Podcast
Tripp Fuller
Hosted by Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister · EN
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Religion Before Belief: What’s actually dying and what was always the deeper thing
3d ago00:23:17Tap to summarizeMost weeks now I get an email from someone who’s sure they’ve believed a lie their whole life — that the faith holding their family, their friendships, their sense of self together is collapsing, and they don’t know who they are without it. I’ve been that person more than once. So in this essay I want to say the thing I wish someone had said to me: what’s dying might not be your faith. It might just be your idea of what your faith was. Drawing on Whitehead’s four stages of religion — ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization — I make the case that belief-centered Christianity is a late, late development, maybe 200 years old in its current intensity, not 2,000. For most of human history religion was bodies moving together, food shared, the dead remembered. The relationship was never in the certainty. It was always in the meal. If you’re in the panic right now, this one’s for you. Pull up a chair. If this conversation is interesting, then come join me and Ilia Delio for our upcoming class, The Future of Religion, where we will digging in to the evolution of religion, its current belief centered crisis, and the possibilities on the horizon. This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen. 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 u...
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James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing
3d ago01:24:19Tap to summarizeWeek five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we’ve done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone’s thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn’t written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone’s sweeping indictment of the Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn’t a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the better theologian, Reinhold the extravert who needed the crowd — and Gary spun it out for ten minutes in a way that you could tell he had been sitting with for years and had never said in public. We ended with Caleb’s question about what it means for white Christians to actually hear the cry of Black blood, and Charlene answered it by describing her teenage grandson trembling in her arms, his whole body shaking, saying he didn’t want to die. That’s where the class ended. That’s where James Cone’s theology begins. If you haven’t joined the class yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Last session is next week — social ethics, full circle. And come to Theology Beer Camp, where Gary, Arron, and Cornel West will all be in the same room. In the podcast we discuss… The three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power: the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning in 1967, and the assassination of King in April 1968 Why Cone said he could not have written that book in Adrian, Michigan — and why bottled rage would have killed him Ontological Blackness: why Cone’s critics could only hear it literally, and why he usually declined to correct them The satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim about demonic forces, not a claim about the humanity of white people Cone, Barth, and Tillich: why Jim was mostly on the Barth side, how Tillich saved him from Barth’s narrowness, and why he smuggled Tillich into his intro course by classifying him as neo-orthodox Cornel West, the 1975 Theology in the Americas showdown with Latin American theologians, and why Cone’s one-factor viewpoint finally broke — and what changed The womanist challenge: Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing nothing in the cross is redeeming — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until he had enough personal distance Charlene on Fanon, ontological Blackness, and the Cone she wanted to recapture — the one who was talking about the rats in the communities, not just the interpersonal dynamics of race Victor Anderson: the gay, postmodern scholar hurt by the Black church who cleared room in Black theology for everyone with a constellation of experiences like his The Niebuhr question Charlene had been sitting with since the seminar: whether the Cecil-and-Jim and Richard-and-Reinhold parallelism was something Cone never talked about in public — and Gary saying yes, and then saying more than he’d ever said before Why Niebuhr never risked anything for a Black person — and Gary’s argument about Lutheran false righteousness that Cone heard, acknowledged, and then declined to include in The Cross and the Lynching Tree Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the night Gary walked behind a student holding a sign that said “James Cone was right” How Black Lives Matter revived Cone as a teacher — and the retirement letter he ripped up Charlene’s grandson, trembling, saying he didn’t want to die — and the question she’s still staying up at night trying to answer Jim’s final word to white people who want to be in solidarity: “Try to be one of the white people who don’t ask Black people to take care of you or make you feel better” Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom <a href="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/2026/04/13/theology-for-troublemakers-gary-...
