Irenicast - A Progressive Christian Podcast

We're survivors of high control religious environments? What? Irenicast co-hosts offer the (sometimes) uncomfortable awareness that if you were in an evangelical/fundamentalist community, much of your life, inside and outside of church, was probably highly controlled. The conversation includes the harmful legacy of growing up and living within a highly controlled religious environment.  For exampl...

Jeff & Casey sit down for a conversation with Matthias Roberts, author of the new book Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms .  Before discussion the book, Matthias talks a little bit about his podcast Queerology and his trademark opening question: How do you identify and how would you say your faith has informed that identity? Focus soon turns toward his new book.  Matthias...

It's a Process Theology Christmas, because that's our thing now.  In this conversation Bonnie leads the team in a super-sized discussion on all things Christmas.  Through a process theology lens of course. It begins with a discussion around an old Christmas classic, O Holy Night.  Specifically the line, "and the soul felt its worth." Where does our worth come from?  God? Experience? Process theolo...

To begin, each of the co-hosts speaks to their experiences of women in church leadership. You might be surprised. Then questions surface like -- should we be gender-izing leadership? Aren't we over the gender binary thing? Bonnie shares her own difficult journey toward claiming pastor-hood.  This episode holds an open-hearted conversation in which mistakes are made and forgiven.  You'll hear men o...

In this episode two innovative spiritual leaders and thinkers, Brian McLaren and Rev. Dr. Penny Nixon, have an intimate conversation beginning with the story of their conservative Christian upbringings, ending with their visions of the future of American Christianity.  Co-hosts, Rajeev Rambob and Bonnie Rambob, ask for insights on faith, doubt, belief, Christian identity and secular Christianity....

In keeping with the shadow side of Halloween, Jeff, Casey and Rajeev ask the question, what is evil? -- capital E, Evil. Each co-host brings his own, different perspective. Is Evil personal?  Is it systemic? Should it be a category at all? Does the Good-Evil binary serve us or harm us? What about the Devil? Through the conversation, the co-hosts model another E word -- Evolution.  Perhaps a conver...

Our first Process Theology episode is finally here!  We know many of our listeners have been waiting to hear more about this particular theology that was introduced to the Irenicast audience by Bonnie in episode #136.  We expect there will be more conversations on this topic to follow. Because, in this episode, we just dip our toes into the realm of possibilities embedded in process thought and th...

Per listener request, the Irenicast crew takes up the topic of Faith Healing. Surprise! Not every evangelical and/or fundamentalist tradition approaches this topic in the same way. Co-hosts discuss personal experiences with Faith Healing through the filters of their former faith contexts as well as their current faith contexts. The question of faith leaders using "faith healing" in manipulative or...

Rajeev sits down and has a conversation on grief with author Megan Devine.  Grief might be the most universal human experience and Megan shares her personal journey to her work as a grief advocate.  She provides wisdom into developing one's own grief skills, whether they are needed for personal griefs or to walk into grief with a loved one.  As a loving act toward yourself, listen to this conversa...

Allen, Casey and Jeff dive into the disturbing notion of "gay conversion therapy", sometimes called "gay reparative therapy".  The episode begins with Casey sharing his personal experience with the horrific practice. Allen and Jeff share from their own experiences as straight white guys.  All three reveal the influence of religiously institutionalized sexual purity culture and homophobia on their...

Rajeev and Bonnie interview their good friend in this episode, The Rev. Dr. Horace L. Griffin.  Rev. Dr. Horace L. Griffin is an Episcopal Priest and gay man serving St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Georgia as Associate for Pastoral Care and Outreach.  He is author of the award-winning book, Their Own Receive Them Not: African American Lesbians and Gays in Black Churches .   The episode beg...

Because the topic is worth repeating, the team is revisiting forgiveness.  Previously, way back in episode 73, Jeff and Mel (aka Mona) came to the conclusion that forgiveness and reconciliation are not at all synonymous. This time around, Jeff, Allen, Bonnie and Rajeev explore humanity's need for forgiveness, individually and communally. They consider the relationship between forgiving and "lettin...

