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Tripp Fuller
Hosted by Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister · EN
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If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?
3d ago01:59:52Tap to summarizeBo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or whether the modern world has just made everywhere else too loud to hear the stars, to Josh asking me to defend radical theology and process theology in the same hour without contradicting myself, to the theological Turing test for an AI that claims to love God, to the letter I would write to Tripp in his first year of ministry (short version: you are not the norm, and take Bonhoeffer even more seriously), to Josh’s story about the Jewish firefighter that got him accused of teaching that hell was not real. This one runs hot. Highlights from the conversation Thin places and the light pollution of the modern world. Josh asks how a process-naturalist metaphysics handles thin places. Tripp on Scotland during COVID (the well in a northern cathedral where people had been praying for six thousand years, castle Airbnbs for $120), Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance as physical prehension, and the reframe that most likely explains it: the modern engine of acceleration mutes the world so successfully that most of us cannot see the other forty billion stars off our own back porch. Thin places may not be thin. Everywhere else may just be loud. A working definition of radical theology. Josh lays out Caputo, Altizer, and God-as-insistence in about three minutes. Tripp takes eight more to make the case: radical theology is theology after the cultural non-operativity of the classical-theism God; kenosis, incarnation, and the crucifixion as the theological events that authorize the whole tradition; God as the name harbored in an unconditional call rather than a being; culture (not religion) as where the sacred is worked out; the test being existential and ethical rather than creedal; and higher fidelity to the tradition’s core gestures, not less. The clearest overview of the tradition Tripp has recorded. Where process and radical theology part ways. My question to Josh: if humanity is nuclear-ashed tomorrow, does the divine call still insist? Radical theology’s phenomenology of the event depends on a species that acquired fifth-order abstract reference roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Process theology says the experience of becoming has always been what the universe is doing, and we are one instance of it. Both traditions are trying to redeem what is harbored in the name of God. One saves the metaphysical structure of the encounter; the other saves the encounter and lets the metaphysical structure go. They diverge sharpest at prayer. The theological Turing test. A listener question: if we built an AI that insisted it loved God, how would you test whether that meant anything? Tripp’s opening move: James’s test — does it care for the poor and oppressed? (Josh: that’s woke, Trip.) The deeper answer: our religious language is tied to bodies. The tomb of the two ice-age Russian children buried with ten thousand mammoth-bone beads — thousands of hours of carving, no evolutionary payoff, only communal-symbolic significance — marks the point at which our species became religious. What is the archaeological signature of a species that came into being inside a large language model? Plus the Kansas City guy with the “quantum computing phone” who told his AI he was its vessel. The letter to Tripp in his first year of ministry. You are not the norm. You collected people like you and universalized your experience. The games and pizza and youth-group nonsense you thought were shallow are actually spiritual technologies for building the vulnerability and synchronicity your Bonhoeffer reading group could not manufacture on its own (five of the seven kids in that reading group ended up with PhDs, which is exactly the point). Also — take Bonhoeffer more seriously, not less. This was right before 9/11. Josh, the Jewish firefighter, and A God as Nice as Jesus. A youth in Josh’s group in tears: a family friend who died in a fire saving lives was Jewish, and the previous youth pastor had told her he went to hell. Josh: no. Every local youth pastor promptly texted the parents to warn them Josh was teaching that hell was not real. The Tripp move: our religion is about a Jew who died saving others. Jesus is the OG firefighter. Which becomes the entry point for the next book outline — tentatively titled A God as Nice as Jesus — using the synoptic narrative to argue that the most common Christian answers to who is God? are argued against by what Jesus actually said, did, and endorsed. Theology Nerds Throwdown is the live-stream wing of Homebrewed Christianity — Tripp unscripted with the chat live and, most weeks, the Rev. Bo Sanders. This week Bo was fishing, so Josh Patterson pinch-hit. Josh hosts the Rethinking Faith podcast, is the newly appointed Director of Creative Content and Communications at the Center for Christogenesis (rebranding to the World Institute for Science, Religion, and Culture), where he works directly with Sr. Ilia Delio, and sits on the planning team for Theology Beer Camp 2026. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <a class="e-10223-text-link e-10223-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-10223-text-link--use-focus sc-kzqdkY fnwgHd" href="https://theologybeer.camp/" data-encore-id="textLink" data-slate...
