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Our goal is to bring the wisdom of the academy's ivory tower into your earbuds. Think of each episode as an audiological ingredient for your to brew your own faith. Most episodes center around an interview with a different scholar, theologian, or philosopher.
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So many clergy members and theology nerds messaged me after JD Vance told the Pope to dial back the theology talk that I had no choice — I called my friend Kevin Carnahan, co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics and author of an extremely technical book on just war theory that he will tell you not to read. Kevin teaches at Central Methodist University in Missouri and he showed up having apparently thought about all of this in serious depth while the rest of us were just screaming into the void. What followed was one of the best episodes we've done. We traced the actual history of just war theory from Aquinas through John XXIII's Pacem in Terris— which moved the Catholic Church so close to pacifism in practice that nearly no war could satisfy its criteria — through the moment nuclear weapons broke the entire framework, through drone warfare and AI targeting that's broken it further, and right up to a Trump administration that dismantled the actual government office dedicated to minimizing civilian harm and then had the audacity to invoke just war theory as a fig leaf. Kevin's read on the papal conflict: the Pope knows exactly what he's doing and is faithfully representing a tradition that JD Vance passed through on Peter Thiel's E-Z Pass lane. We also got into the three streams of Protestant ethics on war — peace churches, just war thinkers, and crusaders — why Hegseth fits cleanly into the crusader category, why Trump fits none of them, why the Lord of the Rings is the best undergraduate ethics text available, and what Bonhoeffer's prayer for his own country's defeat sounds like in 2026. Tripp eventually brought up Tolkien. Bo noted it took an hour and eleven minutes. Bonhoeffer was invoked. John Cobb got in at the end. The trifecta complete.
For those regular Homebrewed Christianity listeners, this is an episode of another weekly podcast Theology Nerd 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
Transcendence, Immanence, and Why Charlie Kirk is Bad at Theology
Moral Clarity & the Uneasy Conscience
A Philosopher & Ethicist Process This Election
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!
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, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass on Tax day! Also, apparently, the day the Vice President told the Pope to stop doing theology. Diana Butler Bass joined me for what was supposed to be a casual religion news roundup and turned into something I didn't entirely expect — a full-on church history seminar about what happens when empire tries to silence the gospel and why it never actually works. We started where everyone started this week: JD Vance, a newly minted Catholic who received what sounds like the Peter Thiel E-Z Pass lane through RCIA, publicly suggesting that the Pope — the Pope — should think more carefully before opining about theology. The same Pope who then responded to a Pentagon threat referencing the Avignon papacy by giving an even stronger anti-war speech. We talked about Trump's Easter posts, the Jesus meme, the "I thought I was a doctor" explanation, and the remarkable spectacle of evangelicals — evangelicals — saying the president might be demon-possessed. But Diana being Diana, she kept pulling the historical threads, and we ended up somewhere genuinely useful: the long story of how American Christianity split the sacred from the secular, why that split is breaking down, what it means for a congregation trying to figure out what to do with the 250th anniversary of a nation that's currently threatening popes and bombing people on Easter Sunday, and why Whitehead's image of the flickering Galilean vision might be the most honest thing you can say right now about where hope lives. We didn't ruin anything. The ruining is, as Diana noted, already adequately covered.
Want to hangout with us in person?! Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!
This conversation was originally for our Substack members, but we’re sharing a portion with all of you – join us at The Process This or The Cottage to catch future episodes live!
Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author, popular speaker, inspiring preacher, and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and contemporary spirituality.
a Few Previous Episodes with Diana & Tripp
How the Lectionary Kept Me Christian
Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control
Religious Liberty & Violence – Unpacking the First 100 Days of Trump 2.0
The Interlocking Crises of Religion & Democracy
Faith in a Toxic Public Square
The Resurrection of Jesus
2024: The Sequel
The Christology Ladder
The Indictment Edition of Ruining Dinner
American Saints in a Cynical Age
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them.
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I've been wearing glasses since seventh grade, when I discovered mid-car-ride that the rest of my family could actually read a license plate and I had no idea that was something people could do. When the optometrist put corrective lenses in front of my eyes for the first time, I gasped. That's the image I keep coming back to when I think about what happens when a philosophy filters out whole categories of human experience — not maliciously, just structurally, the way astigmatism works. You adapt so well to what you're missing that you don't know you're missing it.
