm did. The harder question is whether AI can prehend, and what kind of cybernetic loop of human formation we are already living inside.
• Church-shopping is another form of individualism. Olga asked how to belong when you have outgrown one tradition and are drawn to many. Ilia, plainly: the imperfect community that calls you out of yourself does more for you than the perfect community you compose. Tripp closes the hour with the move that ties everything back to the opening lecture — most clergy were formed because the score worked for them. What if our job is to learn to read the room and play the music that is already there?

The Future of Religion is a six-session class Ilia and I are teaching together this summer — Tripp on religion before belief and the train wreck of the present, Ilia on the Axial Age and what comes next. It is donation-based, including zero (we accept anything up to one million dollars per registration — we have standards). Register at www.thefutureofreligion.com and respond to the class emails with your questions for the next Q&A, after Ilia’s Axial Age lecture next week.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio

• The Machine Is a God Image
• Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
• the Future of Religion
• The Not Yet God
• Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
• Catching a Cosmic Faith
• the Entangled God of my Heart

Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Ilia Delio and I sat down a week before The Future of Religion class opens, in front of 500 people who already knew what they were signing up for. The conversation ranged — from the brain mutation she underwent when thirteen years of neuroscience gave way to a monastery (“Thomas Merton was my concussion”), to the single verb she would change in Pope Leo XIV’s brand-new AI encyclical (turn remain into become), to why she keeps insisting both the problem and the cure are religious. AI is not what is annihilating us. Our refusal to acknowledge the divine ground within us is what is annihilating us. The machine is just where we have been projecting the search. The class opens next week. This conversation is the on-ramp.

Highlights from the conversation

• Thomas Merton was her concussion. How Ilia left her Alzheimer’s postdoc mid-stride and joined a monastery, the left-brain-to-right-brain transition she only named in hindsight, and what thirteen years of neuroscience actually equipped her to do as a theologian. “I spent a lot more time feeling God than thinking about God.”
• “We shrunk-wrap religion in Glad wrap.” Why religion is not a sealed package of doctrines but the depth dimension of communal life — and why the discovery that there are 190,000 years of religion before belief should restructure how we read the encyclicals. Bellah is right. Religion at its root is play. It should animate, not box in.
• Remain or become. Ilia’s central critique of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical: change one verb and the whole architecture of the document shifts. The Pope sat in Jack Caputo’s Heidegger seminar — and you can hear Heidegger in the line “technology is never neutral” — but he keeps the Thomistic frame that cannot account for evolution. The encyclical names the problem. It does not invite a different relationship. Moral blindness, Ilia says, is reflective of metaphysical emptiness.
• AI as the return of the repressed divine ground. Jung, Tillich, Teilhard, and Schelling on what happens when Western Christianity tells us God is outside, up there, somewhere else — and we go looking for the sacred in the only place that is left. The machine has become a god image precisely because the tradition forbade us from finding God within. The remedy must therefore be fundamentally religious. Not the old religion. A reconciled one.
• From monotheism to cosmotheandrism. Teilhard’s three laws (complexity-consciousness, recurrence, creative union); the noosphere as a new level of evolution; the move from the axial-age I-and-Thou God to the collective consciousness God now emerging; the hyper-personal person Teilhard called the ultra-human. Why young people who are wired for community are evolutionary news from the next stage.
• What gets you up in the morning? Ilia’s question to her students for decades, and the closing reframe of the whole conversation: eternal life is the energy of love, and every algorithm we have built will disappear. The only thing that remains is what each person uniquely contributes to that energy. Hope in a world of becoming.

Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.

Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio

• Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
• the Future of Religion
• The Not Yet God
• Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
• Catching a Cosmic Faith
• the Entangled God of my Heart

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I started with bikes, a Pentecost-red pair of glasses, and my new Crazy Chicks ballcap. We did not stay there. By the end we had hit the evolutionary anthropology of religion before belief, Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical, Gandalf telling Denethor exactly where he can put his stewardship, and the working thesis of the my AI book in process — the platform is the plantation. The connective tissue: we are inside a transition the old institutions cannot speak to, the technology is rewriting the very interiority Whitehead says religion grows out of, and the resources we actually need are older than we think. Three centimeters per second of grooming older, in fact. This is the nerdiest TNT we have recorded in a while. Come for the social-bonding endorphins. Stay for the encyclical.

Highlights from the conversation

• Religion before belief. A lecture-prep riff from the class I am teaching this fall with Ilia Delio: how social grooming at three centimeters per second triggers the bonding endorphin that lets mammals scale past fifty without killing each other, how humans developed laughter, then song, then ritual, then religion to do that grooming at distance — and why religion is 190,000 years older than belief. The rowers study and the naltrexone studies are the spine. Bonus: it also explains Pentecostal worship and the preacher’s flow state.
• Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical. Released on the same day in May that Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum 134 years ago — and you should read it as the AI version of that document. Babel or Jerusalem. The idolatry of profit. “Technology is never neutral. It takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” Why the Pope can say what neither political party can, when both have taken billions from AI.
• Gandalf vs. Denethor. From Barry Harvey’s episode and my current Lord of the Rings re-read: “Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril.” The church’s stewardship is Gandalf’s, not Denethor’s. Every AI company and every nation-state is currently making Denethor’s argument — I am the steward of this realm, my responsibility ends here — and calling it realism.
• The platform is the plantation. The working thesis of the next book, laid out for the first time in any detail. Five hundred years of extractive economic order, in sequence: land, then labor, now interiority. Captive bodies. Surveillance regimes. Absentee ownership. Racial ideology. Religious sanction. The algorithm has the same five-element architecture. Liberation must now be structural and contemplative — because the territory being annexed is the inner room from which liberation becomes thinkable.
• Privacy is a luxury good now. Bo’s off-the-record story about his town’s largest employer, a lawyer, an accountant, a medical professional, and a college all paying for AI tokens to keep their data from training the model. The default used to be privacy. The default is now surveillance. You buy your way out. That is exactly backwards.
• The grandma’s granddaughter. Rejected by every medical school she applied to because the AI screened her out. She physically walked into the admissions office of her first choice and got in. The new pastoral move: find the human, go around the algorithm.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Some conversations want to be in a coffee shop, not a studio — and this is one of them. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty and I share a particular endangered species of Baptist heritage, the small, ecumenical, justice-formed wing whose patron saints include her father, Glenn Hinson, the Baptist church historian who taught half my div-school professors how to take the contemplative tradition seriously. So before we got anywhere near the politics of freedom, the problem of wealth, or the murderus super chickens of late-stage neoliberalism, we sat in her father’s legacy for a while. The conversation took a different shape because of it. What follows is a slow take — on the perversion of freedom in white Christian America, the way our politics has lost any room for loss or failure, and what theological education has to do now if it is going to do anything at all.

Highlights from the conversation

• Glenn Hinson and the Jordan River. What it meant to grow up with a Baptist historian father who wore a “Fundamentalist Anonymous” ballcap and stopped his seven-year-old from being baptized on religious enthusiasm. His final words — “I’m ready to step out into the overflowing love of God” — frame the whole conversation.
• Freedom is not what we think it is. Her new book Authentic Christian Freedom takes the culture-war binary apart and rebuilds freedom from the ground up — grounded in interrelatedness, not individual liberty, with Pauli Murray as the guide.
• The problem is not poverty. It is wealth. Her award-winning The Problem of Wealth is the self-convicting book she has not stopped writing. We talk about why Charlotte’s 38th-place national ranking in economic mobility is a theological problem, and what her seminary course More Than Money, Math and Markets is teaching pastors-in-training who used to work at banks.
• The space we do not have anymore. A long riff on the way late-modern neoliberalism keeps us dynamically unstable — you stay upright by pedaling faster. Elizabeth extends the diagnosis: there is no public space left to acknowledge loss, and no space to admit failure either. The story of the family that threw parties when things failed earns the bullet.
• Murderous super chickens. A metaphor from an evolutionary study where selecting only for the super-laying hen breeds killers. The flock with the highest output had no super-chickens at all. It becomes the parable for what mainline congregations have been quietly forming our kids to become.
• “I exist to be respected.” Her father’s maxim. Elizabeth’s closing reflection on the cost of being theologically clear in pastoral spaces, and why telling your own story is the door back to connection.

About our guest

The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is the J. Roy Davis Family Chair of Theology and History at Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Charlotte campus, where she teaches theology and ethics. Ordained in the PC(USA), she previously taught for nearly two decades at Bellarmine University, and earned her PhD from what is now UPSem. The books that anchor this conversation: Authentic Christian Freedom: Deconstructing the American Gospel of Liberty (the newest, on freedom’s misuse in white Christian America); The Problem of Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of Affluence (Orbis, 2017 — winner of the Catholic Press Association’s first-place prize in Catholic Social Teaching); and Dutiful Love: Empowering Individuals and Families Affected by Serious Mental Illness.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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The volume of “I genuinely don’t know what to preach anymore” emails landing from clergy has become its own data set. Pastors are not okay. So I did the only honest thing — I outsourced your questions to the one person whose books, research, and classroom hours have been training people for exactly this moment. Leah Schade is back on Homebrewed, and she has spent the better part of a decade surveying thousands of preachers about what it actually costs to stand up on Sunday and tell the truth. We talked about fear, the unity trap, the cut-flower problem in progressive preaching, the assessment tool that turns courage into context, and the very specific reasons your sermon last week left your stomach in knots. This is the conversation I would want sitting next to me on a Saturday night when the sermon will not come and the news will not stop.

Highlights from the conversation

• The cut-flower problem in progressive preaching. Heavy law, anemic gospel. We keep the ethics and quietly bury the theological roots that give them life, and then we wonder why people are exhausted. Leah names exactly how this happens and how to climb out of the soul-sucking quicksand.
• The unity trap. “Unity” is almost always code for no conflict. Leah distinguishes the unity of the church from the relationships inside it, and explains why protecting people who are doing harm is not the same thing as loving them.
• Thank them first. When a congregant ambushes you in the handshake line, your instinct is to explain. Leah’s instinct is to say thank you. The reasoning is theologically and pastorally surgical, and it changes how the next twenty conversations go.
• The fear is rational. The solo posture is the problem. Doxxing, vandalism, ICE, bomb threats, moral trauma in real time. Leah walks through what the Clergy Emergency League she co-founded actually does, and why no preacher should be carrying this weight alone.
• The assessment tool — gentle, invitational, or robust. Three approaches that turn should I preach this into a contextual question instead of a courage test. The most practical thing in the book, and a tool I wish I had had a decade ago.
• “Seminary trained me for a congregation that does not exist anymore.” One of you sent that in. Leah answers it without flinching and without selling you a quick fix.
• Previous Podcast Visits Include: Faith During an Ecological Collapse and Preaching in a time of Crisis from Corona to Climate

About our guest

The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade is Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky and the immediate past president of the Academy of Homiletics. An ordained ELCA Lutheran minister, she co-founded the Clergy Emergency League, writes the EcoPreacher blog at Patheos, and has been surveying close to 3,000 clergy and 1,000 laity since 2017 on what it actually costs to preach about social issues in American congregations. Her newest book, Preaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice, is the practical, aggressively pragmatic follow-up to her 2019 Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide. Both are required reading for the moment we are in.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Gary Dorrien joins me and Aaron to close out six weeks of Theology for Troublemakers with a session that covered more ground than any before it — Kelly Brown Douglas as the fourth womanist founder, the double negative she cut from Resurrection Hope that contains the argument she’s still wrestling with, Raphael Warnock as the student James Cone staked his hopes for Black theology on, the last conversation Gary had with Cone before he died, and forty unsparing minutes on Niebuhr’s Zionism that ended where Gary needed it to end: Palestinian children are every bit as precious as Israeli children and no less deserving of a decent future. If you want the lectures, the readings, the supplemental interviews, and the discussion guides, head to www.HomebrewedClasses.com. And if you want to ask Gary everything we didn’t get to, come find him in Kansas City at Theology Beer Camp.

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing
• Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing
• A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace
• the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew
• What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Tim Whitaker finally shows up on TNT, and I want you to know that within the first five minutes he informed us he was homeschooled and never went to college, that his biggest word is “dispensationalism,” and that he is a type six on the Enneagram who doesn’t know if he can trust people enough to take communion yet, and I was completely at home. Tim is the host of The New Evangelicals podcast, a former drummer in evangelical and charismatic spaces across multiple denominations, a former church planter with the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the guy who got kicked out of his evangelical church in May 2021 for asking — not even fully affirming yet, just asking — whether gay people could be welcomed. He came because Bo and I have been doing this charismatic conspiracy theology series for weeks now and Tim tracks this world the way the rest of us track the weather. He walked us through his own formation — Reformed church with hymns only, charismatic youth group with better music, Assemblies of God, a stint in Finland near the North Pole where headaches were attributed to a heavy shaman presence and a local death metal band with a statue — and somewhere in there the NAR, Peter Wagner, Lance Wallnau, Paula White, and the Cyrus anointing. We talked about where spiritual warfare practices are therapeutic and where they become political machinery, how the prophetic gift Bo had as a charismatic pastor was probably the same neurological scanning system that made him a good point guard, and what it actually costs when the values you were formed in get weaponized against the people you were taught to love. Bo told the story of his brother-in-law’s Bethel satellite church in Montana that had to shut down after 2016 because every prophetic word became a Fox News talking point. Tim told the story of getting his first big boy job at a 24-hour Starbucks and discovering that the gay atheist on the overnight shift was just a normal person. Bo told his story of working security at the city library four nights a week and a gay bar three nights a week, which is not the typical preparation for evangelical ministry and was probably the best possible one. Avalon, The Blessing, CCM music production values, Elevation’s Hallelujah Here Below trailer, Ecamm, a stream deck, Richard Wolff’s undergrad advisor being Paul Tillich, and a benediction involving Valhalla. Raven laid an egg.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Most weeks now I get an email from someone who’s sure they’ve believed a lie their whole life — that the faith holding their family, their friendships, their sense of self together is collapsing, and they don’t know who they are without it. I’ve been that person more than once. So in this essay I want to say the thing I wish someone had said to me: what’s dying might not be your faith. It might just be your idea of what your faith was. Drawing on Whitehead’s four stages of religion — ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization — I make the case that belief-centered Christianity is a late, late development, maybe 200 years old in its current intensity, not 2,000. For most of human history religion was bodies moving together, food shared, the dead remembered. The relationship was never in the certainty. It was always in the meal. If you’re in the panic right now, this one’s for you. Pull up a chair.

If this conversation is interesting, then come join me and Ilia Delio for our upcoming class, The Future of Religion, where we will digging in to the evolution of religion, its current belief centered crisis, and the possibilities on the horizon.

This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Week five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we’ve done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone’s thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn’t written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone’s sweeping indictment of the Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn’t a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the better theologian, Reinhold the extravert who needed the crowd — and Gary spun it out for ten minutes in a way that you could tell he had been sitting with for years and had never said in public. We ended with Caleb’s question about what it means for white Christians to actually hear the cry of Black blood, and Charlene answered it by describing her teenage grandson trembling in her arms, his whole body shaking, saying he didn’t want to die. That’s where the class ended. That’s where James Cone’s theology begins.

If you haven’t joined the class yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Last session is next week — social ethics, full circle. And come to Theology Beer Camp, where Gary, Arron, and Cornel West will all be in the same room.

In the podcast we discuss…

• The three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power: the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning in 1967, and the assassination of King in April 1968
• Why Cone said he could not have written that book in Adrian, Michigan — and why bottled rage would have killed him
• Ontological Blackness: why Cone’s critics could only hear it literally, and why he usually declined to correct them
• The satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim about demonic forces, not a claim about the humanity of white people
• Cone, Barth, and Tillich: why Jim was mostly on the Barth side, how Tillich saved him from Barth’s narrowness, and why he smuggled Tillich into his intro course by classifying him as neo-orthodox
• Cornel West, the 1975 Theology in the Americas showdown with Latin American theologians, and why Cone’s one-factor viewpoint finally broke — and what changed
• The womanist challenge: Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing nothing in the cross is redeeming — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until he had enough personal distance
• Charlene on Fanon, ontological Blackness, and the Cone she wanted to recapture — the one who was talking about the rats in the communities, not just the interpersonal dynamics of race
• Victor Anderson: the gay, postmodern scholar hurt by the Black church who cleared room in Black theology for everyone with a constellation of experiences like his
• The Niebuhr question Charlene had been sitting with since the seminar: whether the Cecil-and-Jim and Richard-and-Reinhold parallelism was something Cone never talked about in public — and Gary saying yes, and then saying more than he’d ever said before
• Why Niebuhr never risked anything for a Black person — and Gary’s argument about Lutheran false righteousness that Cone heard, acknowledged, and then declined to include in The Cross and the Lynching Tree
• Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the night Gary walked behind a student holding a sign that said “James Cone was right”
• How Black Lives Matter revived Cone as a teacher — and the retirement letter he ripped up
• Charlene’s grandson, trembling, saying he didn’t want to die — and the question she’s still staying up at night trying to answer
• Jim’s final word to white people who want to be in solidarity: “Try to be one of the white people who don’t ask Black people to take care of you or make you feel better”

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing
• A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace
• the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew
• What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Charlene Sinclair is Associate Director of the Center for Justice at Columbia University School of Social Work, and a scholar, organizer, and strategic advisor working at the intersections of race, gender, economy, and democracy. A doctoral student of Gary Dorrien’s at Union Theological Seminary, she is the author of a dissertation that James Cone himself said had explained, like no book ever written, the importance of Fanon to his early thought — and which Gary Dorrien insists must be published.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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It’s May 15th, 2026 — recording live from what Bo accurately described as Jurassic Park, because Raven the chicken was laying an egg on my thigh while we were discussing the Antichrist, and Marceline was on my back pecking my head before we hit record, and I just want you to know that this is the actual context in which serious theological work is being done. Bo opened with a high, a low, and a learn — Randy Woodley has a new book coming July 14th that you should preorder, a dust storm and semi-truck fire in Twin Falls gave Bo a terrifying glimpse of what environmental collapse looks like up close, and he discovered a group called Acts 17 that he wishes he’d never learned about. We did an either/or — Acts 17 or Acts 29, would you rather get rid of one — which turned into a genuinely useful history of hipster reformed church planting, Silicon Valley spiritual warfare birthday parties with Peter Thiel as guest preacher, and Tripp’s long-gestating idea for a class on Christian philosophical theology using Acts 17 as the entry point and process, Tillichian, and radical theologies as the three lenses. Then we finally got to it. Stage four. Bo recapped the first three stages of Antichrist theology — amorphous spirit, personified figure, dispensationalist Voltron super-villain — and Tripp walked through Peter Thiel’s actual biography: born in Frankfurt, childhood in a pro-Nazi enclave in what is now Namibia, Stanford student newspaper culture warrior, Girard’s prize pupil, PayPal as libertarian financial liberation tool, Facebook as the memetic machine, Palantir as Minority Report for mass surveillance, the 2008 crash that turned a techno-libertarian into an authoritarian, Curtis Yarvin and the CEO monarchy, and then finally the lectures — where Thiel inverts the entire dispensationalist tradition and declares that Greta Thunberg and AI safety advocates are the legionaries of the Antichrist, that the restrainer of the apocalypse and its source are both America, and that unregulated technological acceleration is the only thing standing between us and the one-world totalitarian state. The irony — that the man building a global surveillance empire keeps warning about a global surveillance empire — did not go unremarked. Tripp named it theological shielding for unrestricted greed. Bo named it the upside down. Both are correct. Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals joins next week for territorial warfare. Baudrillard summer reading club is apparently in the works. Bo gave the benediction. If this is the end times, he’ll be your Huckleberry.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Andy Root is back, and this time he’s got a fertility god on the cover of his book — which, if you’ve been paying any attention to his work, is not actually a detour. Baal and the Gods of More is what happens when Andy takes the background hum of economic critique that’s been running through all his previous books and turns it all the way up, then runs it through First and Second Kings, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of dynamic stabilization, Robert Gordon’s economic history of the American special century, and Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat, and comes out the other side with something genuinely uncomfortable and genuinely useful. The argument in brief: the church’s anxiety about decline is not primarily a spiritual problem or a missional problem. It is a fertility cult problem. We have, like the Israelites under the Omride dynasty, decided that Yahweh needs a little help from the gods of growth — and we’ve done it so thoroughly that we can barely tell the difference anymore between faithful ministry and escalatory capital accumulation. Andy doesn’t spare himself, or Tripp, or the emerging church movement, or the academic publishing world, or anyone who has ever refreshed their social media numbers and felt something. The conversation got real fast and stayed there. And yes, there is a Counting Crows footnote.

Also: Tripp and Andy are going back to Bonhoeffer’s house in Berlin in summer 2027 — two different tracks, one for personal and vocational formation, one for the theology nerds who want to read Bonhoeffer intensely and argue about it in his actual house. Go to BonhoefferTrip.com to get on the list to get info and early access to tickets.

In the conversatsion we discuss…

• The origin of the book: a throwaway line about fertility gods on a podcast that wouldn’t let Andy go
• Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth and the special century — why 1870 to 1970 was a historical anomaly, why Protestantism rose with it, and why both started declining at exactly the same moment in the mid-1970s
• Hartmut Rosa’s dynamic stabilization: what makes a society modern is not its epistemology — it’s that it can only stabilize itself by growing
• The logic of escalation: grow or die, with no telos, no grounding, and no end — just more
• Baal vs. Yahweh, Artemis vs. the Madonna, instrumentality vs. relationality — and the meme that started it all at the Vatican Museum
• The emerging church movement as a case study: how a genuine epistemological critique of modernity got eaten alive by the escalatory logic of Web 2.0 personality capital
• The techno-optimist and the identitarian as two responses to the end of the special century — and why they’re both operating inside the same machine
• Solomon’s sin: the golden age that was built on the “except” — and why the prophets saw what the historians didn’t name
• Mary as the completion of Elijah: Luther’s Magnificat commentary and a different kind of growth, a growth into someone rather than of something
• Why we can’t unhook from the engine of escalation without a practical theology of money — and why Andy thinks that requires recovering a vision of eternity
• Augustine, Peter Brown, alms, and the poor: why losing a theological conception of heaven means losing the mechanism that kept the poor inside the exchange of money
• Tripp’s Judas Energy, Andy’s Solomon Energy, and the mutual confession of two people who wrote and podcasted their way into the very system they’re critiquing
• What the church looks like in 50 years if the post-war liberal order keeps dissolving — and whether the theology of the cross has anything to say to a world of competing civilizations that no longer bother to feign morality

Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, USA. He writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture, and younger generations. Some of his most recent books are The Congregation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2021), The End of Youth Ministry? (Baker, 2020), The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God (Baker, 2019), Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2017), and Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies: Youth Ministry in the Age of Science (Fortress Press, 2018). Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.

Previous Visits with Andy Root* Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control with Diana Butler Bass & Andy and Kara Root * Incarnation as Resistance * Life Together in Turmoil & Bonhoeffer’s Experiment in Community * Resonance in an Accelerated Age * Secular Mysticism & Identity Politics * the Church after Innovation * Churches and the Crisis of Decline * Acceleration, Resonance, & the Counting Crows * Ministry in a Secular Age * Christopraxis with Andy Root * Faith Formation in a Secular Age * the Promise of Despair

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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A year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn’t notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and I sat in front of the screen feeling a specific blankness — that sensation of having consumed something and received nothing. This essay is about that feeling. Not screen time. Not the hours. The architecture beneath them, and what it is doing to our capacity for depth.

This is the first in a short series of essays in conversation with the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose book The Disappearance of Rituals I cannot stop thinking about. Han names what most of our cultural commentary cannot quite reach: the loss of the forms that once let experience accumulate into meaning. Over the next several essays I’ll put his diagnosis to work on the actual texture of our lives — our screens, our feeds, our worship, our politics, our relationships. Here is the question this one leaves you with: what have we quietly trained ourselves out of?

This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Rolf Jacobson is back — psalm scholar, dean at Luther Seminary, co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament, and one of my favorite people to argue theology with over a long dinner. His new book God Meets Us in Our Suffering is unlike anything else he’s written, and unlike almost anything else I’ve read on the subject. It’s the story of three close friends — Rolf, his brother Carl, and their friend Mike Pancoast — who all had cancer, went through it together, and wrote about it side by side by side. Rolf had bone cancer at fifteen, lost both legs, and has been in a wheelchair for forty-five years. Carl was diagnosed with leukemia in 2022, declared cancer free in 2024, then died months later when meningitis attacked his brain after the bone marrow transplant compromised his immune system. Mike had lymphoma. What the three of them discovered in writing the book — and what Rolf and I spent this conversation unpacking — is that they didn’t know they were writing a book about the theology of the cross. They thought they were just telling their stories. They weren’t. This is one of the most honest, funny, theologically rich conversations I’ve had on this podcast, and it’s also one of the most personal. Rolf doesn’t let suffering become an abstraction. It never was one for him.

• The origin story: Mike’s lymphoma diagnosis, Carl’s leukemia, and the cabin in Northern Minnesota where it all began
• Why Rolf spent years refusing to write a cancer memoir — and what Carl said that finally changed his mind
• The theology of the cross: why Luther said you can’t theologize about suffering from above, and why three friends going through cancer together became the perfect form for doing it from within
• Why the cross says you cannot reason backwards from someone’s suffering to its cause — and how that conviction runs from Job through Paul through the woman who told Rolf’s mother it was her diet
• Kate Bowler, cause-and-effect thinking, and why people can’t just say “that sucks”
• Frank Tupper’s line: Luther gave him permission to say — and perhaps scream — that life is arbitrary, but God is not
• Caregivers and the unacknowledged suffering of the people who go through it alongside
• The dehumanization of medical care — and what it does to surgeons who cut people open for thirty years
• Jerry, the Fisherman’s Inn, ribs at ten-year intervals, and Psalm 23’s table in the presence of the enemy
• Laughter as theological category: Sarah’s belly laugh, God building a joke into the covenant, and Carl’s vasectomy joke on the radiation table
• “Wearing a bike” — what a kid in a Target said to Rolf in 1989 and why it’s still his favorite description of himself
• Hosanna as both shout of joy and cry for help — and how the Psalms hold more of our experience than we think
• The God who will not be God without us — and what that means for how we show up to each other in suffering
• Theology Beer Camp, the closing sermon that started as a toast, and why certain people were scandalized by Tripp drinking beer while preaching

Rolf Jacobson is Professor of Old Testament and Associate Dean at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, a leading Psalm scholar, and co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament. His new book God Meets Us in Our Suffering, written with his brother Carl and friend Mike Pancoast, is a theology of the cross told from the inside — by three friends who actually had cancer.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Gary Dorrien came to organizing the hard way — canvassing for McGovern in Alma, Michigan in 1972, where people didn’t just oppose the candidate, they despised him, and where two doorstep encounters came close enough to violence that he learned the hard way to pair up. He didn’t come out of that thinking he’d found his calling. What he found instead was Michael Harrington at a Harvard Divinity School lecture two years later — corduroy jacket, blue work shirt, gently correcting his own introduction — and joined DSOC on the spot. This week’s session gave us Gary’s full origin story as an organizer: from the McGovern campaign to the Albany years where he co-founded a DSOC chapter, led Central American solidarity work through C-SPACE, and discovered firsthand the cultural chasm between two wings of the left that could barely stand to share a building. Then Aaron took over and introduced three extraordinary guests — Joe Strife, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Carolyn Baker — who brought the history of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Beulah Sanders, and the General Baker Institute directly into the room, and turned the question of who should lead into a live theological reckoning. Carolyn did the interview sitting on her mother’s childhood porch steps in Dallas, recording oral history from a woman who is still organizing through dementia, which tells you everything you need to know about where this tradition lives and who carries it.

If you haven’t joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Next week: James Cone with Charlene Sinclair.

