Homebrewed Christianity

My friend and filmmaker Sarey Concepción and I got to sit down with Justin Lin — yeah, that Justin Lin, the Fast and Furious guy — but this time he's not racing cars, he's exploring the too-fast-too-furious side of evangelical missions gone to the extreme. His new film Last Days tells the story of John Chau, the young American missionary who was killed trying to bring the gospel to the uncontacted...

I don't remember who first told me to read Yanis Varoufakis's Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, but whoever you are—thank you and also how dare you. This book broke something in my brain, in that good way where you realize the map you've been using doesn't match the territory anymore and now you have to rethink everything. Varoufakis isn't a theologian, but reading him felt like encounteri...

This is an audio essay from my Substack, Process This. Look, I wasn't planning to write 5,000 words on Steve Bannon, but then he goes on his podcast and announces that ICE—the same agency that just shot two American citizens in Minneapolis—is going to "surround the polls" in November, and I couldn't help myself. So I went back to Reinhold Niebuhr's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children...

What happens when our obsession with being better than everyone else destroys both who we are and how we relate to each other? Dr. Miroslav Volf joins us to talk about his new book The Cost of Ambition and why America's comparison culture, achievement addiction, and hardening tribal identities are setting us up for something dangerous. Volf witnessed neighbors turn on neighbors during the Yugoslav...

Friends, this week we're diving into something that's been eating at me for a while now—how the architects of Christian nationalism have had the audacity to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. I'm talking about Project 2025 invoking "costly grace" as if Bonhoeffer wasn't writing about them. Here's the thing: when Bonhoeffer penned those famous words in 1937, he wasn't crafting a devotio...

So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom an...

Okay, so you know that bone-deep exhaustion you feel? That sense that no matter how hard you run, you're still falling behind? What if I told you that's not a personal failure—it's a structural trap? German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has been asking why modern life feels like a whirlpool we can't escape, and his diagnosis is devastating: our growth economy requires our exhaustion. It's a feature, no...

In this preview for our upcoming Lent class, Jesus in Galilee, John Dominic Crossan dives into what he calls "A Tale of Two Gods"—Caesar and Christ. He takes on C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma (Lord, Lunatic, or Liar) and asks the question Lewis never considered: what if there were two contemporary claimants to divinity? Because there were. Before Jesus ever showed up, Caesar Augustus was already bei...

David Congdon came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit, and man, did we get into it. We're unpacking what liberalism actually means - not the Fox News version or the MSNBC version, but the philosophical tradition that emerged because people were literally killing each other over interpretations of the Eucharist after the Reformation. David makes this case for why we n...

What is up, Theology Nerds! This week I'm joined by my buddy Matthew Segall from the Footnotes to Plato Substack to announce something exciting: we're doing a joint reading group on Hartmut Rosa's new book Time and World. Rosa's a German sociologist who does big-picture thinking—like old school "let me tell you about modernity" stuff—and his work resonates deeply with process philosophy. His diagn...

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ⁠⁠You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay⁠.⁠ I grew up as a Baptist church planter's kid, and the church gave me everything that matters most to me—my faith, my love of Scripture, my relationship with Jesus. But for over two decades now, I've watched the tradition that formed me transform into something I barely recognize. In...

Marvin Wickware came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit and his book Loving Through Enmity, and we got into some really beautiful and difficult territory. Marvin's story is powerful - raised by an interracial couple in 1980s Indiana who were treated terribly by churches, converted through evangelical campus ministry, ended up at Union studying with James Cone, and th...

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ⁠You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.⁠ In this episode, we explore Paul Tillich's largely forgotten 1933 work The Socialist Decision, written as Hitler rose to power and costing Tillich his professorship and homeland. Here, I explore what it reveals about the current crisis of American Christianity. Tillich argued that aut...

