Homebrewed Christianity

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!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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!</str

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 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 question

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 <a href="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/2026/05/09/sacred-values-and-street-power-the-theolog

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 pe

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</

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 <a href="https://

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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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 C

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 edit

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? Th

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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗<a href="https://homebrewedchristianity.lpages.co/theol

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 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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠⁠⁠ This podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Homebrewed Christianity ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠production. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠<strong

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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠⁠ This po

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 Reverd

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. 📱 ⁠TikTok⁠:  📸 ⁠Instagram⁠: 📬 ⁠Substack⁠ Previous Episodes with Kevin ⁠Tra

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</s

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 include

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

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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠⁠⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠⁠⁠</

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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠⁠ Sign

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. 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠ This podcast is a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Homebrewed Christianity ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠production. Follow ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠the Homebrewed Christianity⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, <a href="https://followthepodcas

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. 📅 Starts Tuesday, April 14 | 1pm ET 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗⁠ Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com⁠ ⁠ John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely reg

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, l

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 Nie

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 t

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. <a href="https://homebrewedchristianity.lpages.co/jesus-in-galile

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 pa

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

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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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? ⁠⁠

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,

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 b

In this first live Q that coinage was the only real mass media of antiquity; that nonviolent resistance was invented — not borrowed — in first-century Judea; and that if you want to understand what an autocrat is planning, read very carefully what the autocrat accuses his opponents of. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of conversation I look forward to all year. ⁠If you want in on the rest of the series — the lectures, the live Q&As, and the full archive — head to CrossanClass.com⁠. ⁠You can WATCH the conversation 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 Minneol

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

Philosopher and religion scholar Tad DeLay (author of Future of Denial) drops a guest essay on us this week, and it's a barn-burner. Tad brings together Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Lacan, Althusser, and Adorno — yeah, the whole squad — to lay out a series of theses on how reactionary consciousness actually works, from repressed sexuality to theological cover stories for raw materialism. He makes the case that white evangelicalism is basically a half-century-old improvisation around whiteness and anticommunism, and that Trumpism is its perfected form — an ecumenical fascism where confessing the dear leader functions like a sinner's prayer. Along the way he unpacks Frank Wilhoit's devastating one-line definition of conservatism, explains why charging evangelicals with hypocrisy is a category error (they simply don't care what they believe), and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to show how shame, guilt, and anxiety keep the whole machine running. Fair warning: Tad doesn't let liberals off the hook either — the essay's conclusion forces all of us to sit with the moral compromises we've made and what it means to keep breathing in hell. Tad DeLay, PhD is a philosopher, religion scholar, and interdisciplinary critical theorist. He has written four books, including his latest, Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change. He is a philosophy professor and lives in Grand Rapids. ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

We lost a giant. Reverend Jesse Jackson has passed away, and I wanted to share this conversation we had with him back during lockdown in 2020 as part of the Black Theology reading group Adam Clark and I were running with over 3,000 people. We were joined by Grace Ji-Sun Kim, who edited a collection of Jackson's sermons and speeches called Keeping Hope Alive, and the Reverend himself showed up and gave us a masterclass in what it looks like when theology breaks out of its bubble — and that bubble image is the thing that'll stick with you. Jackson talked about growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, where the entire Black community lived behind walls that white people set up for exploitation, and how your theology can either reinforce the bubble or blow it apart. He drew a sharp line between piety — behaving, adjusting, staying safe — and power, which is what happens when you follow a Jesus who challenges domination systems instead of one who follows you to the back of the bus. He gave us the real history of the movement, from Rosa Parks and Emmett Till to Fannie Lou Hamer and Daisy Bates, made a clear-eyed and probably controversial distinction between King and Malcolm — arguing Malcolm never really broke out of the bubble while King changed actual public policy — and told the origin story of both "I Am Somebody" and "Keep Hope Alive." He talked about being one of the first Black ministers to publicly embrace the LGBTQ community, about internationalizing Black identity from "Black" to "African American," and about why Obery Hendricks' The Politics of Jesus changed how he saw Christ. Grace brought the warmth and the theological framing, Adam brought the hard questions about Kwame Ture and SNCC, and I mostly just sat there grateful to be in the room with a man who spent his entire life pulling down walls so the sun could get in. 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 u