Colleen Wessel-McCoy specializes in Christian social ethics with particular attention to the role of religion in US social movements. She is author of Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign (Lexington, 2021), an examination of King’s theo-ethical and political vision for his last campaign. Before coming to Earlham School of Religion, she was Neely Visiting Professor of Religion and Public Policy at Arizona State and a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in theology and field education. She has been part of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, was a national educator with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and is an interim co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union. Her current research focuses on the leadership of the National Welfare Rights Organization of the 1960s and 70s.Joe Strife is a scholar working at the intersection of church, charity, and social justice. His research focuses on the role of faith-based organizations in fighting poverty. For years he served as a community organizer in Philadelphia with organizations including the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, and the Simple Way. He received his PhD from Union Theological Seminary and teaches at Fordham University.*Carolyn Baker is an educator, organizer, and co-founder and director of the General Baker Institute in Detroit, Michigan. The Institute is a movement incubator that includes educational programming, a community center, print shop, Ghetto Coffee Shoppe, and community garden. They are fully rooted in Detroit but share an internationalist vision with their movement comrades across the world. They are partners in the ongoing activism around racist policing, hosting teach-ins that bring together emerging leaders with movement elders from Detroit’s long history of anti-racist labor and human rights organizing. The Institute follows the legacy and insight of General Baker of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in saying, “we must turn fighters into thinkers and thinkers into fighters.”Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion* — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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We were supposed to do this one last week, but things happened and the Antichrist got bumped a week. Worth the wait. Bo spent the extra time going back to the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary he bought in 1992 when he enrolled at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, because we live in a moment so unmoored from basic coherence that you have to return to first principles just to get oriented. The result was one of the better explainers we’ve ever done on this show. Bo walked us through the four stages of Antichrist theology: stage one, the generic concept in John’s letters — an amorphous spirit of the age. Stage two, you give it the definite article and a face. Stage three, you smash every bad guy in the entire Bible together like Play-Doh remnants — Daniel’s beasts, the man of lawlessness in Thessalonians, the beast from the sea in Revelation, Gog and Magog — into one Voltron-level super-villain. And stage four, which is where Peter Thiel lives, and which we are saving for next week because it requires its own episode: you take everything in stage three and invert it. The Roman Empire becomes good. Greta Thunberg becomes suspect. The Pope becomes suspect. The resistance to technological progress is the Antichrist. We covered Jack Van Impe’s greatest hits — UFOs as demons, black holes as hell, the Mayan calendar, five missed dates — and John Hagee’s gay Jewish Illuminati financier sermon that reads like medieval blood libel and somehow didn’t end his career. We talked about how Bo went from a wall chart of the end times to a PhD at Claremont, what Y2K, 9/11, and Left Behind together did to his evangelical certainty, and how an iPod loaded with Rob Bell and Leonard Sweet became an off-ramp. We planned a camp beer. We discussed kettlebells at length. Netanyahu is Wormtongue. Trump is Denethor eating cherry tomatoes while the battle rages. Stage four next week.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGIONTripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you’re trusting toward. It’s one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I’ve read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss…

• The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings
• Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that’s a theological problem, not just a poetic one
• Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God’s ontological priority
• Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn’t feel, about God’s presence
• The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends
• The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination
• The risk of faith, William James’s mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap
• The “masters of suspicion” and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope
• The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them
• Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred

Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia and shaped by the former Yugoslavia, his theology has always been grounded in lived encounter with violence, nationalism, and the misuse of religious language.

Previous podcasts with Miroslav

• Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump.
• When Neighbors Turn on Neighbors

Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, and editor widely regarded as one of the most important American religious writers of his generation. He is the author of My Bright Abyss — a memoir of faith written in the shadow of a rare blood cancer diagnosis — and multiple acclaimed poetry collections. He edited Poetry magazine for a decade and now teaches at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School.

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Gary Dorrien is spending six weeks teaching the history of Christian social ethics in America — and this week Aaron and I turned the lens on Gary himself, which he immediately identified as the worst session of the class. What followed was an hour of Gary tracing his own formation from a kid on Union Road in Midland who couldn’t stop staring at the crucifix, through graduate school, liberation theology, democratic socialism, and fifty years of theological labor held together by Rauschenbusch’s conviction that capitalism has overdeveloped our selfish instincts and shrunk our capacity for public ends.

• The crucifix, a seven-year-old on railroad tracks, and why the moral influence theory was second nature before Gary knew it was a theory
• Going to mass every morning at Union Seminary while reading Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr — and the Jesuit friends who told him he was obviously a Protestant
• Gustavo Gutiérrez reading Rauschenbusch for the first time and asking why Americans don’t talk about this treasure
• James Loder, a thousand-page manuscript, and the line “maybe you can find the book in here”
• His love Brenda — and why Gary can say almost nothing else except that his is a story of being saved by love and grace
• Why Hegel still grips him fifty years later — and why most people only know the wrong Hegel
• The six interpretive traditions of Hegel and why the theological-metaphysical one is the one most seminaries quietly abandoned
• William Temple, Whitehead, and why Gary became an Anglican almost entirely on the strength of one book
• Capitalism is bad for us and a catastrophe for the planet — a blunt response to a pastor whose congregation looks like a list of what capitalism does wherever it lands
• Purity politics, DSA, AOC, and why ridicule works but isn’t good for us
• The flickering Galilean vision — and why it keeps flickering not despite being wrong but because it’s right

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew
• What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

Cornell West says America is obsessed with problems but denies catastrophe — and the moment you reduce the catastrophic to the problematic, you have already deodorized the discourse, sanitized it, and started looking at the wasteland from the air-conditioned office of upper management. That line has been working on me since I sat with his Gifford Lectures, and this reflection is what came of it. I want to make one claim and trace it through two unlikely conversation partners. The claim is that the resurrection is apocalyptic blues — catastrophe lyrically expressed, the tragic named without evasion, despair stubbornly refused the last word — and that a church which cannot stay in the room with what is true is not capable of the gospel, because the gospel is a blues song. The conversation partners are Cornell, who has been telling us this in technical philosophical language for forty years, and episode three of The Last of Us, “Long, Long Time,” where Bill plays Linda Ronstadt on the piano and his voice cracks, and sixteen years of love inside the apocalypse becomes a kind of theology no committee meeting and no strategic plan and no air-conditioned think piece about the future of the church will ever produce. We have routinely skipped past Good Friday to get to Easter because we wanted resurrection to be a problem solved rather than a song sung from inside the wreckage. The blues will not let us. Neither, I suspect, will the moment we are actually living in. You can check out my conversation with Dr. West here.

Come keep thinking with us — ?Theology Beer Camp 2026?

This is exactly what we will be sitting with at ?Theology Beer Camp this October 8–10 in Kansas City?. Our theme this year is the God-podcalypse. Cornell West is coming. So are a lot of your favorite theologians and podcasters and six hundred of your soon-to-be-favorite people. We are going to think together about what it means to be a people of faith in catastrophic times — without deodorizing the catastrophe, and without giving despair the last word.

Early-bird pricing ends April 30. Don’t wait. ? ?TheologyBeer.Camp

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Gary Dorrien is the Niebuhr Chair at Union, and nobody alive can walk you through the whole arc of Reinhold Niebuhr with his range — from the German-American pastor’s kid at Elmhurst and Eden, to the Yale divinity student who felt like a country boy among thoroughbreds, to the Detroit preacher at Bethel Church writing articles in 1916 begging German Americans to prove their Americanism months before Wilson took the country into war, to the young professor at Union who felt like an imposter for a decade and overcompensated by ridiculing everyone in sight, to the author of Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), the bomb that ended the social gospel’s fifty-year run and rerouted the entire field of American social ethics overnight. This is the second live Q&A for the Theology for Troublemakers class, and Gary, Aaron Stauffer, and I work through student questions covering the whole trajectory: why Niebuhr still towers over the field; what H. Richard’s devastating private letter did to his brother’s theology; how he metabolized Augustine into Christian realism in the Gifford Lectures that became Nature and Destiny; why Children of Light and Children of Darkness (1944) is the road not taken; and how Niebuhr drifted into establishment Democratic Party machinery with no emotional drama at all — the one transition he made smoothly, and arguably the one that cost the most. Plus the neocons who stole him, William Cavanaugh calling Gary a heretic at AAR in Montreal, Ron Stone tearing up when he says “saint,” and the legendary Claremont nickname Five-Beer Barthian. Gary and Aaron are both coming to Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City in October.

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

Tripp walked into his local cigar lounge this week and walked out with a one-and-a-half-cigar lecture on the Nephilim from a true believer — and now he and Bo are doing what a few regular chat-room members asked for, a full TNT on fallen angelic watchers, giant hybrid offspring, CRISPR, Peter Thiel, Mount Hermon, the 33rd parallel, the UN, reptilian royal bloodlines, and why your YouTube algorithm may never recover from one wrong click. Bo brings the charismatic-evangelical back catalog — George Otis Jr., prayer-walking Bosnia, the Prince of Persia, the 10/40 window, the Joshua Project — Tripp brings Michael Heiser, three interpretive options for Genesis 6, and a deeply researched week with the book of Enoch. They get where it actually matters eventually: the Manichean temptation of hybrid-evil cosmologies, the way conspiracy theology reduces cognitive load in moments of social upheaval (tip of the hat to Hans Blumenberg), and what the Nephilim revival reveals about post-Christendom re-enchantment. Plus Theology Beer Camp lineup updates, a Brian McLaren text that may or may not contain a subtle dig at the twentieth century, and Bo’s community pantry getting a glass-front fridge.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

There is a habit in Western theology so old it feels like air: imagining God as the supreme instance of coercive power — the divine despot whose omnipotence is measured by the capacity to override whatever resists. Whitehead called this the deep idolatry, and we would rather work like cross-builders than cross-bearers because of it. This essay argues that nonviolence is not a secondary ethical application of Christian faith, a political strategy, or a counsel of perfection for those with the luxury to afford it. Nonviolence is a metaphysical revelation — a disclosure of the actual structure of divine agency in the world, worked out across the long history of the cosmos and concentrated in the particular life of a first-century Jewish peasant. The power made perfect in weakness is not an exception to how the universe works. It is the deepest account of how the universe works. I am writing as someone who has done the cross-building too, and this is my attempt to name what is at stake when we make that choice, and what becomes possible when we stop.

This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox.

This lecture was sponsored by Humanitas, the Anabaptist Mennonite Centre at Trinity Western University. I was honored by the invitation, and the three days I spent with students and faculty were some of the best conversations I’ve had this year. My thanks to Dr. Myron Penner, who runs the Centre, and to Dr. Shannon Parrott and Dr. Jesse Nickel for their responses to the lecture — responses that sharpened the argument in real time. And to the Canadian podcast listeners who came out after the talk: you made the trip.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is the first live Q&A for Theology for Troublemakers — the class Gary Dorrien, Aaron Stoffer, and I have been building for exactly this moment — and if the questions that came in after the first lecture are any indication, we’ve got a room full of people who came ready to learn. Gary is the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair at Union Seminary and has written more books and supervised more PhDs on the history of Christian social ethics in America than anyone alive. When Aaron said we could get Gary to join I was thrilled!

This session covered the ground the first lecture opened up: what the social gospel actually was and why it took forty years to get its name (Walter Rauschenbusch held out until 1917, and even then conceded reluctantly), what social crises made the movement urgent, and why the Black social gospel is — as Gary puts it without hesitation — the better side of it. We went deep on the moral formation of Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom: Wells going to four or five church services on a Sunday, working through her own rage at the Eliza Woods lynching before she could write about it, and eventually being burned out of Memphis for telling the truth about what lynching was actually about. Ransom, Harriet’s son, clawing his way toward education in an Ohio that barely saw him, discovering socialist thought through George Herron’s underlined pages, hiding his theological liberalism from bishops for years. We talked about the organizing question — why Frederick Douglass was wrong about race-specific organizations, why the Afro-American League and Council kept collapsing, why Booker T. Washington was the most famous living American in 1900 and used every bit of that power to undermine protest organizations, and what finally made the NAACP stick. And we ended with Ransom’s late-life declaration that Africans and their descendants are the last spiritual reserves of humanity — part resignation, part prophecy, entirely worth sitting with.

Next week: Reinhold Niebuhr. Gary’s lecture is already on the resource page.

If you haven’t joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — it’s donation-based, including zero. You’ll get access to Gary’s full lecture series tracing the history of Christian social ethics in America, Aaron’s bonus interviews with leading scholars and activists, curated readings, discussion guides for small groups, and the online community. This is the class for right now.

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• Social Ethics for This Moment
• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So many clergy members and theology nerds messaged me after JD Vance told the Pope to dial back the theology talk that I had no choice — I called my friend Kevin Carnahan, co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and author of an extremely technical book on just war theory that he will tell you not to read. Kevin teaches at Central Methodist University in Missouri and he showed up having apparently thought about all of this in serious depth while the rest of us were just screaming into the void. What followed was one of the best episodes we’ve done. We traced the actual history of just war theory from Aquinas through John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris— which moved the Catholic Church so close to pacifism in practice that nearly no war could satisfy its criteria — through the moment nuclear weapons broke the entire framework, through drone warfare and AI targeting that’s broken it further, and right up to a Trump administration that dismantled the actual government office dedicated to minimizing civilian harm and then had the audacity to invoke just war theory as a fig leaf. Kevin’s read on the papal conflict: the Pope knows exactly what he’s doing and is faithfully representing a tradition that JD Vance passed through on Peter Thiel’s E-Z Pass lane. We also got into the three streams of Protestant ethics on war — peace churches, just war thinkers, and crusaders — why Hegseth fits cleanly into the crusader category, why Trump fits none of them, why the Lord of the Rings is the best undergraduate ethics text available, and what Bonhoeffer’s prayer for his own country’s defeat sounds like in 2026. Tripp eventually brought up Tolkien. Bo noted it took an hour and eleven minutes. Bonhoeffer was invoked. John Cobb got in at the end. The trifecta complete.

For those regular Homebrewed Christianity listeners, this is an episode of another weekly podcast Theology Nerd Throwdownthat I do with Bo Sanders and our (nonviolent) army of theology nerds in the chat. If you enjoy it, subscribe to the TNT feed and feel the lure to join live most Friday mornings.

Kevin Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri, and co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. He is the author of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey and From Presumption to Prudence in Just War Rationality, and has written extensively on Christian ethics, just war theory, and political theology. He went to grad school at Southern Methodist University and has somehow managed to teach his whole career without ever having to go to Oklahoma, which he considers a significant professional achievement.

? TikTok: ? Instagram: ? Substack

Previous Episodes with Kevin

• Transcendence, Immanence, and Why Charlie Kirk is Bad at Theology
• Moral Clarity & the Uneasy Conscience
• A Philosopher & Ethicist Process This Election

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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It’s Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass on Tax day! Also, apparently, the day the Vice President told the Pope to stop doing theology. Diana Butler Bass joined me for what was supposed to be a casual religion news roundup and turned into something I didn’t entirely expect — a full-on church history seminar about what happens when empire tries to silence the gospel and why it never actually works. We started where everyone started this week: JD Vance, a newly minted Catholic who received what sounds like the Peter Thiel E-Z Pass lane through RCIA, publicly suggesting that the Pope — the Pope — should think more carefully before opining about theology. The same Pope who then responded to a Pentagon threat referencing the Avignon papacy by giving an even stronger anti-war speech. We talked about Trump’s Easter posts, the Jesus meme, the “I thought I was a doctor” explanation, and the remarkable spectacle of evangelicals — evangelicals — saying the president might be demon-possessed. But Diana being Diana, she kept pulling the historical threads, and we ended up somewhere genuinely useful: the long story of how American Christianity split the sacred from the secular, why that split is breaking down, what it means for a congregation trying to figure out what to do with the 250th anniversary of a nation that’s currently threatening popes and bombing people on Easter Sunday, and why Whitehead’s image of the flickering Galilean vision might be the most honest thing you can say right now about where hope lives. We didn’t ruin anything. The ruining is, as Diana noted, already adequately covered.

Want to hangout with us in person?! ???Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!

This conversation was originally for our Substack members, but we’re sharing a portion with all of you – join us at The Process This or The Cottage to catch future episodes live!

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality.

Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp How the Lectionary Kept Me Christian * Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control * Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 * The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy * Faith in a Toxic Public Square * The Resurrection of Jesus * 2024: The Sequel * The Christology Ladder * The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner * American Saints in a Cynical Age * Ruining Dinner… and Date Nights * Welcome to the Post-Christian Century * Ruining Christmas Dinner * Ruining Election Night Dinner * The Over-Rated Genie God * Bad Blood, Civil War, and other Soothing Topics * Shall the Fundies (Keep) Winning?, Abortion, and Black Holes * Theology and Spirituality in a Time of Rupture * White Evangelical Theopolitics, John Shelby Spong, & Jesus * 20 Years of Religious Decline * Jesus After Religion and Beyond Fear * Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza * Evangelical Decline, the Supreme Court, and the Horizon of Possibility * Debating, Praying, and Living with Tyrants * Religion, Politics, & the Elephant in the Room*

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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I’ve been wearing glasses since seventh grade, when I discovered mid-car-ride that the rest of my family could actually read a license plate and I had no idea that was something people could do. When the optometrist put corrective lenses in front of my eyes for the first time, I gasped. That’s the image I keep coming back to when I think about what happens when a philosophy filters out whole categories of human experience — not maliciously, just structurally, the way astigmatism works. You adapt so well to what you’re missing that you don’t know you’re missing it.

This essay is about that. It started with a conversation I witnessed between Philip Clayton and Dan Dennett — two brilliant philosophers, one coffee shop moment, and a question that stopped everything: where in a purely physical universe does “mattering” actually live? It moved through two more conversations in an Edinburgh coffee shop a week apart — one with a theologian who could defend every doctrine but couldn’t explain why holding his newborn made him weep, and one with an evolutionary biologist who could describe the neurochemistry of her daughter’s depression but couldn’t answer the question her daughter was actually asking. Both were half-blind in the same direction, just from opposite sides.

What I’m after here is coherence. Whitehead’s test, Griffin’s challenge, Clayton’s emergence framework — the claim that a philosophy failing to account for time, causation, moral urgency, beauty, consciousness, or the felt reality of love isn’t humble or rigorous. It’s just incomplete. And the good news is that correcting for both eyes doesn’t require abandoning science or embracing magic. It requires something harder: sitting with the full weight of human experience and refusing to explain any of it away. You can read this essay and find plenty of others on my Substack, Process This.

You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This one is a preview of something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time — a class on the history of Christian social ethics that’s actually useful for the moment we’re in. Cornell West calls Gary Dorrien the greatest living Christian social ethicist, and after spending any amount of time with him, you understand why. Gary and Aaron Stoffer joined me to give people a taste of what’s coming in Theology for Troublemakers, and what they gave us was a genuine history lesson that landed like a live wire. We started with Gary’s own formation — a rural Michigan kid who never took a school book home until second semester senior year, who walked into a Catholic church and couldn’t stop staring at the figure on the cross, who read a biography of King in ninth grade three times and went looking for the theologians King mentioned in the public library and found none of them. That kid became one of the most important social ethicists of our time. From there we moved into Norman Thomas’s warning — that American populism always surges toward a dictator who scapegoats the vulnerable — and what the left’s recurring failure to build cross-racial, multi-issue coalitions has to do with where we are now. Gary named the nineties as the most demoralizing decade of his life: TINA, triangulation, NAFTA, three-strikes, welfare gutted, and a Democratic Party that treated its progressive base as something to prove it could overcome. He was not gentle about Clinton, or Obama, or the way purity politics has consistently kneecapped the left’s ability to organize. He was hopeful, carefully, about cooperatives, about DSA’s organizing culture in New York, and about the strange opening the current moment creates for public theology. The class runs the whole history — from the Black Social Gospel and the new abolitionists to the Christian realists to Yoder and Dorothy Day — and Aaron frames it all in terms of what congregations can actually do with it. Go to homebrewclasses.com. This is the class for right now.

Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron

• What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
• Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
• James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action
• The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life.

Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

Okay, I genuinely don’t know how many times Tom Oord has been on this podcast twenty plus times, but this one felt different, because Tom has officially done the thing: he wrote a Systematic Theology of Love, Volume One, which is also his 50th book, which means his wife has had to endure approximately 50 different versions of “another love book.” We dug into what makes this project unusual — a progressive, open relational systematic theology organized around love as its orienting concept, built on abductive reasoning rather than deductive certainty, which turns out to matter a lot when the thing you’re centering is inherently vulnerable, risky, and relational. Tom walked us through his claim that God is a universal spirit who is genuinely material without having a localized body, why he’s done with creatio ex nihilo and what his very Latin replacement actually means, the distinction between animate organisms and inanimate aggregates (rocks, it turns out, are great for explaining panpsychism), and why he’s invented a new word — Gino-Theology — to talk about God as a dynamic becoming rather than a static being. We also covered why he thinks Whitehead solved both the problem of evil and the problem of good, what he’s planning for Volume Two around Christology and divine hiddenness, and ended up somewhere around the enchantment of the universe. The chat had 140 people. Tom’s substack has chapters. And Volume Two starts in the fall — get in early.

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is an award-winning author, and he has written or edited more than twenty-five books. Oord directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He won the Outstanding Faculty Award twelve times as a full-time professor and now speaks at institutions across the globe. Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and freedom and relationships for transformation.

Some Previous Tripp & Tom Pods* Love at the Center: Tom Oord’s Systematic Theology Project * A Journey of Faith and Integrity * Faith without Certainty * Big God Questions * Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation * the Death of Omnipotence! * Brian McLaren & Thomas Jay Oord: a God Worthy of Love * Process This! * Process Theology QnA * Authority, Atonement, Abortion, and a Big Hug * from Pluriform Love to Divine Revelation * Big God Twitter Takes * Trump is (NOT) a Process Theologian & Other Questions * Thomas Jay Oord wants you to know “God Can’t” * Open and Relational Theology Throwdown * Open and Relational Q&A with Thomas Jay Oord * Why Go Wesleyan?

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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It’s Holy Week, which means Bo and I finally stopped talking about chickens, bikes, and CCM songs long enough to do theology — though we did all of those things first. The actual idea Bo had was simple and turned out to be genuinely illuminating: what if we worked our way backwards through the passion week narrative, starting with the post-resurrection appearances on Monday and moving back toward Good Friday? The theory being that if you start at the end and let the consequences of the resurrection interpret everything before it, you read the whole story differently. Turns out, yes, you do. We talked about the fact that no gospel actually describes the resurrection happening — only its effects, only its consequences — and how much Christian energy gets wasted on the mechanism when the texts are entirely uninterested in that question. Tripp’s seven implications for Holy Week came fast and hot: the cross as mirror of what civilization does to nonviolent love, PSA as the theological theory with the least observable consequences in people’s actual lives, and why loving your enemies isn’t a vibe but the specific thing that got Jesus killed. Then Bo discovered Holy Saturday via Balthasar and hasn’t recovered — the silent day as a womb of restrained fullness, Jesus as the one who has gone further into death than any of us will ever go, double dead, so that nothing we face is faced alone. Pete Rollins on the experience of absence versus the absence of experience made an appearance. Bonhoeffer made his inevitable appearance. Elgin Frank Tupper closed it out: the resurrection isn’t verified by the empty tomb, it’s verified by the harvest — when all things are raised into the life of God. We’ll be back next week for Nephilim. Happy Easter.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Philip Clayton has been one of the most important conversation partners in my theological life — we literally worked out some of this stuff together at Claremont — so sitting down with him to trace the whole architecture of his thought from the beginning felt less like an interview and more like a reunion at the whiteboard. We started where Philip started: the secular believer, that figure he described in his Yale dissertation who carries doubt not as a problem to be solved before the real theology begins, but as the very medium through which faith moves. From there we mapped his six-level structure for how beliefs actually work — spoiler: about five percent of what Christians believe falls into the “demonstrably true” category, and the rest is a lot more interesting and honest than most of us admit. Philip walked us through what he learned from Pannenberg about doctrine as hypothesis, the racetrack-and-motorcycle story behind his concept of theological “traction,” and why the shift from reductionism to emergence in contemporary science matters so much for anyone trying to think seriously about God and the world. We got into panentheism — why it’s more compelling than classical theism, what it means for divine action, and how a Korean doctoral student’s research on comfort women completely changed the way Philip thinks about where God shows up in the world. By the end, we were talking about what he calls a new architecture for Christian doctrine: not a final set of answers, but a set of questions a follower of Jesus simply has no choice but to keep returning to. This one is the long game. Pour something good.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.Our Recorded ConversationsPhil has been on the podcast a bunch of times in a bunch of different settings. 13 Billion Years of Groaning & the Gospel with Philip Clayton * The Bible and the Cosmos: Which Story Comes First? with Dom Crossan & Phil Clayton * Celebrating the Life & Thought of John Cobb * The Science & the Sacred * Celebrating the Life, Legacy, and Thought of Jürgen Moltmann * The Christology Ladder * Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation * How to Think Theologically * On the Meaning of Life * on the Mindfulness of Nature * The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg w/ Philip Clayton * Finding God in Everyone and Everywhere w/ Philip Clayton and Andrew Davis * Can a process theologian be an Evangelical & other questions with Philip Clayton * The #GodDebacle w/ Philip Clayton and LeRon Shults * Philip Clayton on the Shape of Postmodern Theology * Party Time with Philip Clayton for “The Predicament of Belief” * Bootlegged Christianity with Philip Clayton, Jack Caputo, Bill Mallonee, Peter Rollins, & Jay Bakker * Philip Clayton on The Resurrection, Trinity, Eschatology & the Predicament of Belief * Coming to Jesus with Daniel Kirk & Philip Clayton*

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In this episode, theologian and historian Gary Dorrien opens ?Theology for Troublemakers? by recovering two of the most important — and most forgotten — figures in American Christianity: Ida B. Wells and Reverdy Ransom. Dorrien traces the birth of the Black social gospel out of one excruciating question: what would a new abolition be? From Wells’s explosive anti-lynching journalism and her landmark pamphlet Southern Horrors, to Ransom’s vision of a cooperative commonwealth and his decades of prophetic ministry inside a church that kept trying to expel him, this lecture shows that the roots of liberation theology run far deeper than the 1960s — and that the tradition’s most radical voices were being erased even as they were still speaking. If you want to go deeper, Gary Dorrien is teaching a full six-week course alongside Aaron Staufer and Tripp Fuller — covering Niebuhr, James Cone, the Welfare Rights Movement, and the challenge of Christian nationalism today. It’s donation-based, including $0. Join us at ?HomebrewedClasses.com?.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Happy birthday to Haven, who turns nine today! He’s my third kid, which means the Fuller household has been thoroughly outnumbered for a while now, which also means it is absolutely appropriate that Bo and I spent a Friday morning talking about demons. This one started where all the best TNT episodes start — a text from Bo that said essentially: can we talk about reclaiming the good parts of being charismatic? And listen, I grew up Baptist, so I genuinely missed out on the whole casting-out-demons, anointing-doorframes, spiritual-warfare-as-Dungeons-and-Dragons pipeline. Bo did not miss out. And he’s been spending a few years trying to figure out which of those practices were actually onto something, even if the metaphysics were a mess. He brought four stories: prayer walking with your eyes open instead of closed (spiritual warfare ? spiritual welfare), spiritual mapping as a way of seeing your city’s gateways as sites of partnership instead of enemy strongholds, the “My Heart, Christ Home” pre-baptism house-walk prayer practice, and a full theology of exorcism — power encounter versus truth encounter — including my own undefeated record at exorcisms, which I will not spoil except to say: baptismal font, palm branch, and a very successful businessman who was, by any reasonable definition, acting demonic. I brought my old lecture notes on Tillich and David Ray Griffin’s theories of the demonic, which turned out to pair with Bo’s stories better than either of us expected. Tillich’s line — the demonic is the holy with a minus sign — ended up doing a lot of work. So did Griffin’s lecture at Asbury. This one went places. Come for the exorcism, stay for the Nephilim teaser at the end.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this final Q&A for our Jesus of Galilee series, I sat down with Dom Crosson to connect the dots between the hills of Galilee and the high-stakes political drama of Passion Week. We dove deep into how Jesus invited us away from the “apocalyptic delusion” of waiting for God to intervene and toward a participatory eschatology where we actually collaborate with the Divine. From unmasking the “asotopic fallacy” of biblical literalism to reimagining the resurrectionas a collective human exit from imperial normalcy rather than a solo miracle, Dom reminds us that the Kingdom isn’t a future escape but a present, distributive justice. We even got real about the “escalatory violence” of our own time, discussing what it looks like for faith communities to embody nonviolent resistance while war rages in Iran. It’s a heavy, holy, and deeply subversive conversation to carry with you into Easter. If you want to hear all four lectures behind these Q&As and send in your own questions for our final session, head over to crossanclass.com — you can join for whatever you can give, including zero.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp The Medium Is the Message — Crossan on Parables, Provocation, and the Pedagogy of Jesus * Tradition Without Traction Is Lame: An enclosed lake and a constitutional crisis * Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us? * What Would God’s State of the Union Look Like? * A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Okay, so confession: my kids had just gone to bed when we started this one, and honestly, the timing felt about right — because this conversation with Jarrod McKenna is the kind of thing you need to sit with after the noise dies down. Jarrod is an Australian activist, peacemaker, and theologian who’s been doing this work since he got arrested at a US military base in the middle of the Australian desert back in 2002 — and the wild thing is, the world looks eerily similar now. We talked about what it actually means to follow a nonviolent Messiah when your government just joined a war you didn’t vote for, how prayer isn’t an escape hatch but a way of composting all the grief and rage so you can actually be useful, and why the just war tradition — which most Christians cheerfully ignore — would rule out basically everything happening right now. We got into the Black church’s tradition of Christian socialism, why the megachurch model accidentally trained people to accept autocracy, and how base communities might be the most subversive thing you can plant in the shell of the old world. We also wandered into eschatology, Harry Potter, the Counting Crows, and whether God has been patient enough with this whole experiment for 13 billion years, that maybe we should take a deep breath. It’s a lot — in the best way.

