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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. You can watch the video on YouTube 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. 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. The book at the center of this conversation is What Is Political Theology?, 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. Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 Divas on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. 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 Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. 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 Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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! You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do we counter narratives of division with justice and care? In marking Pride & Father's Day, Hayley discusses how we can look to the fluid and embodied nature of the Holy Spirit to guide us in participating in the world. (Image from Homebrewed Christianity's Rediscovering the Spirit)Join our live chat! https://discord.gg/MNXJSM8New here? http://brownlinechurch.org/connectResources http://brownlinechurch.org/resourcesLinkTree https://linktr.ee/brownlinechurch Donate http://brownlinechurch.org/donate
How do we counter narratives of division with justice and care? In marking Pride & Father's Day, Hayley discusses how we can look to the fluid and embodied nature of the Holy Spirit to guide us in participating in the world. (Image from Homebrewed Christianity's Rediscovering the Spirit)Join our live chat! https://discord.gg/MNXJSM8New here? http://brownlinechurch.org/connectResources http://brownlinechurch.org/resourcesLinkTree https://linktr.ee/brownlinechurch Donate http://brownlinechurch.org/donate
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. 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. Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH this conversation on YouTube Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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. 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade is Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary. 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. Previous Podcast Visits Include: Faith During an Ecological Collapse and Preaching in a time of Crisis from Corona to Climate 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 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. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary. Previous podcast visits with Andy include: 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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp 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 75,000 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 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. Don't wait. → TheologyBeer.Camp JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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 You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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 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. Don't wait. → TheologyBeer.Camp JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. 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 THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. The class lives at homebrewedclasses.com. JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. JOIN THE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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 Throwdown that 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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Kevin Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri.
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. a Few 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 You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
Okay, I genuinely don't know how many times Tom Oord has been on this podcasttwenty 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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. You can WATCH the lecture and slides here. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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 resurrection as 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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! 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. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
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. Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City! Panel Members Kelly Brown Douglas is Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral. Juan Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches Black religion, race, religion, and film. Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society and Chair of African American Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Adam Clark is Professor of Theology and Director of Civic Engagement at Xavier University. 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. UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them. This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now. Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community are included.
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. 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? 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 & Thecla Ask JC Anything 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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 . Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. 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? 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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. 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. Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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. Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this second live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom works 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. 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. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this audio essay from my SubStack ,Process This, 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. Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! 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? This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has 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 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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