Cabernet and Pray

The word Trinity appears nowhere in your Bible, and the one verse that claims to state the doctrine in plain words is missing from every early Greek manuscript. So where did the doctrine come from?  The path runs through an emperor who had a political problem to solve, two church councils more than fifty years apart, and a lineup of explanations the church eventually declared heresy. You may...

You probably expect a certain type of person to talk to you about deconstruction and doubt. Perhaps someone young and with a lot of life yet to experience. But Jack Reese is 75, a former senior pastor and a professor for 28 years, and he just wrote Grace Sideways , a book about a lifetime of doubting. He has never fully understood certainty, and he argues that a hidden God is the God the Psalms an...

I've been on the ash heap with the Book of Job for eight weeks, and this week the author of Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees , Dr. David Gushee, joins me to close it out. Gushee was once America's leading evangelical ethicist, and after he wrote Changing Our Minds, the community he helped build pushed him out. He reads Job as a story that works like a parable. We take on Job...

For seven weeks, Job has been waiting for God to answer him. In part seven of the Job in Exile series, God finally shows up in the whirlwind and then wants to talk about lions, ravens, mountain goats, and two creatures that sound like they wandered off a monster movie set (yes, we get into whether Behemoth is a dinosaur, complete with a disturbingly catchy children's song). God never answers a sin...

Just when you'd expect the Book of Job to reach its climax, a new character barges in. Elihu is young, angry, and completely certain he has the explanation everyone else somehow missed. In part six of the Job in Exile series, we see Elihu do the one thing the story keeps refusing to do: he shows up with a confident answer. The uncomfortable part is how familiar he sounds in many churches...

Joshua Colburn spent twenty years inside a megachurch, and now he's known as the "Original Sinfluencer." In this conversation, he and Jeremy dig into why humor and satire might be the most honest tools survivors of church trauma have, how fear gets used to keep people in line, and the day Joshua grew his hair out as an act of rebellion the moment he walked away. The heart of it is his story of bei...

Job had a way out. All he had to do was apologize for something he never did, agree that God was punishing him, and his whole world would snap back into place. His community, his reputation, his peace, all of it one lie away. Yet he wouldn't say the lie. In part five of our walk through the Biblical book of Job, we sit in the moment Job tells his friends he will defend his integrity until he dies,...

Job's three friends showed up while his life was in ruins, and by the end they had turned into accusers, convinced that a man suffering this much must have earned it. In part four of Job in Exile, I stay in the long, ugly middle of the book, the stretch most people skip, where everyone closest to Job decides the problem has to be him. If Job's collapse was undeserved, the same could befall any of...

In part three of our Job in Exile series, we sit with something in the book of Job that most of us were trained to read right past. By chapter three, the patient, pious Job we love to quote is gone. He breaks a week of silence, curses the day of his birth, and starts to notice the suffering of a world he had been too comfortable to see. His own eviction gave him new eyes. And yet the most rig...

My guest John Doyle has spent forty years paying attention to the moments most of us file away and never mention out loud. The vision. The voice. The thing that grabbed him when no one was there. He holds these stories loosely, with more humility than certainty, which is what makes them worth sitting with. And it opens up the question I keep circling with people who've had a moment like this: how...

Job's friends showed up, tore their robes, and then said nothing for seven days straight. It's easy to rush past that on the way to the arguments that come later, where these three men get almost everything wrong. But for one week, before any of that, they get one thing exactly right. They sit down in the dung heap next to their ruined friend, and they stay. In part two of the Job in Exile series,...

Job had it all. Seven thousand sheep, ten children, and the title of richest man in the entire region, right up until the afternoon he sat scraping his skin with a piece of broken pottery on a dung heap outside of town. In part one of a new eight-week series, Jeremy pours a glass of Burgundy and works through Job 1-2:10, where a blameless man moves from the penthouse to the outhouse and his whole...

Every civilization in history put a temple at its center. America was the first to try to build a nation without one, and Wes Crawford argues that we couldn't stand the empty space, so we made the country itself sacred. The church historian and author of One Nation Over God walks through how the Constitution became scripture, how kneeling during an anthem became sacrilege, and how voting the wrong...

