Theology Nerd Throwdown

Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the econom...

Bo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or whether the modern world has just made everywhere else too loud to hear the stars, to Josh asking me...

Bo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. (You will not guess.) Underneath the games, though, we got into the parts of being a pastor an...

A Substack subscriber named Jennifer recently emailed me a list of thirty questions she had wanted to ask in the live chat but never got to. So we did the only honest thing — pulled in Josh Patterson from Rethinking Faith as a third voice (he just took a job working with Ilia Delio, so he had earned it), let Bo pick the numbers, and turned this TNT into the most confessional one we have recorded i...

Bo and I started with bikes, a Pentecost-red pair of glasses, and my new Crazy Chicks ballcap. We did not stay there. By the end we had hit the evolutionary anthropology of religion before belief, Pope Leo XIV's AI encyclical, Gandalf telling Denethor exactly where he can put his stewardship, and the working thesis of the my AI book in process — the platform is the plantation. The connective tissu...

Tim Whitaker finally shows up on TNT, and I want you to know that within the first five minutes he informed us he was homeschooled and never went to college, that his biggest word is "dispensationalism," and that he is a type six on the Enneagram who doesn't know if he can trust people enough to take communion yet, and I was completely at home. Tim is the host of The New Evangelicals podcast, a fo...

It's May 15th, 2026 — recording live from what Bo accurately described as Jurassic Park, because Raven the chicken was laying an egg on my thigh while we were discussing the Antichrist, and Marceline was on my back pecking my head before we hit record, and I just want you to know that this is the actual context in which serious theological work is being done. Bo opened with a high, a low, and a le...

We were supposed to do this one last week, but things happened and the Antichrist got bumped a week. Worth the wait. Bo spent the extra time going back to the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary he bought in 1992 when he enrolled at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, because we live in a moment so unmoored from basic coherence that you have to return to first principles just to get oriented. Th...

Tripp walked into his local cigar lounge this week and walked out with a one-and-a-half-cigar lecture on the Nephilim from a true believer — and now he and Bo are doing what a few regular chat-room members asked for, a full TNT on fallen angelic watchers, giant hybrid offspring, CRISPR, Peter Thiel, Mount Hermon, the 33rd parallel, the UN, reptilian royal bloodlines, and why your YouTube algorithm...

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...

It's Holy Week, which means Bo and I finally stopped talking about chickens, bikes, and CCM songs long enough to do theology — though we did all of those things first. The actual idea Bo had was simple and turned out to be genuinely illuminating: what if we worked our way backwards through the passion week narrative, starting with the post-resurrection appearances on Monday and moving back toward...

Happy birthday to Haven, who turns nine today! He’s my third kid, which means the Fuller household has been thoroughly outnumbered for a while now, which also means it is absolutely appropriate that Bo and I spent a Friday morning talking about demons. This one started where all the best TNT episodes start — a text from Bo that said essentially: can we talk about reclaiming the good parts of being...

It's TNT, it's a Friday, and Bo came in hot — with a week's worth of text messages about natural law, JD Vance, and the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary conservatism that started innocently enough and ended somewhere near Bruno Latour and the cloaking of power. Before we get there, I shared a bit about my time at the Futures of Liberation Theology event at Wake Divinity — liberation the...

Eighteen years. That's how long Homebrew Christianity has been doing this thing — and to celebrate, Bo pulls out trivia, giveaways, and a surprise birthday guest in Brian McLaren, who drops in to talk about hope with longer timeframes, process theology as medicine for hardened neo-Platonism, and what worship might look like if we started from a process worldview instead of trying to fix a broken o...

Bo and I came in hot this week — Five Iron Frenzy concert tonight, a heated Chick-fil-A debate (Bo is wrong), In-N-Out orders, and the things southern Idaho doesn't have — before diving into the first five of ten thesis statements from the book I'm writing on the digital colonization of the self. I threw the whole document into an AI slide maker without any coaching and we're seeing the results li...

Bo and I kick off with some old-school podcasting war stories — the duck connector, paying per megabyte, and the time I edited a famous theologian's interview so aggressively that a fan called me out for making them sound like a different person. Then we roll into our alphabet soup series with G and H. Bo drops a banger pairing genre and globalization — the idea being that if his conservative frie...

This week Bo and I kicked things off talking about life getting smaller and simpler — from downsizing kitchens to wire racks for air quality — and I confessed that nine days of solo parenting gave me a whole new respect for single parents everywhere. Then I brought something to the table I've been chewing on for about a decade: when we gather on Sunday mornings, is what we do a complement to the c...

Alright folks, Bo and I are two weeks and two hours delayed because of snow, so buckle up for some cabin fever energy. We tackle the alphabet soup of theology starting with B for belonging and baptism—why there's zero agreement on how to dunk people in water despite it being central to Christianity. We get into the weeds on bipartisan politics as techno-feudalism on rails (think Snow Piercer but w...

Look, I wasn't planning on going here—Bo and I were supposed to get to our dictionary series on the B words. But then my algorithm fed me a parade of people I've loved my whole life defending an ICE agent shooting a mom three times through a window, calling her a "domestic terrorist," and I just lost it. So I wrote this piece exploring how the German church's drift into Nazi accommodation mirrors...

What is up, Theology Nerds! This week Bo and I kicked off our Theological Dictionary of 2026—26 letters for 26, pairing theological concepts with cultural commentary. We dove into the A's: argument culture, adiaphora, and atonement. We started with Deborah Tannen's 1997 book The Argument Culture and marveled at how she thought things were bad then—30 years before algorithms and 24-hour news cycles...

So I made these slides for a talk on centering prayer and process theology, and instead of just presenting them, I sent them to Bo and we played a game where he tried to guess what I was going to say. What emerged was this really fun conversation about how centering prayer is just so different from anything most of us were taught about prayer. Like, it starts in a different place—with practice, no...

🎄 NO ROOM IN THE INN: A Theology Nerds Christmas Special 🎄 Last week, Tripp and Bo played Hallmark Movie Mad Libs—and things got wildly out of hand. With answers shouted out in real time (and some help from the chat), we accidentally wrote an entire progressive Christian Hallmark Christmas movie. It has everything: 🦌 A hunky taxidermist with a heart of gold ⛪ An Episcopal deacon hiding her col...

What is UP, Theology Nerds! This week Bo and I got real caffeinated—or maybe it was eggnog—and let the vibes take us wherever they wanted to go. We kicked things off with some personal life updates (Bo got banished to an RV for being too large and loud at Christmas, and I'm navigating the trials of doing dishes with a teenager sleeping underneath the kitchen). Then we nerded out HARD on Christmas...

What is up, Theology Nerds? Bo and I kicked off this week's episode from my pop-up ice fishing tent in 39-degree rain—complete with my new "professional lighting" that makes it look like I'm telling ghost stories—because that's just how we roll. We dove into our Spotify Wrapped numbers (156% audience growth, baby!). We discovered that our listeners are simultaneously jamming to Taylor Swift, Bach,...

Here's our Thanksgiving episode with some vital jazzercise energy and a whole lot of carnitas-shaking—you're welcome for that visual. But then we got into the real stuff: like how exhausting it is when every single day brings another thing that would've ended any other administration, and how our outrage sensors are so fried we might miss the moment things shift from "different in degree" to "diff...