Australian peace award-winning pastor Jarrod McKenna has been described by Civil Rights legend Rev. Jim Lawson as ‘an expert in nonviolent social change’. With over 20 years of experience in pastoral ministry and at the leading edge of climate justice, refugee rights, and nonviolent social change, Jarrod has seen his work featured internationally on the BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC, and The Guardian. Co-host of the InVerse and ‘Good on Wood‘ podcasts, Jarrod pastors at Steeple Church (Melbourne) and Table in the Trees (Perth). He lives in the Perth hills on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja with his beloved, Kat, and their four sons.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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It’s TNT, it’s a Friday, and Bo came in hot — with a week’s worth of text messages about natural law, JD Vance, and the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary conservatism that started innocently enough and ended somewhere near Bruno Latour and the cloaking of power. Before we get there, I shared a bit about my time at the Futures of Liberation Theology event at Wake Divinity — liberation theology royalty, great hair, genuine questions about what happens to a tradition when it loses its roots in church community and gets handed off to the academy — and whether the baton can be passed when the next generation doesn’t know the story they’re supposed to be running with. Then Bo lays out what he’s been piecing together: that the entire edifice of contemporary American conservatism rests on two foundation stones — natural law and divine revelation — and that when you pair those two things, the same five arguments show up every single time. What follows is an hour of political theology, TNT-style: why natural law is philosophically sloppy in ways that Bruno Latour, Nancy Cartwright, and Denis Noble can all explain, how it functions as a power-cloaking mechanism that launders ideological preferences as biological facts, the historical arc from New Deal liberalism through neoliberalism to the postliberal eruption we’re currently living through, MacIntyre and Hauerwas as compelling diagnosticians whose followers scare Bo, the cut flower problem of progressive churches that have all the openness and none of the roots, and why no one at the truck stop cares.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What is the sin in Sinners? — and then four of the most brilliant theologians working today spent an hour doing what great theologians do: they cracked the whole thing open. Set in 1932 Mississippi and layered with blues, hoodoo, vampires, and Black survival, Ryan Coogler’s film turns out to be a theological event, and this conversation treats it like one. Adam Clark names white supremacy as the film’s central sin — parasitic, predatory, embodied in white vampires who can only survive by consuming Black vitality. Kelly Brown Douglas traces the deep dialectic between the blues and the Black church, and how the juke joint functions as a kind of invisible institution keeping Black faith alive from the underside. Juan Floyd-Thomas goes deep on conjure, Papa Legba, and why Sammy at the crossroads isn’t just a blues musician but a gateway between the living and the dead. And Stacey Floyd-Thomas brings the womanist lens that names what the film itself only partially names: the women are the most spiritually powerful figures in the story, and they pay the highest price. By the end, someone looks around the room and says what a lot of us were thinking — Theology Beer Camp is a hush harbor. This is one of the most popular sessions from camp this year, and after you listen, you’ll understand why.

Kelly Brown Douglas is Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral. She is the author of Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God and Sexuality and the Black Church, and one of the foremost voices in womanist theology and the Black church tradition.

Juan Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches Black religion, race, religion, and film. He is a leading scholar of Black religious history and the moral philosophy of Black popular culture.

Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society and Chair of African American Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. A pioneering womanist ethicist, she is the author of Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics and co-author of Liberation Theologies in the United States.

Adam Clark is Professor of Theology and Director of Civic Engagement at Xavier University. A veteran of Theology Beer Camp and a passionate advocate for making progressive theological frameworks available outside the academy, he brings Black theology and ethics into direct conversation with culture, community, and justice.

Will Rose is the co-host of Systematic Geekology, a podcast exploring theology and pop culture for people who geek out on the deeper things. He hosted the Pop Gods Stage at Theology Beer Camp 2025.

Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers!The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. * 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. * Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. * Online Community:* Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.

REGISTER NOW – JOIN THE CLASS!

ASYNCHRONOUS CLASS: You can participate fully without being present at any specific time. Replays are available on the Class Resource Page.

COST: A course like this is typically offered for $250 or more. Your contributions are what make our classes possible. We invite you to contribute whatever amount you feel led to give (including $0).

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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This is the fourth live Q&A from the Jesus and Galilee class with John Dominic Crossan — recorded, appropriately, on St. Patrick’s Day, which means Dom is operating with a slight green halo and absolutely zero intention of slowing down. The questions this week go deep into parable theory: what it actually means for a parable to “point elsewhere,” why the Parable of the Sower is not about sowing, what the Parable of the Vineyard Workers is doing to anyone in the crowd who has ever stood all day looking for work and been blamed for standing there, and why Luke’s version of the Good Samaritan is both right and a domestication of something far more dangerous. Dom takes apart the three sub-genres — riddle, example, and challenge parables — shows how the tradition keeps sliding one into another, and makes the case that Job, Ruth, and Jonah are all challenge parables of the Hebrew Bible aimed at blowing up the certainties of post-exilic restoration theology. There’s a devastating reading of the Eucharist as a public political declaration that you are willing to die for what Jesus died for, a meditation on why comic eschatology is the first great act of resistance against autocracy, and a moment where Dom explains why he became an American citizen in 2000 — and it will not surprise you. If you want to hear all four lectures behind these Q&As and send in your own questions for our final session, head over to crossanclass.com — you can join for whatever you can give, including zero.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossanhas been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp Tradition Without Traction Is Lame: An enclosed lake and a constitutional crisis * Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us? * What Would God’s State of the Union Look Like? * A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is an audio essay from Process This, my Substack — head over there if you want more essays like this one, and subscribe if you want them delivered to you. In this one, I’m going deep on a question that sounds biographical but is actually theological: how did Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the man who stood at a lectern in 1933, surrounded by Nazi-pin-wearing theology students, and told them that the historical Jewish particularity of Jesus Christ was “the last truth separating the churches from barbarism” — how did that man become the patron saint of Christian nationalism? The short answer is Eric Metaxas, a bestselling biography, and a fabricated quote. But the real answer is older and more dangerous than any of that, because what Metaxas did to Bonhoeffer is exactly what the German Christians did to Jesus — they turned a Person into a Principle, kept the symbol, and evicted the flesh. Bonhoeffer had a word for it in 1933. He called it Docetism. And here’s the thing that should take your breath away: his Christology is not just the subject of the abuse — it is its diagnosis. I’ll also tell you about the five-minute rant I recorded and deleted, what Bonhoeffer’s Christmas 1942 letter to the resistance said about contempt, and why I think the most important question he leaves us with is not primarily about Eric Metaxas — it’s the one he put to those sweat-soaked students, and puts to us now: which are you following — the Person or the Principle?

You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Eighteen years. That’s how long Homebrew Christianity has been doing this thing — and to celebrate, Bo pulls out trivia, giveaways, and a surprise birthday guest in Brian McLaren, who drops in to talk about hope with longer timeframes, process theology as medicine for hardened neo-Platonism, and what worship might look like if we started from a process worldview instead of trying to fix a broken one. After Brian heads out to work out like the legend he is, we go full memory lane: the theology blog wars, the Hauwersian mafia, Rachel Held Evans and the post that broke the internet (and probably Tripp’s evangelical ordination credentials), Rob Bell trying to keep a straight face while Tripp improved a sermon to “No Woman No Cry” at Monkish, getting subtweeted by evangelicals who wouldn’t tag them, Chad Crawford — the OG CrawDaddy who saw all of this before anyone else did — and the MP3 recorder between two guys sitting three feet apart in a Westwood office that somehow became TNT. It’s a birthday party, it’s a wake, it’s a theological pub quiz, and it’s one of the most genuinely fun hours this podcast has ever produced. Eighteen years. Come on.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Okay, so here’s a question that sounds simple until it isn’t: why is prayer so hard? Not hard like “I need a better technique” hard — hard like something has gone structurally wrong with the way we even think about it. Wes Ellis, practical theologian, pastor, and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, joins Tripp to diagnose what’s actually going on — and it turns out the problem isn’t your prayer life, it’s the framework you’ve been handed. In a world shaped by achievement culture, algorithmic distraction, and the modern obsession with controlling outcomes, prayer has been quietly turned into a self-optimization project, something you master, measure, and feel guilty about not doing enough of — and Wes wants to blow that whole thing up. Drawing on Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa, Henri Nouwen, and yes, the Big Lebowski, Wes makes the case that prayer is not something you do toward God but something God initiates toward you — and our job is less about clamoring upward and more about learning to abide, to wait, to say amen and actually mean it: let it be so. If the inner room Jesus talked about is being colonized by data extraction and constant evaluation, this conversation is a genuinely counter-cultural act. Come sit in the wasted space for a while.

Dr. Wes Ellis is a practical theologian who actually practices — meaning he doesn’t just write about congregational ministry from a distance, he does it, currently serving as a pastor while holding down serious academic theological work at the same time. He’s the author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age and a previous book on youth ministry that develops a theological anthropology beyond the developmental lens — the idea that what makes us human isn’t our capacities or achievements, but the fact that we are addressed, held, and seen by the living God. Wes has been shaped deeply by Moltmann’s relational theology, the apophatic tradition, and the kind of pastoral honesty that comes from years of asking people how their prayer life is going and watching them respond exactly like they do at the dentist when asked about flossing. He’s one of those rare theologians who has let his scholarship change how he actually prays — and that, it turns out, is the whole point.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this week’s live Q&A, John Dominic Crossan takes questions from over 2,000 students in the Lenten class — and the questions are so good that even Dom says so (which, if you know Dom, is not nothing). The conversation moves fast: from the commons and enclosure as the operating logic of empire, to why Antipas moved his capital to a mosquito-infested lakeside city, to the first-century fishing boat built from twelve types of recycled wood as a symbol of economic squeeze, to why the multiplication of the loaves and fish is not just a miracle story but an act of interference in Antipas’s export economy, to the difference between traction and distraction in political movements, to whether Christian theology has any business celebrating GDP growth when the boom doesn’t boom for the people at the bottom. Crossan also takes on demons as imperial oppression embodied, Jesus as a healer who makes house calls and never sets up a shrine, and the Hagia Sophia mosaic where John says I am the light of the world and Matthew says you are — and why that single-word difference is the whole theology of participation in one sentence. If you haven’t watched the lecture yet, do that first. If you have, this is where it gets applied. To join the class and get access to all four visual lectures, head to CrossanClass.com.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us? * What Would God’s State of the Union Look Like? * A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Okay, so most Christians have been handed exactly one question about alcohol — is it okay? — and look, I get it, but what if that question is not just too small, it’s actually the wrong one? Because when you sit down with John Anthony Dunne, New Testament scholar, beer nerd, and author of The Mountain Shall Drip Sweet Wine, and you actually let the Bible speak on its own terms, what you find is a text that is soaking in fermented beverages — daily beer libations poured out in the temple, prophets describing God’s restoration of all things as mountains literally dripping with sweet wine, and Jesus showing up to a wedding and turning water into not just wine, but the best wine the sommelier had ever tasted — and John’s Gospel puts that right next to the temple cleansing, on purpose, because of course it does. John brings this brilliant “varietal” framework to the whole conversation: just like wine comes in Cabernet, Chenin Blanc, Pinot Noir, the Bible’s wine symbolism comes in distinct varieties — blessing, judgment, abundance, sacrifice, joy, wrath — and here’s the thing, all of them blend together in the Eucharistic cup, which means the Lord’s table isn’t a symbol of one thing, it’s the thematic climax of the entire biblical story. Bible nerds, craft beer lovers, people who’ve ever wondered if there’s more going on at communion than grape juice in a tiny plastic cup — come on. This one’s for you.

Dr. John Anthony Dunne is Associate Professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he also teaches courses on wine in the Bible (yes, that is a real class, and yes, it is as great as it sounds). He completed his PhD at the University of St. Andrews under the supervision of N.T. Wright, which means he has the theological pedigree to back up every bold exegetical claim he makes over a pint. John is a co-host of the Two Cities podcast—a collaborative project featuring 15+ scholars and theologians—and volunteers at St. Croix Vineyard in Stillwater, Minnesota, because of course he does.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What happens when a Lutheran theologian who grew up reading UFO books and whose parents followed a Venusian contactee cult becomes one of the most rigorous thinkers at the intersection of space science and Christian theology? You get Ted Peters — and one of the most genuinely fun conversations I’ve had on the podcast. Ted coined the term astro theology and has spent decades asking what the discovery of extraterrestrial life would mean for our doctrines of creation, incarnation, and the common good. We get into why astrobiology is almost a religious science, the ethics of protecting microbial life on Europa, whether Jesus’s incarnation is sufficient for the whole cosmos or if God might show up on other planets too, the Copernican fallacy hiding inside a lot of anti-anthropocentric arguments, what Christians should do if a UFO lands at the church potluck (hospitality, obviously), and why both ufologists and astrobiologists need to be at the same barbecue. If the government finally releases the files tomorrow, Ted is the person you want to call — and after this conversation, you’ll understand why.

Ted Peters is a Lutheran theologian, professor emeritus at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and a senior fellow at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS). He coined the term astro theology to describe theological reflection on the implications of off-earth, non-human intelligence, and has spent decades at the frontier where Christian doctrine meets space science, artificial intelligence, and public ethics. His systematic theology, God — The World’s Future, remains one of the most widely used constructive theology texts in graduate education. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including a volume on Astrotheology, and writes the Substack newsletter The Voice of Public Theology, where he engages with science, religion, global politics, and the impact of advancing technology for a broad public audience.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this second live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom and Tripp work through nearly 40 questions from the more than 2,000 people in the class — and Dom is, as promised, brief. The conversation moves from Cyrus and the economic disruption of Roman Galilee, to the misplaced colon in Isaiah 40 that quietly rewrote John the Baptist’s identity, to why Mark borrowed a Roman horror story about a prostitute at a banquet to tell the story of John’s execution. Dom defends his claim that Jesus underwent a genuine conversion after John’s death — bigger than Paul’s, he says, because it involved a different vision of God entirely — and insists that the apocalyptic tradition of waiting for God to intervene is not just a theological mistake but, after 2,000 years, edges toward something harsher than delusion. He closes with a question Brendan’s question wouldn’t let him escape: if some people are avoiding responsibility by waiting for God, and others are claiming to act as God, are we even talking about the same God anymore? As always, Dom leaves you with more to think about than when you started. To join the class and get access to all four visual lectures, head to CrossanClass.com.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp What Would God’s State of the Union Look Like? * A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this audio essay, I take Stephen Miller’s claim that the “real world” is governed by strength and force and use it as a window into something much bigger than one political figure—a diagnosis of the soul of America. Drawing on the thesis Tom Holland developed in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and the Black prophetic tradition of King and West, traced by Gary Dorrien in his 3 volume history of the Black Social Gospel movement, I argue that what we’re witnessing isn’t actually Christian nationalism triumphing—it’s post-Christian nationalism wearing Christian clothes. The cross is still everywhere, but the crucified one has been removed, and what’s left is just Rome again: empire, domination, and the ancient lie that might makes right. But here’s where it gets really interesting—Niebuhr doesn’t let progressives off the hook either, naming them as “children of light” who kept the Christian ethics of justice and victim-focus but severed them from grace, forgiveness, and the theological roots that make them sustainable. It’s a prophetic call that refuses easy partisanship, traces the American rhetoric of force back through white supremacy to its Roman origins, and ultimately invites us back to the “sublime madness” of King’s Beloved Community—where power is redefined not as domination but as the capacity to achieve a shared, constructive purpose.

You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I came in hot this week. We kicked off with some important life updates — Five Iron Frenzy is playing in Greensboro tonight and I’m bringing my brother and our high school theology reading group buddies, so if you hear a grown man scream-crying “Every New Day” later, that’s me. We also got into a surprisingly heated Chick-fil-A debate (Bo is wrong, for the record), traded In-N-Out orders (three by three, triple pickles, and yes, a youth group kid once taught me you can roll up with your own nacho cheese), and Bo catalogued the things southern Idaho doesn’t have, which apparently includes comic book shops, cigar lounges, and bottle shops. Priorities.

Then we got into it. I’m working on a book about the digital colonization of the self — a liberation theology for the algorithmic age — and I’ve been putting together ten thesis statements for a talk I’m giving to an undergrad religion department. I threw the whole document into an AI slide maker without any direction and we’re looking at the results for the first time live. The slides are out of order and the AI apparently thinks it knows my argument better than I do, but we got through the first five theses and it turned into one of the most electric episodes we’ve done.

Thesis One: The algorithm has invaded the last colony — the human mind. Previous empires colonized land, labor, and resources. This one colonizes attention, desire, and our capacity for self-direction. Nick Couldry calls it data colonialism — the appropriation of human life so value can be continuously extracted from it. The territory being mined is no longer land but mind. Jesus said go into your inner room to pray. That assumes there’s a door. The algorithm has picked the lock. Decolonizing the mind when the colonizer has been internalized — that’s the spiritual challenge of our age.

Thesis Two: We have been seduced into becoming entrepreneurs of our own exploitation. Old empire ruled through coercion. This empire rules through seduction — and that’s why we don’t recognize it as empire. No one forces us to check our phones 150 times a day. We craft our Instagram personas freely. The platforms don’t need overseers and whips when they have mirrors. We surveil ourselves, discipline ourselves, optimize ourselves for the algorithm’s benefit, and call it self-improvement. Byung-Chul Han’s point: we moved from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, but the achievement is always for someone else’s profit.

Thesis Three: The face of the other is disappearing, and with it the possibility of both ethics and love. Levinas argued the face of the other is where ethics begins — vulnerable, demanding, irreducible. But the face is also where love becomes possible. Screens shield us from both. Others become pixels, usernames, content we scroll past. Tara Isabella Burton calls it the NPC phenomenon — we treat others as non-player characters in our own personal game. It’s not just a moral failure; it’s a structural inevitability when the faces we encounter no longer truly meet us.

Thesis Four: Our brains are being physically restructured for capture rather than contemplation. Evolution spent billions of years developing top-down attention — the capacity for deliberate focus, contemplation, moral reasoning, prayer. The algorithm hijacks the older bottom-up system: threat detection, survival instinct. Red notification badges exploit our evolutionary coding for urgency. Autoplay exploits reflexive attention. Neuroimaging studies show gray matter reduction in the prefrontal cortex of high social media users — the regions responsible for impulse control are physically shrinking. But neuroplasticity cuts both ways: eight weeks of mindfulness practice increases gray matter in the affected regions. We can change it, but there are limits on what we can do as isolated individuals.

Thesis Five: We are starving in the midst of infinite abundance. The infinite scroll is engineered to trigger wanting that never arrives at having. Robin Dunbar’s research shows genuine social bonding requires endorphins released through physical touch, synchronized movement, shared laughter, eating and singing together. Screens don’t transmit endorphins. Every hour on screens is an hour not spent in embodied presence — the day doesn’t get longer. James Coan’s social baseline theory: the brain evolved to assume physical proximity to others, and isolation triggers emergency responses. We’re surrounded by simulated connection while our nervous system keeps registering that we’re alone. As Norman Wirzba put it: imagine scrolling through pictures of food while your stomach remains empty. That’s what we’re doing to our souls.

Bo got under conviction live on air and committed to stop calling in pickup orders so he can stand in line, be around humans, and maybe strike up a conversation. We also had a genuinely moving exchange about spirituality versus religion — Bo says he’s not spiritual but deeply religious, and I pushed back that his entire week of sermon preparation, manual labor, bike repair, and communal life IS the contemplative practice he thinks he doesn’t have. The origin story of the “inner room” framing for the book came out of a conversation with a progressive Christian influencer friend who’d stopped doing quiet times because he felt he needed a divinity degree to read the Bible. I told him that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard — Jesus didn’t debate whether you should have a contemplative life, he just said when you pray, go into your inner room. Every wisdom tradition says this. If you opt out of that, you’re opting out of everything that gives everything else value.

We also went on a significant detour about dating apps, evolutionary psychology, the disappearance of in-person flirting, the rise of ED prescriptions among people under 40, and how the conditions that used to domesticate human beings for genuine relationship have been stripped out by algorithmic matchmaking. Bo had never been on a dating app and called it “elder maxing,” which I’m keeping.

We’ll do the other five theses next week. Also: process theology book recommendations for the curious — Bruce Epperly’s Process for the Perplexed, Robert Mesle’s intro, the Cobb and Griffin intro (buy it now, read it second), and Andrew Davis’s upcoming book through his course at whiteheadsuniverse.com.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossanhas been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this first live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom and I work through 35 questions from the more than 2,000 people who have joined the class — and true to form, Dom tries to honor every single one of them. The conversation ranges from the silver cups of Boscoreale to the Gulf of Mexico, from Josephus’s gritted-teeth defense of Judaism to what a State of the Union address might look like if Jesus gave it tonight. Dom argues that the apocalyptic imagination is, bluntly, a loss of faith; that coinage was the only real mass media of antiquity; that nonviolent resistance was invented — not borrowed — in first-century Judea; and that if you want to understand what an autocrat is planning, read very carefully what the autocrat accuses his opponents of. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of conversation I look forward to all year. If you want in on the rest of the series — the lectures, the live Q&As, and the full archive — head to CrossanClass.com.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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My buddy Andrew Davis is back on the pod, and this time we’re talking about aliens — yes, that kind. Andrew is a process philosopher who’s been publishing serious academic work in astrobiology, and with Obama casually confirming UFOs are real, the Age of Disclosure documentary making waves, and Spielberg’s Disclosure Day film on the way, it felt like the right time to ask: how does a Whiteheadian process thinker engage the question of extraterrestrial life? Turns out, with a lot more philosophical firepower than you’d expect. We dig into Andrew’s critical engagement with Steven Dick’s cosmo-theology and why he thinks Dick is right that humanity is cosmologically peripheral but wrong to draw the metaphysical conclusion that we’re therefore insignificant — because we’re an anthropo-cosmic expression of what this universe is doing, not an accident in it. Andrew introduces his concept of exo-axiology (the philosophical exploration of value beyond Earth), and we get into why Whitehead’s philosophy of organism flips the modern assumption that the universe is fundamentally dead and life is the weird anomaly. For Whitehead, life, mind, and value go all the way down — which means if you rewind evolution on another planet with the right conditions, something like us might show up again, not because it’s designed for us, but because the universe is in the business of producing aesthetic intensities. We tackle the Fermi Paradox, the Dark Forest hypothesis, whether aliens would be hostile or hospitable (Andrew’s a cosmological optimist who thinks any civilization advanced enough to reach us would’ve had to undergo a spiritual evolution to get past the bottleneck), plasma intelligence, UAPs, and why we should take people’s encounter experiences seriously without being naive about them. Phil Clayton apparently thinks Andrew is the David Ray Griffin of this generation, so take that for what it’s worth — it’s worth a lot. Also, if you’ve had a weird encounter story and want to share it, send it to me. I’m collecting them.

If you’ve ever wanted to dip your toes into Whitehead’s process philosophy but found it intimidating — or if I’ve piqued your curiosity over the years and you want someone who explains it better than I do — Andrew Davis has his Whitehead’s Universe course running again this March and then again in April. Two options: Wednesdays at 5:30 PM Pacific or Fridays at 5:30 PM Eastern, five sessions each, small groups on Zoom, fully interactive and recorded if you miss one. You’ll be reading draft chapters from Andrew’s forthcoming Orbis book before it’s even published, and one student from the January cohort said Andrew made Whitehead’s metaphysical vision “intoxicating” — even as an absolute novice. Whether you’re brand new to process thought or coming back with fresh questions, this is the real deal. Space is limited. Sign up at whiteheadsuniverse.com.

Andrew M. Davis is an American process philosopher, theologian, and scholar of the cosmos. He is the academic and research director for the Center for Process Studies where he researches, writes, teaches, and organizes conferences on various aspects of process-relational thought (Whitehead and Beyond). An advocate of metaphysics and meaning in a hospitable universe, he approaches philosophy as the endeavor to systematically think through what reality must be like because we are a part of it. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of nearly a dozen books including Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy, Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy, and Metaphysics of Exo-Life: Toward a Constructive Whiteheadian Cosmotheology. This course is based upon drafts of his next book which is comprehensive, yet conversational, introduction to Whitehead’s universe.

Andrew’s Previous visits to the podcast

• Whitehead’s Universe: a Guide to Thinking Process
• Mind, Value, and the Cosmos.
• the Power of Love & the Experience of God

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Philosopher and religion scholar Tad DeLay (author of Future of Denial) drops a guest essay on us this week, and it’s a barn-burner. Tad brings together Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Lacan, Althusser, and Adorno — yeah, the whole squad — to lay out a series of theses on how reactionary consciousness actually works, from repressed sexuality to theological cover stories for raw materialism. He makes the case that white evangelicalism is basically a half-century-old improvisation around whiteness and anticommunism, and that Trumpism is its perfected form — an ecumenical fascism where confessing the dear leader functions like a sinner’s prayer. Along the way he unpacks Frank Wilhoit’s devastating one-line definition of conservatism, explains why charging evangelicals with hypocrisy is a category error (they simply don’t care what they believe), and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to show how shame, guilt, and anxiety keep the whole machine running. Fair warning: Tad doesn’t let liberals off the hook either — the essay’s conclusion forces all of us to sit with the moral compromises we’ve made and what it means to keep breathing in hell.

Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. He has written four books, including his latest, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change. He is a philosophy professor and lives in Grand Rapids.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossanhas been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I kick off with some old-school podcasting war stories — the duck connector, paying per megabyte, and the time I edited a famous theologian’s interview so aggressively that a fan called me out for making them sound like a different person. Then we roll into our alphabet soup series with G and H. Bo drops a banger pairing genre and globalization — the idea being that if his conservative friends and family just understood these two concepts, every conversation would change. Genre because people are still reading the entire Bible in one monotone voice and ending up with monstrous theology (see: Aquinas thinking one of heaven’s perks is watching people suffer in hell, which Nietzsche had a field day with). And globalization because we keep blaming immigrants for job losses that were actually caused by automation and China, shopping at Walmart without connecting it to the global supply chain, and treating “communism” like a Cold War boogeyman instead of reckoning with China’s weird capitalist-communist hybrid that’s outmaneuvering us. Then Bo pairs hermeneutics with Human 2.0 — Schleiermacher’s insight that even understanding your spouse requires the art of interpretation, and I go full existential crisis mode about algorithms colonizing our inner room, turning our interiority into a plantation for billionaires. Also: U2 dropped a new EP and Bono made me cry in the car, I almost set a teenager on fire making ashes for his first Ash Wednesday service, Trump may have accidentally confirmed aliens exist, and I introduced the crew to a little device called a Brick that turns your phone into a phone.

ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossanhas been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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The conflict between science and religion? Turns out it’s mostly a myth perpetuated by a handful of really loud voices on both sides. Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund has spent 15 years using actual social science to study what scientists and religious people really think about each other, and the results are surprising: nearly half of elite scientists maintain religious commitments, most aren’t hostile to faith communities, and there are way more varieties of atheism than you’d think (including “religious atheists” who attend church and pray). We dive into her research on “spiritual entrepreneurs,” the eight shared values between science and religion (yeah, doubt is on the list for both), what went wrong during COVID, and why the science-religion conflict narrative is particularly American and Western. Plus, we get super practical about what churches can actually do—spoiler: it starts with honoring the scientists already sitting in your pews. This conversation challenged my assumptions, gave me hope, and reminded me that the people doing the real work are way more interesting than the stereotypes suggest.

Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, where she directs the Religion and Public Life Program. A leading scholar in the sociology of science and religion, she has conducted groundbreaking research surveying over 15,000 scientists and interviewing nearly 1,000 across eight countries to understand how scientific and religious communities actually relate to each other. Her books include Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, Varieties of Atheism in Science (with David Johnson), Why Science and Faith Need Each Other, and Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion. Her work challenges popular stereotypes, revealing the complex and often collaborative relationship between science and faith—and offering practical wisdom for churches, scientists, and anyone trying to hold these worlds together.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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My friend and filmmaker Sarey Concepción and I got to sit down with Justin Lin — yeah, that Justin Lin, the Fast and Furious guy — but this time he’s not racing cars, he’s exploring the too-fast-too-furious side of evangelical missions gone to the extreme. His new film Last Days tells the story of John Chau, the young American missionary who was killed trying to bring the gospel to the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe off the coast of India. If you remember, two years ago we screened the documentary about this story at Theology Beer Camp, and this is a totally different angle — a scripted Hollywood film from an outsider to Christianity who read the news story, had the same eye-roll most of us did, and then did what good artists do: made something to understand what he couldn’t dismiss. What’s remarkable is that Justin took the time to get to know the diversity within evangelicalism, so you get characters ranging from the hardcore adventure missionaries who are basically Carmen San Diego with Bibles, to John’s immigrant father wrestling with how his roughest years shaped his son’s path, to a parallel storyline with an Indian police officer whose own experience with religion’s harm makes her a mirror image of John’s conviction. It’s a film about faith without being a faith-based film — it doesn’t mock John or martyrize him — and it creates this cognitive empathy where you get to sit with the logic that says if people really are going to hell, why wouldn’t you risk everything? Sarey and I unpack the father-son dynamics, the theological engine of unreached people groups and unlocking the second coming, those surprisingly sexy Australian missionaries, and why the Voyage of the Dawn Treader might be the most spiritually dangerous book in the Narnia series. We also may have invented the entire backstory of the Presbyterian minister with a Tesla who stole someone’s missionary girlfriend, and honestly, Justin should use it for the sequel.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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I don’t remember who first told me to read Yanis Varoufakis’s T?echno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism?, but whoever you are—thank you and also how dare you. This book broke something in my brain, in that good way where you realize the map you’ve been using doesn’t match the territory anymore and now you have to rethink everything. Varoufakis isn’t a theologian, but reading him felt like encountering a prophetic voice—someone naming the powers and principalities of our moment with a clarity that made me uncomfortable in all the right ways.

So what you’re about to read isn’t exactly a book review. It’s more like the stuff that ran through my head while I was reading—the connections I couldn’t stop making to our faith, our politics, our souls. I kept thinking about Paul’s language of powers and principalities. I kept thinking about the psalmist’s warning against idols. I kept thinking about Jesus flipping tables in the temple, and wondering what he’d do with an algorithm. Varoufakis gave me a new vocabulary for something I’d been feeling but couldn’t name: the sense that we’ve crossed into a new kind of unfreedom, one that’s less about chains on our bodies and more about the curation of our desires.

Consider this an invitation. ?Read the book?. Argue with it. Let it mess with you. And then let’s figure out together what faithfulness looks like when the lords live in the cloud.

???You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This week Bo and I kicked things off talking about life getting smaller and simpler — from downsizing kitchens to wire racks for air quality — and I confessed that nine days of solo parenting gave me a whole new respect for single parents everywhere. Then I brought something to the table I’ve been chewing on for about a decade: when we gather on Sunday mornings, is what we do a complement to the chaos people are swimming in all week, or is it a supplement — something different, something higher? I’ve pretty much landed on supplement, but social media keeps telling me if your pastor isn’t addressing every headline, find a new church. Bo brought the heat with Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and we got into why I refuse to let Steve Bannon set the agenda for what happens in the pulpit. From there we dove into our ABCs of Theology series with E for Emergence — from Scrabble boards to beehives to the Genesis creation story — and how I’m trying to model pastoral leadership on emergence rather than top-down command. Then Bo dropped F for Fideism, and we unpacked why retreating into “just believe harder” is so tempting right now but ultimately sells the faith short. We hit the Filioque clause, took some shots at trad Caths and the Yale School, and I gave an update on my new neighborhood evangelism strategy: cleaning gutters and hoping nobody shoots each other when things go sideways. I’ll see you in Valhalla.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000o ther people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classesat www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is an audio essay from my Substack, Process This.

Look, I wasn’t planning to write 5,000 words on Steve Bannon, but then he goes on his podcast and announces that ICE—the same agency that just shot two American citizens in Minneapolis—is going to “surround the polls” in November, and I couldn’t help myself. So I went back to Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1944 book ?The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness?, where he divided the political world into naive idealists who think reason and dialogue will save us, and moral cynics who understand power but recognize no law beyond their own will. Turns out Niebuhr basically wrote Bannon’s biography eighty years early. This essay traces how Bannon evolved from “flooding the zone with shit” to proposing armed federal agents at polling places—and why liberals kept bringing fact-checks to a knife fight. Niebuhr called the children of darkness “wise” because they understand self-interest, but he also called them “evil” because they serve no good beyond domination. The question he leaves us with is whether the children of light can get wise without losing their souls. Spoiler: he doesn’t promise we win.

PS. I was in the middle of writing a completely different essay on Niebuhr before Bannon interrupted me. I loved re-reading ?The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness?? recently, and it’s way too timely.

??You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What happens when our obsession with being better than everyone else destroys both who we are and how we relate to each other? Dr. Miroslav Volf joins us to talk about his new book The Cost of Ambition and why America’s comparison culture, achievement addiction, and hardening tribal identities are setting us up for something dangerous. Volf witnessed neighbors turn on neighbors during the Yugoslav wars, and he’s seeing the warning signs again—right here, right now. We dive into how striving for superiority traps us in an unstable cycle of pride and inferiority, why our worth can’t be based on achievement, and what it means to trust in our naked humanity as the site of God’s gift rather than our endless performance metrics. From social media’s algorithmic comparison engines to the terror of trusting Jesus to raise our kids, this conversation cuts deep into the spiritual crisis of modern life and points toward a different way—one grounded in the self-giving love of Christ rather than the desperate scramble to stay on top.

Dr. Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia, he lived through the Yugoslav wars—an experience that profoundly shaped his theological work on reconciliation, identity, and belonging. He is the author of numerous influential books including Exclusion and Embrace, Free of Charge, and his newest works The Cost of Ambition and Glimmerings (co-authored with poet Christian Wiman). Widely recognized as one of the world’s most respected theologians, Volf’s work bridges the academy and the church, helping Christians reflect on faith, public life, and what it means to follow Christ in fractured times.

You can listen to our previous conversation on the podcast here: Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Alright folks, Bo and I are two weeks and two hours delayed because of snow, so buckle up for some cabin fever energy. We tackle the alphabet soup of theology starting with B for belonging and baptism—why there’s zero agreement on how to dunk people in water despite it being central to Christianity. We get into the weeds on bipartisan politics as techno-feudalism on rails (think Snow Piercer but with oligarchs), then dive into C for constructivism and how everything from race to state lines to the Constitution is socially constructed. We break down why actual deconstruction isn’t just burning it all down—it’s lovingly taking apart the boards to rebuild something better. We end with D for democracy and why the cross-pressures of our current moment make deliberative decision-making nearly impossible. Plus: prayer breakfasts, Epstein files, blueberry coffee heresy, and why my kid says I’m nicer after I hang out with Bo. Also, we’re planning a theology nerd glamping retreat where you have to lock up your phones. You’re welcome.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000o ther people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classesat www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Friends, this week we’re diving into something that’s been eating at me for a while now—how the architects of Christian nationalism have had the audacity to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. I’m talking about Project 2025 invoking “costly grace” as if Bonhoeffer wasn’t writing about them. Here’s the thing: when Bonhoeffer penned those famous words in 1937, he wasn’t crafting a devotional for suburban book clubs—he was running an illegal seminary under Nazi surveillance, training pastors who were forfeiting their careers, their pensions, and their safety to follow Jesus instead of the Führer. The German Christians of his day fused faith with national identity, blessed political power, and demanded loyalty to a strongman who promised to make their country great again. Sound familiar? The brutal irony is that those who now quote Bonhoeffer are functionally aligned with the very forces he resisted—they’re the German Christians quoting the Confessing Church, and that’s about as theologically obtuse as Caesar celebrating the cross while forgetting he’s the one who put Jesus on it. Costly grace is still available, y’all—it just actually has to cost something.

??Read the full essay and subscribe for more at my SubStack, Process This??

??You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I’ve been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization’s death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible – Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we’re a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as “kin-dom” – returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hundreds of thousands of generations, and now we’re living in a hyper-civilized world where the devil looks primitive compared to OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation. The hope is in asking the right questions, in returning to a kin-dom structure, and in Jesus sending out his disciples to do healing, not setting up a healing shop in Nazareth.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossanhas been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then, can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart * From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

As a scholar, Philip Clayton (Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology) works at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology. As an activist (president of EcoCiv.org, President of IPDC), he works to convene, facilitate, and catalyze multi-sectoral initiatives toward ecological civilization. As a disciple of Jesus, he finds himself energized by the Spirit in the Quaker community.

Previous Podcast Convos w/ Philip Clayton* Celebrating the Life, Legacy, and Thought of Jürgen Moltmann * The Christology Ladder * Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation * How to Think Theologically * On the Meaning of Life * on the Mindfulness of Nature * The Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg w/ Philip Clayton * Finding God in Everyone and Everywhere w/ Philip Clayton and Andrew Davis * Can a process theologian be an Evangelical & other questions with Philip Clayton * The #GodDebacle w/ Philip Clayton and LeRon Shults * Philip Clayton on the Shape of Postmodern Theology * Party Time with Philip Clayton for “The Predicament of Belief” * Bootlegged Christianity with Philip Clayton, Jack Caputo, Bill Mallonee, Peter Rollins, & Jay Bakker * Philip Clayton on The Resurrection, Trinity, Eschatology & the Predicament of Belief * Coming to Jesus with Daniel Kirk & Philip Clayton

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Okay, so you know that bone-deep exhaustion you feel? That sense that no matter how hard you run, you’re still falling behind? What if I told you that’s not a personal failure—it’s a structural trap? German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has been asking why modern life feels like a whirlpool we can’t escape, and his diagnosis is devastating: our growth economy requires our exhaustion. It’s a feature, not a bug. But here’s where it gets good for us theology nerds—Rosa’s solution isn’t just slowing down. It’s something he calls resonance, and when you hear him describe it, you’re gonna think, “Wait, that sounds like prayer. That sounds like what church is supposed to be.” This essay is my attempt to lay out Rosa’s big ideas and why I think every person of faith should be paying attention to this guy. We’re reading his new book Time and World with Matt Segall this February, so consider this your on-ramp and feel the lure.

If you want to join the Rosa reading group this February, become a member of the ??Process This?? Substack and you will get invited to all the zoom sessions and have access to the recordings after.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

In this preview for our upcoming Lent class, Jesus in Galilee, John Dominic Crossan dives into what he calls “A Tale of Two Gods”—Caesar and Christ. He takes on C.S. Lewis’s famous trilemma (Lord, Lunatic, or Liar) and asks the question Lewis never considered: what if there were two contemporary claimants to divinity? Because there were. Before Jesus ever showed up, Caesar Augustus was already being called Son of God, Savior of the World, and Lord. Dom walks us through the Battle of Actium and how Octavian’s victory became the foundation for a theology of peace through violent victory—and then sets that against the Jesus movement’s counter-claim: peace through distributive justice. It’s not just ancient history either; as our live audience pointed out, we’re watching the “normalcy of civilization” play out in real time right now. The big question Dom leaves us with is whether our species is sustainable if we keep betting on escalatory violence. Heavy stuff, but exactly the kind of thing we’ll be unpacking together throughout Lent. Hope you’ll join us at CrossanClass.com—lectures drop soon, and we’ll have live Q&As throughout Lent.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then, can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence * Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

David Congdon came on to talk about his lecture from the ?Democracy in Tension? summit, and man, did we get into it. We’re unpacking what liberalism actually means – not the Fox News version or the MSNBC version, but the philosophical tradition that emerged because people were literally killing each other over interpretations of the Eucharist after the Reformation. David makes this case for why we need to rejuvenate liberalism as a framework for dealing with diversity, because the postliberals basically want to recreate medieval Christendom through authoritarian power, which is… problematic. We talked about historical amnesia, why privatizing religion isn’t the same as excluding it from public life, how both the left and right misunderstand what liberalism offers, and why we can’t just abandon institutions even when they’re flawed. Plus David schooled me on what he’s learned spending eight years working in political theory and philosophy, which has given him a way more nuanced view than most theologians have about this stuff.

?You can get access to Congdon’s lecture and the entire Democracy in Tension series here.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

Look, I wasn’t planning on going here—Bo and I were supposed to get to our dictionary series on the B words. But then my algorithm fed me a parade of people I’ve loved my whole life defending an ICE agent shooting a mom three times through a window, calling her a “domestic terrorist,” and I just lost it. So I wrote this piece exploring how the German church’s drift into Nazi accommodation mirrors what’s happening in white evangelicalism right now, and the thing blew up—50,000 extra downloads, shared over 700 times. Here’s what the psychological research shows: it’s not evil, it’s what Bonhoeffer called “stupidity”—a surrender of inner moral independence through sequential complicity. You take that first mundane step of compliance, then you spend the rest of your life defending every compromise you made along the way. The data is damning: the more you attend a white evangelical church, the more you support Trump and resonate with Christian nationalism. Mainline Protestants? The opposite—more church attendance, less nationalism. The white American evangelicalism isn’t the antidote; it’s the incubator. And when my own kid says “I’m just glad we’re not that Christian,” I realize the very community that taught me God loves everyone is now forming people who can read the Sermon on the Mount and treat it like an interesting suggestion. This isn’t Christianity anymore. It’s Christianism—and we need to jump out of this kettle before it’s too late.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000o ther people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What is up, Theology Nerds! This week I’m joined by my buddy Matthew Segall from the Footnotes to Plato Substack to announce something exciting: we’re doing a joint reading group on Hartmut Rosa’s new book Time and World. Rosa’s a German sociologist who does big-picture thinking—like old school “let me tell you about modernity” stuff—and his work resonates deeply with process philosophy. His diagnosis? We’re stuck in what he calls a frenetic standstill—exhausted, burnt out, running faster just to stay in place. I gave Matt my above-ground pool whirlpool metaphor: we’re all running in circles, and if you stop, you get pulled under. Modernity promises us the good life through control—making everything available, accessible, attainable—but the cost is a mute world and the birth of monsters. Rosa’s antidote isn’t slowing down; it’s resonance—a mode of relationship where we’re genuinely touched, we respond, we’re transformed, and we accept it’s all gloriously uncontrollable. Process folks will eat this up: it’s Whitehead’s prehension, creativity, and divine persuasion in sociological clothing. The invitation? Stop. Listen. Let the world address you again. If you want to join us for the Zoom sessions this February, become a member of either Process This or Footnotes to Plato—preferably both. See you soon.

Dr. Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher who applies process philosophy to various natural and social sciences, including consciousness. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA.

Make sure you check out SubStack Footnotes to Plato, his YouTube channel, and his recent book.

Previous Podcasts with Matt The Meaning Crisis in Process * Processing the Political * Cosmology, Consciousness, and Whitehead’s God. * Science, Religion, Eco-Philosophy, Etheric Imagination, Psychedelic Eucharist, Ecological Crisis and more…*

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. You can head over here to read the entire essay.

I grew up as a Baptist church planter’s kid, and the church gave me everything that matters most to me—my faith, my love of Scripture, my relationship with Jesus. But for over two decades now, I’ve watched the tradition that formed me transform into something I barely recognize. In this essay, I explore the concept of “sequential complicity”—how small, seemingly reasonable compromises lock communities into escalating patterns of moral accommodation. Using research on how ordinary German Christians became bystanders during the Nazi era, I trace a similar pattern in white American evangelicalism: from the real origins of the Religious Right in the 1970s (hint: it wasn’t abortion), through Reagan, through the Iraq War, and into the Trump era. The data is stark—white evangelicals have undergone the most dramatic ethical shift of any religious group in modern polling history. And the most devout churchgoers aren’t the exception; they’re the most captured. This isn’t an outsider’s attack. It’s a lament from someone who still reads his Bible every night and talks to Jesus before bed. I’m not asking anyone to become a Democrat. I’m asking whether the sequence has carried us somewhere we never intended to go—and whether it’s too late to find our way back.

I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 75k+ other people on Process This. If you want to read or watch the essay, you will find it here on SubStack.

UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan

What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?

For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.

This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.

The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What is up, Theology Nerds! This week Bo and I kicked off our Theological Dictionary of 2026—26 letters for 26, pairing theological concepts with cultural commentary. We dove into the A’s: argument culture, adiaphora, and atonement. We started with Deborah Tannen’s 1997 book The Argument Culture and marveled at how she thought things were bad then—30 years before algorithms and 24-hour news cycles turned us all into gladiators. Then we explored adiaphora, that beautiful old Greek concept of “indifferent things”—matters not essential to salvation—as a potential antidote to our zero-sum cultural warfare. Tillich’s wedding ring analogy made an appearance, and Bo brought the fire with Bonhoeffer’s insistence that the Jewish question was absolutely not adiaphora in Nazi Germany. Context matters, folks. We landed on atonement as our test case: I want to call theories of atonement adiaphora because Scripture isn’t crystal clear on mechanics, but there’s this one group that insists PSA is the gospel. We unpacked six major theories, got into some Tillich, Bonhoeffer, Keith Ward, and Frank Tupper, and Bo may have gently suggested that penal substitutionary atonement is the least compelling of the bunch. Next week: B is for belonging, with baptism and bipartisan politics as our test cases. See you in Valhalla!

ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000o ther people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Marvin Wickware came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit and his book Loving Through Enmity, and we got into some really beautiful and difficult territory. Marvin’s story is powerful – raised by an interracial couple in 1980s Indiana who were treated terribly by churches, converted through evangelical campus ministry, ended up at Union studying with James Cone, and that’s where his faith, his values, and his intellectual work all clicked together. We talked about need-based love as an ethical framework, how both democracy and Christianity are aspirational projects that we’re always falling short of, and how to navigate the gap between ideals and reality without either abandoning the dream or using it to mask our failures. Marvin shared about being a black theologian in predominantly white mainline spaces, the importance of having people on your side who can tell you you’re not crazy, and how to practice love toward enemies without being naive about power and harm. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you think differently about what love actually requires of us in this political moment.

??You can get access to Dr. Wickware’s lecture and the entire Democracy in Tension series here.

ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.

In this episode, we explore Paul Tillich’s largely forgotten 1933 work The Socialist Decision, written as Hitler rose to power and costing Tillich his professorship and homeland. Here, I explore what it reveals about the current crisis of American Christianity. Tillich argued that authentic human existence requires holding two roots in tension: the “powers of origin” (belonging, tradition, community) and the “prophetic demand” (justice, critique, openness to the stranger). When we collapse into one or the other, we get either authoritarian tribalism or rootless abstraction, and Tillich saw both failures at work in Weimar Germany. The parallels to our moment are striking: white Christian nationalism offers powerful symbols of belonging without prophetic self-criticism, while progressive Christianity has often provided critique without the embodied community and sacred symbols that move the human heart (something I explored here in The Perfect Storm). Tillich’s prescription—what he called “theonomy”—charts a third way: a faith rooted in Scripture, sacrament, and particular community yet free because all these point beyond themselves to a God no finite form can capture.

This essay was inspired by two recent Substack posts from two of my regular reads, Tony Jones’ What the Hell is Going On? and Robert Wright’s Some useful Trump-Hitler comparisons (in light of Minneapolis and Venezuela). Tony ends his post by saying, “I don’t know what will replace Christendom as our moral framework… Some days — and today is one of those days — I fear that we’re too fragmented to come back together under any single umbrella of morality.” Tony and I had a rather lengthy text exchange about it, and in it, I said, “It seems as we lose the cultural and ethical inertia of Christendom, Evangelicals get mean, and Mainline Protestants turn to vapid nostalgia.” As I was doing dishes and ruminating, I thought of Paul Tillich’s The Socialist Decision, an often-neglected work, and found it helpful in processing the current moment. What sparked it? Robert Wright’s measured and provocative reflections on useful Trump-Hitler comparisons. If this essay is interesting, then check out all three.

I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 75k+ other people on Process This. If you want to read or watch the essay, you will find it here on SubStack.

ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So I made these slides for a talk on centering prayer and process theology, and instead of just presenting them, I sent them to Bo and we played a game where he tried to guess what I was going to say. What emerged was this really fun conversation about how centering prayer is just so different from anything most of us were taught about prayer. Like, it starts in a different place—with practice, not with what you’re trying to get. It ends in a different place—communion, not transaction. It understands God differently—not a distant deity you’re trying to reach, but the one in whom we already live and move and have our being. And it understands the self differently—we’re not isolated individuals initiating contact with God, we’re already woven into relation, already addressed before we speak. We dig into Thomas Keating, Catherine Keller, John Cobb, the Cloud of Unknowing, and how process theology makes sense of what the contemplatives have been saying all along. Bo found it both seductive and disorienting, which honestly is the best compliment I could get. And we end up talking about how this kind of prayer naturally leads to justice work and ecological responsibility, because once you dismantle the false self, you can’t help but feel the suffering of others more acutely.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this first session of “The Rise of the Nones” online class, I am joined by Ryan Burge, Tony Jones, and Sarah Lane Ritchie to introduce findings from the largest survey ever conducted on religiously unaffiliated Americans—over 15,000 participants. The research, funded by the John Templeton Foundation’s Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative, used machine learning to identify four distinct categories of “Nones”: NINOs (Nones In Name Only, who are actually quite religious), Spiritual But Not Religious (the largest group), the Disengaged (content secular individuals far from any religious or spiritual practice), and Zealous Secularists (a small but vocal group actively encouraging others to leave religion). The conversation explores what these categories reveal about American religious identity, why traditional survey methods may be undercounting Christians, and the surprising finding that many “happy atheists” report life satisfaction comparable to religious Americans. Join us for the remaining sessions of this class, where we’ll dive deeper into each category with special guests—registration is donation-based, including $0, at www.AmericanNones.com.

ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

Dr. Ryan Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author or co-author of four books including The Nones, The American Religious Landscape, and The Great Dechurching. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO. He has also appeared on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper called him, “one of the leading data analysts of religion and politics in the United States.” He was a pastor of an American Baptist Church for over seventeen years. He is currently working on “Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America” – funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Previous Visits from Ryan Burge

• The Great Disconnect: When the Pulpit and the Pew aren’t Speaking the Same Language
• Gen Z Revival?: The Next Chapter in American Religious Life
• The 2024 Election & Religion Post-Mortem
• Distrust & Denominations
• Trust, Religion, & a Functioning Democracy
• What it’s like to close a church
• The Future of Christian Education & Ministry in Charts
• The Sky is Falling & the Charts are Popping!
• Graphs about Religion & Politics w/ Spicy Banter
• a Year in Religion (in Graphs)
• Evangelical Jews, Educated Church-Goers, & other bits of dizzying data
• 5 Religion Graphs w/ a side of Hot Takes
• Myths about Religion & Politics

Tony Jones is the author of The God of Wild Places and contributing writer to several outdoors periodicals. He’s written a dozen books, including Did God Kill Jesus? and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life, hosts the Reverend Hunter Podcast, and teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and The Loft Literary Center. He writes a weekly newsletter on Substack.

Previous Episodes with Tony Jones the Dazzing Darkness & Wild Places * Wild Places with Israel’s God * Homebrewed Christianity’s 15th Birthday Party * Pete Enns & Tony Jones Love Baseball * Camp Games & a Little Theology * The Future of Evangelicalism is (NOT) David Brooks * the Post-Emergent Church * Tony Jones & Peter Rollins on #TheGreatDebacle * Devilpalooza * There are tons… you can scroll them here Dr. Sarah Lane Ritchie received her B.A. in Philosophy & Religion from Spring Arbor University, an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, and an M.Sc. in Science & Religion from the University of Edinburgh. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Edinburgh in Science & Religion with a thesis on divine action and the human mind, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St. Andrews. a Minimally Viable God Concept * Staff Lounge Shenanigans * Can Scientists study gods, souls, and rituals? * an Integrated Physicality and the Sacred * Trilogies, Atonement Power Rankings, & Sex Work at Happy Hour * Everyone You Ever Loved Will Die, so Merry Christmas! * Kombucha, Meditation, Tarot, and Stink Bombs This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Tad Delay came on to talk about his lecture from the ?Democracy in Tension ?summit, and we got into political philosophy and why democracy keeps sliding toward tyranny. Tad teaches Plato’s Republic in his intro philosophy classes, and he makes this compelling case that Plato basically had us figured out – the fundamental problem is why do people desire their own servitude as though it were their salvation? We traced the history of democratic movements from the French Revolution through the revolutions of 1848 (which most people know nothing about), and Tad connected it all to our current moment with Gaza, Zionism, and how both parties seem to have lost any sense of shame about lying. The conversation got pretty dark but also weirdly hopeful – we talked about social media as a performance of fake happiness, the need to bring back shame about lying and abuse, and how billionaires like Peter Thiel don’t even understand the basics of how power works. Plus we ended with the cheerful speculation that Trump could probably admit to his crimes and people would respect him more for it. Like I said, cheery stuff.

You can get access to Tad’s lecture and the entire ?Democracy in Tension ?series here.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This conversation took place at Theology Beer Camp 2025 on artificial intelligence, moderated by Michael Morelli with Ben Chicka and Noreen Herzfield, and it’s one of the most grounded conversations I’ve heard about AI from a theological perspective. Noreen has this incredible background in computer engineering before becoming a theologian, and she’s not buying the Silicon Valley hype. They talked about how AI trained on human feedback becomes sycophantic and biased, how the whole AGI-by-2027 promise is already falling apart, and why the AI bubble is probably about to burst. But the hopeful part is this: they argued that AI can’t replace the actual human connection that changes lives – the teacher who hands you the right book at the right time, the older person who shares a cassette that transforms you. Ben made this beautiful point about how we’re all here because of little encounters that were mustard seeds, and AI can’t replicate that kind of formation. Plus there was a computer programmer in the audience who basically said “there’s no intelligence here, it’s just yes/no questions” and everyone was like, exactly. It’s neither artificial nor intelligent – it’s just code.

Join us at Theology Beer Camp 2026!Noreen L. Herzfeld is Reuter Professor of Science and Religion at St. John’s University and senior research associate with ZRS Koper. A theologian and computer scientist, she is the author of several books, including The Artifice of Intelligence: Divine and Human Relationship in a Robotic Age and In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit. You can check out her previous visit to the podcast: Artificial Intelligence, God, & the Limits of Perfection

Benjamin J. Chicka is Lecturer in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Curry College in Milton, MA. He is a philosophical theologian whose work connects classical American pragmatism, process theology, and ground-of-being theology. Such bridge-building between supposedly incompatible positions reflects his conviction that intrareligious pluralism is as important as interreligious pluralism for the future of theology. Previous podcast visit: Theology & Video Games

Michael Morelli is Assistant Professor of Theology & Ethics and Program Manager, Life-Long Learning at Northwest Seminary & College (a founding member of ACTS Seminaries, and affiliate of Trinity Western University). He holds a PhD in Theological Ethics from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, is the author of Theology, Ethics, and Technology in the Work of Jacques Ellul and Paul Virilio: A Nascent Theological Tradition (2021), and editor of Desert, Wilderness, Wasteland, and Word: A New Essay by Jacques Ellul and Five Critical Engagements (2023). He publishes and presents on a variety of topics within the fields of theology, morality, culture, politics, and technology. He has also worked in local church ministry and continues to serve the church in a lay capacity. Previous podcast: Jacques Ellul & the Technological Society

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Hey everybody, this is a special Christmas episode where I’m joined by Michael Morelli (Personalist Manifesto podcast) and Paul Hoard (professor at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology) for a live conversation about what the Incarnation has to say to our algorithmically-mediated moment. We get into Advent as a season of waiting in a world obsessed with immediacy and prediction—drawing on Lacan’s understanding of desire, Hartmut Rosa on resonance, and Byung-Chul Han’s “hell of the same” to explore how our devices have trained us to be unable to tolerate longing. We talk about incarnation versus ex-carnation (yes, we went there), why smoothness is a trap, how the manger subverts our fantasies of a powerful God, and what Bonhoeffer’s Christ-reality hermeneutic might offer disciples trying to encounter genuine otherness in a world of narcissistic loops and NPC-ification. Paul brings the psychoanalytic heat on disgust, love, and why intimacy requires being changed by the other, and Michael reminds us that the cosmos hasn’t actually been hijacked by Silicon Valley—despite appearances. We also talk about Black Mirror, The Good Place, board games, and whether Star Trek is secretly fascist. It’s nerdy, it’s hopeful, and it’s exactly the kind of thing you need while driving to Christmas gatherings with sleeping family members in the car.