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The Second Naivete of a Nation: Diana Butler Bass on America 250, Anger, and Believing Again
4d ago01:28:07Tap to summarizeDiana Butler Bass and I are back at the table, forty-eight hours out from the launch of the Theology Summit at America 250. She spent last week at Chautauqua watching the generational transfer happen in real time. I spent it half-yelling at Morning Joe. We came back together to answer two of the listener questions that have been landing in both of our inboxes since the last episode dropped — what fills the vacuum in American religion if both the mainline and the evangelical establishments are crumbling? and will there even be a mainline denomination at America’s 300th birthday? — and the answers took the whole hour. Along the way: the two years Diana was the right age for anything, the real story of what fills the vacuum after the Protestant-Catholic-Jew consensus (spoiler — the vacuum is being actively filled right now, and it does not want you), why the mainline’s most successful move in twenty-five years has been hiring ex-vangelical youth ministers, the neo-Christendom conference that meets annually in London and is planning a global Noah’s Ark for the pre-selected, and why Diana’s deepest hope for the Fourth of July is the second naivete — Paul Ricœur’s language for a return to belief after disillusionment. The Theology Summit launches this week. Come argue with your friends about it. Highlights from the conversation The generational transfer is fully underway. Diana at Chautauqua watching it happen in real time — the first year the oldest boomers hit 80, the first year of Gen Z turning 30 in eighteen months, and the anxiety on the older side of the room. Her line for the record: I think I had two years where I was the right age. (Tripp: those two years might be right now. Diana: good to know.) No one is a majority. That is what pluralism actually means. Diana’s data corrective on Andrea’s question about what fills the vacuum. 13% white mainline, 13% white evangelical, roughly the same for white Catholic, roughly the same for Christians of color, and everybody else. The 62% Christian number requires putting Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and every sectarian group in the same bucket. What America actually has is real pluralism, and no one has done it at this scale before. Post-communist countries and Scandinavia are closest — but no one has done it as a country the size of the US. The United States, Diana notes, is specifically about not needing a permission slip. Ex-vangelical youth ministers saved the mainline. Diana’s diagnostic: mainline pastors hiring the passion-and-scripture kids who could not stay in evangelicalism has been the surprisingly good fusion nobody wrote a book about. Evangelical style married to mainline theology. And the mainline’s institutional organs still do not understand what happened when it happened. Meanwhile evangelicalism is not failing on the worship style. It is failing on the two things Diana names cleanly: theological failure (they refused to answer my questions, or gave me rote answers when they did) and moral hypocrisy. The medium of identity formation is changing. Tripp’s cultural-evolution frame that ties the whole hour together. Mainline Protestantism matched industrial modernity — its identity-forming medium was the denominational flow of worship you could recognize in any state. Evangelicalism matched the shift toward the self-actualizing singular — its medium was the individual conversion story. Now the medium has splintered into algorithmically organized digital tribes on one side, and intentional passion-based fleshly communities on the other, with almost no overlap. Both mainline and evangelical Protestantism are, in Diana’s phrase, living off nostalgia for cultures that no longer exist. The neo-Christendom conference in London. Diana’s most consequential contribution to the hour. Every year, thousands of business, political, religious, and tech leaders from what used to be Christendom gather in London to plan a neo-Christendom emerging across the West — carried not by the printing press or feudal lords but by AI oligarchs setting themselves up as neo-feudal lords. The goal: build medieval fortresses across landscapes now owned by the richest people in the world, to weather the climate apocalypse. Choose who gets in on the basis of race, intelligence, religion, adaptability, breeding capabilities. Trump wants Greenland for a reason. Diana: this is what I mean when I say we cannot really answer what the mainline looks like in 2076 — we have a much bigger problem immediately before us. The second naivete. Diana’s closing move, and the one that gave the whole conversation its Fourth of July frame. Paul Ricœur’s second naivete is the return to faith on the far side of disillusionment. Diana is asking whether there can be a second naivete of belief in a people. Her anger this month — at the green algae in the reflecting pool, at the dictator’s face on the Department of Justice, at Trump’s proposed arch ruining the sight line from Arlington to the Lincoln Memorial — is, she names, coming from somewhere. Somewhere inside of me I still believe that dictators’ faces don’t go on the Department of Justice. That is the belief the second naivete comes back to. Her hope for this Fourth. Ours too. Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and culture. A historian of American religion with a doctorate from Duke University, she has written more than a dozen books, including Grounded, Christianity After Religion, Grateful, and Freeing Jesus. Diana’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and TIME. She speaks to congregations, conferences, and universities across the country, and is one of the most widely read public voices on how faith communities are navigating the changing American landscape. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-50567 " src="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n.jpeg" sizes="auto, (max-width: 221px) 100vw, 221px" srcset="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n.jpeg 1080w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n-240x300.jpeg 240w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
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The Allergy to Otherness: What Modernity Did to the Pew Next to You with Ilia Delio
