A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar

Text us your questions! Do you keep a healthy distance between yourself and the book of Revelation? Have a loved one who believes super weird things about Revelation? If so, you're in good company. Scot McKnight wrote a brilliant book called Revelation for the Rest of Us that turns all of those weird ways of interpreting Revelation on their heads and shows us what Revelation truly is.  It tur...

Text us your questions! In this special Easter episode, Kyle and Randy discuss all their questions about resurrection. They cover its significance to them, its coherence, whether it makes any sense to hope for it, apologetic approaches to it, how much it matters, and why Randy finds conversations about it kind of frustrating. Happy Easter! Extra resources (including those mentioned in the episode)...

Text us your questions! Who will be saved in the end? Does the Bible support eternal conscious torment, annihilationism, or ultimate reconciliation (or all three)? Can a good God condemn a majority of human beings who've ever lived to eternal hell? In this episode we tackle these questions and more, and we find out that Randy and Kyle don't quite agree on this one. In this episode, we ta...

Text us your questions! Are science and religion compatible? Should there be any crossover whatsoever? Why is it dangerous when we try to make our science fit into our religion? These are questions that Randy and Kyle chat about in our latest episode. Kyle strongly thinks that science and religion are in completely different categories and should almost never mix. Randy likes the "almost&quot...

Text us your questions! Bonnie Kristian is a journalist who writes for Christianity Today and has been published in The New York Times, The Week, CNN, The Daily Beast, and many more. Bonnie wrote the book Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community . The title says it all. How can we have good faith conversations and dialogue...

Text us your questions! Brad Jersak is an Eastern Orthodox theologian, author, and great friend of this podcast. Brad recently published a book called Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction . In this interview, we chat about what Brad calls the Great Deconstruction, the history and tradition of deconstruction within and outside of our faith tradition, why Brad is a devotee of Simo...

Text us your questions! Humility is one of those fleeting virtues in our world, and it feels like we need a healthy dose. Being comfortable with what we know and what we don't know, what we're good at and what we're not, and not trying to live in hubris and pretense. It's not easy, but it is really important. In this episode, Randy and Kyle talk about humility, pride, certainty...

Text us your questions! Randy S. Woodley is a Native American theologian, community builder, and seed farmer, and sees little difference between those vocations. We speak with him about the relationship between Christianity, Judaism, and Native American religion, the contrasts and similarities between indigenous and Western worldviews, why he thinks the Bible shouldn't have been translated in...

Text us your questions! For New Year's, we're re-airing an episode from Season 1 in which we discuss the question "What is truth?" We think it's as timely now as it was when we first released it and probably deserves a bit more attention than it got then. We hope you enjoy re-listening or perhaps catching it for the first time. We'll be back on our regular schedule wi...

Text us your questions! Merry Christmas! In this episode, we talk with Kelley Nikondeha about her book The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope . Kelley helps us reimagine the meaning of Advent by taking us into the complex political, religious, and ethnic landscape that forms the backdrop of the Christmas story, and encourages us to trade our often...

Text us your questions! Dave Lutz is a therapist in Seattle who works with families, couples, men, youth, and more. He's also a former college pastor at a mega-church whose faith journey has evolved and simplified into a spacious and beautiful place. And he's Randy's former college pastor who is in many ways to blame for who Randy is and what he's doing on this podcast. Dave re...

Text us your questions! We were raised in the church, and now it's our turn to parent our kids and figure out how to pass on a healthy spiritual journey to them. We don't really know how to do it, but we know we don't want to do it in ways that we were raised on in the church. Does that sound familiar? Bekah McNeel wrote Bringing Up Kids When the Church Lets You Down from exactly th...

Text us your questions! Our second political episode ever! Does it have anything to do with the elections occurring next week? You bet! Did we invite this guest on the show to trash nationalism some more? Sure did! BUT: Paul Miller is not our typical guest. For one thing, he's a self-described conservative patriot. He's a professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University in Was...

Text us your questions! Austen Hartke is a transgender Christian man who wrote the book Transforming: the Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians . The book is a gift to the trans Christian community, as well as to parents, church leaders, and the church in general. While the church and politicians debate and degrade transgender people's existence, they are trying to live lives without...

Text us your questions! Sometimes it's appropriate to carefully weigh all sides of an issue, patiently sorting through reasons, listening to perspectives, and respectfully dialoging with people who believe differently. We spend most of our time on this podcast trying to commend and practice that sort of thing. On the other hand, sometimes ideas are just bad, and it's appropriate to say w...

Text us your questions! This one is for the whiskey geeks. In this special bonus episode, we join our friends TJ, Chuck, and Brian at the Power of Bourbon YouTube channel for a blind-tasting of six exquisite whiskies. Along the way, we also find time to chat a bit about our podcast and introduce ourselves to their subscribers. And now we're sharing the experience with you, so you can get to k...

Text us your questions! We speak with philosopher James (Jamie) K.A. Smith about his new book How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now . It's a contemplative exploration of what it means to be a temporal creature, a being constituted by a past and oriented toward a future. If that sounds heady, it's honestly one of the most spiritual and restf...

Text us your questions! Stanley Hauerwas. Do we need to say more? The man is the preeminent living American theologian and has formed and shaped Christian thought and practice for decades. Stanley is a gift to the Church, and we loved chatting with him. We talked about sola scriptura, Kierkegaard, pacifism, how to be a Christian in America today, and much more. The audio for this episode is not to...

Text us your questions! In this episode, we chat with John Walton, one of the foremost evangelical Old Testament scholars alive. Dr. Walton teaches Old Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois. John has also written groundbreaking books about Genesis 1 and 2, commentaries on Genesis and Job and many more books. We chat about creation, ancient people groups and cultures that the Bible was written i...

Text us your questions! Why is "bar" part of the theme of our show (besides the obvious joke)? Kyle and Randy break this down with the help of an excellent article by Rich Manning called " The Complicated Journey from Holy Studies to Hospitality ," which interviews various bartenders about their experiences in the seemingly contrasting spaces of the hospitality industry and the...

Text us your questions! Deconstruction. What is it, why are so many doing it, and why are so many others apparently so threatened by it? We've said a few times on the show that we don't want to be just another deconstruction podcast, but we've never quite fully explained what we mean. So we sat down to work through our own experiences with deconstruction and what we've heard fr...

Text us your questions! Brian McLaren is at it again, writing a book for people on the edge of Christianity, just barely holding on. Do I Stay Christian? is a brilliant book that takes a very honest look at Christianity, ponders reasons to go, and reasons to stay, while presenting us with a new kind of Christianity...one that's more Christ-like and rooted in this moment and on this earth we f...

Text us your questions! Our first discussion with Beth Allison Barr and Scot McKnight at the end of Season 1 was so popular and helpful that they wanted to come back a second time to answer more questions about biblical translations, gender, and bias. We cover the editing process, translation committees, trusting the right experts, different translation styles, why translations aren't more di...

Text us your questions! Buckle up, friends...this is a major episode. Lisa Sharon Harper wrote Fortune , which dives into and details the history of her ancestors from Africa, to slave ships, to plantations and displaced and colonized Native Americans, all the way through to her own lived experience and the trauma, bravery, and resilience she carries in her own body through her ancestors. The book...

Text us your questions! Does God move supernaturally in our world today? Should we expect miracles? These are questions that New Testament scholar Craig Keener investigated, documented, and wrote about in his book Miracles Today . The book is fascinating and a bit frustrating in some ways, but also compelling and deeply researched. Dr. Keener has also written a ridiculous amount of scholarly work...