The conflict between science and religion? Turns out it's mostly a myth perpetuated by a handful of really loud voices on both sides. Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund has spent 15 years using actual social science to study what scientists and religious people really think about each other, and the results are surprising: nearly half of elite scientists maintain religious commitments, most aren't hostile to faith communities, and there are way more varieties of atheism than you'd think (including "religious atheists" who attend church and pray). We dive into her research on "spiritual entrepreneurs," the eight shared values between science and religion (yeah, doubt is on the list for both), what went wrong during COVID, and why the science-religion conflict narrative is particularly American and Western. Plus, we get super practical about what churches can actually do—spoiler: it starts with honoring the scientists already sitting in your pews. This conversation challenged my assumptions, gave me hope, and reminded me that the people doing the real work are way more interesting than the stereotypes suggest. You can WATCH this conversation on YouTube Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund is the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, where she directs the Religion and Public Life Program. A leading scholar in the sociology of science and religion, she has conducted groundbreaking research surveying over 15,000 scientists and interviewing nearly 1,000 across eight countries to understand how scientific and religious communities actually relate to each other. Her books include Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think, Varieties of Atheism in Science (with David Johnson), Why Science and Faith Need Each Other, and Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion. Her work challenges popular stereotypes, revealing the complex and often collaborative relationship between science and faith—and offering practical wisdom for churches, scientists, and anyone trying to hold these worlds together. UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? <a href="https://homebrewedchristianity

My friend and filmmaker Sarey Concepción and I got to sit down with Justin Lin — yeah, that Justin Lin, the Fast and Furious guy — but this time he's not racing cars, he's exploring the too-fast-too-furious side of evangelical missions gone to the extreme. His new film Last Days tells the story of John Chau, the young American missionary who was killed trying to bring the gospel to the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe off the coast of India. If you remember, two years ago we screened the documentary about this story at Theology Beer Camp, and this is a totally different angle — a scripted Hollywood film from an outsider to Christianity who read the news story, had the same eye-roll most of us did, and then did what good artists do: made something to understand what he couldn't dismiss. What's remarkable is that Justin took the time to get to know the diversity within evangelicalism, so you get characters ranging from the hardcore adventure missionaries who are basically Carmen San Diego with Bibles, to John's immigrant father wrestling with how his roughest years shaped his son's path, to a parallel storyline with an Indian police officer whose own experience with religion's harm makes her a mirror image of John's conviction. It's a film about faith without being a faith-based film — it doesn't mock John or martyrize him — and it creates this cognitive empathy where you get to sit with the logic that says if people really are going to hell, why wouldn't you risk everything? Sarey and I unpack the father-son dynamics, the theological engine of unreached people groups and unlocking the second coming, those surprisingly sexy Australian missionaries, and why the Voyage of the Dawn Treader might be the most spiritually dangerous book in the Narnia series. We also may have invented the entire backstory of the Presbyterian minister with a Tesla who stole someone's missionary girlfriend, and honestly, Justin should use it for the sequel. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube ⁠⁠⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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

I don't remember who first told me to read Yanis Varoufakis's Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, but whoever you are—thank you and also how dare you. This book broke something in my brain, in that good way where you realize the map you've been using doesn't match the territory anymore and now you have to rethink everything. Varoufakis isn't a theologian, but reading him felt like encountering a prophetic voice—someone naming the powers and principalities of our moment with a clarity that made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. So what you're about to read isn't exactly a book review. It's more like the stuff that ran through my head while I was reading—the connections I couldn't stop making to our faith, our politics, our souls. I kept thinking about Paul's language of powers and principalities. I kept thinking about the psalmist's warning against idols. I kept thinking about Jesus flipping tables in the temple, and wondering what he'd do with an algorithm. Varoufakis gave me a new vocabulary for something I'd been feeling but couldn't name: the sense that we've crossed into a new kind of unfreedom, one that's less about chains on our bodies and more about the curation of our desires. Consider this an invitation. Read the book. Argue with it. Let it mess with you. And then let's figure out together what faithfulness looks like when the lords live in the cloud. ⁠⁠You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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-b