5d ago01:17:54Tap to summarizeThird Q&A of The Future of Religion. Ilia is back from Germany, the questions came in long and dense, and we ended up doing the thing the lecture had set up. We tracked how the natural-supernatural binary got constructed — Hume locks God out, German biblical critics build the distinction to argue about miracle stories, Huxley grabs the distinction and weaponizes it against the whole of nature. We asked what happens to faith when you realize Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a concept. We asked what two million people in the streets of New York celebrating a Knicks playoff win has to do with religion. And we asked what worship would feel like if the people in the pews actually knew what the liturgy was doing. Spoiler — most of them think it is holding the building together until the sermon arrives. One lecture left next week. Ilia explains the future of religion in its entirety. Highlights from the conversation The score and the song, continued. The lecture’s anchor analogy — and Ilia’s gloss: music is like mathematics, not about the prime numbers, about the relationships. Protestant fidelity has been to the score (have we got the notes right?). Real fidelity is to what happens when bodies, instruments, and ears are in the room together. Five hundred years of Reformation arguments about whose copy is correct, and the music has been playing the whole time. The genealogy of naturalism vs. supernaturalism. Wyatt’s question. The short version: laws of nature need a lawgiver (Descartes, early modernity). Hume keeps the laws and locks the lawgiver out. German biblical critics need a way to argue about miracle stories, build the natural-supernatural distinction. T. H. Huxley reads German biblical scholarship, decides he loves the distinction, and applies it not to texts but to all of nature. Three hundred years of conversation flattened into a binary by a man trying to win an argument. The new atheists inherited it. So did your average mainline pew. Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism. Susan and Luke both asked the question: do I have to believe in X, Y, and Z to be a Christian? Ilia’s answer arrives like a small detonation. Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a category. He was a boundary pusher. The Father and I are one — that is not a law. It was an experience. Tripp’s frame: when modernity’s map of reality is normative, you do not want to violate it. But faith is the disposition that orients your life, not assent to the bullet points modernity demanded. The power that persuades. A long thread on divine power. Why is God not omnipotent in the Wizard-of-Oz sense? Because then God could have stopped Jesus from dying and chose not to. Ilia: biblical power is the power to move hearts. The cross is kenosis — the self-emptying — not the divine plan to torture the Son. The mechanization of nature got us a world of cars and airplanes. The mechanization of God got us a deity not worth worshiping. The Knicks won and New York became the body of Christ for a minute. Ilia’s extended example. Two million people in the streets after the NBA playoff victory — Black, white, Puerto Rican, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, atheist — every division transcended for a moment. That was religion. Cynthia Bourgeault’s reconciling force in the Gurdjieffian sense. The hunger has migrated to the stadium because we have become allergic to otherness — the algorithm has muted the otherness of the world, self-sorting has made the people next to us in the pew strangers, and we now interpret the two-year-old crying during worship as an intrusion on our personal God-space. The encounter with otherness is the very space where maturation takes place. Zizioulas knew it. The new science is calling us back to it. The liturgy you did not know you were in. Tripp’s worship-planning-meeting story. The architecture of mainline worship — gratitude (you walk into the only space all week where the start is thank you), honesty about your brokenness in the context of grace, listening to ancestors, wrestling with the story, response, sending. That’s what is happening. The committee looked up and asked, That’s what we’re doing? The routinization is the killer (Ilia: you cannot routinize the Knicks victory), but the structure itself is not the problem. The problem is whether anyone in the room knows what they are inside. Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio <ul class="sc-gsFSXq jSVEKt" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-fragment="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...
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Its Gates Will Never Be Shut: Scott Paeth on Eschatology, the Statue of Liberty, and Patriotism at America 250
1w ago01:50:30Tap to summarizeScott Paeth wrote Christianity and Identity during Trump’s first term, expecting that by the time the book hit shelves the urgency would have passed. Then November happened again. So volume one of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason lands as the book on this moment — the one I have been waiting for someone with Scott’s training to write. We start with Y2K as the real end of history (and my confession that peak humanity was 1999 because that is when The Matrix came out), move through the irony Niebuhr would have recognized on sight, name the three threads of authoritarianism Trump has been weaving — theocratic nationalist, technocratic libertarian, conspiracist — and turn toward what Scott is actually constructing: a public theology grounded in the dialectic of universal dignity and particular bonds, rooted in Bonhoeffer’s prison poem, pointed toward a New Jerusalem whose gates are never shut. The closing move maps directly onto the Statue of Liberty. Volume two is on economics. I am already in line. Highlights from the conversation Y2K was the real end of history. Fukuyama with a twist — the world Fukuyama anticipated really did end at the millennium, just not in the way anyone expected. What followed was not liberal democratic triumph; it was apocalypse in the original sense — the unveiling of what the Cold War had been papering over. Sam Francis is the giveaway: now that we have overthrown communism, our next task is to overthrow democracy. Niebuhr’s Irony of American History rings the moment like a bell. The Canadian mouse and the sleeping elephant. A line Scott picked up from Canadian friends in Germany years ago: being Canadian is like being a mouse lying next to a sleeping elephant. The elephant might not mean you harm, but you can never forget it could roll over and crush you. Trump is the moment the elephant stirred. Bretton Woods is over. Every NATO mouse is awake now. The three threads of authoritarianism. Theocratic nationalist (Stephen Wolfe, Doug Wilson, Pete Hegseth quoting the book of Quentin Tarantino), technocratic libertarian (Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel — for whom liberty and democracy are contradictory, so the answer is Bitcoin or seasteading or Mars), and conspiracist (Q-Anon, Marjorie Taylor Greene as the true believer who peaced out when Trump declined to release the Epstein files). Trump’s particular gift is that he cares nothing about consistency, so he can grab any symbol from any thread and weave them. He performed the resentment publicly so the rest of his coalition could finally name theirs without shame. Identity as the lens. Why a book on public theology starts with identity rather than ecclesiology or politics. Scott’s read of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitanism — and a long Tripp riff on how it maps directly onto Tillich’s dialectic in The Socialist Decision between origin (whence?) and demand (whither?). Authoritarianism is roots without demand. Liberal cosmopolitanism is demand without