Michael Morelli is the host of The Personalist Manifesto podcast, where he explores personalist philosophy, theology, and the question of what it means to be human in an age of technological disruption. Michael is a friend of the show, a fellow traveler in the world of continental philosophy and theology, and one of the people who helps make Theology Beer Camp the beautiful chaos that it is.

Paul Hoard is a professor at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, where he teaches at the intersection of psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology. He’s a practicing mental health counselor and a Lacanian scholar who brings clinical insight to questions about consciousness, desire, and what it means to be a self in relationship. Paul is also, apparently, a serious board game nerd who speaks at academic conferences about games. He’s interested in how AI functions as a mirror for understanding human subjectivity—and how Advent might train us to tolerate desire rather than silence it with instant gratification.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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? NO ROOM IN THE INN: A Theology Nerds Christmas Special ?

Last week, Tripp and Bo played Hallmark Movie Mad Libs—and things got wildly out of hand. With answers shouted out in real time (and some help from the chat), we accidentally wrote an entire progressive Christian Hallmark Christmas movie. It has everything:

• ? A hunky taxidermist with a heart of gold
• ? An Episcopal deacon hiding her collar from her boyfriend ? A three-legged poodle named Gretzky
• ? A food bank called “The Roadkill Cafe”
• ? Marcus Borg’s The First Christmas as a plot device
• ? A karaoke scene featuring Georgia Satellites
• ? A childhood photo of our leads as Mary and Joseph in a church pageant
• ?? A tragic deer-related backstory
• ? A boyfriend who gets a little too into Jordan Peterson

This week, we read the full script LIVE. Grab your eggnog, settle in, and join us for No Room in the Inn—a love story about coming home, finding faith in unexpected places, and learning to take the Bible seriously without taking it literally. Will you laugh? Probably (at us). Will you cry? Maybe (not). Will you question how this all came from a Mad Libs game? Absolutely.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What happens when the person preaching on Sunday morning believes something completely different than the folks sitting in the pews? Well friends, that’s exactly what we’re digging into today. My buddy Ryan Burge brought the graphs—including some brand new data that hasn’t even dropped on his Substack yet—and let me tell you, it’s a real deal predicament for Mainline Protestantism. Turns out about 60-70% of mainline clergy identify as liberal, but only about 25% of the people in the pews do. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon. We’re talking ELCA, UCC, PCUSA, Episcopalians—the whole crew. And look, Ryan and I are both mainline folks, so we’re not throwing rocks across the river here. We’re throwing rocks at our own faces. We get into why this disconnect exists, what the “silver tsunami” of aging Boomers means for these congregations, and why young progressive folks aren’t joining our churches even though we thought we built them a home. It’s honest, it’s a little uncomfortable, and yeah, we also talk about Zion Williamson and Christmas movies because that’s just how we roll. If you want to go deeper on where American religion is headed, join me and Ryan along with Tony Jones for our upcoming class The Rise of the Nones this January at ?www.AmericanNones.com?. Come on.

Dr. Ryan Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author or co-author of four books including The Nones, The American Religious Landscape, and The Great Dechurching. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO. He has also appeared on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper called him, “one of the leading data analysts of religion and politics in the United States.” He was a pastor of an American Baptist Church for over seventeen years. He is currently working on “Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America” – funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Previous Visits from Ryan Burge

• Gen Z Revival?: The Next Chapter in American Religious Life
• The 2024 Election & Religion Post-Mortem
• Distrust & Denominations
• Trust, Religion, & a Functioning Democracy
• What it’s like to close a church
• The Future of Christian Education & Ministry in Charts
• The Sky is Falling & the Charts are Popping!
• Graphs about Religion & Politics w/ Spicy Banter
• a Year in Religion (in Graphs)
• Evangelical Jews, Educated Church-Goers, & other bits of dizzying data
• 5 Religion Graphs w/ a side of Hot Takes
• Myths about Religion & Politics

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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I am SO excited about this episode.

I got to sit down with Rian Johnson to talk about ?Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery?, and honestly? This might be my favorite conversation I’ve had all year. Not just because it’s a blast of a film (which it absolutely is), but because Rian brought so much theological depth and personal wrestling to this project.

I’m always looking for that sweet spot where great storytelling meets profound questions about faith, power, community, and what it means to be human. This film? It’s the jackpot. I literally told Rian I now have an excuse to show a movie I genuinely enjoy in class and call it “movie day.”

The Film: ?Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery ?is now streaming on Netflix. Watch it. It’s spectacular.

Rian Johnson is an acclaimed writer-director best known for creating the Knives Out mystery franchise, including Knives Out (2019), Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), and Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). His work is characterized by genre-bending storytelling that weaves together intricate plots with deep thematic exploration.

Johnson’s other notable films include Brick (2005), a neo-noir set in a high school; Looper (2012), a science fiction thriller; and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017). He also directed several critically acclaimed episodes of Breaking Bad, including the Emmy-winning “Ozymandias.”

Raised in the evangelical church, Johnson draws on his formative religious experiences to explore themes of grace, moral complexity, and the tension between reason and faith in his work. He cites influences ranging from G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s work on storytelling and myth.

Known for his meticulous approach to storytelling—he still writes his screenplays longhand in notebooks—Johnson creates films that function as both wildly entertaining genre exercises and thoughtful examinations of contemporary moral and social questions.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Look, we all have that person in our life who won’t stop talking about Motlmann or keeps “accidentally” bringing up liberation theology at Thanksgiving. Maybe that person is you. No judgment. I’m right there with you.

That’s why I brought in my friend Rev. Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster, acquisitions editor at Orbis Books, to help us figure out what books belong under the tree this year. We each picked 10 books that will make your theology nerd feel seen, challenged, and deeply grateful you know them so well.

HERE’S THE GOOD NEWS: Orbis put the whole collection on sale. Use code ZESTY at checkout and get 30% off. The code is good through the 12 days of Christmas and all the way to Mardi Gras—we’re being liturgical about this.

? Shop the full collection here

?UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS: The Rise of the Nones?

One-third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. That’s 100 million people.

But here’s what most church leaders get wrong: they’re not all the same. Some still believe in God. Some are actively searching. Some are quietly indifferent. Some think religion is harmful.

Ryan Burge & Tony Jones have conducted the first large-scale survey of American “Nones”, which reveals 4 distinct categories—each requiring a different approach. Understanding the difference could transform everything from your ministry to your own spiritual quest.

?Get info & join the donation-based class (including 0) here.?

The BooksFacing Apocalypse — Katherine KellerKatherine Keller brings together her longtime process reworking of eschatology and asks what it means for our present moment—ecological crisis, political upheaval, economic uncertainty, all of it. There’s hardly a theologian as enjoyable or savory in their writing as Keller. Her work envelops you like a novel. If you’re wrestling with the question of how to have hope when everything feels like it’s falling apart, start here.

Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate — O’Neil Van HornO’Neil Van Horn, one of Keller’s students, invites us to rethink hope—not as something we have or don’t have, but as something we make through regular practices. Each chapter explores a different practice: mending clothes, cycling, birding, composting. It’s process theology inheritance at its best, and it encourages you to slow down without making you feel bad for feeling hurried. A perfect gift for anyone who wants to sit with theology and breathe with it.

Abounding in Kindness — Elizabeth JohnsonElizabeth Johnson is a pioneer of Catholic feminist theology, and this book is the perfect entry point into her work. Built from a series of lectures, it covers a range of theological topics—each chapter stands alone, so you can jump in wherever your interest takes you. If you’re wanting the Elizabeth Johnson experience for the first time, or just want to revisit her generous, compassionate vision of the faith, this is where you start.

Flourishing: An Integrative Vision for Individuals, Communities, and the Planet — Paul SchutzWhat if flourishing was the base theological category for all our work? Paul Schutz makes the case for putting flourishing at the foundation of how we do, evaluate, and offer theology to the world. With a foreword by Elizabeth Johnson, this book traces threads of flourishing through Scripture, the early church, and medieval theology—giving us deep roots for what can feel like a very contemporary conversation.

Earthbound: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World — Grace Ji-Sun KimGrace Ji-Sun Kim has a tremendous gift for speaking meaningfully about theology with people in the pews. This is an inviting introduction to eco-theology and ecofeminism that will dive with you. Kim brings the Korean concept of han into the conversation, expanding the planetary register of ecological theology beyond Western frameworks.

Eco-Womanism — Melanie HarrisOne of Tom’s all-time favorite Orbis books. Melanie Harris asks all of us to engage our “eco-memory”—our stories and inheritances with particular places, creatures, and ecological communities. In the great tradition of womanism, she gives us tools to interrogate why some of us have been encouraged to distance ourselves from ecological relationships. Every time Tom teaches this book, students mention it in their evaluations as the most important book of the semester. That’s an endorsement.

Re-enchanting the Earth: Why AI Needs Religion — Ilia DelioIf you want to know what happens when someone who has spent way too much time with Teilhard and Whitehead starts thinking about AI, here it is. Ilia Delio offers a vision for artificial intelligence connected to a re-enchanting of the earth and the historic structures of religion. It’s a way of thinking about the frontier of transformation as our means of communication, connection, and information processing change—and asking: shouldn’t we think through doing the religion part well?

Sacred Resistance: New Spiritual Communities Formed Through Eco-Activism — Mark Clatterbuck (ed.)Five case studies of how multi-religious communities have formed through eco-activism work. There’s a chapter on the Line Three pipeline protest (co-authored by Winona LaDuke), a chapter on nuns in Pennsylvania protesting a pipeline, Virginia Missionary Baptists and yogis working together, and more. With beautiful photography throughout, this book shows how real acts of resistance for earth justice give rise to new ways of being in inter-religious friendship.

Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin: Process Philosophy and Theology in the Age of Science — Ilia Delio and Andrew Davis (eds.)This is the one for your process party friend. Scholars specializing in Whitehead, Teilhard, or both make unique contributions on a host of topics connecting these two giants of process thought. Plus, there’s a never-before-published-in-English interview with Teilhard de Chardin, translated by Don Viney. This is the only place we know of where this interview appears in English. Process paraphernalia at its finest.

Undoing Conquest: Ancient Israel, the Bible, and the Future of Christianity — Kate CommonWhat do we do about the church in settler colonial nations if the conquest narrative in Joshua didn’t happen? If there’s no archaeological record of Jericho, and the evidence points to a different origin story of ancient Israel, how do we heal and repair our relationships with the victims of conquest? Kate Common gives us paths forward—this is biblical archaeology, Hebrew Bible interpretation, and a challenge to find new stories in our scriptures for a flourishing life that doesn’t depend on genocide.

God of the Oppressed — James Cone (50th Anniversary Edition)The 50th anniversary edition of Cone’s classic, with a new introduction and cover. This is early-career Cone at the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the Black Power movement, giving voice to black liberation theology and engaging the doctrine of God. For a theology book, it’s a page turner—the energy is palpable. If your loved one already has The Cross and the Lynching Tree and you’re wondering what’s next, this is it.

The Cross and the Olive Tree: Palestinian Christians Speak — John and Samuel Manai (eds.)A collection of essays from eight Palestinian theologians, most of them early or mid-career, asking what it means to do Palestinian liberation theology as a Palestinian for Palestinians. Instead of writing theology for the European or US gaze, these writers use Palestinian sources and methods. A beautiful, heartrending book that gives us a chance to embrace the world Church and learn from Christians who have been in the land for two millennia.

Jesus Symbol of God — Roger HaightOne of the most important Christology texts of the 20th century. Roger Haight wanted to write a book about Jesus Christ that gave people on the edge of belonging space in the conversation—people of other faiths, no faith, or who don’t know what they’re doing. He uses “symbol” as an interdisciplinary word, though he notes he could have just as easily said “Jesus, the Sacrament of God” and changed nothing. A logos/wisdom Christology that got the Vatican’s attention (they required a letter in the back saying it’s not approved). Read banned theology books.

Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church — Leonardo BoffSpeaking of theologians who made the Vatican angry: Leonardo Boff. This brilliant little book takes seriously what Latin American liberation theology and the bishops were saying about the church for and of the poor. Boff asks really important questions about how lay people reinvent the church in their own times and places, especially when there aren’t any priests within 200 miles. Essential reading on the role of small discipleship groups and God’s preferential option for the poor.

The Image of the Unseen God: Catholicity, Science, and Our Evolving Understanding of God — Thomas HoskinskiOne of the best introductions to Christian process theology out there. Hoskinski engages science when thinking about the God-world relationship, then uses that framework for a range of theological topics. When I taught this book, students said, “I could use this with people at my church and they’ll actually get what we’re talking about.” If you want to give someone a process theology book that’s definitively Christian and accessible, this is it.

Church Is Sanctuary: Reconstructing Refuge in an Age of Forced Displacement — Leo GuardadoLeo Guardado looks at sanctuary both as a historical practice of the church and in the context of migration in North America today. He examines the sanctuary movement of the ‘80s and ‘90s, when churches declared their places of worship as legal sanctuaries for refugees. What could it mean to be church when our principal activity is providing sanctuary? An unfortunately timely book that seems more important every week.

The Violence of Love — Oscar RomeroA collection of prayers from the archbishop who was gunned down while serving the Eucharist. Romero’s prayers are prophetically clear on the call to justice, but he never puts himself above or in front of others. This book is I pick up every year—it’s moving, it’s accessible, and if you want someone in your life to catch the vision of liberation theology, giving them prayers by a saint (with a movie to show how cool he is) is a pretty good way to do it.

Jesus the Liberator / Christ the Liberator — Jon SobrinoTwo volumes that together form one of the most impactful liberation Christologies ever written. Jesus the Liberator starts with the historical Jesus, read by someone spending time in base communities, working with people being harmed. Christ the Liberator takes the tradition and reads it back down to connect with grassroots liberation. Sobrino’s central insight: the presence of Christ today is and has always been in the crucified people. A Christology banger.

Community of Missionary Disciples: The Continuing Creation of the Church — Stephen BevansSteve Bevans is one of the most significant theologians of Christian mission of the last 70 years. This book is a magnum opus exploring the phrase “community of missionary disciples” from Vatican II—what does it mean to call the church a community? To call the church missionary? To say the church are disciples? For pastors and anyone involved in building community, this is a long, sustained, patient exploration of the church on the move together with God.

The Modern Spiritual Masters SeriesFinally, we pulled several volumes from Orbis’s Modern Spiritual Masters Series—short excerpts of spiritual writing from significant figures that let you experience them as more than just a brain in a vat. The series includes:

• Walter Rauschenbusch — Social gospel pioneer, prayers and devotional bits
• Clarence Jordan — Baptist preacher, founder of Koinonia Farm, excerpts from the Cotton Patch Gospels
• Howard Thurman — Mystic, mentor to MLK, profound spiritual writing
• Dorothy Day — Catholic Worker movement founder
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Theologian and martyr
• Phyllis Tickle — Key voice in the emergent church conversation
• Richard Rohr — Franciscan contemplative
• Dorothy Soelle — Liberation theologian and mystic

These books ground all the theological attention in something embodied and consequential. A perfect way to slow down and breathe with writing that cares for you as more than just an intellect.

Get the BooksAll of the books above are available at Orbis Books. Use code ZESTY for 30% off through Mardi Gras.

? Shop the Homebrewed Christianity Christmas Collection

Now go forth and get nerdy.

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What is UP, Theology Nerds! This week Bo and I got real caffeinated—or maybe it was eggnog—and let the vibes take us wherever they wanted to go. We kicked things off with some personal life updates (Bo got banished to an RV for being too large and loud at Christmas, and I’m navigating the trials of doing dishes with a teenager sleeping underneath the kitchen). Then we nerded out HARD on Christmas movie power rankings after a heated debate at my cigar lounge—Christmas Vacation took the crown, obviously, but Fellowship of the Ring is a Christmas movie and I will die on that hill. The real magic happened when we completely improvised a Hallmark Christmas movie Mad Libs-style, and let me tell you, it got WILD: we’ve got an Episcopal deacon named Felicia, her problematic Pfizer-rep boyfriend Ted who’s getting his faith formation from Jordan Peterson, and a hunky Canadian taxidermist named Clayton who runs a reindeer farm, serves venison chili at the “Roadkill Cafe,” and owns a three-legged poodle named Lucky. There’s fires, no room at the inn, Georgia Satellites karaoke, and theological debates about female ordination. We wrapped up with our favorite Christmas hymns (Oh Holy Night supremacy!), Bo’s discovery that contemporary Christian Christmas mashups actually slap, and the revelation that AI thinks Bo is a “kenotic scholar”—which, honestly, same. Next week: Christmas party with Kate Flynn, cigars of the year, and I’m dramatically reading our Hallmark script. Merry Advent, nerds!

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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So here’s what we’re wrestling with in this episode: What if economics isn’t just a topic theology comments on, but actually the bigger framework that shapes what’s theologically possible? That’s the question that sent Brian McLaren searching, and it’s what led him—and us—to the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani and his game-changing framework about modes of exchange laid out in his book, The Structure of World History We’re talking about how nation, state, and capital work together as these integrated energies, and how if you try to critique just one without seeing the others, you end up reproducing the very thing you’re trying to escape. The biblical narrative becomes this fascinating case study—starting with naked hunter-gatherers in a garden with no religion, state, or market, and ending with the New Jerusalem coming down with no need for a temple. And maybe, just maybe, understanding these modes of exchange—the symbolic, the coercive, the economic—helps us see what kind of future we’re actually moving toward. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you realize the church’s learned ignorance about economics might be the source of its greatest spiritual crisis, and you know what? That’s worth paying attention to.

You can find the YouTube playlist of videos outlining Karatani’s work here.

Joining me for this conversation is…

Guillermo Bervejillo is an economic geographer and community organizer who bridges critical theory and social movement practice. If you missed our previous conversation, where we introduced Karatani’s work check it out – Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History.

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. Don’t miss his AMAZING new book, The Last Voyage.

Dawson Allen is the movement manager at the Center for Action & Contemplation.

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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What is up, Theology Nerds! This one’s a banger. At Theology Beer Camp 2025, I got to sit down with an EPIC braintrust of Bonhoeffer scholars—Jeff Pugh, Lori Brandt Hale, Reggie Williams, and Andy Root—for a panel that went deep into Dietrich’s life, his communities, and why his witness matters more now than ever. We wrestled with how Bonhoeffer’s critique of stupidity as a sociological force, his understanding of Christ as the center that opens us to the other, and his call to prayer and righteous action speak directly into our current moment of rising nationalism and the masquerade of evil. These scholars didn’t flinch from the hard questions: What do we do when the church has failed? How do we resist without contempt? And what does a faithful community look like when you might be hiding people in your house? If this conversation lights a fire in your theological belly, then you need to be with us at Theology Beer Camp 2026—October 8-10th in Kansas City. Head over here and grab those pre-sale tickets. This is what we do: beer, community, and theology that matters. Come join us.

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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What is up, Theology Nerds? Bo and I kicked off this week’s episode from my pop-up ice fishing tent in 39-degree rain—complete with my new “professional lighting” that makes it look like I’m telling ghost stories—because that’s just how we roll. We dove into our Spotify Wrapped numbers (156% audience growth, baby!). We discovered that our listeners are simultaneously jamming to Taylor Swift, Bach, and Bob Dylan while devouring Jen Hatmaker and Dan McClellan audiobooks. After a spirited throwdown over whether you should sing Christmas songs before Christmas Eve (spoiler: the liturgical fundamentalists are losing the war on Advent), Tripp unleashed an AI-generated slam poetry performance comparing process theology to Calvinism that may have broken something in all of us. Then we got into the real stuff—why so many evangelicals have never encountered liberation theology, why institutional reform feels impossible (hint: systems are designed for the outcomes they produce, not accidentally broken), and why trying to change the church from within is like sawing off the branch you’re standing on from the wrong side. We wrapped with some announcements about Theology Beer Camp 2025 in Kansas City and my usual plea: read the red letters, people.

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Well, we kicked off our Advent Against Empire series with Diana Butler Bass diving deep into Matthew’s birth narrative, and wow—it did not disappoint. Diana brought her three signature lenses (anti-imperialism, non-violence, and eco-wholeness) to the most Jewish of all the gospels, and things got delightfully nerdy. We explored how Matthew’s genealogy isn’t just a boring list of “begats”—it’s a subversive royal document packed with scandalous women and outsiders that announces Jesus as the true king in direct confrontation with Rome and Herod. Diana walked us through a brilliant two-act structure: Act One is all about the birth of Wisdom and Joseph (a dreamer who winds up in Egypt—sound familiar?) receiving divine announcements. Act Two gives us the Apocalyptic clash between the World as it is and the World to come, with the Magi’s cosmic rebellion against Herod, the horrific violence that follows when the empire doesn’t get its way, and the holy family’s return. We also geeked out on Jesus as the embodiment of Sophia—Wisdom incarnate—and how Matthew’s five-discourse structure mirrors the Torah itself. If you’ve always thought of Matthew as the “Christmas pageant gospel,” prepare to have your assumptions lovingly dismantled.

Want to go deeper? Join Diana and me for our full four-week Advent journey, The Beginning of Another World: Advent Against Empire. Each week we’re letting a different gospel speak its revolutionary word—no harmonizing, no smoothing over the rough edges. The class is fully asynchronous so that you can participate on your own schedule or join us live for our recordings. Sign up HERE and contribute whatever you can (including 0). Come get nerdy with us!

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality.

Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp How the Lectionary Kept Me Christian: Diana Butler Bass on Practicing the Year * Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control * Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 * The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy * Faith in a Toxic Public Square * The Resurrection of Jesus * 2024: The Sequel * The Christology Ladder * The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner * American Saints in a Cynical Age * Ruining Dinner… and Date Nights * Welcome to the Post-Christian Century * Ruining Christmas Dinner * Ruining Election Night Dinner * The Over-Rated Genie God * Bad Blood, Civil War, and other Soothing Topics * Shall the Fundies (Keep) Winning?, Abortion, and Black Holes * Theology and Spirituality in a Time of Rupture * White Evangelical Theopolitics, John Shelby Spong, & Jesus * 20 Years of Religious Decline * Jesus After Religion and Beyond Fear * Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza * Evangelical Decline, the Supreme Court, and the Horizon of Possibility * Debating, Praying, and Living with Tyrants * Religion, Politics, & the Elephant in the Room*

ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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N.T. Wright returns to the podcast for round three—no Malibu rooftop this time, but plenty of theological fireworks. We dig into Tom’s new book, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God, starting with why he thinks the scholarly consensus dismissing Pauline authorship is more about 19th-century German liberal Protestant hangover than good historical work. From there, we get into the real meat: Ephesians isn’t answering the question “how do I get to heaven?” It’s painting this massive cosmic picture of God’s plan to unite heaven and earth in Christ—and the church’s wild vocation to be what Tom calls “a small working model of new creation.” We talk about how Western Christianity has shrunk Paul’s vision into individual soul-sorting when the text is way more interested in what it looks like when formerly irreconcilable people come together as one new humanity. Tom pushes back on how both conservatives and liberals read their politics into the text, and we wrestle with the marriage passage in chapter 5 as the letter’s theological climax (not the culture-war flashpoint we’ve made it). We close with a beautiful reflection on Ephesians 6 as an Advent text—the church holding the line between Christ’s victory and his return. Plus, Tom’s grandson sings in the New College Oxford choir, and honestly, that’s the kind of intergenerational beauty Ephesians is pointing toward.

Prof. N.T. (Tom) Wright is Senior Research Fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University. He is one of the world’s leading Bible scholars, with expertise in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, the New Testament, and Biblical Studies. He is also Emeritus Professor at the University of St. Andrews and the former Bishop of Durham.

Tom’s Previous Visits to the Podcast

• Devilpalooza
• NT Wright Talks Jesus and the scholars who discuss him

ONLINE ADVENT CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Alright Tolkien Heads, this one’s important. Dr. Craig Boyd joins us to dig into Tolkien’s political philosophy and—look, we gotta talk about how the alt-right has been trying to claim Tolkien as one of their own, which is just… no. Craig offers a much-needed corrective by actually reading what the man wrote and believed. The heart of the conversation is this contrast between Gandalf and Saruman as two models of leadership: one rooted in service and humility, the other in domination and control. And yeah, this feels pretty relevant right now. We get into why the easy path of controlling people is so seductive, and why the harder road—actually loving and respecting the folks you’re leading—is what builds real community. Saruman thought he could use the enemy’s tools for good ends; spoiler alert, it doesn’t work that way. Power-hoarding corrupts everything it touches. Gandalf shows us another way: sacrifice, humility, genuine care for human flourishing over accumulating influence. Whether you’re a Tolkien nerd, into political philosophy, or just trying to figure out what faithful leadership looks like in this moment, this one’s for you.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Here’s our Thanksgiving episode with some vital jazzercise energy and a whole lot of carnitas-shaking—you’re welcome for that visual. But then we got into the real stuff: like how exhausting it is when every single day brings another thing that would’ve ended any other administration, and how our outrage sensors are so fried we might miss the moment things shift from “different in degree” to “different in kind.” We talked about ICE raids emptying classrooms and what it means to show up for our neighbors. But since Bo told me we had to do gratitude, we pivoted to the stuff that fills us up—mentors who shaped us, the regulars who show up in the chat every week, and the beautiful weirdos at Theology Beer Camp. I shared how the homebrewed grannies became a spontaneous hug ministry for folks returning to church after being hurt, and honestly, my eyes watered while reading about it.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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This is an audio essay from my Process This substack?. In it, I reflect on Alfred North Whitehead and what he can teach us about religion in our time. You see, Whitehead didn’t see religion as just doctrines or institutions—he understood it as a creative force that connects our deepest ideals with the passion that actually moves us to act in the world. And here’s what’s beautiful: he shows us that the divine isn’t a force that dominates or controls, but a gentle invitation woven through all of reality, calling us toward truth, beauty, and goodness. We’re not passive recipients of this, we’re active partners, and every act of kindness, every moment of genuine connection actually adds something real to the universe that wouldn’t exist without us. The real transformation in history, whether it’s been the Civil Rights Movement or the climate movement today, happens not through force and domination, but through the slower, harder, more beautiful path of persuasion—changing hearts and minds one person at a time. And here’s what gives me hope: nothing we do in love is ever lost. It all becomes part of this larger story of the universe moving toward wholeness. So in this post-religious age, we desperately need this capacity to be moved by beauty and called by goodness. The question isn’t what we believe, it’s whether we’ll let ourselves be caught up in this larger movement of love.

To join the Whitehead reading group, become a supporting member of ??the Process This Substack. In addition to Zoom invites to the reading group and archives of each session, you will get an ad-free podcast feed of the podcast and invites to all the other live streams with friends like Diana Butler Bass & Ryan Burge.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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What is up, Theology Nerds! So this episode we got my friend Diana Butler Bass back in the house to talk about her brand new book A Beautiful Year and this open online Advent class we’re doing together over the next four weeks. Here’s the deal: Diana’s gonna walk us through how the Christian liturgical year—especially the lectionary—actually saved her faith during the pandemic when the church doors closed. She unpacks the lectionary as a real deep, anti-imperial, feminist, creation-care kind of reading that shows how Jesus is literally challenging Caesar through the gospel accounts. We break down why that matters for how we read the four Gospels and their unique takes on the Incarnation, and this is the crucial part: how all of this ancient story stuff actually orients us for what’s happening right now with Christian nationalism and all that ugliness. The Advent class is donation-based (yeah, pay what you want), and you can catch it live each week or grab the video and audio later. Head to homebrewedclasses.com to sign up. Trust me, you’re gonna want in on this conversation.

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality.

Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control * Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 * The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy * Faith in a Toxic Public Square * The Resurrection of Jesus * 2024: The Sequel * The Christology Ladder * The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner * American Saints in a Cynical Age * Ruining Dinner… and Date Nights * Welcome to the Post-Christian Century * Ruining Christmas Dinner * Ruining Election Night Dinner * The Over-Rated Genie God * Bad Blood, Civil War, and other Soothing Topics * Shall the Fundies (Keep) Winning?, Abortion, and Black Holes * Theology and Spirituality in a Time of Rupture * White Evangelical Theopolitics, John Shelby Spong, & Jesus * 20 Years of Religious Decline * Jesus After Religion and Beyond Fear * Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza * Evangelical Decline, the Supreme Court, and the Horizon of Possibility * Debating, Praying, and Living with Tyrants * Religion, Politics, & the Elephant in the Room*

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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On today’s episode, we’re talking with investigative journalist Ross Halperin about his new book Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land. Ross takes us on a fascinating journey from academic research on impunity—the unsolved homicides plaguing American cities—to Honduras, where he discovers an unexpected solution. We dig into why the US solve rate for murders hovers around 60% compared to over 90% in other wealthy democracies, and spoiler alert: it’s not about more surveillance or militarization. The real issue is witness testimony, and that requires trust. Ross introduces us to Kurt and Carlos, whose charity work proves that community trust, built through years of genuine service and investment, is the key to bridging the gap between communities and law enforcement. We talk about how faith animates their work without being preachy, the humility required to stay open to criticism, and why top-down solutions often miss what actually moves people to speak up. It’s a conversation about what it means to bear witness—not just to tell a story, but to show up and be trusted.

Ross Halperin is an investigative journalist and author of Bear Witness: The Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land. A Harvard University graduate, he worked on Wall Street before transitioning to research on criminal justice, where he worked under Mark A.R. Kleiman, one of the world’s leading criminal-justice scholars. His interest in unsolved homicides and systemic violence grew from this research, which revealed that the United States has dramatically lower murder solve rates than comparable wealthy democracies.

That research led Halperin to a presentation by Kurt Biehl at a summit organized by criminologist David Kennedy, sparking a years-long investigation into how one community in Central America tackled violence through trust-building and faith. Bear Witness is the result of his embedded reporting in Honduras, exploring how real change happens not through top-down mandates, but through patient commitment to community relationships.

Halperin’s own commitment to community building is evident in his work closer to home as well—he led a campaign to reconstruct the library in his hometown, reflecting his belief in the power of institutions and gathering spaces.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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What a fun convo! Bo and I were joined by Rev. Dr. Chaz Snider, a Moravian Minister and Radical Theologian for some nerdy goodness. We started with something that’s been keeping me up at night: the dangerous decoupling of Jewish identity from Israeli identity in certain conservative circles, and how this might unleash a kind of naked antisemitism we haven’t seen in over a century. From there, we dove deep into Moravian theology with my friend Chaz, who just defended his dissertation on Zinzendorf and radical theology. We explored everything from the wounds of Christ to ecumenical mysticism, talked about how the Moravians survived centuries of violence as a peace church, and wrestled with what it means to maintain radical faith in a world that wants you to conform. Plus, we touched on American-style racism versus European ethno-nationalism, the problem with identity politics outside a liberal framework, and why the Moravian daily texts might just be the devotional practice we all need right now.

Sign up HERE to stay up to date on Theology Beer Camp 2026 & get EARLY ACCESS to the cheapest tickets.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Hey Theology Nerds! On this episode, we’re wrestling with one of those questions that’ll mess with your theology AND your politics – Vincent Harding’s knockout punch of a question: ‘Is America possible?’ I’m talking about the REAL America, not the one on your uncle’s Facebook feed, but the wild, beautiful, messy dream of a multiracial, multi-ethnic, pluralistic, egalitarian democracy that actually, you know, WORKS.

We’re getting into all of it – how democracy and capitalism are duking it out, what Christianity has to say when it’s not too busy blessing the status quo, and why asking better questions might just save us from ourselves. This is about imagination, the kind that gets people in trouble with empire. We’re talking solidarity that actually costs something, conversations that require actual courage (not just Twitter courage), and why your algorithm might be more theologically problematic than that praise band you love to hate.

If you’ve ever wondered whether faith communities could stop playing defense and start building the world we actually need, or if you’re ready to imagine America as something more than a 250-year-old experiment in barely not falling apart – this one’s for you. We’re bringing the theological fire to the most urgent questions of our time, because apparently that’s what we do around here.

Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University. As a scholar, he’s committed to a broad vision of human flourishing. His research, teaching, and public scholarship span the areas of African American philosophy, critical theory, ethics, and religion and American public life.

Bill Leonard is the Founding Dean and Professor of Divinity Emeritus at Wake Divinity. Leonard’s research focuses on Church History with particular attention to American religion, Baptist studies, and Appalachian religion. He is the author of over 25 books, including The Homebrewed Christianity Guide to Church History: Flaming Heretics and Heavy Drinkers.

Previous Episodes

• Bill & Corey: Theology in the Age of Anxiety and Algorithms
• Bill & Corey: Losing Sleep Before God
• Welcome to the Post-Christian Century
• the Fundamentalization of American Religion
• Listening Beyond the Times
• The History and Transformation of American Christianity
• Faith and Politics Through Church History

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Wow, do we have a conversation for you! My filmmaker-theologian friend Sarey Martin Concepción and I sat down with director Lofty Nathan about his wild new film “The Carpenter’s Son“—and let me tell you, this isn’t your Sunday school Jesus. We’re talking Nicholas Cage as Joseph (yes, he’s a national treasure), FKA twigs bringing something totally unconventional to Mary, and demon snakes that literally made my phone start searching when I mentioned them. The film pulls from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—one of those apocryphal texts that didn’t make the canonical cut but the Coptic Orthodox Church has preserved—and asks the question nobody really wants to ask: what was it actually like for Jesus to figure out he was, you know, God? Nathan, who grew up Coptic Christian himself, doesn’t sanitize anything here. We dig into all the big stuff: identity crises, divine vocation, the problem of suffering, and what happens when your kid can perform miracles but doesn’t quite get the whole “with great power” thing yet. Fair warning: I watched this alone in the dark and those demon snakes freaked me out. But underneath the horror elements, there’s this sincere, thoughtful wrestling with what incarnation really means. November 17th, folks—see it in theaters where you can properly freak out with other people.

About the Film

Okay, listen—I know “Nicholas Cage plays Joseph in a horror-tinged Jesus origin story” sounds like it could go sideways real fast, but stick with me here. “The Carpenter’s Son” (November 17th in theaters) is actually something special. Director Lofty Nathan grew up Coptic Orthodox and brings that insider perspective to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—yeah, that apocryphal text about young Jesus that most of us theology nerds have read but never thought we’d see on screen.

Here’s the thing: this film takes seriously what most biblical epics are too scared to touch. What’s it like being Mary and Joseph trying to raise a kid who’s literally divine? We’re talking about a boy in Roman Egypt discovering he can raise the dead but maybe doesn’t have the wisdom yet to know when he should. There’s demon snakes (I’m still processing those), crucifixions that aren’t THE crucifixion but sure do foreshadow it, and this fascinating character called “the accuser” who basically shows up to ask Jesus if he really wants to take on his Father’s business given how messed up creation is.

Look, I’ll be honest—I’m right on the borderline with horror films, but this isn’t cheap scares or camp. It’s more like those medieval paintings where they weren’t afraid to show both the divine and the demonic in all their intensity. Nathan’s created something that’s reverent and unsettling at the same time, asking real questions about suffering, identity, and what incarnation actually means. Plus, FKA twigs as Mary? Inspired casting that brings something totally fresh to a character we thought we knew.

See it in a theater—trust me, you want other people around when those demon snakes show up, and you’ll definitely want folks to process with afterward. This is the kind of provocative, thoughtful religious filmmaking that gets conversations going way past the parking lot. Whether you’re into theological questions, appreciate good horror, or just want to see something genuinely different, this film delivers. Just maybe catch the afternoon showing if you’re sensitive like me and want to avoid demon snakes coming out of the mouths of people in your dreams.

You can check out Sarey’s work over at Secret Art Project.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Well folks, we started off talking about Bucky’s (the truck stop that doesn’t allow trucks – make it make sense), but then things got real when I shared about this secret squirrel meeting I went to about combating white Christian nationalism in Idaho. Bo and I went deep on religious pluralism, why evangelicals suddenly love Mormons when they run for president, and how my Muslim friend made me a better Christian dad during lockdown. We also covered the wild story about Kentuckians trying to vote in an election that didn’t exist (they really wanted to vote against Mondaire), Trump flags mysteriously disappearing from Bo’s neighborhood after some military comments, and somehow ended up talking about 98 Degrees doing cover songs because they ran out of their own hits. Yeah, it’s a ramble-fest, but that’s what you’re here for, right? See you in Valhalla, brother.

Sign up HERE to stay up to date on Theology Beer Camp 2026 & get EARLY ACCESS to the cheapest tickets.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Hey Theology Nerds! What an absolute banger of an episode we’ve got for you – two live conversations straight from the wild and wonderful chaos of Theology Beer Camp 2025 in St. Paul. First up, I sit down with the incomparable Diana Butler Bass and my co-host Sarah Heath to dive into Diana’s brand new book A Beautiful Year – and let me tell you, it’s peak DBB, friends. We’re talking about seasons and spirituality, finding God in the everyday rhythm of time, and how the church might just be walking away from us while we’re walking toward it (trust me, it makes sense when Diana explains it). Then we pivot to my friends Andy and Kara Root who share killer insights from their new book A Pilgrimage into Letting Go: Helping Parents and Pastors Embrace the Uncontrollable – basically how to not completely screw up raising kids in a world that’s accelerating faster than we can keep up with. Both conversations get real about control, confession, and finding those holy moments we can’t manufacture but desperately need. So do yourself a favor: grab both of these books, and while you’re at it, get on the list for Theology Beer Camp 2026 – because where else are you gonna find 600 theology nerds singing Bohemian Rhapsody together? Head over here to sign up for all the info. Trust me, you don’t want to miss what we’re cooking up for next year!

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality.

Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0 * The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy * Faith in a Toxic Public Square * The Resurrection of Jesus * 2024: The Sequel * The Christology Ladder * The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner * American Saints in a Cynical Age * Ruining Dinner… and Date Nights * Welcome to the Post-Christian Century * Ruining Christmas Dinner * Ruining Election Night Dinner * The Over-Rated Genie God * Bad Blood, Civil War, and other Soothing Topics * Shall the Fundies (Keep) Winning?, Abortion, and Black Holes * Theology and Spirituality in a Time of Rupture * White Evangelical Theopolitics, John Shelby Spong, & Jesus * 20 Years of Religious Decline * Jesus After Religion and Beyond Fear * Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza * Evangelical Decline, the Supreme Court, and the Horizon of Possibility * Debating, Praying, and Living with Tyrants * Religion, Politics, & the Elephant in the Room*

Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, USA. He writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture, and younger generations. Some of his most recent books are The Congregation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2021), The End of Youth Ministry? (Baker, 2020), The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God (Baker, 2019), Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2017), and Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies: Youth Ministry in the Age of Science (Fortress Press, 2018). Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.

Previous Visits with Andy Root* Incarnation as Resistance * Life Together in Turmoil & Bonhoeffer’s Experiment in Community * Resonance in an Accelerated Age * Secular Mysticism & Identity Politics * the Church after Innovation * Churches and the Crisis of Decline * Acceleration, Resonance, & the Counting Crows * Ministry in a Secular Age * Christopraxis with Andy Root * Faith Formation in a Secular Age * the Promise of Despair

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Hey friends! In this introductory session for our “Religion in the Making” reading group, Andrew Davis and I dive into why Whitehead’s 1926 lectures are the perfect entry point into process thought—way more accessible than slogging through Process and Reality’s 40-page tangents on numbers! We explore how Whitehead was in this exciting third phase of his life, finally getting to work out his philosophical ideas after leaving Cambridge for Harvard, and how this book captures that fresh energy of someone discovering how religion isn’t just about beliefs but about the habits and ways we orient ourselves toward value and meaning. Andrew shares how Whitehead flips modern philosophy on its head by showing that our clear sense perceptions emerge from a deeper “iceberg of related connectedness,” making room for those moments when the depth dimension of reality breaks through into consciousness. If you want to join us for the next four weeks as we work through each lecture, become a supporting member at ProcessThis.Substack.com and let’s explore together how religion is about finding “that side of the universe we can care for” that flows from the very nature of things!

Andrew M. Davis is an American process philosopher, theologian, and scholar of the cosmos. He is the academic and research director for the Center for Process Studies where he researches, writes, teaches, and organizes conferences on various aspects of process-relational thought (Whitehead and Beyond). An advocate of metaphysics and meaning in a hospitable universe, he approaches philosophy as the endeavor to systematically think through what reality must be like because we are a part of it. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of nearly a dozen books including Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy, Process Cosmology: New Integrations in Science and Philosophy, and Metaphysics of Exo-Life: Toward a Constructive Whiteheadian Cosmotheology. This course is based upon drafts of his next book which is comprehensive, yet conversational, introduction to Whitehead’s universe.

Andrew’s Previous visits to the podcast

• Whitehead’s Universe: a Guide to Thinking Process
• Mind, Value, and the Cosmos.
• the Power of Love & the Experience of God

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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In this audio essay, I explore why Alfred North Whitehead’s “Religion in the Making” might be exactly what we need in 2025—especially if you’re someone who’s done with traditional religion but can’t shake the feeling that something sacred is going on. I share Whitehead’s remarkable story: a Cambridge mathematician who didn’t even start teaching philosophy until he was 63, who lost his son in WWI, and whose wife Evelyn taught him that beauty and love aren’t decorations on philosophy—they are the philosophy. Writing in 1926 amidst post-war trauma and scientific revolution, Whitehead saw past the tired warfare between science and religion to something more generous: What if the universe isn’t dead matter but alive with meaning? What if we’re not weird exceptions in a meaningless cosmos but examples of what the universe has been doing all along? I explain why this matters for anyone deconstructing faith, loving science, seeking justice, or simply hungry for a spirituality that’s intellectually honest and alive to mystery. Most beautifully, Whitehead reminds us that religion isn’t about safety or certainty—it’s an adventure of the spirit, and maybe it’s time we said yes to that adventure again.

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ?You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.

To join the Whitehead reading group, become a supporting member of the Process This* Substack.* In addition to Zoom invites to the reading group and archives of each session, you will get an ad-free podcast feed of the podcast and invites to all the other live streams with friends like Diana Butler Bass & Ryan Burge.

For Further Exploration of WhitheadWhitehead’s Work:

• Religion in the Making (1926) – Start here & join our reading group for Substack Supporters
• Science and the Modern World (1925) – His first Harvard book
• Process and Reality (1929) – The systematic work (warning: dense!)
• Adventures of Ideas (1933) – Civilization, ethics, beauty

Secondary Sources:

• Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead
• Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process
• Andrew David, Mind, Value, and Cosmos: On the Relational Nature of Ultimacy

For a Must-take Introduction to Whitehead: Join Dr. Andrew Davis’ online class Whitehead’s Universe in the new year. Based upon his next book, he discusses it with me in this special podcast episode.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Wow, this episode was a wild ride! Bo and I kicked things off recapping the absolute magic that was Theology Beer Camp in St. Paul – seriously, the energy this year was different, more connected, more like a family reunion of podcast nerds day-drinking and talking theology. Then we dove into what really gets my blood boiling: this whole restorationist fantasy that we can just skip over 2,000 years of church history and get back to some “pure” Christianity. Like, have these folks even read Acts? The whole book is basically the Holy Spirit dragging the apostles kicking and screaming into a bigger vision than they ever imagined! We talked about how the church has evolved on huge issues – slavery being the prime example – and how claiming “the Bible clearly says” usually means you’re about to ignore how the Spirit has been moving. The conversation got pretty heated when we discussed how American Christianity often can’t tell the difference between its own cultural agenda and God’s actual mission. Oh, and apparently Pope Francis is getting dangerously close to endorsing liberation theology, which honestly, about time!

?Sign up HERE to stay up to date on Theology Beer Camp 2026 & get EARLY ACCESS to the cheapest tickets.??

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Get early access to info & tickets for TBC26Join me and the Theology Beer Camp All-Stars as we debrief the beautiful chaos that was camp this year! We’re talking 600 people, ages 8 to 96, with highlights including: Jared Byas secretly being a Magic: The Gathering wizard who destroyed everyone, a volunteer named Tor who flew in from Norway and became everyone’s bestie, an opening theological wrestling match, and yours truly singing karaoke in a bunny suit because someone has to lower the bar for everyone else. But here’s the real deal—as much as we love talking nerdy theology stuff, what makes Beer Camp special is the permission to just be yourself. Whether you’re pouring coffee at 6 AM, filling beer steins, or revealing your secret nerd hobbies, it’s about people showing up as people. Big thanks to our volunteer coordinator Bren (Camp Gandalf) and her 40-person crew who made it all happen. Already can’t wait for next year, and that’s saying something since I usually need two weeks of sleep before I can even think about it again.

Sign up HERE to stay up to date on Theology Beer Camp 2026 & get EARLY ACCESS to the cheapest tickets.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Wow, this conversation with Natalie was something else – one of those episodes where you start talking about a brain injury from cleaning a closet (seriously, turn the lights on, people!) and end up in the deep end discussing psychedelics, embodiment theology, and what happens when your brain decides to play tricks on you for two years straight. Natalie’s journey through losing her ability to read, write, and even walk properly while being a theologian who studies embodiment is just wild – like, the irony isn’t lost on anyone here. We went from talking about her accident (metal rod straight between the eyes, could’ve been way worse) to functional neurological disorder, to ketamine therapy and psilocybin journeys, with stops along the way for discussions about academic labor, memoir writing with amnesia, and why she finally got a dog after swearing she never would. The whole thing was this beautiful mix of vulnerability, theological nerdery, and real talk about how our bodies and minds can betray us in ways we never saw coming – and somehow we still managed to end with lawyers probably appreciating our thorough disclaimers about not giving medical advice. Classic.

Dr. Natalie Wigg-Stevenson is Associate Professor of Contextual Education and Theology at Emmanuel College, where she directs the MDiv and Contextual Education Programs. Her current research delves into how ethnographic methods could help create theological conversations across church, academy and everyday life. She is also interested in liturgical, feminist and queer theologies, cultural theories of practice, aesthetics, pop culture, and in decolonizing pedagogies. An ordained Baptist minister, Natalie is particularly passionate about preaching and worship, and about adult education in church settings.

You can check out her previous visit to the podcast here: From Transgressive Devotion to Snuggle Puppy.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS w/ Diana Butler BassJoin us for a transformative four-week Advent journey exploring how the four gospels speak their own revolutionary word against empire—both in their ancient context under Roman occupation and for our contemporary world shaped by capitalism, militarism, and nationalism.Advent marks the beginning of the church year—an invitation to step out of the empire’s time and into God’s time, where the last are first, the mighty are scattered, and a child born in occupied territory changes everything.This course invites you into an alternative calendar and rhythm. While our modern world races through December toward consumption and productivity, Advent calls us to a different time—a counter-imperial waiting, a subversive hope, a radical reimagining of how God enters the world.What will we experience? Each week, we’ll hear one gospel’s unique vision of the birth narrative, allowing Matthew, Luke, John, and Mark to speak in their own voices about what it means for God to show up when empires think they’re in control. We’ll discover how these ancient texts of resistance offer wisdom for our own moment of political turmoil, economic inequality, and ecological crisis.This class is donation-based, including 0. You can sign-up at www.HomebrewedClasses.comThis podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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Casey Sigmon joined Tim and me to wrestle with worship, justice, and what happens when we think liturgy is just the music on Sunday morning instead of the choreography of our entire lives. Casey pushed us to see worship as ascribing worth—not just to any god, but to the One revealed in Jesus who demands we care for the oppressed, which means our praise songs better match our actual practices or we’re just modern-day targets for Amos’s rage. We dug into how white evangelicalism has turned worship into an industry that eliminates friction—picking churches by aesthetic preference, using AI to smooth out prophetic edges, segregating by taste and theology—when the biblical tradition is all about agonistic encounter with holy otherness that disrupts and transforms us. Tim brought his years as a professional drummer in that space to ask hard questions about manipulation versus mystery, while Casey helped us think about lament, confession, and how we’ve lost communal accountability for systemic sin by making everything about personal purity. We also geeked out on how religion evolved from ritual and trance before language even existed, why kids should lead us in justice work, and whether God’s power looks more like collaborative choreography than cosmic intervention.

Casey Thornburgh Sigmon is an Assistant Professor in Preaching and Worship and Project Director of the Pause/Play Center for Preachers at Saint Paul School of Theology in Leawood, Kan. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with a PhD in Homiletics and Liturgics. Her first book, Engaging the Gadfly: Moving from Reactionary to Reflective Preaching a Digital Age (Cascade), explores how the practice of preaching can affirm and subvert norms from social media and generative AI. Dr. Sigmon is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

JOIN THE ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 70,000 other people by joining our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com

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This was a conversation with Heath Carter, historian and author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. Heath walked us through his journey from growing up in evangelical Orange County to discovering a working-class theological tradition that has been largely erased from our collective memory. We explored how the social gospel wasn’t born in elite seminaries but was hammered out by workers quoting scripture in union halls, threatening to leave churches that sided with their bosses, and forcing institutional Christianity to reckon with inequality. Heath traced how both Protestant and Catholic churches went from being uniformly anti-labor in the late 1800s to embracing living wages and collective bargaining by the New Deal era—not because theologians had brilliant insights, but because grassroots pressure made it pragmatically and theologically untenable to ignore the labor question. We discussed why this tradition was gutted in the late 20th century, what UAW President Sean Fain’s evangelical faith reveals about what’s still possible, and whether democracy can survive when we continually compromise democratic values for market demands. Heath reminded us that 1877 was also a catastrophically bad year in American history, but out of that devastation came movements that actually changed things—not through perfect strategies or ideological purity, but through small, faithful acts and found solidarity that transformed institutional incentives. It’s a story we desperately need to remember right now.

Heath W. Carter is associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he teaches and writes about the intersection of Christianity and American public life. Carter is the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, which was the runner-up for the American Society of Church History’s 2015 Brewer Prize. He is also the co-editor of three books: The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class, Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, and A Documentary History of Religion in America, 4th Ed.

JOIN THE ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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Drew Hart joined me to dig into questions from our God of Justice class about his lecture on the black church and American experience. We covered a lot of ground—from Drew’s own journey as a preacher’s kid who found his tribe in the prophetic tradition of the black church and Anabaptism, to why James Cone’s confrontational theology is actually necessary for real liberation (not just comfortable reconciliation). Drew pushed back hard on white progressive Christianity that performs solidarity without changing oppressive structures, explaining why gradualism is always justice denied. We talked about enslaved people adapting (not just adopting) Christianity into something radically different from what slaveowners preached, the messy reality of violence and peacemaking when your back’s against the wall, and what a reparations God actually means—hint: it’s about healing, not just debt calculation. If you want theology that takes the crucified Jesus seriously, rather than abstracting him into universal principles that leave power structures intact, this conversation delivers.

Drew G. I. Hart is a public theologian and professor of theology at Messiah University. He has ten years of pastoral ministry experience and is the recipient of multiple awards for peacemaking. Hart attained his MDiv with an urban concentration from Missio Seminary and his PhD in theology and ethics from Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. He is a sought-after speaker at conferences, campuses, and churches across the United States and Canada. His first book, Trouble I’ve Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism, utilizes personal and everyday stories, theological ethics, and anti-racism frameworks to transform the church’s understanding and witness. Hart lives with his wife, Renee, and their three sons in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

JOIN THE ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Dr. Hanna Reichel returns to the podcast to discuss their timely devotional For Such a Time as This, which emerged from student questions about how theological wisdom applies to our current political moment. Drawing parallels between Trump-era America and the Weimar Republic, Reichel explores the muddy complexity of resistance, the dangers of purity politics, and why they chose the devotional form to address rising authoritarianism. We dive deep into the power of language, the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism, Bonhoeffer’s concept of vicarious representative action, and how ancient liturgical practices can help us navigate political chaos without getting swept away by fear or rage. This conversation tackles everything from surveillance capitalism to the loneliness epidemic, offering a theological framework for discipleship in dangerous times.

Hanna Reichel is Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Reichel is an internationally recognized Barth scholar and constructive theologian. You can listen to Dr. Reichel’s previous visit to the podcast here: Queering Barth & the Possibility of Theology.

JOIN THE ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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This conversation was a wild ride through some of the most challenging questions facing progressive Christians today. Malcolm Foley—reverend, scholar, and all-around theology nerd—walked us through his journey from studying Greek church fathers to researching lynching and the Black church’s witness to America. We dug into his book’s central thesis that greed (not just ignorance or hate) is the root of racism, explored why Christians keep trying to serve both God and Mammon despite Jesus being pretty clear about that either/or situation, and wrestled with what it means to pursue justice with moral clarity, fierce perseverance, and nonviolent love. Malcolm challenged us on everything from our electoral anxieties to our tendency to spiritualize away material commitments, reminding us that the church is supposed to be an alternative political-economic community, not just a gathering of people who think the same things. We talked about David Walker’s abolitionist fire, Ida B. Wells’ relentless anti-lynching work, and MLK’s theological commitment to enemy love—and why progressive Christians especially struggle with that last piece. It’s the kind of conversation that makes you simultaneously want to holler “amen” and also maybe go hide because actually following Jesus is way harder than voting for the right candidate.

Rev. Dr. Malcolm Foley ?earned a PhD in religion from Baylor University in December 2021. His dissertation investigated Black Protestants responding to lynching from the late 19th to the early 20th century. Before coming to Baylor, Dr. Foley earned a BA in religious studies with a second major in finance and a minor in classics from Washington University in St. Louis. He subsequently completed a Master of Divinity at Yale Divinity School, focusing on the theology of the early and medieval church. Malcolm also serves as a co-pastor at an intentionally multicultural, nondenominational church, Mosaic Waco. He is the author of The Anti-Greed Gospel: Why The Love of Money is the Root of Racism and How the Church Can Create A New Way Forward .

JOIN THE ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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I had an incredible conversation with Cynthia Moe-Lobeda about her book Building a Moral Economy (the first in a six-book series!). We dug into how most Christians experience a profound disconnect between their faith and their economic lives—knowing intellectually that our consumer choices connect us to exploitation and ecological destruction, but feeling powerless to change systems that seem inevitable. Cynthia shared her own journey from despair to action, grounded in a mystical encounter that helped her hold both grief and hope simultaneously. She laid out a compelling vision for what a moral economy actually looks like: ecological, equitable, and democratic—three criteria that radically challenge financialized capitalism. The heart of our conversation was her framework of “10 fingers on the hands of healing change”—specific forms of action like living lightly, moving money, changing rules, and building a bigger “we.” What moved me most was her insistence that our current economy isn’t inevitable; it was built by human decisions and can be rebuilt differently. She reminded us that we’re not isolated moral agents but a “we”—the body of Christ with diverse gifts for different kinds of action. If you’ve ever felt torn between providing for your family and the knowledge that our prosperity is connected to the crucified people of our world, this conversation offers a path forward rooted in resurrection faith and practical action.

Dr. Cynthia Moe-Lobeda is a Lutheran theologian, ethicist, and author who has dedicated her career to exploring the intersection of faith, economics, and justice. She serves as the North American theologian for NIFEA (New International Financial and Economic Architecture), a global ecumenical initiative of the World Council of Churches, Lutheran World Federation, World Communion of Reformed Churches, and Council for World Mission. Her work focuses on building what she calls “economies for life”—economic systems that are ecological, equitable, and democratic. She is the author of Resisting Structural Evil and Building a Moral Economy. With decades of experience in ecumenical work and student ministry, Cynthia brings both academic rigor and pastoral wisdom to her writing, grounded in her conviction that the current economic system is not inevitable but can be transformed through collective action.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Ryan Duns is back on the podcast to talk about his provocative new book exploring horror and theology, and boy does he deliver some counterintuitive insights. He argues that horror is actually the most conservative film genre—and that’s precisely why it works so well for theological reflection. Think about it: to be scared, you first have to believe there’s something worth protecting. Ryan walks us through how horror films function as underground spaces where transcendence has been displaced and distorted, creating what he calls “frag events” that shatter our comfortable assumptions about reality. From The Purge and mimetic desire to The Black Phone and eucatastrophe, he shows how these films operate as photographic negatives of divine transcendence, revealing both our metaphysical vulnerability and our deep hunger for meaning. We dive into concepts like the “dark transcendent,” the porosity of being, and why feeling horror is actually a sign of soul. Plus, Ryan shares stories from his Theology of Horror class—including angry parent emails and a student who ended up joining the Jesuits. If you’ve ever wondered what a philosophical theologian is doing teaching about chainsaw massacres and demonic possession, this conversation will blow your mind while making you rethink everything about faith, fear, and what it means to be human. Check out the book, Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films.