This is an audio essay from my Substack, Process This. Look, I wasn't planning to write 5,000 words on Steve Bannon, but then he goes on his podcast and announces that ICE—the same agency that just shot two American citizens in Minneapolis—is going to "surround the polls" in November, and I couldn't help myself. So I went back to Reinhold Niebuhr's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, where he divided the political world into naive idealists who think reason and dialogue will save us, and moral cynics who understand power but recognize no law beyond their own will. Turns out Niebuhr basically wrote Bannon's biography eighty years early. This essay traces how Bannon evolved from "flooding the zone with shit" to proposing armed federal agents at polling places—and why liberals kept bringing fact-checks to a knife fight. Niebuhr called the children of darkness "wise" because they understand self-interest, but he also called them "evil" because they serve no good beyond domination. The question he leaves us with is whether the children of light can get wise without losing their souls. Spoiler: he doesn't promise we win. PS. I was in the middle of writing a completely different essay on Niebuhr before Bannon interrupted me. I loved re-reading The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness⁠ recently, and it's way too timely. ⁠You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.⁠⁠ ⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠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-ba

What happens when our obsession with being better than everyone else destroys both who we are and how we relate to each other? Dr. Miroslav Volf joins us to talk about his new book The Cost of Ambition and why America's comparison culture, achievement addiction, and hardening tribal identities are setting us up for something dangerous. Volf witnessed neighbors turn on neighbors during the Yugoslav wars, and he's seeing the warning signs again—right here, right now. We dive into how striving for superiority traps us in an unstable cycle of pride and inferiority, why our worth can't be based on achievement, and what it means to trust in our naked humanity as the site of God's gift rather than our endless performance metrics. From social media's algorithmic comparison engines to the terror of trusting Jesus to raise our kids, this conversation cuts deep into the spiritual crisis of modern life and points toward a different way—one grounded in the self-giving love of Christ rather than the desperate scramble to stay on top. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia, he lived through the Yugoslav wars—an experience that profoundly shaped his theological work on reconciliation, identity, and belonging. He is the author of numerous influential books including Exclusion and Embrace, Free of Charge, and his newest works The Cost of Ambition and Glimmerings (co-authored with poet Christian Wiman). Widely recognized as one of the world's most respected theologians, Volf's work bridges the academy and the church, helping Christians reflect on faith, public life, and what it means to follow Christ in fractured times. You can listen to our previous conversation on the podcast here: Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump. UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? <a href="https://homebrewedchristianity.l

Friends, this week we're diving into something that's been eating at me for a while now—how the architects of Christian nationalism have had the audacity to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. I'm talking about Project 2025 invoking "costly grace" as if Bonhoeffer wasn't writing about them. Here's the thing: when Bonhoeffer penned those famous words in 1937, he wasn't crafting a devotional for suburban book clubs—he was running an illegal seminary under Nazi surveillance, training pastors who were forfeiting their careers, their pensions, and their safety to follow Jesus instead of the Führer. The German Christians of his day fused faith with national identity, blessed political power, and demanded loyalty to a strongman who promised to make their country great again. Sound familiar? The brutal irony is that those who now quote Bonhoeffer are functionally aligned with the very forces he resisted—they're the German Christians quoting the Confessing Church, and that's about as theologically obtuse as Caesar celebrating the cross while forgetting he's the one who put Jesus on it. Costly grace is still available, y'all—it just actually has to cost something. ⁠Read the full essay and subscribe for more at my SubStack, Process This⁠ ⁠You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.⁠ Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠⁠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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible - Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we're a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as "kin-dom" - returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hundreds of thousands of generations, and now we're living in a hyper-civilized world where the devil looks primitive compared to OpenAI's $500 billion valuation. The hope is in asking the right questions, in returning to a kin-dom structure, and in Jesus sending out his disciples to do healing, not setting up a healing shop in Nazareth. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube ⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! As a scholar, Philip Clayton (Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology) works at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology. As an activist (president of EcoCiv.org, President of IPDC), he works to convene, facilitate, and catalyze multi-sectoral initiatives toward ecological civilization. As a disciple of Jesus, he finds himself energized by the Spirit in the Quaker community. 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. ⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? <a href="https://homebrewedchristianity.lpages.co/jesus-in-gali