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If This Is the End Times, I’ll Be Your Huckleberry: Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Theology
5d ago02:11:41Tap to summarizeIt’s May 15th, 2026 — recording live from what Bo accurately described as Jurassic Park, because Raven the chicken was laying an egg on my thigh while we were discussing the Antichrist, and Marceline was on my back pecking my head before we hit record, and I just want you to know that this is the actual context in which serious theological work is being done. Bo opened with a high, a low, and a learn — Randy Woodley has a new book coming July 14th that you should preorder, a dust storm and semi-truck fire in Twin Falls gave Bo a terrifying glimpse of what environmental collapse looks like up close, and he discovered a group called Acts 17 that he wishes he’d never learned about. We did an either/or — Acts 17 or Acts 29, would you rather get rid of one — which turned into a genuinely useful history of hipster reformed church planting, Silicon Valley spiritual warfare birthday parties with Peter Thiel as guest preacher, and Tripp’s long-gestating idea for a class on Christian philosophical theology using Acts 17 as the entry point and process, Tillichian, and radical theologies as the three lenses. Then we finally got to it. Stage four. Bo recapped the first three stages of Antichrist theology — amorphous spirit, personified figure, dispensationalist Voltron super-villain — and Tripp walked through Peter Thiel’s actual biography: born in Frankfurt, childhood in a pro-Nazi enclave in what is now Namibia, Stanford student newspaper culture warrior, Girard’s prize pupil, PayPal as libertarian financial liberation tool, Facebook as the memetic machine, Palantir as Minority Report for mass surveillance, the 2008 crash that turned a techno-libertarian into an authoritarian, Curtis Yarvin and the CEO monarchy, and then finally the lectures — where Thiel inverts the entire dispensationalist tradition and declares that Greta Thunberg and AI safety advocates are the legionaries of the Antichrist, that the restrainer of the apocalypse and its source are both America, and that unregulated technological acceleration is the only thing standing between us and the one-world totalitarian state. The irony — that the man building a global surveillance empire keeps warning about a global surveillance empire — did not go unremarked. Tripp named it theological shielding for unrestricted greed. Bo named it the upside down. Both are correct. Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals joins next week for territorial warfare. Baudrillard summer reading club is apparently in the works. Bo gave the benediction. If this is the end times, he’ll be your Huckleberry. 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 the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & <a class="e-91036-text-link e-91036-baseline...
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The Meme, the Madonna & the Fertility God: Andrew Root on Idolatry, the Church & Late Capitalism
6d ago01:36:48Tap to summarizeAndy Root is back, and this time he’s got a fertility god on the cover of his book — which, if you’ve been paying any attention to his work, is not actually a detour. Baal and the Gods of More is what happens when Andy takes the background hum of economic critique that’s been running through all his previous books and turns it all the way up, then runs it through First and Second Kings, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of dynamic stabilization, Robert Gordon’s economic history of the American special century, and Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat, and comes out the other side with something genuinely uncomfortable and genuinely useful. The argument in brief: the church’s anxiety about decline is not primarily a spiritual problem or a missional problem. It is a fertility cult problem. We have, like the Israelites under the Omride dynasty, decided that Yahweh needs a little help from the gods of growth — and we’ve done it so thoroughly that we can barely tell the difference anymore between faithful ministry and escalatory capital accumulation. Andy doesn’t spare himself, or Tripp, or the emerging church movement, or the academic publishing world, or anyone who has ever refreshed their social media numbers and felt something. The conversation got real fast and stayed there. And yes, there is a Counting Crows footnote. Also: Tripp and Andy are going back to Bonhoeffer’s house in Berlin in summer 2027 — two different tracks, one for personal and vocational formation, one for the theology nerds who want to read Bonhoeffer intensely and argue about it in his actual house. Go to BonhoefferTrip.com to get on the list to get info and early access to tickets. In the conversatsion we discuss… The origin of the book: a throwaway line about