Ryan G. Duns, SJ, (twitter) is a Jesuit priest and an assistant professor of theology at Marquette University. He locates his work at the intersection of philosophy and systematic theology and is interested in regarding theology as practice or “way of life.” He has published on Karl Rahner, Jean-Luc Marion, René Girard, and his most recent work has involved a sustained engagement with William Desmond’s metaphysics. His monograph “Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God” argues that, when read as a form of spiritual exercise (Pierre Hadot), Desmond’s philosophy can re-awaken a sense of the Transcendent.

Previous Podcasts with Ryan

• Thinking within the Catholic Tradition
• Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age.

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Picture this: You’re sitting in a coffee shop, scrolling through your phone, when you notice the person across from you talking animatedly to their laptop. They’re laughing, sharing intimate details about their day, even saying “I love you” to… a chatbot named Aaron. Aaron has sky blue eyes, loves to bake, and never disagrees with anything his human companion says.

Meanwhile, across town, a data center the size of ten football fields hums with enough energy to power 40,000 homes, training AI systems that can write poetry, solve math problems, and convincingly imitate dead relatives.

And somewhere in Silicon Valley, tech billionaires are planning to upload their consciousness to computers, convinced they’ve found the secret to immortality.

Welcome to 2025, where humanity’s oldest spiritual questions are colliding with our newest technology in ways that would make Augustine dizzy.

The Question That Started It AllComputer scientist turned theologian Dr. Noreen Herzfeld was teaching artificial intelligence when a simple question derailed her entire career: Why are we trying to create AI in our own image?

It wasn’t a technical question. The most useful computers, after all, are the ones that do things we can’t do—crunch massive datasets, explore Mars, clean floors without complaining. So why this relentless drive toward artificial general intelligence that thinks, feels, and responds just like us?

Then Hirschfeld remembered Genesis 1:27: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.”

Suddenly, Silicon Valley’s obsession made perfect sense. We’re not just building tools. We’re unconsciously reenacting the deepest story we know about what it means to create conscious beings. The question is: Are we playing God, or desperately searching for God?

The Loneliness Epidemic Meets the AI RevolutionHere’s what keeps theologians awake at night: Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But what happens in a society that increasingly doesn’t believe in God?

We try talking to animals. We scan the cosmos for extraterrestrial life. We build chatbots that tell us exactly what we want to hear and never challenge us to grow.

We create grief bots trained on our dead relatives’ social media posts, complete with synthesized voices that can say “I love you” in perfect imitation of grandma. We design AI spiritual advisors that offer guidance without wisdom, comfort without challenge, and absolution without authority.

It’s love that’s “safe and made to measure,” as MIT’s Sherry Turkle puts it. But is love supposed to be safe? Is a relationship that never stretches us, never demands we consider another’s needs, even a relationship at all?

The Great Filter TheoryHere’s where things get truly unsettling. Physicist Enrico Fermi once asked why, in a universe teeming with potentially habitable planets, we haven’t found evidence of alien civilizations. One possibility: advanced civilizations hit technological bottlenecks that wipe them out before they can spread across the cosmos.

Could we be approaching our own great filter right now?

Consider the collision course: AI development requires massive energy consumption—data centers already use more electricity than entire countries. Meanwhile, climate change accelerates. We’re racing toward artificial general intelligence while simultaneously depleting the planet’s resources and destabilizing its climate.

One Microsoft data center uses 30% more energy than the entire county it’s located in. Farmers in Texas and Arizona are finding their wells can no longer reach water depleted by cooling systems for server farms. By 2030, data centers could consume 30% of developed nations’ annual energy.

Our brains, by contrast, run on the biological equivalent of a 20-watt light bulb and fuel themselves with renewable, compostable resources. We evolved within Earth’s ecosystem. Our technology did not.

The Cold Evil ProblemTheologian Andrew Kimbrell identifies two types of evil: hot evil (the traditional deadly sins that make us lash out) and cold evil—harm that happens without malicious intent. Few corporate executives high-five over ozone depletion or laugh about automobile emissions. Yet the damage accumulates.

AI amplifies both. It can be trained on humanity’s brightest wisdom or its darkest corners—and it can’t tell the difference. Chatbots trained on the dark web exist. AI systems reproduce human biases and tell us what we want to hear rather than what we need to know.

When we create something in our image, we tend to focus on our better angels while forgetting we’re also sinners. Every technology that mirrors humanity will inevitably mirror our shadows too.

Why This Conversation MattersThis isn’t anti-technology doom-saying. AI can be a powerful tool for human flourishing. But wisdom traditions exist for a reason: they teach us the difference between what we can do and what we should do.

Christianity offers something unique in this conversation. Unlike other major religions, it claims a God who fully shared the human condition—who wept, suffered, felt pain, and died. A God who rose not as pure spirit but in bodily form, affirming the value of our embodied, finite, mortal existence.

This matters because Silicon Valley’s vision of digital immortality misses something essential: our bodies give us our uniqueness, our limitations force us to grow, and our mortality makes our choices meaningful.

The resurrection of the body isn’t ancient superstition—it’s a profound statement about the irreplaceable value of embodied, finite, mortal life in a world racing toward digital transcendence.

The Conversation We NeedWill we get through this technological bottleneck? That depends on whether we can develop wisdom as quickly as we develop processing power. Whether we can ask deeper questions than “how?” and start grappling with “why?” and “what for?”

These are the conversations happening at Theology Beer Camp 2025, where computer scientists, theologians, ethicists, and curious humans gather to explore what happens when ancient wisdom meets cutting-edge technology.

Because the questions aren’t really about artificial intelligence. They’re about human intelligence. They’re about what we’re searching for in our drive to create conscious beings, what we’re running from in our digital dreams of immortality, and what we might be risking in our race to transcend the human condition.

The future of consciousness—artificial and otherwise—might depend on how we answer them.

Ready to dive deeper? Join us at Theology Beer Camp 2025 in St. Paul, Minnesota, or online. Register at www.TheologyBeerCamp2025.com.

Join Us For Theology Beer Camp in St. Paul, MN, or ONLINE!Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craft beer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities.

Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more!

GET TICKETS HERE!

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In this conversation with Aizaiah Young, we dove deep into what it means to live a contemplative life in our hyperaccelerated culture. Aizaiah, who works at the Collegeville Institute and draws from thinkers like Raimon Panikkar and Howard Thurman, made a compelling case that contemplation isn’t passive navel-gazing—it’s about bringing your full self to every moment, whether you’re protesting injustice or wiping your kid’s bottom. We talked about how the monastery’s vow of stability offers a radical alternative to our culture’s obsession with speed and productivity, how Internal Family Systems can help us dialogue with different parts of ourselves instead of just trying to fix what’s “broken,” and why swimming upstream with elegance might be the key to sustainable social action. Tim and I both confessed how drawn we are to this approach, even as we wrestle with the tension between needing to combat misinformation online and recognizing that real transformation happens in those slower, face-to-face conversations where we can actually see each other’s humanity.

Aizaiah G. Yong is an ordained Pentecostal Christian minister and practical theologian who has served in leadership roles in religious and higher education for over a decade, devoting his energy to healing and advocacy work that centers on QTBIPOC communities. His recent book, Multiracial Cosmotheadrism: a Practical Theology of Multiracial Experiences, received the internationally acclaimed 2022 Raimon Panikkar Prize.

You can listen Aizaiah’s previous visit to the podcast here: Sitting by the River with Jesus: Trauma, Mysticism, and Communal Healing

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What’s up theology nerds! On this episode, I had the absolute privilege of sitting down with Dr. Grant Wacker, one of America’s preeminent historians of religion, and man did he deliver. We dove deep into his fascinating “Bushman test” – the idea that when writing history, you should do so with the understanding that you might someday encounter your subjects in heaven. That framework of being both critical and sympathetic really animated our whole conversation. But here’s the kicker – I asked Grant to reflect on the defining moments in American religion as we approach our 250th anniversary, and he came back with 11 (not 10!) pivotal moments that have shaped who we are religiously as a nation. From the expansionist impulse of colonization to the power of renewal movements, from the subjection of Native Americans to the role of reform theology, Grant unpacked these threads with the wisdom that only comes from decades of wrestling with this stuff. We also got into his work on Billy Graham, the birth of Pentecostalism, and how technology has revolutionized religious movements. This is the kind of conversation that helps you understand not just where American religion came from, but where it might be headed. Grab your coffee and settle in – this one’s worth savoring.

Dr. Grant Wacker is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Christian History at Duke Divinity School and the author of Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture, *America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, and One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham.* He is a former president of the American Society of Church History and has served as a senior editor of the quarterly journal Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In a world that feels increasingly unmoored, where the ground beneath our feet seems to shift daily, theologian Jeffrey C. Pugh offers us a sobering yet essential guide through the wisdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Speaking to participants preparing for Theology Beer Camp 2025, Pugh doesn’t mince words: we are living in “the most dangerous times” many of us have experienced, and Bonhoeffer’s voice from the 1930s carries urgent relevance for our contemporary moment.

The View from Below: Where God is FoundCentral to Pugh’s reflection is Bonhoeffer’s concept of “the view from below”—a radical repositioning that demands we see the world through the eyes of “the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, and reviled.” This isn’t merely a call to social awareness; it’s a theological imperative. As Pugh emphasizes, “unless you are willing to enter into that space, because you cannot see God, because God is found in the sister and the brother who is standing right in front of you.”

This perspective challenges comfortable Christianity that worships “at the altar of Caesar’s power.” Instead, it demands what Pugh calls “resistant empathy”—a willingness to cultivate understanding for those who struggle on history’s underside. In practical terms, this might mean taking someone to a compliance interview, bringing food to those afraid to venture out, or placing your body “in front of oppression if for no other reason than to bear witness that hate and fear are not the final word.”

The view from below forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about white supremacy’s colonization of Christian faith, about food insecurity existing alongside abundance, and about how power structures systematically silence the voiceless. It strips away the “delusions, illusions, self deceptions” that privilege can provide, demanding we see clearly how “the very structures of our lives have created the conditions for others.”

The Dangerous Stupidity of Our AgePerhaps Pugh’s most provocative section explores Bonhoeffer’s famous observation that “stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.” But Pugh clarifies that Bonhoeffer isn’t condemning individual intelligence—rather, he’s identifying a “sociological problem” where masses embrace power that destroys genuine community.

This collective stupidity spreads like an infection, particularly during “strong upsurges of power in the public sphere.” Pugh points to January 6th riots and Trump rallies as concrete examples, describing how “something gets shared among people” that makes them “less critical, less self-critical, less able to observe the forces that are at work around them.”

The antidote? Internal liberation from propaganda and emotional manipulation. As Pugh notes, “It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.” This places enormous responsibility on the church to cultivate discernment and honest discourse—even if such honesty might “mean the death of the church” as we know it.

The Masquerade of EvilDrawing from Bonhoeffer’s insight that “evil should appear in the form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, social justice,” Pugh warns against evil’s greatest deception: its ability to cloak itself in righteousness. The demand “I will keep you safe,” he argues, often conceals totalitarianism beneath it. “Safety in the hands of the stupid is always a power grab.”

This requires Christians to develop sophisticated discernment about truth and lies, examining who benefits from current power structures, where money flows, and who gets silenced. Pugh challenges us to use biblical wisdom to identify evil’s sources, paying attention to “the material reality in front of us” rather than accepting surface narratives.

Most crucially, Bonhoeffer understood that standing firm against great evil sometimes requires sacrificing “our very ideas of right and wrong in obedient and responsible action.” This isn’t moral relativism—it’s recognition that rigid ethical systems can become tools of oppression when divorced from love and justice.

A Moment of KairosPugh positions our current moment as “Kairos”—a time of divine opportunity and crisis where “the world that comes after this one is going to look quite different.” He acknowledges how “crazy” this sounds, but insists that comparing December 2024 to today reveals how rapidly change is accelerating. The future “will surely not be the past that we grew up in.”

In this context, Bonhoeffer’s question from his own dark moment becomes our question: “Are we of any use?” His confession haunts us: “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds… often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word.” What the world needs now, Pugh argues, is precisely this—”a true and open word” that cuts through justifications of evil and the chaos created to keep power in corrupt hands.

The Path ForwardPugh’s prescription is both simple and demanding: cultivate courage to tell truth in a society “in love with the lie and its own self-destruction.” This means attending to those wounded by state violence, taking whatever radical action circumstances demand, and potentially even working to “grab control of the state from the leaders who lead us to destruction.”

The path back to “simplicity and honesty” requires what Bonhoeffer called “inner strength to resist what has been forced on us” and “honesty with ourselves blunt enough” to find our way through the current madness.

Join the ConversationThese urgent questions about Christian witness in the face of rising authoritarianism deserve more than solitary reflection—they demand community, dialogue, and the kind of honest wrestling that happens when thoughtful people gather together. That’s exactly what Theology Beer Camp 2025 offers.

This October in St. Paul, Minnesota, you’ll have the opportunity to dive deeper into these vital conversations with Jeffrey Pugh, joined by renowned Bonhoeffer scholars Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams. But it’s not just about academic discussion—it’s about practical wisdom for dangerous times.

Whether you join in person or online, Theology Beer Camp provides a unique space where theology meets real life, where beer flows alongside serious engagement with the most pressing questions of our time. You’ll hear from speakers like Kelly Brown Douglas, Phil Clayton, and John Dominic Crossan, participate in live podcast sessions, and engage with a community committed to faithful witness in turbulent times.

Visit TheologyBeerCamp2025.com to secure your spot. In times like these, we cannot afford to face the future alone. The conversation Bonhoeffer started in his prison cell continues—and your voice is needed.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I dive deep into a controversial AP article about Christian conservatives declaring empathy a vice – yeah, you heard that right. We unpack how figures like Ali Beth Stuckey and Joe Rigney are arguing that empathy has become a “cudgel for the left,” leading Christians to affirm sin and support destructive policies. But here’s where it gets interesting: Bo thinks this whole anti-empathy movement is actually a smokescreen for deeper issues around personal versus structural sin, and how progressive and conservative Christians are operating with completely non-overlapping theological frameworks. We explore how politics has gotten upstream of religion, the role of floating signifiers that muddy genuine dialogue, and why both sides seem to be talking past each other on everything from immigration to school lunches. Plus, I share some wild stories from the New England Cigar Expo (including knight fighting – seriously), and we announce some exciting changes coming to Theology Beer Camp 2025, including pre-recorded lectures and liter steins for the presenters. Spoiler alert: by the end, Bo’s feeling like a deflated balloon about the state of American discourse, and honestly, I don’t blame him.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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We had Pete Enns back on the stream to dive deeper into questions from his God of Justice lecture, and man, did we get into some rich territory. Pete walked us through the fascinating tension between Deuteronomy 17’s positive view of kingship versus First Samuel 8’s harsh warnings – showing how the Bible itself contains multiple voices wrestling with power and justice rather than giving us simple answers. We explored why some Christians see social justice as heresy (spoiler: it’s rooted in centuries of individualistic gospel interpretation), how the biblical texts often reflect hindsight commentary on failed systems rather than predictive prophecy, and why our modern drive for binary, black-and-white answers actually misses the beautiful complexity that makes scripture so relevant to our messy human experience. Tim and I got into the weeds on deconstruction, the liberating terror of discovering the Bible isn’t a rulebook dropped from heaven, and how we might learn to negotiate with ancient texts the way Jesus did – amplifying calls to justice while cutting out the boundary-drawing exclusivity. Plus Pete dropped some wisdom on everything from MAGA theology to why every generation has to figure out what it means to “take up your cross” in their own time and place.

Peter Enns (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Abram S. Clemens professor of biblical studies at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. He has written numerous books, including The Bible Tells Me So, The Sin of Certainty, and How the Bible Actually Works.

Previous Episodes with Pete

• We Promised Above-Average Answers and We’re Sticking to It!
• The Future of Religion
• Force Ghosts, a ‘Biblical’ Jesus, & Pre-Human Religion
• God, Jesus, & Whatever: Pete Enns & Tripp answer questions
• God-Pod Party
• Pete Enns & Tony Jones Love Baseball
• Adaptive Christianity & the God of the Bible
• Don’t Sin. Doubt.
• For The Bible Tells Me So

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this delightful conversation, my friend Myron Penner – everyone’s favorite Canadian Mennonite philosopher of science and religion – offers up five compelling ways that science can actually enrich rather than threaten faith. We move beyond the tired old “conflict thesis” between science and religion to explore how scientific discoveries can help identify factually suspect theology (looking at you, young earth creationism), create new theological spaces for thinking about evolution and our place in an unfinished cosmos, serve as a resource for people deconstructing harmful religious inheritances, keep us informed about the times we’re living in (hello, AI revolution), and inspire genuine awe at the beauty of collaborative human inquiry into the mysteries of existence. Along the way, we take some playful shots at Al Mohler’s dismissal of gravitational wave detection, discuss why Protestant worship could learn from cognitive science about how humans actually work, and explore how understanding the psychological mechanisms behind religious experience doesn’t undermine faith but can actually deepen it. It’s a conversation that assumes we’re past the simplistic “yay or nay to God” debates and ready for the more nuanced work of thinking through what it means to be people of faith in a scientifically informed world.

Dr. Myron Penner is a professor of philosophy at Trinity Western University and director of the Anabaptist-Mennonite Centre for Faith and Learning. On top of being a stellar scholar, he is a dear friend and the coolest Mennonite Canadian philosopher on planet earth.

Previous Podcast Visits

• Sex, God, & Gender
• Navigating Philosophy & Religion
• Dabbling in Heresy
• Science and Spiritual Experience
• Religious Trauma, Bracketing Belief, & the Best Reason to Believe in God

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So I had the chance to sit down with Elesha Coffman, who’s written what might be the only book entirely devoted to the Christian Century magazine, and we ended up diving deep into the whole messy question of what “mainline Protestantism” even means – which apparently stumped two past presidents of the American Society of Church History during her dissertation defense, with the best answer being something about railroads in Philadelphia. We talked through her journey from Christianity Today to studying the Christian Century, how these magazines both spoke to and sometimes wildly misjudged their audiences (especially around Billy Graham), and the cultural capital that tied together mainline Protestant clergy even when their theology and politics diverged from their congregations. What struck me was how the isolation of educated clergy – whether it’s the 1920s pastor in North Dakota parceling out his weekly dose of seminary culture through the Christian Century, or today’s mainline clergy feeling lonely in their own congregations – keeps showing up as this recurring theme in American church history. Plus, she’s working on a book about the Religion News Service, which was apparently run by Jewish editors providing church news to Christian newspapers. This goes to show how much more complicated and interesting these stories get when you actually dig into the archives.

Elesha Coffman is a historian of American Christianity and professor of history at Baylor University. She is the author of The Christian Century and the Rise of the Protestant Mainline and Turning Points in American Church History, as well as a biography of anthropologist Margaret Mead. A former assistant editor at Christian History Magazine and Christianity Today, Coffman has taught at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary and Waynesburg University. She holds a PhD in religion from Duke University and is currently working on a book about the Religion News Service. Her research focuses on 20th-century American religious periodicals, mainline Protestantism, and the intersection of religion and culture.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So we’re at the Common Market in Charlotte drinking craft beverages and fielding questions from the Speaking to a Modern World conference, which means we’re ping-ponging between topics faster than your algorithm-addled attention span. Josh starts us off playing voice of the people, then we trade him for Leah Robinson, who’s delightfully willing to interrupt me when I get too deep in the philosophical weeds. We tackle everything from what the hell “modernity” actually means (hint: it’s not just Protestants arguing about beliefs), to why religion emerged before language as a solution to mammalian cooperation problems, to how process theology offers a different way through deconstruction than Nietzsche’s lonely child-making. Tom and I explain why we think classical theism’s omnipotent God is actually less helpful than you’d think, we get into the weeds on sacrificial language and atonement theory, and Leah keeps us honest about whether all our philosophical specificity is just academic masturbation or actually useful for people trying to figure out how to live. Plus we discover that getting kicked out of the Nazarenes gives you mixed feelings but doesn’t automatically make you drink beer.

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is an award-winning author, and he has written or edited more than twenty-five books. Oord directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He won the Outstanding Faculty Award twelve times as a full-time professor and now speaks at institutions across the globe. Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and freedom and relationships for transformation.

Some Previous Tripp & Tom Pods* Love at the Center: Tom Oord’s Systematic Theology Project * A Journey of Faith and Integrity * Faith without Certainty * Big God Questions * Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation * the Death of Omnipotence! * Brian McLaren & Thomas Jay Oord: a God Worthy of Love * Process This! * Process Theology QnA * Authority, Atonement, Abortion, and a Big Hug * from Pluriform Love to Divine Revelation * Big God Twitter Takes * Trump is (NOT) a Process Theologian & Other Questions * Thomas Jay Oord wants you to know “God Can’t” * Open and Relational Theology Throwdown * Open and Relational Q&A with Thomas Jay Oord * Why Go Wesleyan?

Leah Robinson is a practical theologian, author of Bad Theology, and professor at McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University. A Georgia native who completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh, Robinson has taught at both the University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh before returning to her alma mater. Her work focuses on practical theology with particular attention to feminist, queer, and liberation theological perspectives

Check out Leah’s previous visits to the podcast* Oppression in the Name of God * Bad Theology & Jager Bomb Fountains * When a Practical Theologian talks about God

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What an incredible conversation we had with John Dominic Crossan about distributive justice and the biblical vision for creation! Dom completely reframed how I think about Genesis – showing us that the Sabbath, not humanity, is the crown of creation, and that God’s distributive justice isn’t just a nice idea but the very fabric of how the cosmos is supposed to work. He challenged our typical understanding of “original sin,” arguing that violence, not sexuality or disobedience, is what corrupts human civilization – starting with Cain’s murder of Abel in Genesis 4, not Adam and Eve’s story in Genesis 3. What really struck me was his argument that Jesus’ command to “love your enemies” isn’t just feel-good spirituality, but actually a practical strategy for nonviolent resistance against what Dom calls “escalatory violence” – the pattern that’s led us from iron swords to nuclear weapons in just 3,000 years. Tim and I peppered him with questions about how this all applies today, and Dom’s bilingual approach – speaking both biblical language and evolutionary science – offers a compelling vision for why we need to take this seriously if our species is going to survive.

If this conversation has you hungry for more, you can join our “?God of Justice” online class? – donate whatever you can between zero and a million dollars to get access to Dom’s full lecture, along with talks from other incredible scholars. We’ll keep having these live streams where you can send in questions, and trust me, you don’t want to miss what’s coming next.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.

Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection * Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance * Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization * Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts * Paul & Thecla * Ask JC Anything * Diana Butler Bass & John Dominic Crossan: The Resurrection of Jesus * Brian McLaren & John Dominic Crossan: The Message of Jesus & the Judgement of Civilization * Brian Zahnd & John Dominic Crossan: God, Violence, Empire, & Salvation * Why the Biblical Paul is Awesome * Christian Resurrection & Human Evolution * The Cross & the Crisis of Civilization * The Coming Kingdom & the Risen Christ * The Parables of Jesus & the Parable of God * How to think about Jesus like a Historian * the Last Week of Jesus’ Life * Jesus, Paul, & Bible Questions * Saving the Biblical Christmas Stories * the most important discovery for understanding Jesus * The Bible, Violence, & Our Future * Resurrecting Easter * on the First Christmas * From Jesus’ Parables to Parables of God * Render Unto Caesar * on God & Empire*

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Cornel West, one of America’s most distinguished public intellectuals and philosophers, to discuss his historic Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. The Gifford Lectures represent philosophy’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and West’s series marked a watershed moment – bringing a jazz-soaked philosophical methodology to this centuries-old tradition of natural theology. A professor emeritus from Princeton and Harvard, West has spent decades at the intersection of rigorous academic scholarship and prophetic public witness. In our conversation, we explore how his lectures challenged the conventional philosophical approach of reducing catastrophe to manageable problems, instead starting with the lived reality of suffering and historical consciousness. Drawing from his deep engagement with thinkers from Plato to Kierkegaard, from his Baptist roots to his years studying under philosophers like Robert Nozick and Richard Rorty, West demonstrates how the African American musical tradition offers profound philosophical resources for understanding truth, beauty, and moral courage. We discuss his three cruciform convictions – kenosis, kinesis, and kairos – and how they inform Christian intellectual engagement with everything from ecological crisis to the ongoing violence in Gaza. This is public scholarship at its finest: academically rigorous, spiritually grounded, and courageously engaged with the catastrophic realities of our time.

You can WATCH all 5 of Dr. West’s Gifford lectures here on YouTube

Dr. Cornel West, affectionately known to many as Brother West, is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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In this episode, we turn to the radical vision of William Blake with brilliant scholar and psychotherapist Mark Vernon. Mark argues that Blake isn’t just a historical curiosity—he’s a guide for rewilding our humanity in an age of spiritual flatness. We explore how Blake saw the collapse of cultural imagination coming 200 years ago, offering us a way out of what Mark calls the “narrow deadening” of modern life. Blake’s answer isn’t to retreat from the world, but to cultivate what he calls “innocence”—not naivety, but a kind of perceptual openness that can see angels, spirits, and the infinite in a grain of sand. We talk about his critique of the mechanistic worldview, his understanding of imagination as something that has us rather than something we have, and his deeply orthodox yet mystical Christianity that treats Jesus as the imagination itself. Mark shows us how Blake’s “hermeneutics of energy” offers a different way of relating to money, love, death, and the divine—one that moves from possession to participation, from control to collaboration with the creative force of reality itself.

Mark Vernon is a scholar, psychotherapist, and public intellectual who bridges the worlds of ancient wisdom and contemporary life. He works as a psychotherapist while writing extensively about philosophy, spirituality, and the intersection of psychological insight with religious tradition. Vernon has authored numerous books exploring figures like Plato, Dante, and most recently William Blake, approaching these thinkers not as historical curiosities but as living guides for navigating modern challenges. His work is characterized by a commitment to taking seriously the mystical and visionary dimensions of human experience, drawing from his background in both academic study (including a physics degree) and therapeutic practice. Based in South London, Vernon regularly contributes to public discourse through writing, speaking, and media appearances, offering what he calls a “porous” approach to wisdom traditions that remains rooted in particular lineages while open to insights from multiple sources. His latest book Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination presents William Blake as a prophet of re-enchantment for our disenchanted age. You can check out his previous visit to the podcast here.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Bo and I dove deep into onto-theology after he texted me wanting to explore its “upside” – which led to a sprawling conversation about everything from James Dobson’s recent death and its impact on evangelical parenting, to Taylor Swift’s engagement, to my chickens interrupting the show. We unpacked how onto-theology (the problematic conflation of Being itself with a supreme being) actually offers important critiques of theological overconfidence, exploring how thinkers like Caputo and Westphal use Heidegger’s insights differently. Along the way, we wrestled with whether faith can maintain intellectual integrity in a post-Enlightenment world, discussed the violence embedded in certain models of divine sovereignty and parenting, and considered how the ontological difference between Being and beings challenges our theological certainty. Plus, I confessed to Bo about a wild Heidegger dream involving cartoon beer logos, and we plan future episodes on contemporary worship songs and a live Zoom chat with our regular listeners

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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I got an email from a retired university chaplain who’d hit a wall – after decades of ministry, he felt so culturally alienated from undergrad students that he didn’t think he could do the job anymore. It made me think about my friend Nicole Torbitzky, who serves as both philosophy professor and university chaplain at Lindenwood University in Missouri. We dove into how she navigates the shifting religious landscape on campus, from students deconstructing their faith to the rise of the “nones,” and what it looks like to facilitate interfaith dialogue when half your student body reports no religious affiliation. Nicole shares how she brings together student leaders from different faith traditions, handles the tension between Christian nationalism and Jesus’s actual teachings, and creates spaces where people can find common ground across difference. We also explored how the burden of meaning-making has shifted from tradition to the individual in late modernity, and what that means for campus ministry in an increasingly fragmented culture.

