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Tripp Fuller
Hosted by Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister · EN
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We’re the Ones Lamenting: James McGrath on Reading Revelation from Inside the Empire
1w ago01:19:20Tap to summarizeWelcome to TBC 26 FM, the post-apocalyptic radio station broadcasting from the wasteland of late modern America. James McGrath — the Religion Prof himself — was the right guest for the apocalyptic-themed Theology Beer Camp preview, because he wrote Theology and Science Fiction, he loves some Battlestar Galactica, and he spent a full year of sabbatical thinking about nothing but the New Testament’s best apocalyptic preacher. We got the post-apocalyptic factions workshopped (James thinks the sorting needs a Hunger Games battle), then we went where the actual apocalypse lives: what John the Baptist was actually preaching in Second Temple Judaism, why apocalyptic literature always gets the end wrong and why that is a feature rather than a bug, why American Christians reading Revelation as horror instead of hope says everything about which side of the ledger we are on, what AI actually is under the hood and what it does to the way we read scripture, how James teaches a course called The Bible and Misinformation by fooling his own students on day one with AI-generated footage of himself announcing the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant, and — the part that will stay with me — what he says to the person whose evangelical faith is collapsing and who wrote me terrified. James’s answer: that thing you thought was faith was actually doubt. Come for the Andor riff. Stay for the pastoral turn. Highlights from the conversation The post-apocalyptic factions, workshopped live. Tripp lays out the four Theology Beer Camp factions and the spiritual orientations underneath them — the Sand Walkers (Dune, the desert mothers and fathers, treasuring and preserving the tradition’s practices), the Fleet (Battlestar, the pilgrims committed to a direction even without knowing the destination), the Remnant (Stranger Things and Fallout, the stewards of memory asking what is worth preserving and who will do it), and the Witnesses (Fury Road, the prophetic zeal that says what does it cost to tell the truth in public and I’m willing to pay it). James’s only note: you cannot sort people peacefully into apocalyptic factions. There has to be a battle. He can make more cardboard swords if needed. Apocalyptic literature always gets the end wrong — and that is fine. James’s reframe of the genre. The eschatological charts that still name Gorbachev should be a warning that the approach needs rethinking, not the date. The real problem is not that people expect the end. It is that comfortable people who benefit enormously from empire read Revelation as horror instead of hope — and never notice they are on the side that laments the fall of Babylon, not the side that rejoices. Apocalyptic gives hope to people living lives of resistance. The moment it becomes the property of people who want to build crosses rather than bear them, church history shows exactly how fast it goes south. What John the Baptist was actually preaching. From the year James spent thinking about nothing else. John looked at a people who had been waiting on Jeremiah’s seventy years and Daniel’s seventy weeks of years and whose deadlines had come and gone, and named the problem differently: not that God was unwilling, but that we have not had our act together, and this is one last chance. And his ethical teaching in Luke is the same insight applied downward — the tax collector who cannot dismantle the extractive system he works inside can still refuse to collect more than he is owed. John disentangled himself from injustice as fully as a human can, and then realized that staying disentangled makes no difference. Engaging society means getting your hands dirty. In the meantime, in the sphere you actually control: do what is right. Do not use the system as your excuse. What AI actually is, in a nutshell. James on the technology, from someone who has been writing about it since before ChatGPT. They took the system that learned to play chess by deducing the rules from a very large dataset, and fed it text. It learned to play the game of human language. Which is why it seems to think. There is no mechanism whatsoever safeguarding factual content — factuality is woven into speech patterns often enough to create the impression, until you push it to the edges. His actual worry is not Terminator. It is that people are already trusting it for medical answers and spiritual guidance, and that because it is trained on what is most frequent online, its theological output drags you backward toward the oldest and most patriarchal readings rather than forward. On the flip side: undermind.ai finding scholarship in Indonesian that James can now actually engage is a genuine expansion of who counts as a conversation partner in the body of Christ. The Bible and Misinformation. James’s newly retitled course. Day one he shows students a mix of clips — real NBC footage about