This essay is about that. It started with a conversation I witnessed between Philip Clayton and Dan Dennett — two brilliant philosophers, one coffee shop moment, and a question that stopped everything: where in a purely physical universe does "mattering" actually live? It moved through two more conversations in an Edinburgh coffee shop a week apart — one with a theologian who could defend every doctrine but couldn't explain why holding his newborn made him weep, and one with an evolutionary biologist who could describe the neurochemistry of her daughter's depression but couldn't answer the question her daughter was actually asking. Both were half-blind in the same direction, just from opposite sides.
What I'm after here is coherence. Whitehead's test, Griffin's challenge, Clayton's emergence framework — the claim that a philosophy failing to account for time, causation, moral urgency, beauty, consciousness, or the felt reality of love isn't humble or rigorous. It's just incomplete. And the good news is that correcting for both eyes doesn't require abandoning science or embracing magic. It requires something harder: sitting with the full weight of human experience and refusing to explain any of it away. You can read this essay and find plenty of others on my Substack, Process This.
Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!
UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them.
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This one is a preview of something I've been wanting to do for a long time — a class on the history of Christian social ethics that's actually useful for the moment we're in. Cornell West calls Gary Dorrien the greatest living Christian social ethicist, and after spending any amount of time with him, you understand why. Gary and Aaron Stoffer joined me to give people a taste of what's coming in Theology for Troublemakers, and what they gave us was a genuine history lesson that landed like a live wire. We started with Gary's own formation — a rural Michigan kid who never took a school book home until second semester senior year, who walked into a Catholic church and couldn't stop staring at the figure on the cross, who read a biography of King in ninth grade three times and went looking for the theologians King mentioned in the public library and found none of them. That kid became one of the most important social ethicists of our time. From there we moved into Norman Thomas's warning — that American populism always surges toward a dictator who scapegoats the vulnerable — and what the left's recurring failure to build cross-racial, multi-issue coalitions has to do with where we are now. Gary named the nineties as the most demoralizing decade of his life: TINA, triangulation, NAFTA, three-strikes, welfare gutted, and a Democratic Party that treated its progressive base as something to prove it could overcome. He was not gentle about Clinton, or Obama, or the way purity politics has consistently kneecapped the left's ability to organize. He was hopeful, carefully, about cooperatives, about DSA's organizing culture in New York, and about the strange opening the current moment creates for public theology. The class runs the whole history — from the Black Social Gospel and the new abolitionists to the Christian realists to Yoder and Dorothy Day — and Aaron frames it all in terms of what congregations can actually do with it. Go to homebrewclasses.com. This is the class for right now.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them.
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!
Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University.
Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron
What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity
Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism
James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology
The Future of Faith & Justice
Theology for Action
The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Okay, 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
Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. He is an award-winning author, and he has written or edited more than twenty-five books. Oord directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He won the Outstanding Faculty Award twelve times as a full-time professor and now speaks at institutions across the globe. Oord is known for his contributions to research on love, open and relational theology, science and religion, and freedom and relationships for transformation.
Love at the Center: Tom Oord’s Systematic Theology Project
A Journey of Faith and Integrity
Faith without Certainty
Big God Questions
Christ, Christmas, & the Incarnation
the Death of Omnipotence!
Brian McLaren & Thomas Jay Oord: a God Worthy of Love
Process This!
Process Theology QnA
Authority, Atonement, Abortion, and a Big Hug
from Pluriform Love to Divine Revelation
Big God Twitter Takes
Trump is (NOT) a Process Theologian & Other Questions
Thomas Jay Oord wants you to know “God Can’t”
Open and Relational Theology Throwdown
Open and Relational Q&A with Thomas Jay Oord
Why Go Wesleyan?
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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 up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this 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 regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us?
A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
Paul & Thecla
Ask JC Anything
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Okay, so confession: my kids had just gone to bed when we started this one, and honestly, the timing felt about right — because this conversation with Jarrod McKenna is the kind of thing you need to sit with after the noise dies down. Jarrod is an Australian activist, peacemaker, and theologian who's been doing this work since he got arrested at a US military base in the middle of the Australian desert back in 2002 — and the wild thing is, the world looks eerily similar now. We talked about what it actually means to follow a nonviolent Messiah when your government just joined a war you didn't vote for, how prayer isn't an escape hatch but a way of composting all the grief and rage so you can actually be useful, and why the just war tradition — which most Christians cheerfully ignore — would rule out basically everything happening right now. We got into the Black church's tradition of Christian socialism, why the megachurch model accidentally trained people to accept autocracy, and how base communities might be the most subversive thing you can plant in the shell of the old world. We also wandered into eschatology, Harry Potter, the Counting Crows, and whether God has been patient enough with this whole experiment for 13 billion years, that maybe we should take a deep breath. It's a lot — in the best way.
Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!
Australian peace award-winning pastor Jarrod McKenna has been described by Civil Rights legend Rev. Jim Lawson as 'an expert in nonviolent social change'. With over 20 years of experience in pastoral ministry and at the leading edge of climate justice, refugee rights, and nonviolent social change, Jarrod has seen his work featured internationally on the BBC, Al Jazeera, ABC, and The Guardian. Co-host of the InVerse and 'Good on Wood' podcasts, Jarrod pastors at Steeple Church (Melbourne) and Table in the Trees (Perth). He lives in the Perth hills on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja with his beloved, Kat, and their four sons.
UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them.
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community included.
📅 Starts Tuesday, April 14 | 1pm ET 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is the sin in Sinners? — and then four of the most brilliant theologians working today spent an hour doing what great theologians do: they cracked the whole thing open. Set in 1932 Mississippi and layered with blues, hoodoo, vampires, and Black survival, Ryan Coogler's film turns out to be a theological event, and this conversation treats it like one. Adam Clark names white supremacy as the film's central sin — parasitic, predatory, embodied in white vampires who can only survive by consuming Black vitality. Kelly Brown Douglas traces the deep dialectic between the blues and the Black church, and how the juke joint functions as a kind of invisible institution keeping Black faith alive from the underside. Juan Floyd-Thomas goes deep on conjure, Papa Legba, and why Sammy at the crossroads isn't just a blues musician but a gateway between the living and the dead. And Stacey Floyd-Thomas brings the womanist lens that names what the film itself only partially names: the women are the most spiritually powerful figures in the story, and they pay the highest price. By the end, someone looks around the room and says what a lot of us were thinking — Theology Beer Camp is a hush harbor. This is one of the most popular sessions from camp this year, and after you listen, you'll understand why.
Join 600+ Listeners, 30 theologians, & 30 God-Pods at Theology Beer Camp 2026 this October 8-10 in Kansas City!
Panel Members
Kelly Brown Douglas is Visiting Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School and Canon Theologian at Washington National Cathedral.
Juan Floyd-Thomas is Associate Professor of African American Religious History at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where he teaches Black religion, race, religion, and film.
Stacey Floyd-Thomas is the Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society and Chair of African American Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Adam Clark is Professor of Theology and Director of Civic Engagement at Xavier University.
Will Rose is the co-host of Systematic Geekology, a podcast exploring theology and pop culture for people who geek out on the deeper things.
UPCOMING ONLINE CLASS - Theology for Troublemakers: Christian Social Ethics from the Margins
The injustices we face are immense — but they are not unique. Previous generations confronted the same powers with theological conviction and strategic brilliance. The question is whether we'll learn from them.
This 6-week online course, led by Dr. Gary Dorrien and Dr. Aaron Stauffer, recovers the radical tradition of Christian social ethics — from Reverdy Ransom and Reinhold Niebuhr to James Cone and the Welfare Rights Movement — and asks what faithfulness demands of us right now.
Weekly lectures, live Q&A conversations, guest lecturers, and an online community are included.
📅 Starts Tuesday, April 14 | 1pm ET 💰 Donation-based — including $0 🔗 Sign up at HomebrewedClasses.com
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is the fourth live Q&A from the Jesus and Galilee class with John Dominic Crossan — recorded, appropriately, on St. Patrick's Day, which means Dom is operating with a slight green halo and absolutely zero intention of slowing down. The questions this week go deep into parable theory: what it actually means for a parable to "point elsewhere," why the Parable of the Sower is not about sowing, what the Parable of the Vineyard Workers is doing to anyone in the crowd who has ever stood all day looking for work and been blamed for standing there, and why Luke's version of the Good Samaritan is both right and a domestication of something far more dangerous. Dom takes apart the three sub-genres — riddle, example, and challenge parables — shows how the tradition keeps sliding one into another, and makes the case that Job, Ruth, and Jonah are all challenge parables of the Hebrew Bible aimed at blowing up the certainties of post-exilic restoration theology. There's a devastating reading of the Eucharist as a public political declaration that you are willing to die for what Jesus died for, a meditation on why comic eschatology is the first great act of resistance against autocracy, and a moment where Dom explains why he became an American citizen in 2000 — and it will not surprise you. If you want to hear all four lectures behind these Q&As and send in your own questions for our final session, head over to crossanclass.com — you can join for whatever you can give, including zero.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us?