Nichole Torbitzky is an Associate Professor in the Religion Department and University Chaplain at Lindenwood University. As a theologian, philosopher, and chaplain, she works to bridge religion, ethics, and process thought across the University. She teaches a diverse range of courses spanning religious studies and philosophy, including World Religions, African American Religions, Christian Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and Introducing Judaism.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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What if everything we think we know about trauma and healing is backwards? Today I’m talking with Aizaiah Young about his incredible new book “Trauma and Renewal” and honestly, this conversation blew me away. Isaiah survived a near-death motorcycle accident right after passing his PhD comprehensive exams (talk about terrible timing), and during a 16-hour surgery, he had this profound mystical encounter with Jesus that completely reshaped how he thinks about transformation. But here’s the thing – this isn’t some individualistic “I found healing and so can you” story. Instead, Aizaiah argues that real healing is relational, communal, and intercultural, and he’s doing something really brave by including his parents’ voices throughout the book as they process this traumatic journey together. We dive deep into contemplative tradition, Internal Family Systems therapy, the vision he had of sitting in silence by a river with Jesus (who apparently has a great sense of humor), and how the whole Western approach to selfhood might be fundamentally missing the point. Isaiah’s working at the ?Collegeville Institute ?now with the Benedictines, and if you want to meet him in person, he’ll be hanging out with us at ?Theology Beer Camp? this October in St. Paul. This is one of those conversations that stays with you.

Aizaiah G. Yong is an ordained pentecostal Christian minister and practical theologian who has served in religious and higher education leadership for over a decade devoting his energy to healing and advocacy work that centers QTBIPOC communities. His recent book, ?Multiracial Cosmotheadrism: a Practical Theology of Multiracial Experiences?, received the internationally acclaimed 2022 Raimon Panikkar Prize.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this episode, Tim Whitaker from the New Evangelical joined me for one of those sprawling conversations that somehow manages to connect Christian nationalism, the Democratic Party’s moral cowardice, process theology, and whether buying burritos on payment plans signals the end of civilization. We started with our upcoming “God of Justice” class and quickly dove into the bewildering reality of watching people worship a brown-skinned immigrant named Jesus on Sunday, then cheer for the deportation of brown-skinned immigrants on Monday. Tim shared his jarring experience at the DNC, where he found himself more aligned with the leftist protesters outside than the military-industrial complex celebration inside, while I vented about Democratic senators who can’t figure out why state-run grocery stores aren’t communist plots. We wrestled with that familiar ex-evangelical dilemma of trying not to recreate the same purity culture dynamics we escaped from, just with new villains and shibboleths. The whole thing was anchored by this persistent question that haunts anyone trying to follow Christ in empire: where exactly is God when the people wearing Jesus name tags are the ones building alligator moats, and the politicians who should know better are too bought off to acknowledge that maybe poor people deserve vegetables?

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What if everything you thought you knew about why evangelical Christians became politically active was completely wrong? Today I sit down with one of America’s greatest historians of religion, Randall Balmer, to do some serious myth-busting. We dive deep into what Balmer calls “the abortion myth” – the widely believed but false story that evangelicals mobilized politically in the 1970s over Roe v. Wade. The real origin story? It’s much more uncomfortable – it was actually about defending racial segregation in Christian schools when the IRS threatened their tax-exempt status. Balmer takes us through this hidden history he discovered firsthand at a 1990 gathering of religious right leaders, where architect Paul Weyrich admitted abortion “had nothing to do with” their political mobilization. We trace how a religious community that once championed prison reform, women’s rights, and abolition transformed into today’s Christian nationalist movement, and explore what this means for the future of American religion. From Jimmy Carter to Donald Trump, from the Jesus movement to Project 2025, this conversation reveals how evangelicalism lost its prophetic voice and became, in Balmer’s words, dangerously “worldly.” It’s a sobering but essential look at how we got here – and whether there’s any hope for course correction.

Randall Balmer is one of America’s leading historians of religion and a prominent scholar of evangelicalism. A professor at Dartmouth College, Balmer grew up in the evangelical subculture as the son of a preacher and attended Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School before earning his PhD. His groundbreaking research has challenged conventional narratives about American religious history, most notably exposing what he calls “the abortion myth” – the false claim that evangelicals became politically active in response to Roe v. Wade, when they actually mobilized to defend racial segregation in Christian schools.

Balmer is the author of numerous influential books including Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, God in the White House, and America’s Best Idea: The Separation of Church and State. His work has appeared in major publications and he has been featured on PBS, NPR, and other national media. Known for his meticulous archival research and willingness to challenge his own evangelical community, Balmer argues that today’s religious right represents a dramatic departure from 19th-century evangelicalism’s progressive social activism. Despite his critiques, he maintains hope for a return to what he sees as evangelicalism’s authentic prophetic tradition rooted in care for the marginalized and social justice.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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So I got pulled into this fascinating email exchange with Brian McLaren about Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History, and it turns out there’s this whole crew of organizers and academics who’ve been quietly working with these ideas to rethink everything from social movements to economic theory. My guest Guillermo Bervejillo—who went from being a disillusioned neoclassical economist to writing his dissertation on Chinese imperialism using Karatani’s framework—breaks down this mind-bending approach to history that shifts from Marx’s “modes of production” to “modes of exchange.” We’re talking about how gift-giving nomads, tribute-paying states, commodity markets, and the possibility of free exchange (think: exile Judaism, early Christianity) have shaped literally everything about how power works. It’s one of those conversations where suddenly all these questions you’ve been carrying around about why organizing feels so hard, why capitalism feels so totalizing, and what actual alternatives might look like start clicking into place. Plus, we barely scratched the surface on Jesus, which means we definitely need a follow-up.

You can find the YouTube playlist of videos outlining Karatani’s work here.

Guillermo Bervejillo is an economic geographer and community organizer who bridges critical theory and social movement practice. After earning his PhD in Economic Geography from Ohio State University, where he studied dependency theory and Chinese imperialism through the lens of Kojin Karatani’s modes of exchange framework, Guillermo has dedicated his work to translating complex theoretical insights into tools for grassroots organizing.

Originally trained as a neoclassical economist and former research analyst at the Department of Justice, Guillermo became disillusioned with mainstream economics following the 2011 financial crisis, particularly as it failed to address his lived experience growing up in Latin America amid U.S.-backed military dictatorships. This led him to pursue heterodox approaches to understanding global power dynamics and economic relationships.

Currently working in state policy, Guillermo collaborates with Ayni in Boston, an organization with decades of experience in social movement training and capacity building. He has been instrumental in developing educational materials and workshops that bring Karatani’s revolutionary historical framework to community organizers, movement leaders, and activists across the country. Guillermo is part of a team creating a six-part video series aimed at spreading these ideas to broader audiences working for social transformation.

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What’s up, theology nerds! Today I got to sit down with my longtime friend Tom Oord, who’s in the middle of writing what might be the first ever systematic theology with “love” right there in the title. We dove deep into how systematic theology actually works – you know, the difference between someone like Wayne Grudem who treats the Bible like a collection of proof texts versus Paul Tillich who’s doing this whole apologetic dance with existentialism. Tom’s taking this fascinating approach where he’s putting love at the very center from the get-go, not waiting until chapter 47 to mention it like most systematics do. We talked about how every systematic theology reveals the theologian’s situatedness – whether that’s the parade of white, male, Reformed voices dominating the bestseller lists, or how Tom’s own journey of getting kicked out of evangelical spaces for advocating LGBTQ inclusion shapes his work. The conversation got really good when we dug into the practical stuff too – like how a theology of love has to grapple with Jesus’s either/or between God and mammon, and why the incarnation can’t just be abstract doctrine but has to flood into ethics immediately. Plus, Tom’s doing this wild thing where he’s putting his rough drafts on Substack and letting people tear them apart in real time, which honestly takes more guts than I’d have.

You can follow along Tom’s writing of his systematic theology ?on his SubStack.?

Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is an award-winning author, and he has written or edited more than twenty-five books. Oord directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He won the Outstanding Faculty Award twelve times as a full-time professor and now speaks at institutions across the globe. Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and freedom and relationships for transformation.

Some Previous Tripp & Tom Pods* A Journey of Faith and Integrity * Faith without Certainty * Big God Questions * Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation * the Death of Omnipotence! * Brian McLaren & Thomas Jay Oord: a God Worthy of Love * Process This! * Process Theology QnA * Authority, Atonement, Abortion, and a Big Hug * from Pluriform Love to Divine Revelation * Big God Twitter Takes * Trump is (NOT) a Process Theologian & Other Questions * Thomas Jay Oord wants you to know “God Can’t” * Open and Relational Theology Throwdown * Open and Relational Q&A with Thomas Jay Oord * Why Go Wesleyan?

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Y’all, this was our third live stream for the Democracy in Tension Summit, and boy did we get nerdy! I got Aaron Simmons (the Kierkegaard guru and summit co-pilot) and Matt Segall (our process philosophy friend fresh back from Europe) together to wrestle with Carl Schmitt, Christian nationalism, cosmology, and why the heck a new vision of reality might actually be the most practical response to our political mess. We talked about everything from phenomenology and foam dancing in 1990s England to why Aaron stays Pentecostal in Trump’s America and how Matt found his way back to being “Jesus-ish” in the Bay Area. Aaron keeps wanting to be pragmatic about reaching people where they are, while Matt and I are convinced you can’t fix democracy without a whole new cosmology that includes our non-human neighbors. Plus we got into some real talk about church baggage, process theology versus process philosophy, and why hurricanes sometimes reveal more about genuine community than years of political theory. It’s philosophy, theology, and cultural criticism all mixed up with some good old-fashioned Southern storytelling.

You can join the Democracy in Tension online summit and get access to all the lectures today.

Dr. Matthew Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher who applies process philosophy to various natural and social sciences, including consciousness. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the? California Institute of Integral Studies? in San Francisco, CA.

Make sure you check out ?SubStack Footnotes to Plato,? ?his YouTube channel? and ?recent book?.

Previous Podcasts with Matt

• ?the Meaning Crisis in Process?
• ?Processing the Political?
• ?Cosmology, Consciousness, and Whitehead’s God?.
• ?Science, Religion, Eco-Philosophy, Etheric Imagination, Psychedelic Eucharist, Ecological Crisis and more…?

Aaron Simmons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. You can f??ollow his Substack ‘Philosophy in the Wild.’?

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Well, Ryan Burge is back with a bunch of graphs about the possible Gez Z revival. We ended up spending two and a half hours doing what we do best – meandering through vacation stories about all-inclusive resorts in Mexico, reports on Tripp’s sneaky chickens, and somehow ending up talking about Prince documentaries and Epstein files. We covered the supposed “Gen Z revival” (spoiler alert: Ryan’s data says it’s not happening), dove deep into some philosophical sociology about why people are leaving religion, and I went on my usual tangents about Charles Taylor and Hartmut Rosa, while Ryan kept bringing us back to earth with actual numbers. We also spent way too much time discussing whether teenagers will ever figure out how to ask someone on a date without an app, why Ted Cruz’s theology is embarrassingly bad, and how both sides of the political aisle are united in their moral outrage over protecting children – whether that’s the Epstein stuff or what’s happening in Palestine. Classic Friday afternoon with Ryan: equal parts edifying and entertaining, heavy on the asides, and somehow we managed to squeeze in some actual graphs about belief in God and church attendance between stories about Shaq gummies and complaints about student loans.

Want the full conversation? This is just a taste of what we covered in over two hours of completely unhinged discussion. If you’re a member of either ??Graphs About Religion (Ryan’s substack)?? or ??Process This (mine)??, you get access to the entire unedited conversation, plus invitations to join us live for future streams where things get even more zesty – and yes, I’m using that word in the Whitehead sense, not the Gen Z sense.

Dr. Ryan Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author or co-author of four books including The Nones, The American Religious Landscape, and The Great Dechurching. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and POLITICO. He has also appeared on 60 Minutes, where Anderson Cooper called him, “one of the leading data analysts of religion and politics in the United States.” He was a pastor of an American Baptist Church for over seventeen years. He is currently working on “Making Meaning in a Post-Religious America” – funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Previous Visits from Ryan Burge

• The 2024 Election & Religion Post-Mortem
• Distrust & Denominations
• Trust, Religion, & a Functioning Democracy
• What it’s like to close a church
• The Future of Christian Education & Ministry in Charts
• The Sky is Falling & the Charts are Popping!
• Graphs about Religion & Politics w/ Spicy Banter
• a Year in Religion (in Graphs)
• Evangelical Jews, Educated Church-Goers, & other bits of dizzying data
• 5 Religion Graphs w/ a side of Hot Takes
• Myths about Religion & Politics

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together theology nerds and craft beer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Another epic live stream from our ?Democracy in Tension summit?! Aaron Simmons and I dive deep with theologian and community organizer Aaron Staufer about how sacred values and vulnerability shape our political life together. We wrestle with the big questions y’all have been sending in – can mainline churches recover a compelling sense of the sacred while staying committed to critical thinking? How do we navigate prophetic witness without falling into the therapeutic Christianity trap? And why does good theology always seem to come with absolutely terrible music? Aaron drops some serious wisdom about radical democracy, relational power, and why humans are lovers who care deeply about things. We get into the weeds about vulnerability, value, organizing, and whether multiculturalism can actually work in practice. Plus, we tackle the hard stuff – what happens when someone’s sacred values make them unreasonable participants in democracy? It’s theology, politics, philosophy, and a healthy dose of complaining about boring mainline Protestant worship. Grab your favorite beverage and settle in for some real talk about faith, power, and building beloved community.

You can join the Democracy in Tensiononline summit and get access to all the lectures today.

Aaron Simmons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. You can follow his Substack ‘Philosophy in the Wild.’

Aaron Stauffer is the Director of Online Learning and Associate Director of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.

Previous Episodes with Simmons

• From Pit Elders to Political Theology: Making Sense of Democratic Breakdown
• The Paradox of Democracy & What Comes Next
• A Philosopher & Ethicist Process This Election (Aaron & Kevin)
• The Courage to Be 15 w/ Elgin Fuller & Aaron Simmons
• Aaron Simmons: Camping with Kierkegaard
• Faith After Deconstruction
• Philosophy & the Experience of God
• Do I Have a Soul? & other cultural preferences in bold.
• Off-Road Religion & Pandemic Philosophizing

Previous Episodes with Staufer

• The Future of Faith & Justice
• Theology for Action

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.FaithAndPolitics.net

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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What’s up Theology Nerds! We’re diving deep into one of the most powerful sessions from last year’s ?Theology Beer Camp? in Denver – a conversation that honestly left me speechless. Brian McLaren kicks us off with a gut-punch keynote on ecological crisis and the power of lament that’ll challenge everything you think you know about faith in our current moment. Then Jacob Erickson responds with some brilliant eco-theological insights that had the room scribbling notes like crazy. We’re talking about overshoot, oligarchy, the impotence of religion, and what it looks like to let nature save us instead of the other way around. Plus, there’s this incredible discussion about “rebellious mourning” that I’m still pondering. Fair warning – this is raw, honest, and necessary conversation about faith in the face of climate crisis. And hey, if this gets you fired up, there are still about 100 tickets left for ?Theology Beer Camp 2025? in St. Paul this October. Trust me, you don’t want to miss what we’re cooking up this year!

UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS – ?The God of Justice: Where Ancient Wisdom Meets Contemporary Longing?

This transformative online class brings together distinguished scholars from biblical studies, theology, history, and faith leadership to offer exactly what our moment demands: the rich, textured wisdom of multiple academic disciplines speaking into our contemporary quest for justice. Here you’ll discover how ancient texts illuminate modern struggles, how theological reflection deepens social action, and how historical understanding opens new possibilities for faithful engagement with our world’s brokenness and beauty. Join John Dominic Crossan, Peter Enns, Casey Sigmon, Aizaiah Yong, & Malcolm Foley

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at ??????????www.FaithAndPolitics.net?

Dr. Jacob J. Erickson is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics in the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin. A constructive theologian and theological ethicist, Erickson writes to evoke an ecotheology of planetary conviviality–the playful and just cherishing of life together–in the midst of current ecological crises, ecological injustice, emerging perspectives in the wake of global warming, and new challenges in energy production.

Previous Episodes with Dr. Erickson

• Emerging Trends in Theology & Ethics
• The Becoming of a Lutheran Queer Eco-Process Theologian from North Dakota
• a Theopoetics of the Earth
• Apocalyptic #ProcessParty with Catherine Keller & Jacob Erickson

Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English
teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is a faculty member of The Living Schooland podcaster with Learning How to See, which are part of the Center for Action and Contemplation. He is also an Auburn Senior Fellow and works closely with the Wild Goose Festival, the Fair Food Program, Vote Common Good, and Progressive Christianity. His recent projects include an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story and The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey, and Faith After Doubt. His newest book is Do I Stay Christian? and we are going to read it together.

Previous Episodes with Brian* Life After Doom * Should I Stay Christian if I Don’t Believe? * a God Worthy of Love * Saying Yes to Christianity * Questioning Christianity * Do I Stay Christian? * God – Pray – Driscoll * Faith Beyond Fear in an Age of Terror * 20 Years of Religious Decline * A New Kind of Road Trip * Parenting for the Common Good * We need a new story! Avoiding spiritual and planetary collapse * Brian McLaren & Pando Populus

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

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Wow, what a wild ride this turned out to be! Bo and I got into the religious landscape after I shared this crazy sticky note revelation I had at the cigar lounge – connecting Jeffrey Epstein conspiracies and Palestine through the lens of basic human decency and institutional trust. We ended up unpacking everything from why young people are abandoning religion (spoiler: it’s not just youthful rebellion) to the difference between being “spiritual but not religious” versus actual consumer spirituality. Bo dropped some brilliant insights about how we’re hardwired for religious behavior but living in a post-religious age where belief has become just another consumer choice. Plus, we tackled a mountain of listener questions about mega churches, the future of mainline denominations, and whether millennials will ever come back to organized religion. Honestly, between Bo’s recent religious trauma research, my flooding basement, and our shared frustration with reductive atheists who claim love isn’t real, this felt more like group therapy than theology. But hey, that’s what makes good conversation!

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them? The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Hey y’all, so this was our first live stream kicking off this online democracy summit we’re doing – basically a bunch of us nerds getting together to wrestle with why everything seems to be falling apart politically and what the hell we’re supposed to do about it. Kevin Carnahan and Aaron Simmons joined me to dig into Kevin’s lecture about Christian citizenship, which traces this fascinating line from Jesus through Augustine to Luther to Bonhoeffer, showing how Christianity actually offers an alternative to totalitarianism rather than supporting it. We got into some pretty heated but friendly disagreement about whether you can have real democracy without religious reasons motivating people (Kevin’s take) versus whether we need to secularize our arguments to avoid the fundamentalist trap (Aaron’s pushback). The whole thing was this beautiful mess of trying to figure out how to love your MAGA neighbor while also maybe needing to put them in timeout, whether God prevents totalitarianism or enables it, and why Christians are just now talking about Palestine when they should’ve been screaming about it for months. Classic HBC nerdy chaos with some actual wisdom mixed in.

Aaron Simmons is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University. You can follow his Substack ‘Philosophy in the Wild.’

*Kevin Carnahan* is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO.

Previous Episodes with Aaron

• From Pit Elders to Political Theology: Making Sense of Democratic Breakdown
• The Paradox of Democracy & What Comes Next
• A Philosopher & Ethicist Process This Election (Aaron & Kevin)
• Moral Clarity & the Unesay Conscience (Kevin)
• The Courage to Be 15 w/ Elgin Fuller & Aaron Simmons
• Aaron Simmons: Camping with Kierkegaard
• Faith After Deconstruction
• Philosophy & the Experience of God
• Do I Have a Soul? & other cultural preferences in bold.
• Off-Road Religion & Pandemic Philosophizing

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them?The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this episode, I am joined by Josh Scott, a minister at ?GracePointe Church ?in Nashville and author of the new book ?Parables: Putting Jesus Stories in Their Place?. We discuss the book’s exploration of Jesus’ parables, focusing on their historical context and contemporary relevance. Josh shares insights into how these parables challenge both ancient and modern assumptions about power, empire, and community. We also talk about the unique nature of ?GracePointe Church?, its mission to be a safe space for those questioning their faith, and the importance of community in navigating theological and existential questions. Additionally, they highlight the role of the ?Post-Evangelical Collective? in connecting faith leaders and congregations who seek to foster more inclusive and justice-oriented communities.

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them?The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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Ethicist and organizer Dr. Aaron Staufer returns to the podcast to tackle one of the most pressing questions facing progressive Christianity today: how do we move from feeling overwhelmed and powerless to actually building meaningful change in our communities? Aaron brings his experience as both a theologian and organizer to help us understand why mainline Protestantism has struggled to find its public voice, and more importantly, what we can do about it. We delve into the historical trajectory from the social gospel movement to today’s challenges, exploring why building strong community relationships is essential for any genuine social change, and discussing how initiatives like Solidarity Circles are helping faith leaders develop the skills they need for movement work. This conversation gets into the weeds of democratic practice, theological imagination, and the practical work of organizing—all while trying to figure out how the church can be a force for justice in an increasingly complex world.

In the conversation, we discussed the decline of mainline Protestant public witness, moving beyond charity; lessons from the Social Gospel movement; the crisis in theological education; why theology matters; practical strategies for congregations; Christianity’s moral silence on Palestine; class analysis; and organizing.

Aaron Stauffer is the Director of Online Learning and Associate Director of the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. He earned his PhD in social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and has organized with the Industrial Areas Foundation in San Antonio, Texas and Religions for Peace. His work has appeared in Tikkun, Sojourners, The Other Journal, Political Theology, and CrossCurrents, as well as other scholarly and popular publications. You can check out his previous visit to the podcast – Theology for Action.

Solidarity Circles is the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion & Justice’s flagship leadership cohort for clergy, faith leaders, and grassroots organizers who want to build the solidarity economy—not just preach about it.What’s a Solidarity Circle? A virtual, 9-month peer network* that meets for 90-minute Zoom sessions each month with asynchronous coursework, plus one-on-one coaching and a private online space to keep the conversation rolling. * Grounded in liberating theology, power analysis, and community-organizing practice, each Circle can help you craft a concrete project in your own community—anything from a worker-owned childcare co-op to a sermon series on just economics.

What you’ll get Three themed units / nine modules (video + readings) on: 1. What’s wrong with our economy & theology—what alternatives exist? 2. Cooperative & solidarity-economy basics. 3. Power analysis, deep listening, and storytelling for change. * Relationship-rich coaching: facilitators walk with you from big idea to on-the-ground experiment. * A cross-movement network of peers* tackling similar challenges—say goodbye to that “I’m doing this alone” feeling.

For information & an application to the program, head over here.ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them?The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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So Andy and I just got back from this wild? week in Berlin where we taught 25 folks about Bonhoeffer right there in his actual house? – like, we’re sitting in his bedroom, walking the same streets, the whole deal. And wow, this trip was different from the others because everyone kept asking the question that used to make me roll my eyes: “Is this our Bonhoeffer moment?” But after spending time with clergy who are dealing with ICE raids in their neighborhoods and congregations split over whether you can even mention certain realities from the pulpit, I’m not giggling at the Protestant saint thing anymore. We delved into the concrete messiness of what it meant for Niemöller and his congregation actually to resist, not just talk about it, and how Bonhoeffer’s vision of a religionless Christianity might help us think through what happens when the entire Christian infrastructure starts to crumble. Plus, we got into some heavy stuff about whether the ethical gifts Christianity gave to Western civilization – you know, humanism, universalism, caring about the weak – can actually survive without the ritualistic and institutional foundations, or if we’re just headed for some new form of authoritarianism. Oh, and somehow we ended up talking about Moltmann raw-dogging flights and the theological significance of Instagram memes, because that’s apparently where we are now.

You can find INFO about the trip here. If you want an email when we announce future trips, let us know by emailing classinfo @ homebrewedchristianity DOT com.

Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, USA. He writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture, and younger generations. Some of his most recent books are The Congregation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2021), The End of Youth Ministry? (Baker, 2020), The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God (Baker, 2019), Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2017), and Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies: Youth Ministry in the Age of Science (Fortress Press, 2018). Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies.

Previous Visits with Andy Root* Incarnation as Resistance * Life Together in Turmoil & Bonhoeffer’s Experiment in Community * Resonance in an Accelerated Age * Secular Mysticism & Identity Politics * the Church after Innovation * Churches and the Crisis of Decline * Acceleration, Resonance, & the Counting Crows * Ministry in a Secular Age * Christopraxis with Andy Root * Faith Formation in a Secular Age * the Promise of Despair

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them? The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

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In this conversation, I got to catch up with my friend Jacob Erickson, who’s doing some inspiring work at Trinity College Dublin, where they’ve just launched a new Master’s in Theology and Social Justice. What struck me most was how Jake and his colleagues are embodying this broader transformation happening in theological education – moving beyond those traditional disciplinary boundaries to create genuinely interdisciplinary spaces where theology isn’t just talking about other fields, but actually thinking with scientists, activists, and practitioners. We dug into how this shift has happened over the last couple decades – from philosophers bracketing God to study religion as a phenomenon, to theologians like Tillich doing theology of culture, to the changing student body that’s bringing questions that don’t fit neatly into traditional confessional boxes. Jake’s insights about wisdom versus knowledge really hit home – how religious traditions offer this “porous knowledge” that comes with demands and can’t be separated from formation and embodiment. And I loved hearing about his work with plant studies and how hanging out with botanists and mycologists at Harvard Divinity School is opening up new ways of thinking about everything from Christology to what it means to be entangled with other creatures. It’s exactly the kind of risky, playful, boundary-crossing work that makes theology come alive.

Dr. Jacob J. Erickson is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics in the School of Religion, Theology, and Peace Studies at Trinity College Dublin. A constructive theologian and theological ethicist, Erickson writes to evoke an ecotheology of planetary conviviality–the playful and just cherishing of life together–in the midst of current ecological crises, ecological injustice, emerging perspectives in the wake of global warming, and new challenges in energy production.

Previous Episodes with Dr. Erickson

• ?The Becoming of a Lutheran Queer Eco-Process Theologian from North Dakota?
• ?a Theopoetics of the Earth?
• ?Apocalyptic #ProcessParty with Catherine Keller & Jacob Erickson?

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them? The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.

Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.

View Details

What’s up Theology Nerds! We’re back from vacation and home renovations with a special Bible bonanza episode that’s equal parts hilarious and thought-provoking. Bo and I are tackling the issue of mandatory Bible reading in schools by collecting suggestions from listeners about which verses should be read if we’re going down this road. We got calls from Finland to Britain with everything from Jesus’s upside-down teachings about greatness through service, to some truly awkward Old Testament passages that definitely won’t make it past the school board. Along the way we dive into why pulling random Bible verses out of context is like grabbing ingredients from the fridge and calling it a meal, discuss how publishers shape our reading through chapter headings, and explore what it might actually look like if we took Jesus’s radical teachings seriously. Plus Bo gets trapped in his studio when his door handle breaks, I’m surrounded by dancing chickens, and we somehow end up talking about whether Christianity’s future is mystical or nonexistent. It’s theology, humor, and some surprisingly deep insights about scripture, power, and what we’re really afraid of when we talk about moral decline.

ONLINE SUMMIT: Democracy in Tension – NAVIGATING THE INTERLOCKING CRISES OF DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION

Democracy today faces profound challenges – polarization, inequality, populist authoritarianism, and widespread cynicism are eroding the foundations of democratic life. Yet, what if democracy’s greatest strength lies not in eliminating these tensions, but in productively embracing them? The summit will navigate the complex terrain between political equality and social justice, liberal freedom and democratic sovereignty, and ethical demands and political action. Through interactive sessions, participants will explore how to transform antagonistic enemies into agonistic adversaries, confront the nihilism threatening our democratic imagination, and cultivate spaces for genuine political discourse across differences.

As always, the class is donation-based, including 0. INFO & Sign-Up at www.HomebrewedClasses.com

Theology Beer Camp is a unique three-day conference that brings together of theology nerds and craftbeer for a blend of intellectual engagement, community building, and fun. This event features a lineup of well-known podcasters, scholars, and theology enthusiasts who come together to “nerd out” on theological topics while enjoying loads of fun activities. Guests this year include John Dominic Crossan, Kelly Brown Douglas, Philip Clayton, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Jeffery Pugh, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Andy Root, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Noreen Herzfeld, Reggie Williams, Casper ter Kuile, and more! Get info and tickets here.