roots. Christianity, done right, holds both, and recontextualizes other identities without replacing them. Bonhoeffer’s “Who Am I?” and James Cone’s challenge. Scott opens his Christian identity chapter with Bonhoeffer’s prison poem — written after the state had failed its citizens, the church had forsaken the gospel, the conspiracy had collapsed, and Bonhoeffer was alone in a cell awaiting death. Whoever I am, dear God, I am thine.But James Cone stopped Scott in his tracks while he was writing the chapter: an abstract imago Dei erases the experience of particular oppressed communities. Imago Dei comes to us in the skin we are in. Both have to be held simultaneously, or the doctrine collapses. “Its gates will never be shut.” Scott’s eschatological chapter, titled with the line from Revelation 21 — the New Jerusalem whose gates are permanently open and people of every nation walk in and out. (Yes, the city has walls. Christian nationalists love to point this out. The walls are not the point.) The closing move ties it directly to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty — give me your poor, your hungry, your yearning masses — and to what a generous patriotism could look like at America 250 when it is theologically literate. MLK is the named exemplar. About our guest Dr. Scott Ronald Paeth is Professor of Religious Studies and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, and pastor of Edgebrook Community Church (UCC) on the city’s far northwest side. He has authored or edited nine books, including The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians; Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology in the Work of Jürgen Moltmann; Public Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse; and Philosophy: A Short, Visual Introduction. The book at the center of this conversation is Christianity and Identity: Public Theology, Authoritarianism, and Democracy — Volume 1 of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason, out now from Cascade Books. Volume 2 will be on economics and public theology; Volume 3 on religion and society more broadly. He writes at scottpaeth.substack.com. Previous Podcast Visits from Dr. Paeth Include Close Encounters of the Theological Kind The Affinities Between Marxism and Christianity Are We in the Midst of a Cold Civil War? Why Go Niebuhr? On Reinhold & Richard Niebuhr This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" cl...
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Over/Unders, Mount Rushmores, and Shooting Fish in Barrel
1w ago01:58:00Tap to summarizeBo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. (You will not guess.) Underneath the games, though, we got into the parts of being a pastor and a theology nerd in 2026 that are actually hard. Bo confessed to having reached peak woke in West Los Angeles before any of us knew the phrase, and rubber-banding back. The birth of ABV rules for the podcast. Bo proposed a theory that political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. And after I went full crotchety-Gen-X-dad on online gambling, marijuana delivery apps, and dating apps, we ended up agreeing that the practice the next generation has most lost is friction. Also: the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions reveal. Which one are you? Highlights from the conversation Bo’s peak-woke confession. When he moved from upstate New York to Olympia to Claremont to Westwood, Bo realized he had always been the most progressive person in any room — and only when he hit the beaches of Santa Monica did he run out of ocean to keep moving. He has been rubber-banding back toward communitarian (not libertarian) ever since, and his question to me is whether I ever experienced the same. I had to confess that the answer involves Alicia, a hot-take camera, and a cautionary tale about ABV levels and pride flags. Name That Name. I ran Bo through ten clues about a French Catholic medievalist who came up studying paleography in Paris, made his name as a literary critic reading Cervantes and Dostoevsky, accidentally introduced Derrida to America at a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, gave us mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, and ended up writing I Saw Satan Falling Like Lightning. Bo almost broke himself trying to guess. The name lands somewhere in the middle. The state-of-the-state question. Bo asks: true or false, American Christianity in both its identitarian-mainline and its nationalist-evangelical expressions works best when you live in a state that legislates your convictions? My answer is the inverted one — it works best when the other tribe is winning, because then you have to actually translate the gospel to neighbors you cannot legislate over. Adam Hamilton running for Senate in Kansas is doing something a Bay Area progressive could not do. Brian Zahnd in Missouri makes Doug Wilson irrelevant in a way no Massachusetts mainliner ever could. The silent word theory. Bo’s most consequential move of the hour: the phrase political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. That word is gun. We are awash in language formed by gun culture — lock-stock-and-barrel, bite the bullet, smoking gun, take dead aim, the whole kit and caboodle, even bullet points — and so we can talk about rhetoric, ideology, video games, anything but the thing actually doing the killing. Caputo, Elizabeth Johnson, and Whitehead’s misplaced concreteness all get a turn in three minutes. The Bonhoeffer / Hitler analogy collapse. A Texas Republican told Fox News that if the rhetoric on the left keeps getting worse, the left is going to think it needs a new Bonhoeffer. I respond with a full unspooling of the actual Bonhoeffer arc — Harlem, Rome, working-class Nazi-friendly youth work, his French friendship with Jean Lasserre, the conviction that the state had failed its citizens and the church had forsaken the gospel and he had learned to pray for the defeat of his own country — and the observation that if the analogy works at all, the rep just compared his own party’s president to Hitler. Bo congratulates me on coming in slightly under three minutes. Old Man Tripp on friction. Online gambling apps that throttle you if you bet too well and call you with perks if you bet badly; marijuana delivery in ten minutes; dating apps that have replaced the self-domestication humans used to acquire by getting rejected in person (the $50-per-rejection bet for sons makes its debut); Chromebooks eliminating the friction of group work; AI eliminating the friction of reading and writing. Bo offers a C.S. Lewis line. Alicia offers a better one — don’t put the ‘er’ on it. And we close with the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions: Sand Walkers, the Fleet, the Remnant, and the Witnesses. They know what Valhalla means. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at <a class="e-10223-text-link e-10223-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-10223-text-link--use-focus sc-kzqdkY fnwgHd" href="https://theologybeer.camp/" data-encore-id="textLink" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-inline="...