Does God Act? In an epilogue to their Community series, Irenicast co-hosts ask and answer the question where they find God showing up in the world. Spoilers: they don't all agree! After a brief discussion on the language we use for God, Casey helps turn the discussion toward the experiential, highlighting the diversity of the team. Eventually this connects to a more theoretical and systematic cons...

Elizabeth Jeffries PhD, author of Through the Kaleidoscope, sits down with Irenicast co-host Jeff, bringing forth spiritual treasures out of the world of molecular biology. For anyone seeking to ground their religious affections and theological process in the solid matter of the natural world, Jeffries offers fresh ideas-- herself having navigated a path of deconstruction with an open mind and ope...

Author Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors.  Formerly incarcerated and homeless, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make the all headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work—drawing a direct line between the church's lack of diversity and the church's...

If you didn't get out to your local LGBTQ Pride festivities -- no worries -- this episode is a Pride month celebration.  Our own Pastor Casey Tinnin was elected the Grand Marshal of the Sacramento, California Pride Parade. What do you wear when you're the Grand Marshal of a Pride parade?  In the first half of this celebration, Casey recounts his experience, internally and externally, of representi...

In the final episode of the "relational" series, the Irenicast crew reflects on chosen community.  We all need a chosen family to do life with. This is especially true for people in marginalized, oppressed groups like those who are LGBTQ+ and are those who minortized because of their race/ethnicity.  Co-hosts discuss the formation and cultivation of chosen community, the distribution of power and...

Parenting is hard, but deconstructing with kids adds an extra layer to the hard.  Some parents feel the need to reform fundamentalist/evangelical Christian values into progressive Christian values.  Other parents want to distance children from conservative Christianity by raising children outside of religious faith.  Still other parents jerk the family back and forth as they figure it out. Because...

It gets real as the Irenicast team talks about one's given community -- or family of origin-- as family systems rather than a collection of individuals.  Thinking about family as a system impacts the way we think about ourselves in relation to family members. Family relationships can be especially hard to navigate when one's views of the world are very different from other family members' views.  ...

Conceptualizing the self, building intrapersonal intelligence, becoming aware of our interconnectedness, reclaiming self-love in theological context, moving beyond platitudes about self-care, and more mix in this week's conversation.  Officially kicking off our series on relationships, the team begins with that person nearest and dearest to us - our own selves. A game of Desert Island rounds off t...

Jeff, Allen, Casey and Raj embark on a heart and head heavy journey towards pluralism as guided by Diana Eck's markers of pluralism: "First, pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity. Diversity can and has meant the creation of religious ghettoes with little traffic between or among them. Today, religious diversity is a given, but pluralism is not a given; it is...

How cosmology shapes our theology: as our understanding of our origins and universe shifts, what does that mean for our concepts of ourselves and of God? Jeff, Allen, Raj, and Casey talk all things science and literature, touching on biological evolution, the evolution of galaxies, ancient cosmologies, fundamental shifts like the Copernican revolution and the cosmological principle, overcoming mis...

While some may play the Alphabet Game on a road trip, Casey and Bonnie get into a deep conversation on two tried and true Christian approaches - Apologist or Evangelist. Jeff and Raj are brought into Casey's and Bonnie's road trip question:  Are you an apologist or an evangelist? In other words, are you more interested in defending Christianity (or as Casey says, put lipstick on a pig) or in sprea...

Despite what many of us from fundamentalist backgrounds have been told, there is a diverse array of Christian theologies.  Liberation, Queer, Womanist and Process theology are some of the lenses we will be looking through on this week's episode. This week Raj, Bonnie and Casey share their learnings and leanings on the the theologies of Liberation, Queer, Womanist and Process in ways that are movin...

Irenicast Roundtable y'all! There are certain legends that speak of a round table where valiant heroes, thought leaders and purveyors of magic gathered to rid the world of injustice.  Well f**k those guys. This is the round table worthy to be called a showcase of the immortals. Where else can you encounter a high caliber cast of characters that could be taken straight out of a Tolkien novel? There...