A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
Paul & Thecla
Ask JC Anything
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This is an audio essay from Process This, my Substack — head over there if you want more essays like this one, and subscribe if you want them delivered to you. In this one, I'm going deep on a question that sounds biographical but is actually theological: how did Dietrich Bonhoeffer — the man who stood at a lectern in 1933, surrounded by Nazi-pin-wearing theology students, and told them that the historical Jewish particularity of Jesus Christ was "the last truth separating the churches from barbarism" — how did that man become the patron saint of Christian nationalism? The short answer is Eric Metaxas, a bestselling biography, and a fabricated quote. But the real answer is older and more dangerous than any of that, because what Metaxas did to Bonhoeffer is exactly what the German Christians did to Jesus — they turned a Person into a Principle, kept the symbol, and evicted the flesh. Bonhoeffer had a word for it in 1933. He called it Docetism. And here's the thing that should take your breath away: his Christology is not just the subject of the abuse — it is its diagnosis. I'll also tell you about the five-minute rant I recorded and deleted, what Bonhoeffer's Christmas 1942 letter to the resistance said about contempt, and why I think the most important question he leaves us with is not primarily about Eric Metaxas — it's the one he put to those sweat-soaked students, and puts to us now: which are you following — the Person or the Principle?
You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.
Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1Okay, so here's a question that sounds simple until it isn't: why is prayer so hard? Not hard like "I need a better technique" hard — hard like something has gone structurally wrong with the way we even think about it. Wes Ellis, practical theologian, pastor, and author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age, joins Tripp to diagnose what's actually going on — and it turns out the problem isn't your prayer life, it's the framework you've been handed. In a world shaped by achievement culture, algorithmic distraction, and the modern obsession with controlling outcomes, prayer has been quietly turned into a self-optimization project, something you master, measure, and feel guilty about not doing enough of — and Wes wants to blow that whole thing up. Drawing on Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa, Henri Nouwen, and yes, the Big Lebowski, Wes makes the case that prayer is not something you do toward God but something God initiates toward you — and our job is less about clamoring upward and more about learning to abide, to wait, to say amen and actually mean it: let it be so. If the inner room Jesus talked about is being colonized by data extraction and constant evaluation, this conversation is a genuinely counter-cultural act. Come sit in the wasted space for a while.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. Wes Ellis is a practical theologian who actually practices — meaning he doesn't just write about congregational ministry from a distance, he does it, currently serving as a pastor while holding down serious academic theological work at the same time. He's the author of Abiding in Amen: Prayer in a Secular Age and a previous book on youth ministry that develops a theological anthropology beyond the developmental lens .
Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this week's live Q&A, John Dominic Crossan takes questions from over 2,000 students in the Lenten class — and the questions are so good that even Dom says so (which, if you know Dom, is not nothing). The conversation moves fast: from the commons and enclosure as the operating logic of empire, to why Antipas moved his capital to a mosquito-infested lakeside city, to the first-century fishing boat built from twelve types of recycled wood as a symbol of economic squeeze, to why the multiplication of the loaves and fish is not just a miracle story but an act of interference in Antipas's export economy, to the difference between traction and distraction in political movements, to whether Christian theology has any business celebrating GDP growth when the boom doesn't boom for the people at the bottom. Crossan also takes on demons as imperial oppression embodied, Jesus as a healer who makes house calls and never sets up a shrine, and the Hagia Sophia mosaic where John says I am the light of the world and Matthew says you are — and why that single-word difference is the whole theology of participation in one sentence. If you haven't watched the lecture yet, do that first. If you have, this is where it gets applied. To join the class and get access to all four visual lectures, head to CrossanClass.com.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
Are We Waiting for God, or Is God Waiting for Us?