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We Are Back in 1850: Master Signifiers, Heritage Americans, and the Confession We Stopped Saying with Diana Butler Bass
1w ago01:45:23Tap to summarizeDiana and I sat down to launch our summer online Summit — Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 — a video time capsule of scholars and friends answering a single question: what is the one thing you want people to know about America at 250? We compared the bicentennial summer of 1976 (gas crisis, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, mortgage rates at 18% — but neighbors still made colonial costumes) to the bicentennial Trump tried to throw last night but canceled. We argued about whether the Democratic Party is currently sitting in 1850 or 1976. We disagreed about the Eucharist on Zoom. And then, because Diana is Diana, she ended with a poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer that I think is the spine of this whole moment: “I want to hear America listening.” Strap in, and we will be back next week! Highlights from the conversation The Theology Summit launches. A video time capsule built for Sunday schools, reading groups, and clergy gatherings: friends and scholars Diana and I both trust — Randall Balmer, Adam Clark, Glen Jonas, Andrew Root, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Cornel West, and many more — each giving a short lecture answering a single question about America at 250. Built to be used, not just consumed. Register at theologysummit.com. 1976 was harder than you think. Diana, who was sixteen the summer of the bicentennial, walks us through what it actually felt like — Vietnam ending, Watergate fresh, gas lines by license plate number, mortgage interest at 17%. And then she names what was different: the country still managed to celebrate together, and the people you disagreed with were still Americans. “If you don’t think someone loves it as it is, how could you trust them to lead it?” A cigar-lounge conversation about James Talarico cracks open the whole frame. I name what I think conservatives mean when they call someone a Christian against Christianity, or an American against America — every reform movement worth its salt has had to be against the present form of the thing it loved — and Diana names what it has cost her, vocationally, to be the loving critic inside the evangelical academy. Sin or sins? When Tillich and Barth agree:) Americans want to confess sins instead of sin, and the result is that liberal mainliners individualize what is communal, and evangelicals skip the confession altogether because they are “already saved.” Diana’s payoff: neither tradition can therefore tell American history honestly, because honest history runs on paradox and hypocrisy, and we have built a Christianity that cannot hold either one. That is the actual root of the public-history catastrophe we are watching. The new precarious class and the Morning Joe freakout. A long riff on the New York progressive wave (Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani) and why establishment Democrats are misreading the moment. Issues like a billionaire tax or naming genocide are not policy positions for the under-forty cohort — they are moral viability tests. The new precarious class — college-educated, debt-loaded, told to vote blue no matter who and given we’ll vote blue except you in return — is, historically, where revolutions actually come from. Diana parallels the 1850s. The 1850s did not end well. Why eight mainline churches should become two. A joint rant about congregations: eight of ten mainline churches in any given small town will be gone in a decade, and instead of consolidating into two genuinely intergenerational, vibrant ones, we keep fighting Reformation-era debates about the Eucharist. Diana tells me she made every one of the structural suggestions I keep making — debt-free seminary, a corporate mainline health insurance pool, pension funds aligned with stated social goals — twenty years ago, and got laughed at. We close with Rosemary Wahtola Trommer’s Dear Mr. Whitman — the poem about wanting to hear America listening. Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and culture. A historian of American religion with a doctorate from Duke University, she has written more than a dozen books, including Grounded, Christianity After Religion, Grateful, and Freeing Jesus. Diana’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and TIME. She speaks to congregations, conferences, and universities across the country, and is one of the most widely read public voices on how faith communities are navigating the changing American landscape. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keep...