Keith Giles spent two years digging through gospels that didn't make the cut, the ones buried in a jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945 alongside fifty other texts the church decided not to count. On this episode, Jeremy pours a Bordeaux blend and sits down with the author of the Quantum Gospel series to ask what it means that the people who assembled the New Testament were doing canon math with pol...

Lauren Peiser has spent time making wine in Italy, working at a seminary, and writing a Substack that will make you use your imagination. In this episode, she brings a concept called "wild magic," the kind of transformation that can't be packaged into a sermon or a stage talk. She talks about Mary not as the untouched ideal of purity culture but as someone who chose to birth Christ in the dirt, in...

What do saints, sinners, and zombies have in common? In this episode, Jeremy sits down with author Matthew DiStefano to talk about his book on The Last of Us , the video game that somehow became one of the most philosophically serious explorations of what it means to be human. This conversation goes places you won't see coming: the MLM structure of Christian nationalism, why empathy is more danger...

Ben introduces the idea of the "feral spirit," a way of understanding spiritual encounter that doesn't require institutional scaffolding to be real. He talks about what happens when churches try to manufacture the Spirit's presence instead of simply making space for it, the difference between rituals that help us remember and rituals that help us control, and why a thousand dolphins playing in the...

What do you do when the very people who introduced you to Jesus can no longer recognize the Jesus your faith has led you to? C.E. Jarnagin is a priest, researcher, and author who's asking that exact question in his new book The Congruent Life , and he brings a rare combination of Anglican liturgy, pastoral honesty, and zero tolerance for religious veneer to the conversation. In this episode, Jerem...

Bethany Cseh is a pastor who spent years standing at a pulpit she wasn't sure she was allowed to occupy, internally justifying each sermon as something other than what it actually was. That tension turned out to be the beginning of a longer, stranger education. In this episode, Bethany joins Jeremy to talk about co-pastoring two completely different churches with her husband, what happened when th...

Beau Stringer spent years as a lead pastor in evangelical spaces. He's on the other side of that now, working in adult discipleship at one of the largest United Methodist churches in the country and making the case that mainline churches are the best thing most deconstruction-adjacent Christians have never heard of. His image for them: public libraries. Quiet, scattered through communities, not se...

What does it actually take for a church to be a safe place? Anthony Parrott, co-pastor of Table Church DC, has spent 17 years in ministry and a lifetime accumulating enough theology to know when it stops being honest. In this conversation, he and Jeremy trace a winding path through open and relational theology, trauma competency, why packaging spiritual formation into a program is its own kind of...

What happens when a former pastor trades the pulpit for a microphone? In this episode, we sit down with Stuart Delony, host of Snarky Faith and author of The Tribulation Survival Guide , for a conversation that is equal parts hilarious and razor-sharp. Stuart unpacks why fear-based theology is basically a drug dealer's business model, how humor functions as a Trojan horse for spiritual healin...

This week on Cabernet & Pray, we sit down with Collin Packer for a conversation that feels as honest as it is necessary. Collin shares his journey from fundamentalist pastor to working in the Texas State House, from not voting for 12 years out of theological conviction to wrestling with what it means to let “justice take a side.” We talk about racial reconciliation, political discipleship, the...

What if the Bible’s most familiar wine stories have been quietly misunderstood all along? In this episode of Cabernet and Pray , Jeremy sits down with New Testament scholar John Anthony Dunne , author of The Mountains Shall Drip Sweet Wine , to uncork what Scripture actually says about alcohol. From the wedding at Cana to the myth of “biblical grape juice,” they explore how modern anxieties have f...

What happens when someone can no longer believe in God—but still can’t let go of Jesus, Pentecostalism, or the church that formed them? In this episode, Jeremy sits down with Colten Barnaby, who calls himself an “atheist Pentecostal,” to talk honestly about losing faith without losing integrity. They explore church history, certainty vs. honesty, why pretending belief can feel like a moral failure...