fertility gods on a podcast that wouldn’t let Andy go Robert Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth and the special century — why 1870 to 1970 was a historical anomaly, why Protestantism rose with it, and why both started declining at exactly the same moment in the mid-1970s Hartmut Rosa’s dynamic stabilization: what makes a society modern is not its epistemology — it’s that it can only stabilize itself by growing The logic of escalation: grow or die, with no telos, no grounding, and no end — just more Baal vs. Yahweh, Artemis vs. the Madonna, instrumentality vs. relationality — and the meme that started it all at the Vatican Museum The emerging church movement as a case study: how a genuine epistemological critique of modernity got eaten alive by the escalatory logic of Web 2.0 personality capital The techno-optimist and the identitarian as two responses to the end of the special century — and why they’re both operating inside the same machine Solomon’s sin: the golden age that was built on the “except” — and why the prophets saw what the historians didn’t name Mary as the completion of Elijah: Luther’s Magnificat commentary and a different kind of growth, a growth into someone rather than of something Why we can’t unhook from the engine of escalation without a practical theology of money — and why Andy thinks that requires recovering a vision of eternity Augustine, Peter Brown, alms, and the poor: why losing a theological conception of heaven means losing the mechanism that kept the poor inside the exchange of money Tripp’s Judas Energy, Andy’s Solomon Energy, and the mutual confession of two people who wrote and podcasted their way into the very system they’re critiquing What the church looks like in 50 years if the post-war liberal order keeps dissolving — and whether the theology of the cross has anything to say to a world of competing civilizations that no longer bother to feign morality Andrew Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, USA. He writes and researches in areas of theology, ministry, culture, and younger generations. Some of his most recent books are The Congregation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2021), The End of Youth Ministry? (Baker, 2020), The Pastor in a Secular Age: Ministry to People Who No Longer Need God (Baker, 2019), Faith Formation in a Secular Age (Baker, 2017), and Exploding Stars, Dead Dinosaurs, and Zombies: Youth Ministry in the Age of Science (Fortress Press, 2018). Andy has worked in congregations, parachurch ministries, and social service programs. He lives in St. Paul with his wife Kara, two children, Owen and Maisy, and their dog. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Andy spends far too much time watching TV and movies. Previous Visits with Andy Root Two Books, One Night: Finding Beauty in What We Can’t Control with Diana Butler Bass & Andy and Kara Root Incarnation as Resistance Life Together in Turmoil & Bonhoeffer’s Experiment in Community Resonance in an Accelerated Age Secular Mysticism & Identity Politics the Church after Innovation Churches and the Crisis of Decline Acceleration, Resonance, & the Counting Crows Ministry in a Secular Age Christopraxis with Andy Root Faith Formation in a Secular Age the Promise of Despair Join our upcoming 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-content/uploads/2026/05/1-1.jpg 1080w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/1-1-240x300.jpg 240w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/1-1-81...
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Binge-Watching as Spiritual Formation (And Not in a Good Way)
1w ago00:10:06Tap to summarizeA year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn’t notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and I sat in front of the screen feeling a specific blankness — that sensation of having consumed something and received nothing. This essay is about that feeling. Not screen time. Not the hours. The architecture beneath them, and what it is doing to our capacity for depth. This is the first in a short series of essays in conversation with the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose book The Disappearance of Rituals I cannot stop thinking about. Han names what most of our cultural commentary cannot quite reach: the loss of the forms that once let experience accumulate into meaning. Over the next several essays I’ll put his diagnosis to work on the actual texture of our lives — our screens, our feeds, our worship, our politics, our relationships. Here is the question this one leaves you with: what have we quietly trained ourselves out of? This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen. 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 the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000others on our Substack – Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes<span ...