A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance
Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization
Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts
Paul & Thecla
Ask JC Anything
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Okay, so most Christians have been handed exactly one question about alcohol — is it okay? — and look, I get it, but what if that question is not just too small, it's actually the wrong one? Because when you sit down with John Anthony Dunne, New Testament scholar, beer nerd, and author of The Mountain Shall Drip Sweet Wine, and you actually let the Bible speak on its own terms, what you find is a text that is soaking in fermented beverages — daily beer libations poured out in the temple, prophets describing God's restoration of all things as mountains literally dripping with sweet wine, and Jesus showing up to a wedding and turning water into not just wine, but the best wine the sommelier had ever tasted — and John's Gospel puts that right next to the temple cleansing, on purpose, because of course it does. John brings this brilliant "varietal" framework to the whole conversation: just like wine comes in Cabernet, Chenin Blanc, Pinot Noir, the Bible's wine symbolism comes in distinct varieties — blessing, judgment, abundance, sacrifice, joy, wrath — and here's the thing, all of them blend together in the Eucharistic cup, which means the Lord's table isn't a symbol of one thing, it's the thematic climax of the entire biblical story. Bible nerds, craft beer lovers, people who've ever wondered if there's more going on at communion than grape juice in a tiny plastic cup — come on. This one's for you.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. John Anthony Dunne is Associate Professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he also teaches courses on wine in the Bible. He completed his PhD at the University of St. Andrews under the supervision of N.T. Wright, which means he has the theological pedigree to back up every bold exegetical claim he makes over a pint. John is a co-host of the Two Cities podcast—a collaborative project featuring 15+ scholars and theologians—and volunteers at St. Croix Vineyard in Stillwater, Minnesota, because of course he does.
Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happens when a Lutheran theologian who grew up reading UFO books and whose parents followed a Venusian contactee cult becomes one of the most rigorous thinkers at the intersection of space science and Christian theology? You get Ted Peters — and one of the most genuinely fun conversations I've had on the podcast. Ted coined the term astro theology and has spent decades asking what the discovery of extraterrestrial life would mean for our doctrines of creation, incarnation, and the common good. We get into why astrobiology is almost a religious science, the ethics of protecting microbial life on Europa, whether Jesus's incarnation is sufficient for the whole cosmos or if God might show up on other planets too, the Copernican fallacy hiding inside a lot of anti-anthropocentric arguments, what Christians should do if a UFO lands at the church potluck (hospitality, obviously), and why both ufologists and astrobiologists need to be at the same barbecue. If the government finally releases the files tomorrow, Ted is the person you want to call — and after this conversation, you'll understand why.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Ted Peters is a Lutheran theologian, professor emeritus at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and a senior fellow at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS). He coined the term astro theology to describe theological reflection on the implications of off-earth, non-human intelligence, and has spent decades at the frontier where Christian doctrine meets space science, artificial intelligence, and public ethics. His systematic theology, God — The World's Future, remains one of the most widely used constructive theology texts in graduate education. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including a volume on Astrotheology, and writes the Substack newsletter The Voice of Public Theology, where he engages with science, religion, global politics, and the impact of advancing technology for a broad public audience.
Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this second live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom works through nearly 40 questions from the more than 2,000 people in the class — and Dom is, as promised, brief. The conversation moves from Cyrus and the economic disruption of Roman Galilee, to the misplaced colon in Isaiah 40 that quietly rewrote John the Baptist's identity, to why Mark borrowed a Roman horror story about a prostitute at a banquet to tell the story of John's execution. Dom defends his claim that Jesus underwent a genuine conversion after John's death — bigger than Paul's, he says, because it involved a different vision of God entirely — and insists that the apocalyptic tradition of waiting for God to intervene is not just a theological mistake but, after 2,000 years, edges toward something harsher than delusion. As always, Dom leaves you with more to think about than when you started. To join the class and get access to all four visual lectures, head to CrossanClass.com.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance
Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization
Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts
Paul & Thecla
Ask JC Anything
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this audio essay from my SubStack ,Process This, I take Stephen Miller's claim that the "real world" is governed by strength and force and use it as a window into something much bigger than one political figure—a diagnosis of the soul of America. Drawing on the thesis Tom Holland developed in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Reinhold Niebuhr's The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, and the Black prophetic tradition of King and West, traced by Gary Dorrien in his 3 volume history of the Black Social Gospel movement, I argue that what we're witnessing isn't actually Christian nationalism triumphing—it's post-Christian nationalism wearing Christian clothes. The cross is still everywhere, but the crucified one has been removed, and what's left is just Rome again: empire, domination, and the ancient lie that might makes right. But here's where it gets really interesting—Niebuhr doesn't let progressives off the hook either, naming them as "children of light" who kept the Christian ethics of justice and victim-focus but severed them from grace, forgiveness, and the theological roots that make them sustainable. It's a prophetic call that refuses easy partisanship, traces the American rhetoric of force back through white supremacy to its Roman origins, and ultimately invites us back to the "sublime madness" of King's Beloved Community—where power is redefined not as domination but as the capacity to achieve a shared, constructive purpose.
