A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar

Text us your questions! ... drinking. This is a more personal episode for us, particularly for Randy. As you know, we like alcohol around here, especially whiskey. In this episode, we chat about that and the presence it's had on our podcast and in our lives. Can we have a "healthy relationship" with alcohol? What does that look like? How does that question get answered for each of u...

Text us your questions! David Gushee is an influential Christian ethicist who famously changed his mind about LGBTQ Christians. His 2014 book Changing Our Mind (now in its third edition) has been celebrated and widely recommended as an honest and forceful reckoning with the ethical issues surrounding LGBTQ Christians and the church's complicity in their exclusion, neglect, and abuse. It is a...

Text us your questions! Philosopher Aaron Simmons joins us to discuss his new book Camping with Kierkegaard . It's all about living life in a way that is "worthy of your finitude," avoiding becoming an "asshole capitalist," and learning how to value the things in your life with the help of folks like Kierkegaard and Simone de Beauvoir. We discuss living faithfully, being p...

Text us your questions! Where do we engage when we're done with evangelicalism, but we don't want to be done with the church? Thanks be to God, there are new signs of life springing up in the post-evangelical wasteland, and we're so here for it. Keri Ladouceur leads one of those hopeful spaces called the Post Evangelical Collective . Keri is the Executive Director of the PEC, has be...

Text us your questions! For New Year's, we're re-airing an episode from Season 1 in which we discuss God and love in the context of suffering, abuse, betrayal, and addiction with William Paul Young and Brad Jersak. It remains one of our most popular episodes to date, and we hope re-airing it will introduce it to new listeners. Enjoy! We'll be back on our regular schedule with new co...

Text us your questions! Merry Christmas! Brian Zahnd is back on the show to discuss his Christmas devotional The Anticipated Christ . We talk about why he's "trying to be religious," the difference between Christmas and Advent, the book of Isaiah, the Magnificat, what nonviolence has to do with Advent, the current Israel–Hamas war, and more. We also spend a few minutes at the end ju...

Text us your questions! This is such a rich conversation. Dr. Willie James Jennings is an incredible theologian who teaches Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. Dr. Jennings has written influential books like, The Christian Imagination: Theology and Origins of Race , After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging , and a groundbreaking commentary on the book of Acts, among...

Text us your questions! How do you process your identity and theology if you feel invisible as a person? What if your story, history, and experience are largely rejected and excluded from the culture you're a part of? How does that shape the way you see God and the world? Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim is a Korean-American theologian who works in liberation and feminist theology and wrote the book Invi...

Text us your questions! Jeff joins us to ask some questions about evil and get into the philosophical weeds a bit. What is the connection between God's nature and suffering? Can we say that suffering is meaningless? What was up with Leibniz? And a lot more. If you'd like to ask a question about a recent episode to be featured on one of these bonus segments, email us at pastorandphilosoph...

Text us your questions! We discuss the history of evangelicalism with Isaac B. Sharp. Or rather, the alternative history of evangelicalism, for it differs in some significant ways from what you may have heard about how evangelicalism in America developed, and how most of us understand what it is today. Would it surprise you to learn there were once proud theologically liberal evangelicals? That th...

Text us your questions! We wrap our discussion of evil and suffering with a look at some other sorts of responses to the problem and a reflection on where we land personally. If you haven't heard part 1, start there first. Due to the subject and the tone of this conversation, these episodes do not include a beverage tasting. Content note: this conversation includes discussion of evil and suff...

Text us your questions! How can people who believe in a good God account for the existence of pervasive suffering and evil? This is the oldest and most powerful objection to both belief in God's existence and religious practice, and it has been the subject of philosophical discussion and theological speculation spanning many religious traditions for thousands of years. We've run into it...

Text us your questions! Elliot has a few more questions about AI following our conversation with Derek Schuurman. Is AI a Tower of Babel moment? Is there any real reason for concern? Will it go so great that it makes us all soft? If you could live forever, would you? What about the end of the world? Big questions! We do our best for answering on the fly. If you'd like to ask a question about...