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God Meets Us in Our Suffering: Rolf Jacobson on Cancer, the Theology of the Cross & Three Friends Who Went Through It Together
1w ago01:28:04Tap to summarizeRolf Jacobson is back — psalm scholar, dean at Luther Seminary, co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament, and one of my favorite people to argue theology with over a long dinner. His new book God Meets Us in Our Suffering is unlike anything else he’s written, and unlike almost anything else I’ve read on the subject. It’s the story of three close friends — Rolf, his brother Carl, and their friend Mike Pancoast — who all had cancer, went through it together, and wrote about it side by side by side. Rolf had bone cancer at fifteen, lost both legs, and has been in a wheelchair for forty-five years. Carl was diagnosed with leukemia in 2022, declared cancer free in 2024, then died months later when meningitis attacked his brain after the bone marrow transplant compromised his immune system. Mike had lymphoma. What the three of them discovered in writing the book — and what Rolf and I spent this conversation unpacking — is that they didn’t know they were writing a book about the theology of the cross. They thought they were just telling their stories. They weren’t. This is one of the most honest, funny, theologically rich conversations I’ve had on this podcast, and it’s also one of the most personal. Rolf doesn’t let suffering become an abstraction. It never was one for him. The origin story: Mike’s lymphoma diagnosis, Carl’s leukemia, and the cabin in Northern Minnesota where it all began Why Rolf spent years refusing to write a cancer memoir — and what Carl said that finally changed his mind The theology of the cross: why Luther said you can’t theologize about suffering from above, and why three friends going through cancer together became the perfect form for doing it from within Why the cross says you cannot reason backwards from someone’s suffering to its cause — and how that conviction runs from Job through Paul through the woman who told Rolf’s mother it was her diet Kate Bowler, cause-and-effect thinking, and why people can’t just say “that sucks” Frank Tupper’s line: Luther gave him permission to say — and perhaps scream — that life is arbitrary, but God is not Caregivers and the unacknowledged suffering of the people who go through it alongside The dehumanization of medical care — and what it does to surgeons who cut people open for thirty years Jerry, the Fisherman’s Inn, ribs at ten-year intervals, and Psalm 23’s table in the presence of the enemy Laughter as theological category: Sarah’s belly laugh, God building a joke into the covenant, and Carl’s vasectomy joke on the radiation table “Wearing a bike” — what a kid in a Target said to Rolf in 1989 and why it’s still his favorite description of himself Hosanna as both shout of joy and cry for help — and how the Psalms hold more of our experience than we think The God who will not be God without us — and what that means for how we show up to each other in suffering Theology Beer Camp, the closing sermon that started as a toast, and why certain people were scandalized by Tripp drinking beer while preaching Rolf Jacobson is Professor of Old Testament and Associate Dean at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, a leading Psalm scholar, and co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament. His new book God Meets Us in Our Suffering, written with his brother Carl and friend Mike Pancoast, is a theology of the cross told from the inside — by three friends who actually had cancer. 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 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 ?...
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Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing
2w ago01:24:52Tap to summarizeGary Dorrien came to organizing the hard way — canvassing for McGovern in Alma, Michigan in 1972, where people didn’t just oppose the candidate, they despised him, and where two doorstep encounters came close enough to violence that he learned the hard way to pair up. He didn’t come out of that thinking he’d found his calling. What he found instead was Michael Harrington at a Harvard Divinity School lecture two years later — corduroy jacket, blue work shirt, gently correcting his own introduction — and joined DSOC on the spot. This week’s session gave us Gary’s full origin story as an organizer: from the McGovern campaign to the Albany years where he co-founded a DSOC chapter, led Central American solidarity work through C-SPACE, and discovered firsthand the cultural chasm between two wings of the left that could barely stand to share a building. Then Aaron took over and introduced three extraordinary guests — Joe Strife, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Carolyn Baker — who brought the history of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Beulah