Irenicast - A Progressive Christian Podcast

Mona sits down with Lauren Andrea-Lucia to explore what it means to have multiple religious identities. Lauren grew up in Italy with a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, and finds religious and spiritual nourishment in both traditions, identifying as a dual-religious person. Lauren shares her experience of holding both religious identities together, despite their seemingly mutually-exclusive cla...

In a conversation geared more toward culture than faith Jeff, Mona and Allen explore why young males are disengaging from society.  Far from an agreeable conversation about things we can do to reverse this trend, this episode focused on nuanced disagreement about its primary causes.  Between video games, easy access to pornography, education, economic factors and a host of other causes, is there a...

Is prophecy today simply fortune telling or something else?  Jeff, Mona and Allen discuss this deceptively layered topic.  Much of the time the rhetoric around prophecy, or the prophetic, or even the hebrew prophets themselves seems so otherworldly.  Saturated with mysticism and the divine.  Perhaps there is more.  And that although all that is true, there is another dimension to the tradition of...

As part of our celebration of International Podcast Day 2016 we are giving you a bonus episode of Irenicast.  Jeff, along with guest co-hosts Adam and Dylan, provide a critical analysis of God's Not Dead.  We watch horrible Christian movies so you don't have to.  Racial stereotypes, bad theology, one-dimensional characters and the Newsboys come together for this cringe inducing film based off of a...

Art vs. the artist.  Can bad people create good things?   How closely should we judge someone's work in view of the person themselves?  Our co-hosts go in, without concrete answers, to mine for clarity in this nebulous conversation.  Two-thirds of our hosts leave this conversation relatively sure how they feel about this topic.  One ends up more confused than ever.  And finally, for your word-asso...

Does pray work?  How is it possible that a post-evangelical podcast like ours has had over 80 episodes without ever talking about prayer?  This episode reconciles this quandary.  Jeff, Mona and Allen ultimately agree to disagree about how prayer causes God to act, or not act.  However, they all agree that prayer is a worthwhile spiritual practice that is beneficial for a person's well being and co...

Does God laugh?  Is God affected by creation and the affairs of people?  Despite getting trapped in a theological hamster wheel of logic, Jeff, Mona and Allen set out to tackle these questions head on.  Recognizing that, though we may never have definitive proof either way, our opinions about divine emotion have implications for the way we live and/or practice faith.  To further add to the confusi...

Joining us this week for a conversation on simply simplicity is second-time guest Adam Loveridge, who steps into an empty co-host chair while Mona is on vacation. He joins Jeff and Allen as they think aloud about the nature of our relationship with the stuff we own, what it might be like to transform that relationship, and what we stand to gain in doing so (Allen thinks it's "everything").  We kno...

Guess who's back, back again?  Allen's back, tell a friend.  That's right, our illustrious co-host Allen is back for another conversation on faith and culture.  In this episode, each host reflects on their personal pilgrimage experiences while discussing the larger concept of pilgrimage itself.  We close our time together with a Knowin' Jemonen segment highlighting each host's top 3 favorite veggi...

Maintaining status quo can be a strong motivation for people in power to suppress questioning and intellectual exploration.  Often in church communities we can feel isolated for asking hard questions.  Especially questions that challenge long standing ideas and methods.  This week Jeff and Mona discuss the many layers surrounding the topic of anti-intellectualism within the church and christianity...

Many times it is difficult to really understand the plight of any group of people without insight into what life is really like for them.  Inspired by conversation Mona overheard on a city bus, this week's episode explores the issue of homelessness.  Jeff and Mona discuss attempt to provide a new perspectives on stereotypes and false rhetoric associated with homelessness.  They also touch on socia...

Life, God, community and beer.  These are the pillars of a different type of church model, beer church, introduced to us by guest co-host Jeff, aka Jeff 2.  Jeff 2 shares with us the great value he places on gatherings of corporate worship.  That the sacred nature of gathering together is in itself the divine, not necessarily the method or space in which we worship.  His preferred method of corpor...