Text us your questions! The rise of artificial intelligence has happened at a startlingly rapid rate, and it seems like it's only accelerating by the month. Whether it's AI writing (plagiarizing) college papers and lazy pastors' sermons,  potentially curing horrific diseases, making fake humans, or taking over the world, we all have an endless amount of questions when it comes to wh...

Text us your questions! Our friend Jeff Cook joins us for a new Q&A segment to reflect on our conversation with Rob Schenck (see parts 1 and 2 of that conversation here and here ). This is our second installment of what will become a regular bonus segment with Jeff unpacking the content of certain episodes. You can hear the first installment, on LQBTQ affirmation and the church, at our Patreon...

Text us your questions! In the second part of our interview with Rob Schenck, a former Washington insider and heavy hitter in the evangelical pro-life lobbying industry, we discuss gun culture among American Christians and how asking questions about it ultimately cost him the organization he built and led for decades and led to him being ostracized by longtime friends and colleagues. Why are so ma...

Text us your questions! Season 4 is here! To kick it off, we've got a 2-parter for you with Rob Schenck, a former Washington insider and heavy hitter in the evangelical Christian lobbying industry. Rob was an influential voice in the pro-life movement for decades, but lost his position, and his funding, when he began to question the consistency of the evangelical position on guns with their s...

Text us your questions! We speak with Dr. Bradley Onishi, a religion scholar whose latest book, Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next , explores the rise of the extremist religious right in America and its evolution from the 1960s through the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. We discuss his personal transformation from conservativ...

Text us your questions! Many Protestants don't understand or appreciate how transformational Vatican II was for the Catholic Church and the whole global Christian Church in general. Our friend and Catholic theologian Shaun Blanchard co-wrote a book called Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction . In this episode, we chat with Shaun about the size, scope, and impact of Vatican II in the 1960s, a...

Text us your questions! If you're an American evangelical or used to be, there's a good chance you've heard of the Enneagram. You may have even run into it in another context or heard about it from friends who are really into personality tests. We've discussed it briefly on the show before, and we've wanted to eventually give it its own episode because Randy has found it r...

Text us your questions! Tom Oord is back! Dr. Thomas Oord and his daughter Alexa compiled and edited a book called Why the Church of the Nazarene Should be Fully LGBTQ+ Affirming . "  We wanted to talk to them about the book because everyone in the church (not just the Church of the Nazarene) is talking about human sexuality and whether or not the church should be LGBTQ+ affirming. LGBTQ+ inc...

Text us your questions! We speak with theologian and philosopher (and former pastor) Thomas Jay Oord about his new book The Death of Omnipotence and the Birth of Amipotence . We cover Tom's objections to the classical idea that God is all powerful, including that it's unbiblical, philosophically unsound, and makes the problem of evil impossible to solve. It's a fun interview and Tom...

Text us your questions! If you heard our recent episode on hell and universalism, you may recall that Randy mentioned having Keith DeRose, a philosopher at Yale, on the show at some point to respond to some of the objections Kyle had to universalism (the idea that everyone is eventually reconciled to God). Well, we reached out to Keith and he graciously agreed to chat with us. Our conversation cov...

Text us your questions! Sheila Gregoire is an author who has written several books that break the mold of Christian books about sex and marriage. Her latest book, She Deserves Better , is about raising girls as followers of Christ in ways that leave purity culture and teaching about modesty in the dust while showing us a better way. We also talked to Sheila about her 2021 book The Great Sex Rescue...

Text us your questions! Every now and then we like to talk to someone who is an expert in something we know almost nothing about. What better topic than philosophy and neuroscience? Andy Clark is Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at the University of Sussex, and is a well-known voice within philosophy of mind, pushing the boundaries of how we conceive of the brain, its connections with our environ...