You can subscribe to the Audio Essay podcast feed here.
Join us at Theology Beer Camp, October 8-10, in Kansas City!
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
This Lenten class begins where all of Dr. John Dominic Crossan's has work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas' transformation of the "Sea of Galilee" into the commercial "Sea of Tiberias" mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John's baptism movement proclaiming God's Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message? Only by understanding what Jesus' parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
The class is donation-based, including 0, so join, get info, and join up here.
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this first live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series Jesus in Galilee, Dom and I work through 35 questions from the more than 2,000 people who have joined the class — and true to form, Dom tries to honor every single one of them. The conversation ranges from the silver cups of Boscoreale to the Gulf of Mexico, from Josephus's gritted-teeth defense of Judaism to what a State of the Union address might look like if Jesus gave it tonight. Dom argues that the apocalyptic imagination is, bluntly, a loss of faith; that coinage was the only real mass media of antiquity; that nonviolent resistance was invented — not borrowed — in first-century Judea; and that if you want to understand what an autocrat is planning, read very carefully what the autocrat accuses his opponents of. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of conversation I look forward to all year. If you want in on the rest of the series — the lectures, the live Q&As, and the full archive — head to CrossanClass.com.
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 Minneola, Florida.
Previous Podcast Episodes with Dom & Tripp
A Tale of Two Gods: Why C.S. Lewis’s Famous Argument Falls Apart
From Iron Swords to Nuclear Bombs: Tracing 3,000 Years of Escalatory Violence
Paul, Christ, & the Mystery of Execution & Resurrection
Paul, Josephus, & the Challenge of Nonviolent Resistance
Paul, Rome, & the Violent Normalcy of Civilization
Paul & the Fictional History of Luke-Acts
Paul & Thecla
Ask JC Anything
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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
Whitehead’s Universe: a Guide to Thinking Process
Mind, Value, and the Cosmos.
the Power of Love & the Experience of God
ONLINE LENT CLASS: Jesus in Galilee w/ John Dominic Crossan
This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com
Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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The situation in Palestine is a televised holocaust and any Christian who approves or maintains indifference is on the level of a Nazi collaborator. To say nothing of the anti-Trump progressive Christians who conveniently found reasons to support the Biden administration and subsequent Harris campaign in the midst of carrying out this bloodbath.
shit, it has been 15 years.
The land is a part of our spirituality because it represents an alternative symbol of the ancestors who are always present as the life and spirit we can connect to in nature as the living and spiritual reality of the land. 33:38
African mystical perspective of God as a powered energy or spirit that we can connect to at any moment. This led to a pantheism or panentheism that is similar to Sally McFague’s perspective of the universe as God’s body. 32:04
In a secular sense, we are constantly looking forward to a better future. In a theological sense, we are looking back at the past. When are we in the now, in the present moment? 17:24
MSNBC is garbage. Diana is a first-rate intellect but her incessant libbery is troubling. Recommending Bill Kristol's podcast 😠
David Brooks fucking sucks.
I gave it a shot. First episode is full of Biblical misunderstandings. Maybe spend more time in the Bible. Blessings to all.
Nonsense. French Enlightement was influenced by British thought. Major figures of French Enlightement pretty much worshipped everything British.
This was a fabulous episode. Loved Tripp's description of sacred practices.
this guy has a tiny, tiny penis.
Thanks nerds, The argument that God is distant and only resides in the philosophical if God doesn't get angry, as a way of justifying the acts that God commands and allows, in the OT, is weak. I agree God is angry and unhappy with many of the ways we behave BUT God rarely if ever resorts to punishment and then only when it doesn't significantly or permanently harm those punished. This means we have to treat with great suspicion, parts of the Bible that do suggest that is how God behaves. In fact we must admit that these represent a significant misunderstanding of God. Blessings.
Tripp sounds so bored in this podcast.
lol @ respecting David Brooks