Experiencing anger in a life-giving way for some may seem like a paradox.  However, every emotion has the potential for good if we seek to understand where it is coming from and are able to control where we take it.  Sometimes we can figure out the best way to express anger within ourselves or our community.  Other times we need to seek professional help.  It is only when we deny or dismiss people...

Inspired by a listener comment on a past episode, Jeff and Mona have a conversation about forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not forgetting.  It is all about remembering, reframing and creating healthy space.  But what else is it?  How do we practice it?  Our attempts to answer these questions lead us into topics like justice, trauma and reconciliation.  For our segment the theme of forgiveness continue...

This week we discover the story behind the story: the feminist theology foundations of Irenicast. Mona welcomes to the show Kat, Jeff's wife (whom you may remember from our family reunion episode), and a feminist theologian named Dr. Debbie Blades. Debbie has played in significant role in walking with both Mona and Kat during uneasy and challenging times of spiritual de- and re- construction. Mona...

You are creative.  Many times in life we convince ourselves that we are not creative.  That creativity is reserved for the special and talented.  This week Jeff and Mona debunk that idea and celebrate the creativity of everyone.  Our hosts discuss the relationship between creativity and talent and offer up their own creative methods.  The episode ends in a creative exercise with the segment, Good...

The statistics regarding church attendance and relevancy in today's culture seems to be getting more and more bleak.  With church participation steadily declining in America it is important for churches to let go of outdated models and begin to explore new ways for people of faith to gather together.  This week we talk with guest co-hosts Zach Kerzee and Christy Wright of Simple Church.  Simple ch...

In a follow-up episode on the Orlando attack, Mona interviews her friend Rafael who is an LGBTQ Latino. Rafael shares about about the impact of this shooting from a multifaceted cultural perspective, and offers some personal insights on the events and what it means to work across difference. They discuss internalized homophobia, faith, othering, and what brings them hope for overcoming hate in try...

Grieving for Orlando in the aftermath of the shooting at the Pulse night club Jeff & Mona discuss the tragedy with guest host, Bentley. Bentley is a chaplain at UCSF Medical in the Bay Area, and has worked for many years as a pediatrics chaplain. He is also originally from Orlando and provides profound context to the origins of the Pulse night club. Through grappling with their own feelings and th...

Churches, non-profits, Kickstarter campaigns, charity events - Jeff, Mona and Allen give some space this week to the topic of charitable giving.  How do we exercise generosity in a way that really makes a difference?  From the "faith giving" of the televangelists' guaranteed returns to the one-for-one giving of Toms shoes, this conversation challenges our notions of philanthropy and charity - and...

The social media landscape seems endless.  Not only are there more and more platforms available, but there are also endless implications for humanity.  These are some of the things Jeff, Mona and Allen explore this week.  Does social media make us more social?  Do we end up more disconnected in the long run?  Is all of it it simply a funhouse mirror that distorts what's already inside of us?  We e...

Bridging the gap between culture and language are two of the biggest hurdles in approaching scripture.  For the final installment of our interpreting the Bible series Jeff, Mona and Allen talk about ways we can accomplish this sometimes overwhelming task.  How do we read the bible in and out of its original context?    The episode, and series, ends with a segment called Biblical Oddities.   Interp...

Week two of our interpreting the Bible series centers around a conversation on the editing of the Biblical texts.  How was the Bible written over time?  Jeff, Mona & Allen discuss the progression of the Biblical text over time through the lense of Source and Redaction criticism.  The episode finished with a fun round of Sound Charades.   Irenicast Book Club Announcement ( 01:02 ) Interpreting the...

Part one of a new series on interpreting the Bible starts this week.  Throughout the course of the next three episodes we will be answering the questions: How do we read the Bible as literature? How was the Bible written over time?  How do we read the Bible in and out of context?  Jeff, Mona and Allen kick everything off with a conversation laying out why the Bible should be recognized as literatu...

In this episode Allen interviews author Mark Van Steenwyk whose works include That Unholy Anarchist , The UnKingdom of God , and most recently the children's book A Wolf at the Gate .  He is a co-founder of Mennonite Worker and co-producer of Iconocast.  In discussing his new book, Mark touches on topics like anarchist resistance, ecopsychology, intentional community, theological imagination, viol...