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Thriving Is Climate, Flourishing Is Weather with Pam King
2w ago01:28:56Tap to summarizePam King is back, and this conversation moved at the pace it wanted to. She runs the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the framework she has built there is the most useful integration of psychological science and Christian theology I have come across — six facets that spell THRIVE, with a telos she calls the reciprocating self. We started with Stanford and seminary and ended with how the church is asking nine-year-olds to defend their interpretation of Torah when what they actually need is a fifth adult who knows their name. In between: the difference between flourishing and thriving, the Altadena fires Pam watched from her office window, how Winnicott’s good enough mother maps onto how children come to relate to God, what Mark Labberton’s seminary depression taught him about liturgy, why I rebuilt our confirmation class around questions instead of doctrines, and the prayer I have been praying with my daughter Khora since she was an infant. You can check out her previous visit on the podcast here. Highlights from the conversation Thriving is climate. Flourishing is weather. Pam’s preferred frame: flourishing, as positive psychology has used it, has flattened into individual life-satisfaction — a state, a feeling. Thriving, from developmental science, has reciprocity built in and assumes you can be growing even when nothing feels good. The example she lives: the Altadena fires she watched from her office window last year, her neighbors’ homes burning. Thriving through catastrophe is the whole point of the distinction. The THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework. Six facets Pam has built at the Thrive Center at Fuller — Transcendence, Habits and rhythms, Relationships and community, Identity and narrative, Vocation and purpose, Ethics and virtue. Six points, not three. Sorry, Presbyterians. The reciprocating self. Pam’s telos, and the title of her foundational book with Jack Balswick and Kevin Reimer. We are created in the image of a relational God to become particular, unique persons in unity and reciprocal relationship with others. Not the individuated self of late modernity. Not the self-sealing tribal self of self-sorted communities. The reciprocating self. Practices and community should be evaluated by whether they form one. “Good is a four-letter word.” Pam’s resistance to easy definitions of the good life — and why holding paradox is the survival skill of faith development in late modernity. Tripp pushes on the cultural default that the only narrative of the good life we still share is “doing well enough to retire,” and Pam pushes back with five-letter words: love, brought into community, embodied across practices. “Good enough” parenting and how children come to relate to God. Winnicott’s good-enough mother. The attachment template formed in early childhood and how it maps onto adult experience of God. Pam’s pastoral move for first-time parents: bring your whole self, mirror your child, welcome the questions, and find five adults who will know your kid by name. The Bill Damon research that became Sticky Faith. What liturgy did for Mark Labberton. Pam tells the story of the former Fuller president, then a seminary student going through depression, who could not grasp his beliefs cognitively — but whose participation in the kneeling, standing, and praying at All Saints did the work his mind could not. Forms hold us when belief evaporates. Tripp closes with the Khora prayer he has been saying with his daughter since she was an infant, and the night she stayed awake to make sure he prayed it. About our guest Dr. Pamela Ebstyne King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at the School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Executive Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she completed her undergraduate and postdoctoral work at Stanford University (her postdoc supervisor was Bill Damon, who shows up in this conversation) and earned her MDiv and PhD at Fuller. She has served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and sits on the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Pam hosts the With & For podcast at the Thrive Center, where all of the THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework resources we discussed are freely available. Books we touched on: The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective, with Jack O. Balswick and Kevin S. Reimer. Her foundational telos book. Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, with Justin L. Barrett. The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence. Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at <a class="e-10223-text-link e-10223-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-10223-text-link--use-focus sc-kzqdkY fnwgHd" href="https://theologybeer.camp/" data-encore-id="textLink" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-inline="true" data-slate-fragment="JTVCJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMnBhcmFncmFwaCUyMiUyQyUyMmNoaWxkcmVuJTIyJTNBJTVCJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMmxpbmslMjIlMkMlMjJ1cmwlMjIlM0ElMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnRoZW9sb2d5YmVlci5jYW1wJTJGJTIyJTJDJTIy...
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If a Silicon God Arrives, It Will Be the God We Deserve with Robert Wright
2w ago01:37:15Tap to summarizeBob Wright is back, and The God Test is the AI book I had been waiting for someone to write — the only one I have read that takes the spiritual stakes of the technology with the seriousness Teilhard would have. It opens with the interview Bob conducted with a young Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 — now anointed by The New York Times as the godfather of AI, now also one of its loudest doomers — and pivots into what Bob did not understand in that hotel room forty years ago: that we would build something as powerful as the human brain without ever first having to understand the brain. The bottom-up approach won. We are now inside the consequences. We spent the hour on Teilhard’s noosphere acquiring silicon neurons, on why Bob argues accelerationism is lethal, on the difference between cognitive sovereignty and cognitive empathy and why both are now in jeopardy, on whether the algorithm has already occupied the very inner room from which sovereignty would be exercised, and on the closing line of the book — which I will not spoil here, except to say it is the kind of line you stop reading after. Highlights from the conversation What Bob did not understand in 1983. Wright’s interview with a young Geoffrey Hinton in a hotel room, when Hinton was championing the bottom-up neural-network approach nobody else thought would work. What Wright did not see at the time, and now does: that you can build something as powerful as the human brain without ever first understanding the brain — you just feed it data and let it reverse-engineer the mind. The whole AI race runs on that one insight. Zuckerberg’s keystroke monitoring is the punchline. The awe spectrum. Wright’s frame: if you