In this first session of "The Rise of the Nones" online class, I am joined by Ryan Burge, Tony Jones, and Sarah Lane Ritchie to introduce findings from the largest survey ever conducted on religiously unaffiliated Americans—over 15,000 participants. The research, funded by the John Templeton Foundation's Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative, used machine learning to identify four distinct catego...

Tad Delay came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit, and we got into political philosophy and why democracy keeps sliding toward tyranny. Tad teaches Plato's Republic in his intro philosophy classes, and he makes this compelling case that Plato basically had us figured out - the fundamental problem is why do people desire their own servitude as though it were their sal...

This conversation took place at Theology Beer Camp 2025 on artificial intelligence, moderated by Michael Morelli with Ben Chicka and Noreen Herzfield, and it's one of the most grounded conversations I've heard about AI from a theological perspective. Noreen has this incredible background in computer engineering before becoming a theologian, and she's not buying the Silicon Valley hype. They talked...

Hey everybody, this is a special Christmas episode where I'm joined by Michael Morelli (Personalist Manifesto podcast) and Paul Hoard (professor at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology) for a live conversation about what the Incarnation has to say to our algorithmically-mediated moment. We get into Advent as a season of waiting in a world obsessed with immediacy and prediction—drawing on...

What happens when the person preaching on Sunday morning believes something completely different than the folks sitting in the pews? Well friends, that's exactly what we're digging into today. My buddy Ryan Burge brought the graphs—including some brand new data that hasn't even dropped on his Substack yet—and let me tell you, it's a real deal predicament for Mainline Protestantism. Turns out about...

I am SO excited about this episode. I got to sit down with Rian Johnson to talk about Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, and honestly? This might be my favorite conversation I’ve had all year. Not just because it’s a blast of a film (which it absolutely is), but because Rian brought so much theological depth and personal wrestling to this project. I’m always looking for that sweet spot where...

Look, we all have that person in our life who won’t stop talking about Motlmann or keeps “accidentally” bringing up liberation theology at Thanksgiving. Maybe that person is you. No judgment. I’m right there with you. That’s why I brought in my friend Rev. Dr. Thomas Hermans-Webster, acquisitions editor at Orbis Books, to help us figure out what books belong under the tree this year. We each picke...

So here's what we're wrestling with in this episode: What if economics isn't just a topic theology comments on, but actually the bigger framework that shapes what's theologically possible? That's the question that sent Brian McLaren searching, and it's what led him—and us—to the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani and his game-changing framework about modes of exchange laid out in his book, The St...

What is up, Theology Nerds! This one's a banger. At Theology Beer Camp 2025, I got to sit down with an EPIC braintrust of Bonhoeffer scholars—Jeff Pugh, Lori Brandt Hale, Reggie Williams, and Andy Root—for a panel that went deep into Dietrich's life, his communities, and why his witness matters more now than ever. We wrestled with how Bonhoeffer's critique of stupidity as a sociological force, his...

Well, we kicked off our Advent Against Empire series with Diana Butler Bass diving deep into Matthew's birth narrative, and wow—it did not disappoint. Diana brought her three signature lenses (anti-imperialism, non-violence, and eco-wholeness) to the most Jewish of all the gospels, and things got delightfully nerdy. We explored how Matthew's genealogy isn't just a boring list of "begats"—it's a su...

N.T. Wright returns to the podcast for round three—no Malibu rooftop this time, but plenty of theological fireworks. We dig into Tom's new book on Ephesians, starting with why he thinks the scholarly consensus dismissing Pauline authorship is more about 19th-century German liberal Protestant hangover than good historical work. From there, we get into the real meat: Ephesians isn't answering the qu...

Alright Tolkien Heads, this one's important. Dr. Craig Boyd joins us to dig into Tolkien's political philosophy and—look, we gotta talk about how the alt-right has been trying to claim Tolkien as one of their own, which is just... no. Craig offers a much-needed corrective by actually reading what the man wrote and believed. The heart of the conversation is this contrast between Gandalf and Saruman...