Homebrewed Christianity

Paul Hoard is back — solo this time, since Michael Morelli is off doing something in Canada that surely involves hockey and maple syrup — and he came on to witness to me in the name of Lacan. Here’s the setup: I collect Lacanian friends and have a running bit where I refuse to actually read Lacan, purely to irritate them. Paul teaches counseling psychology at the Seattle School, blends two schools...

This is the final Q&A of the class, and the story doesn’t end where the book did. Christ and Empire came out in 2007, right before Obama was elected and a lot of people decided empire wasn’t our problem anymore. Then came 2016, and everyone started worrying about empire again. Joerg’s last lecture brought the whole thing into the present: Christian nationalism, the white Christ, and a pr...

This is the fifth live Q&A for ⁠The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep⁠ in which Joerg and I got to Friedrich Schleiermacher: the father of liberal theology, the DNA of American mainline Christianity, and yes, a card in my theologian baseball card collection. (Joerg wants to trade for it. Negotiations are ongoing.) Joerg started by saying this session isn't meant to make anyone in the liberal tradit...

Kristin Du Mez signed the contract for this book about a week before Beth Moore tweeted about Jesus and John Wayne, and that book took on a life of its own inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne moment, which is partly her excuse for why it took so much l...

This is the fourth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we're in the Americas with Bartolomé de las Casas — Joerg's pick over Martin Luther for the Reformation-era chapter, and the hinge of the whole course. Here's why. Las Casas owned an encomienda. He had Native people working for him. He was, in Joerg's words, a slave driver. Then he woke up, gave the land away,...

Barry Harvey is back with a book that puts madness, theocracy, and anarchism in the title. It's a collection of essays developed over his career, and beneath them all sits one assertion: the church is not a subsystem of civil society. It has its own integrity, its own allegiance, and its own context for rethinking how it relates to everything else. The preface opens with Justin...

This is the third live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we did everyone's favorite theologian: Anselm. Here's the setup for those who've carried atonement baggage since youth group. The angry God demanding a victim is not Anselm. That caricature is a later invention, and Joerg asks why contemporary conservative theology needs a version of the tradition that the tradition...

Robbie Jones wrote a book called Backslide, and I went in expecting a chronicle of every way a Southern Baptist kid from Jackson, Mississippi cursed or lusted in middle school. That is not what this book is. Robbie takes a word that in our shared upbringing was entirely personal and entirely theological, and puts it next to the way political scientists now use the same word to describe what i...

Second live Q&A, and this week we went to Nicaea. Here's the setup, in case you're new: Constantine called the council, funded the bishops' travel, set the agenda, chaired it, and personally suggested the technical term homoousios — that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Joerg's method is to notice who pays for the trip. The boss funds the conference, the boss owns the prod...

Al Mohler recently let the internet know he finds it a bit sus when a woman talks about the Bible on a podcast. Today's guest is one of four women who just launched a podcast where they talk about the Bible. Four. Plural. It's called Bible Divas, and Anna Sieges says she plans to email Al every time an episode drops so he doesn't miss one — and maybe gets an opportunity to be moved by th...

My dad had a giant church history timeline hanging in his office wall when I was a kid. And if you are a pastor's kid, you learn a lot watching how your parents handle the church member who shows up to run an inquisition. Somebody would come in and say, "You said X, but the biblical answer is not X," and Dad would point up at that timeline and start naming people. What about this gu...

This is the first live Q&A for the new class, and Joerg Rieger came ready. Christ and Empire came out during my last year of div school, and that's why I was so excited to try to study with him, until Joerg promptly went on sabbatical. So this whole class is, in a sense, twenty years of making that up. The argument is not that empire won. It's that across two thousand years, empire ...

There is an entire content industry built on "biblical archaeology" right now — TV shows, YouTube channels, the House of David series on Amazon, all of it running on big Nephilim energy. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott does not watch any of it, because it makes her yell at the screen. (Her husband, however, likes to watch her watch it.) She is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor and an actual field archa...

Dan Koch just finished a seven-and-a-half-year process and came out the other side a fully licensed clinical psychologist. So I did what any friend would do — took over his podcast, gave him a week off from prepping, and made him answer every question I've been saving. He did zero prep on purpose. What we got is the conversation you have with someone you've known long enough to skip the throat-cle...

Tony Jones has been getting up early for ten years and refusing to talk to anyone until he has written for hours. Now we know why. Son of Helena is the first book of a trilogy about Constantine — a figure Tony correctly calls a cipher, the empty container into which everyone who loves or hates the marriage of church and state pours their own opinions — and nobody had ever written th...

My friend & Orbis editor, Dr. Tom Hermans-Webster, sent me this book with a note that said, "You're going to love this, Tripp. No, really, you are." He was right. O'neil Van Horn's Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate opens on page one by announcing that hope does not exist — which sounds like a branding failure until you realize he means hope is not...

Welcome to TBC 26 FM, the post-apocalyptic radio station broadcasting from the wasteland of late modern America. James McGrath — the Religion Prof himself — was the right guest for the apocalyptic-themed Theology Beer Camp preview, because he wrote Theology and Science Fiction, he loves some Battlestar Galactica, and he spent a full year of sabbatical thinking about nothing but the New Testam...

Jamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, mo...

Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Whe...

Diana Butler Bass just got back from Ireland, where she and Richard escaped the Fourth of July — and she came home with the most stunning historical counterfactual we have ever discussed on the podcast. Standing in the death-row hallway at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, the prison where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed one by one, Diana asked herself the question that turned her w...

Gianni Vattimo — the Catholic-communist-gay Italian pioneer of pensiero debole (weak thought) — died in 2023, and the intellectual biography he deserved has finally arrived, courtesy of Thomas Jared Farmer, a fellow Claremont alum who wrote the book at the University of Münster and now works at Emory Law School. Vattimo is not the household philosopher he should be in English, and this b...

Political theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what polit...

Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is back, and her timing is, as always, impeccable. We recorded this conversation about her new book on biblical interpretation right after Al Mohler announced that women cannot, in fact, teach the Bible on podcasts. So we did the only honest thing. We talked about scripture for an hour. Serving Up Scripture is the book Jennifer co-wrote with Aaron Higashi, and it u...

This was a live one, recorded on the eve of the 250th at Wake Forest Divinity School with the Double Deans in the room. Corey Walker's Theology Summit lecture — which spent six hours at the top of Substack the week we recorded — uses two moments in American history to name where we are: James Duane's October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring revolution, and Gil Scott-Heron's 197...

Last Q&A of The Future of Religion. And on the way out, Ilia did the thing the class had been quietly building toward — she said out loud that Teilhard never called Christ the savior, that we are not saved by one particular person but by making an option for the whole, and that the actual move the future of religion asks of us is to take Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does....