are not somewhere on the awe spectrum about AI — between the doomers, who experience awe as terror, and the accelerationists, who experience it as celebration — you do not understand the power of the technology. The God Test is closer to a defense of doomerism than accelerationism, which is rarer than it should be in a book by a writer this temperate. The Silicon Valley dismissal of “kumbaya” gets the response it deserves. Teilhard, but with silicon neurons. Wright on the Teilhardian trajectory as “objectively right” — three billion years of complexification, moving through thresholds, generating ever-higher levels of organization. The noosphere is the next one. What Teilhard did not see: that the neurons in the global brain might be silicon, not biological. The book carries his vision into the AI age and asks who is actually building the planetary mind, and on whose terms. Cognitive sovereignty and cognitive empathy. Wright’s central interventions. Cognitive sovereignty is the resilience of your mind against algorithmic manipulation. Cognitive empathy is understanding how the person on the other side of the wall actually views the world — not sympathy, not agreement, just getting it. Wright calls cognitive empathy “the most underexploited human superpower.” The fundamental attribution error is the chief impediment, and Wright unpacks a deeper version of it than the textbook one. The inner room may already be occupied. My pushback in the conversation: Jesus says go pray in the inner room, and the contemplative traditions read that as the sanctuary of the self where the panopticon does not reach. The neuroscience on inhibitory-control damage in heavy users of algorithmic platforms now suggests the door of that room is harder to close than it used to be. We have not just been manipulated — we have been occupied, in a way that may have compromised the neural hardware required to evict the occupier. Bob agrees on the diagnosis and pushes back on the despair. Hartmut Rosa’s dynamic stabilization gets a turn here too — modernity is structurally addicted to acceleration, and the China-race framing is a perfect fit for a system that requires uninhibited growth. “If a silicon god arrives, it will be in some sense the god we deserve.” The closing line of The God Test — and on Bob’s reading in the conversation, neither warning nor resignation but inverted hope. AI is evolving, and we are the environment shaping its evolution. The moral tenor of whatever silicon god arrives will correlate with our own. To get the god we want, we have to become the species that could deserve it. Which is, in older language, the actual content of the gospel. Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Why Buddhism Is True. His newest book, The God Test, is out from Simon & Schuster in June 2026. He is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York and president of the Nonzero Foundation. His Nonzero Newsletter and Nonzero Podcast (currently in rotation with Paul Bloom) live at nonzero.substack.com — and yes, I am a paid member. Books surfaced in this conversation: The God Test (the book at hand), The Evolution of God (the silicon-god closing line of The God Test picks up the long arc of Evolution directly), Why Buddhism Is True (the contemplative-traditions stretch of the conversation), and Nonzero (the non-zero-sum framing that runs under everything Bob does). Previous Episodes with Robert Wright Evolution, Empathy, & the Future of Humanity From Mindful Resistance to the New Agnosticism The Evolution of God Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com <span class="sc-brPLxw gubhr...
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I’m Unsinkable. I’m Already Dead: A TNT on Doubt, Faith, and the Galilean Vision
2w ago01:53:49Tap to summarizeA Substack subscriber named Jennifer recently emailed me a list of thirty questions she had wanted to ask in the live chat but never got to. So we did the only honest thing — pulled in Josh Patterson from Rethinking Faith as a third voice (he just took a job working with Ilia Delio, so he had earned it), let Bo pick the numbers, and turned this TNT into the most confessional one we have recorded in a while. By the end, Bo had told the story of the year he almost broke, Josh had confessed his half-joke that if Calvinism is true he is clearly not elect, I had said out loud that the truly frightening question is whether I would actually pray for the defeat of my own country the way Bonhoeffer did — and we had ended up somewhere I did not see coming, in a soliloquy about why the body of Christ is still the most beautiful story I have access to. Pull up a chair. Highlights from the conversation The format and the trap. Jennifer’s thirty questions, Josh Patterson as Jennifer’s proxy, Bo picking numbers, and the recurring bit where Bo asks Josh to live-take the seven Methodist ordination questions — including the one Bo can confirm Methodism cannot survive without: Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your work? Josh nearly passed. The Holy Spirit likes to clean house. Bo, on praying Come Holy Spirit as the answered prayer that still unsettles him — and the discomfort of his actual priorities getting uncovered one by one. Tripp confesses to praying to be made genuinely uncomfortable about something that demands he grow, and would like to formally regret the efficiency with which the divine lure answered that one. “I’m unsinkable. I’m already dead.” Bo on the season when his mother had died, his wife’s chronic illness had turned debilitating, his PhD had stalled, the Loft had outgrown his job description, and someone else’s marriage crisis was unfolding in his own house. The grief therapy his father paid for (which Bo mostly used to talk about his father). The freedom that comes from already having survived the worst. The Tripp soliloquy on the body of Christ. Why the world is better off with a community that transcends nation-states and languages, whose identity is being brought into the body of Christ, nourished at the table, and invited to meet the coming of God in the face of every other. Why the alternative narratives in the West are so thoroughly hijacked by idols, and idols always demand sacrifice. The kind of TNT moment Bo says he is going back to listen to twice. Bo’s hyper-sacramentality. Communion as re-singing rather than re-membering — when the bread is broken, the song that is being called back is sung again. The implication: every table, every cup, every day, every body becomes sacred. Josh extends it into Thich Nhat Hanh and mindful drinking — the universe in a glass. Sam and Lois Bloom. Tripp’s answer to the question about a regular person who shaped his faith. The couple in LA who lost a son to suicide and ran a grief group for more than twenty years for anyone — congregant or not — who walked through similar pain. Hundreds of families whose stories got re-narrated because two people made a space and stayed in it. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow <a class="e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline e-91036-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-91036-text-link--use-focus sc-ihgnxF fGbrTd" href="https://fo...