Okay, so you know that bone-deep exhaustion you feel? That sense that no matter how hard you run, you're still falling behind? What if I told you that's not a personal failure—it's a structural trap? German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has been asking why modern life feels like a whirlpool we can't escape, and his diagnosis is devastating: our growth economy requires our exhaustion. It's a feature, not a bug. But here's where it gets good for us theology nerds—Rosa's solution isn't just slowing down. It's something he calls resonance, and when you hear him describe it, you're gonna think, "Wait, that sounds like prayer. That sounds like what church is supposed to be." This essay is my attempt to lay out Rosa's big ideas and why I think every person of faith should be paying attention to this guy. We're reading his new book Time and World with Matt Segall this February, so consider this your on-ramp and feel the lure. If you want to join the Rosa reading group this February, become a member of the ⁠⁠Process This⁠⁠  Substack and you will get invited to all the zoom sessions and have access to the recordings after. ⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠ ⁠⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠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 Ner

In this preview for our upcoming Lent class, Jesus in Galilee, John Dominic Crossan dives into what he calls "A Tale of Two Gods"—Caesar and Christ. He takes on C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma (Lord, Lunatic, or Liar) and asks the question Lewis never considered: what if there were two contemporary claimants to divinity? Because there were. Before Jesus ever showed up, Caesar Augustus was already being called Son of God, Savior of the World, and Lord. Dom walks us through the Battle of Actium and how Octavian's victory became the foundation for a theology of peace through violent victory—and then sets that against the Jesus movement's counter-claim: peace through distributive justice. It's not just ancient history either; as our live audience pointed out, we're watching the "normalcy of civilization" play out in real time right now. The big question Dom leaves us with is whether our species is sustainable if we keep betting on escalatory violence. Heavy stuff, but exactly the kind of thing we'll be unpacking together throughout Lent. Hope you'll join us at CrossanClass.com—lectures drop soon, and we'll have live Q&As throughout Lent. You can WATCH the lecture and see all the slides on YouTube. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!⁠ ⁠UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠⁠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 <a hr

David Congdon came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit, and man, did we get into it. We're unpacking what liberalism actually means - not the Fox News version or the MSNBC version, but the philosophical tradition that emerged because people were literally killing each other over interpretations of the Eucharist after the Reformation. David makes this case for why we need to rejuvenate liberalism as a framework for dealing with diversity, because the postliberals basically want to recreate medieval Christendom through authoritarian power, which is... problematic. We talked about historical amnesia, why privatizing religion isn't the same as excluding it from public life, how both the left and right misunderstand what liberalism offers, and why we can't just abandon institutions even when they're flawed. Plus David schooled me on what he's learned spending eight years working in political theory and philosophy, which has given him a way more nuanced view than most theologians have about this stuff. You can get access to Congdon's lecture and the entire Democracy in Tension series here. You can WATCH this conversation on YouTube ⁠⁠⁠⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! UPCOMING ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan⁠⁠ What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make? ⁠⁠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 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

What is up, Theology Nerds! This week I'm joined by my buddy Matthew Segall from the Footnotes to Plato Substack to announce something exciting: we're doing a joint reading group on Hartmut Rosa's new book Time and World. Rosa's a German sociologist who does big-picture thinking—like old school "let me tell you about modernity" stuff—and his work resonates deeply with process philosophy. His diagnosis? We're stuck in what he calls a frenetic standstill—exhausted, burnt out, running faster just to stay in place. I gave Matt my above-ground pool whirlpool metaphor: we're all running in circles, and if you stop, you get pulled under. Modernity promises us the good life through control—making everything available, accessible, attainable—but the cost is a mute world and the birth of monsters. Rosa's antidote isn't slowing down; it's resonance—a mode of relationship where we're genuinely touched, we respond, we're transformed, and we accept it's all gloriously uncontrollable. Process folks will eat this up: it's Whitehead's prehension, creativity, and divine persuasion in sociological clothing. The invitation? Stop. Listen. Let the world address you again. If you want to join us for the Zoom sessions this February, become a member of either Process This or Footnotes to Plato—preferably both. See you soon. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City! Dr. Segall is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher who applies process philosophy to various natural and social sciences, including consciousness. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA. Make sure you check out SubStack Footnotes to Plato, his YouTube channel, and his recent book. Previous Podcasts with Matt The Meaning Crisis in Process <a hr