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Theology Nerd Throwdown
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FYI... I was on a very large dose of steroids for a month for poison ivy, which made me a bit "more porous and transparent" about my love of hanging out with the BoDaddy. So that's the energy. I went looking for my camp planning notes this week and instead found the auto-updating document where your questions land — roughly 70 of them tagged TNT — so we spent the hour on those. Bo picked numbers. Josh Patterson, this year's camp director, joined from planning-team headquarters (his house). What came out is part listener mailbag, part Theology Beer Camp preview, and part accidental therapy session about vocation, youth ministry, and why neither of us ended up with the academic career we pictured. Also: the mom at the gas station blasting vampire erotica loud enough that Haven and his best friend started asking what words meant, Bo's Powell's Books sweatshirt theory of finding your people, and a Lord of the Rings draft where Bo gets cast twice depending on his mood. Camp is three weeks out. In-person is sold out. Online is not.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
What's actually happening at camp this year
No normal talks. Everything is a conversation, structured, with the books read ahead of time. Cornel West and Gary Dorrien — lifelong friends, literal next-door neighbors — on the life and legacy of James Cone, hosted by Adam Clark, who was Cone's student. Bill Leonard and Diana Butler Bass on the history of religious dissent in America. Sarah Heath with Kristin Kobes Du Mez on Live Laugh Love. Bo hosting Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Craig Boyd on the seven deadly sins, virtue ethics, and American culture — the one Tripp wanted so badly he mailed Bo both books and an extensive guide. Ilia Delio. James McGrath. The Bible Divas recording live. TBC 26 FM, the main stage, broadcasting from an apocalyptic wasteland.
Plus: the faction sorting survey (the Godpodcalypse), a physical passport with prompts and stamps and prizes — built by introverts, for introverts, so you have permission to walk up to the theologian you came to meet — a slushie machine, the opening-night '80s prom in the Upside Down with Trey Pearson DJing karaoke, and more taps than ever, including a dedicated gluten-free line, non-alcoholic beer, hop water, and nightly mocktails. Vine Street, KC Bier, Casual Animal, Martin City, Cervecería, River Bluff, Stranger Days, Urban Chestnut, Cinder Block, Torn Label, and more.
In-person is sold out. Get the online ticket.
The Bring Your Own Beer edition streams two stages live for every session block, so you can pick your track in real time — including Bo's seven-deadly-sins conversation on the live podcast stage. Everything else gets recorded, and you get all of it on replay. Same conversations, same room, your own couch, your own fridge.
JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
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
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Bo sent me a meme. That's the whole setup. An account called Reasoned Reality posting "seven core Christian doctrines invented after Christ died, and the church wrote down the exact dates" — Trinity 325, original sin with Augustine, Anselm in 1098, inerrancy in a Chicago hotel in 1978, the rapture with Darby in the 1830s. I didn't text him back that night because I was writing notes. Here's the thing: the premise is right and the execution is a slander. Doctrines do develop. But when you put a date on something and act like it came out of nowhere, you're announcing you haven't read it. If evangelicals want to be liberal theologians, be real ones — von Harnack has nine volumes on the history of dogma, agrees the thing evolved, and actually understands why. So we spent the hour on whether religion is allowed to evolve, which turns out to have a whole typology of answers from people with Saint in front of their name. Plus: Bo's springs metaphor for contextual theology and the postcolonial critique that's made him rethink it, the LDS question in a town that's seven-out-of-nine Mormon at one high school, the guy who told Bo that feeding people without praying first makes it filthy rags, and the golf round where Bo asked a retired CMA pastor what good taking the Bible seriously does if you end up at Trump. It got quiet after that.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
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 sent Bo a seven-page show proposal this week, which is roughly six and a half pages more than the bullet points he normally sends me the day before. It came out of a lecture I gave in my Luther Seminary class where I kept telling Bo stories as examples, and finally thought — I should just try this out on Bo instead of writing the essay. He printed it out this morning and the printer asked if he wanted all seven pages. Here's the idea. The parable of the Good Samaritan answers "who is my neighbor?" by changing the category. The neighbor stops being the man in the ditch and becomes the one who stopped. Which means, in our late-modern moment, the question is not a category question at all. It's a capacity question. Do you still have the subjectivity to be seized by another person? Or has the achieving subject — optimized, accelerated, scheduled, closed — lost the ability to have a neighbor at all? Bo warned me up front that he was going to be so honest people might think he's a jerk. He was not a jerk. His house is gutted for air quality, his wife can't live there, his church is doing fall kickoff, there's a family crisis, and there's a guy sleeping on the church steps he had to walk around to let his plumbers in. This one has the Princeton Good Samaritan experiment, a blank check from a man who turned his hearing aids off during my sermons, and a food pantry that had to be completely redesigned once they actually got to know their neighbors. Come sit with it.
You can watch the ENTIRE conversation on YouTube & join live next week
JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
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
Bo's mic died, so this one almost didn't happen — and then it turned into one of the best hours we've recorded. He came back from a week of night school, a home renovation, a bike ministry, and a community center opening with four conversation partners he had pulled off his shelf to put in dialogue with the Han and Rosa material from the last few weeks: David Brin's The Transparent Society, James Gleick's Faster, Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, and Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. What came out is the clearest synthesis we have managed yet — how the safety-over-freedom trade got made in 1999 and completed by now, why our technological horse is running faster than our eyeball can process, why the panopticon Baudrillard described in the '70s is now self-operated by you for the algorithm, and why Han thinks the enemy is no longer the virus outside but the self's atrophying ability to encounter another person at all. Before all that: a listener who sent me three separate emails during one podcast to complain about my cigar and then ordered Tony's book anyway, Bo's canning class revelation, and my kid's first week of college with a Warhammer club and Tocqueville. Also, Bo is doing radio voice at Beer Camp. There is no going back.
You can WATCH (the unedited) conversation on YouTube
About TNT
Theology Nerds Throwdown is the live-stream wing of Homebrewed Christianity — Tripp unscripted with the chat live and, most weeks, the Rev. Bo Sanders. Bo is lead pastor at First United Methodist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho, where he runs the Holy Rollers bike ministry and just opened a community center thirty minutes north (750 people came through the August 1 open house). He writes at bosanders.substack.com.
JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
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
We started with alt-blonde beards, the Lakers selling for $12.5 billion, and the gambling apps that will call you with Super Bowl tickets when you lose your year's income and cancel your account when you win. Then Bo told the story of the four-clergy ministerium in Twin Falls discovering that none of them use the same words for the same things — vestry, deacon, elder, narthex, vestibule — which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual hour. I brought slides from this week's Luther Seminary class, where the students had been reading Hartmut Rosa and Byung-Chul Han together, and the conversation went somewhere I did not plan. Rosa's resonance: the vibrating wire between a self and an uncontrollable other. Han's terror of the same: the elimination of the negativity that makes thinking possible. And then Bo confessed his hyper-sacramentality to a Board of Ordained Ministry that had no idea what he was talking about, and we ended up with an ecclesiology conversation about Dunbar's 150, octave equivalence, and why singing together is a spiritual technology 190,000 years older than any doctrine. Also: the flock cameras, the performance zombie, and a line from a student I am stealing forever.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep
Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com.
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