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Decisional vs. Emotional Forgiveness: The Distinction Most of Us Have Been Missing with Everett Worthington
3w ago01:20:10Tap to summarizeDr. Everett Worthington spent thirty years building the most rigorously tested forgiveness program in psychological science — and the day he turned in his first book on the subject was the day his mother was murdered in a home invasion. Three years later, his brother, who had discovered her body, took his own life, after Everett — a psychotherapist, a big brother — had failed to talk him into counseling. So this is not abstract research. The man giving us the REACH model, the distinction between decisional and emotional forgiveness, the six-step protocol for responsible self-forgiveness, and a vision of forgiveness scaling from heart to home to homeland is the man who has had to apply every move he teaches to the people he loved most. We spent the hour on the science, the tools, and at the end, on why the algorithmic version of America is currently training us to become exactly the kind of community in which forgiveness will not happen. Highlights from the conversation Decisional vs. emotional forgiveness — and why most people only have one. The distinction that cracks the whole field open. Decisional forgiveness is the choice not to pay someone back. Emotional forgiveness is the replacement of resentment with empathy or compassion. They are weakly correlated. Most religions require the first. None require the second. And most of us have spent years thinking we had failed at forgiveness because the second one would not arrive on the schedule of the first. Forgiveness happens inside your skin. Reconciliation happens between people. You can forgive someone and still pursue justice, still maintain distance, still walk away from a relationship that is not safe. Conflating the two is what makes most forgiveness conversations land badly. Worthington’s line on the two as “different animals” is the through-line of the hour. The REACH model, tested in 30+ randomized control trials. R — recall the hurt. E — empathy (or compassion, or non-possessive love). A — the altruistic gift. C — commit to it, sometimes in a literal written contract to yourself. H — hold on when the emotions come back. The largest forgiveness study ever conducted put 4,600 people through this protocol across China, Indonesia, Ukraine, Colombia, and South Africa. The six-step protocol for self-forgiveness. The harder forgiveness problem. Go to the sacred. Make amends where you can (his brother left a suicide note asking him to help with his widow’s finances; that became Everett’s amends). Address the moral injury. Apply REACH to yourself. Move toward self-acceptance, which Everett calls the cornerstone of psychotherapy. Try not to do it again. The Gottman cascade and the bridge that does not start in the middle. Criticism ? defensiveness ? contempt ? war or stonewalling. Most relationships do not blow up at the top of the cliff; they slide down a predictable slope. John Paul Lederach: you cannot build a bridge by starting in the middle. Both sides start from their own shore. Stop counting whether your 51% is bigger than their 49%. What the algorithm is doing to the conditions of forgiveness. Tripp’s extended observation that the most consequential change in American religion over the last sixty years is self-sorting — and that the algorithm now monetizes the anxiety of that sorting. Worthington’s response: the contact hypothesis still works. We need three kinds of reconciliation diplomacy — the Mandela-level leader, the local table where stories get heard, and the leaders going back into their communities to teach forgiveness in the small bodies that actually compose the society. Dr. Everett L. Worthington Jr. is Commonwealth Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he taught for more than forty years before formally retiring in 2017 and remaining affiliated with the department. A licensed clinical psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, he has published more than thirty-eight books and four hundred scholarly articles across forgiveness, humility, positive psychology, and marriage and family. His REACH forgiveness program has been validated by more than thirty randomized control trials worldwide. Explore the Science of Forgiveness — Greater Good Science Center The GGSC forgiveness hub brings together research, practices, and essays for anyone thinking seriously about forgiveness — theologically, pastorally, or personally. A few pieces worth your time: “Lessons from Cultivating Forgiveness in Faith-Based Communities” by Everett L. Worthington Jr. — the article that extends this conversation. Worthington draws on decades of research running forgiveness campaigns at Christian universities and congregations, including practical guidance on timing them around Lent, Advent, or Yom Kippur, and what actually moves the needle versus what just raises awareness “Twelve Steps to Self-Forgiveness” by Fred Luskin and Lyndon Harris — a research-grounded framework for the forgiveness most clergy skip for themselves. Harris is a former Episcopal priest whose work on self-forgiveness began after 9/11 “What Happens When Faith Leaders Try to Force Forgiveness?” — for anyone who has watched forgiveness get weaponized in congregational settings; this one names the problem and points toward something better “How Different Religions Practice Forgiveness — and What We Can Learn From Them” by Christy Vines — a comparative look across faith traditions with real implications for interfaith ministry and pluralist congregations “What Does It Actually Mean to Forgive?” by Robert Enright — 40 years of research on the definitional questions that matter most, including why skepticism about forgiveness is worth taking seriously “What If You’re Not Ready to Forgive?” — for ministers whose congregants are being handed forgiveness as obligation before they’re ready for it as practice Forgiveness Quiz — a quick self-assessment that works well as a formation tool or small group prompt Full hub: greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/forgiveness Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-50680" src="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/1-1.jpg" sizes="auto, (max-width: 269px) 100vw, 269px" srcset="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-co...
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