Sanders, and the General Baker Institute directly into the room, and turned the question of who should lead into a live theological reckoning. Carolyn did the interview sitting on her mother’s childhood porch steps in Dallas, recording oral history from a woman who is still organizing through dementia, which tells you everything you need to know about where this tradition lives and who carries it. If you haven’t joined yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Next week: James Cone with Charlene Sinclair. Colleen Wessel-McCoy specializes in Christian social ethics with particular attention to the role of religion in US social movements. She is author of Freedom Church of the Poor: Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign (Lexington, 2021), an examination of King’s theo-ethical and political vision for his last campaign. Before coming to Earlham School of Religion, she was Neely Visiting Professor of Religion and Public Policy at Arizona State and a lecturer at Union Theological Seminary in theology and field education. She has been part of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, was a national educator with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, and is an interim co-chair of the National Welfare Rights Union. Her current research focuses on the leadership of the National Welfare Rights Organization of the 1960s and 70s. Joe Strife is a scholar working at the intersection of church, charity, and social justice. His research focuses on the role of faith-based organizations in fighting poverty. For years he served as a community organizer in Philadelphia with organizations including the National Union of the Homeless, the National Welfare Rights Union, and the Simple Way. He received his PhD from Union Theological Seminary and teaches at Fordham University. Carolyn Baker is an educator, organizer, and co-founder and director of the General Baker Institute in Detroit, Michigan. The Institute is a movement incubator that includes educational programming, a community center, print shop, Ghetto Coffee Shoppe, and community garden. They are fully rooted in Detroit but share an internationalist vision with their movement comrades across the world. They are partners in the ongoing activism around racist policing, hosting teach-ins that bring together emerging leaders with movement elders from Detroit’s long history of anti-racist labor and human rights organizing. The Institute follows the legacy and insight of General Baker of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement in saying, “we must turn fighters into thinkers and thinkers into fighters.” 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 <p class="e-91036-text encore-te...
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The Hyperlink Permission: How Dispensational Eschatology Reads the Bible & Why It Gets Wild
2w ago02:03:28Tap to summarizeWe were supposed to do this one last week, but things happened and the Antichrist got bumped a week. Worth the wait. Bo spent the extra time going back to the Eerdmans Bible Dictionary he bought in 1992 when he enrolled at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, because we live in a moment so unmoored from basic coherence that you have to return to first principles just to get oriented. The result was one of the better explainers we’ve ever done on this show. Bo walked us through the four stages of Antichrist theology: stage one, the generic concept in John’s letters — an amorphous spirit of the age. Stage two, you give it the definite article and a face. Stage three, you smash every bad guy in the entire Bible together like Play-Doh remnants — Daniel’s beasts, the man of lawlessness in Thessalonians, the beast from the sea in Revelation, Gog and Magog — into one Voltron-level super-villain. And stage four, which is where Peter Thiel lives, and which we are saving for next week because it requires its own episode: you take everything in stage three and invert it. The Roman Empire becomes good. Greta Thunberg becomes suspect. The Pope becomes suspect. The resistance to technological progress is the Antichrist. We covered Jack Van Impe’s greatest hits — UFOs as demons, black holes as hell, the Mayan calendar, five missed dates — and John Hagee’s gay Jewish Illuminati financier sermon that reads like medieval blood libel and somehow didn’t end his career. We talked about how Bo went from a wall chart of the end times to a PhD at Claremont, what Y2K, 9/11, and Left Behind together did to his evangelical certainty, and how an iPod loaded with Rob Bell and Leonard Sweet became an off-ramp. We planned a camp beer. We discussed kettlebells at length. Netanyahu is Wormtongue. Trump is Denethor eating cherry tomatoes while the battle rages. Stage four next week. 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 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 This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & <spa...
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Glimmerings: Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman on Friendship, Faith & Letters That Pressed Them Both
2w ago01:08:15Tap to summarizeMiroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged over years of friendship that moves from the problem of religious language to the hiddenness of God to what it means to trust without being able to specify what you’re trusting toward. It’s one of the more unusual and quietly devastating books I’ve read in a while, and the conversation was every bit as good. In it we discuss… The origin of their friendship and the letter exchange that became Glimmerings Why big words like faith, grace, and redemption slip free from meaning — and why that’s a theological problem, not just a poetic one Attention, divine agency, and the debate between active receptivity and God’s ontological priority Christian writing letters from a hospital room during an experimental bone marrow transplant — and what he felt, and didn’t feel, about God’s presence The hiddenness of God versus Christ hidden in the faces of non-Christian friends The cross, the resurrection, and why one is visceral and the other remains mostly imagination The risk of faith, William James’s mountain climber, and why Wallace Stevens kept pointing toward a further leap The “masters of suspicion” and why intellectual culture rewards doubt more than hope The hard sayings of Jesus — the passages that act like shards of glass, and what it means to park them rather than tame them Where two or three are gathered — and whether that was always a warning about what happens at five hundred Miroslav Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School and founder of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Born in Croatia and shaped by the former Yugoslavia, his theology has always been grounded in lived encounter with violence, nationalism, and the misuse of religious language. Previous podcasts with Miroslav Faith in the Public Square in the Era of Trump. When Neighbors Turn on Neighbors Christian Wiman is a poet, essayist, and editor widely regarded as one of the most important American religious writers of his generation. He is the author of My Bright Abyss — a memoir of faith written in the shadow of a rare blood cancer diagnosis — and multiple acclaimed poetry collections. He edited Poetry magazine for a decade and now teaches at the Yale Institute for Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. 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 Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers! The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignright wp-image-50300" src="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/1.jpg" sizes="auto, (max-width: 324px) 100vw, 324px" srcset="ht...
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A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace: Gary Dorrien’s Memoir in His Own Words
3w ago01:22:18Tap to summarizeGary Dorrien is spending six weeks teaching the history of Christian social ethics in America — and this week Aaron and I turned the lens on Gary himself, which he immediately identified as the worst session of the class. What followed was an hour of Gary tracing his own formation from a kid on Union Road in Midland who couldn’t stop staring at the crucifix, through graduate school, liberation theology, democratic socialism, and fifty years of theological labor held together by Rauschenbusch’s conviction that capitalism has overdeveloped our selfish instincts and shrunk our capacity for public ends. The crucifix, a seven-year-old on railroad tracks, and why the moral influence theory was second nature before Gary knew it was a theory Going to mass every morning at Union Seminary while reading Barth, Tillich, and Niebuhr — and the Jesuit friends who told him he was obviously a Protestant Gustavo Gutiérrez reading Rauschenbusch for the first time and asking why Americans don’t talk about this treasure James Loder, a thousand-page manuscript, and the line “maybe you can find the book in here” His love Brenda — and why Gary can say almost nothing else except that his is a story of being saved by love and grace Why Hegel still grips him fifty years later — and why most people only know the wrong Hegel The six interpretive traditions of Hegel and why the theological-metaphysical one is the one most seminaries quietly abandoned William Temple, Whitehead, and why Gary became an Anglican almost entirely on the strength of one book Capitalism is bad for us and a catastrophe for the planet — a blunt response to a pastor whose congregation looks like a list of what capitalism does wherever it lands Purity politics, DSA, AOC, and why ridicule works but isn’t good for us The flickering Galilean vision — and why it keeps flickering not despite being wrong but because it’s right Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom Social Ethics for This Moment What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology The Future of Faith & Justice Theology for Action The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life. Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change. Join Our New Donation-Based Online Class – Theology for Troublemakers! The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today? For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrienhas been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world. This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves.What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel? Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now. WHAT IS INCLUDED? 6 Pre-Recorded Lectures: Each video lecture features Dr. Dorrien’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his landmark scholarship in social ethics and liberal theology. 6 Livestream Conversations: Each week includes a live conversation with Gary Dorrien, Aaron Staufer, and Tripp Fuller—your chance to ask questions and engage directly with one of the world’s leading scholars of Christian social ethics. Guest Lecturers: Learn from a diverse range of voices including Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, Joe Strife, Nicholas Hayes Mota, Carolyn Baker, Colleen Wessel-McCoy, and Charlene Sinclair. Online Community: </st...
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