Noah’s Ark in Turkey, actual excerpts from the Gospel of Philip that sound fake and are not, and AI-generated news footage of James himself announcing the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant — and asks them to sort real from fabricated. The debrief: I didn’t do as well as I thought I would. James: that is a win for day one. Students then fact-check chatbot output on questions like did God have a wife? and discover the citations are real pages, topically relevant, and do not support the claims attached to them. One student, unprompted: by the time I fact-check all this, I could have just written it myself. His line on why the Bible is the right training ground: there was weird stuff online about the Bible before there was weird stuff online about anything else. We had a head start. “That thing you thought was faith was actually doubt.” The pastoral turn, and the heart of Beyond Deconstruction. Tripp reads an email from someone whose evangelical world is collapsing and who is terrified. James’s answer uses the house-renovation analogy from the book: sometimes rot can be repaired if you catch it early, and sometimes the structure has to come down. But the diagnostic is the sharp part — if you have spent years closing yourself off from every argument and perspective that might bring the house down, you already knew on some level that it could not withstand scrutiny. That is not faith. That is doubt with better branding. Faith is the courage to believe God is big enough that your questions will not bring God down with the structure. Evangelicals know the biblical language about testing the spirits better than anyone — they just never turn the spotlight inward. And the kindergarten-level version of the faith is fine as a starting point. The problem is being told to stay there forever, in a tradition whose own scriptures are full of language about maturity and putting away childish things. About our guest Dr. James F. McGrath is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University in Indianapolis, where he also chairs the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He trained at the University of Cambridge, the University of London (BD), and Durham University (PhD, under James D. G. Dunn). He blogs as Religion Prof on Patheos and was Patheos’s featured writer in June 2026. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. <img decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-50567 " src="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874...
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Performing for the Digital Slave Master: Bo Sanders’s Strava Confession and the Hell of the Same
2w ago01:25:55Tap to summarizeBo listened to last week’s Jamie Smith conversation and came back this Friday with a follow-up on his own — Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade, and the dark-night processing changed the conversation in ways Bo did not see coming. Which turned out to be the perfect on-ramp for the actual topic of the hour: Byung-Chul Han, the Korean-German philosopher I have been walking my Luther Seminary class through this month, whose diagnosis of late modernity is the closest thing anyone has written to a technical explanation of what Jamie is describing pastorally. The core move is the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person or an unfamiliar tradition. We have used technology to eliminate that friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. Han’s word for what we get instead is the hell of the same. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through our culture, Han insists, are not infections from something external. They are infarctions — internal blockages from an excess of positivity. Along the way: Bo’s blood-hymn story from his non-religious Canadian friend’s first time in a church, the paragraph in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that mandates ministering to the neighborhood not the ghosts of the past, Bo’s discovery that in a red state most of his congregants are the only Democrat they know, Bo’s Strava confession, and the smartphone as modern rosary. If you have the itch to smash the machines by the end of the hour, Han’s own solution is not Luddism — it is the recovery of friendliness. Come sit with this one. Highlights from the conversation Bo’s James K.A. Smith debrief. Jamie has been Bo’s favorite frenemy for a decade — the Reformed philosopher whose analysis of continental thought Bo has taught with, whose critique of modernity Bo respects, whose Augustinian Eucharistic solution in chapter four Bo has always thought was cheating. Then Bo listened to the dark-night episode from last week and the pastoral heart won. Bo’s summary of modern spirituality after Jamie: it is a new smart monitor plugged into an old computer. Sometimes the monitor cannot even recognize the computer. The algorithm and the soul are not communicating. Han’s core move: the expulsion of the other. The self forms in relation to genuine otherness — the friction, distance, mystery, and resistance of another person, another tradition, another body. Han’s diagnosis: we have used technology to eliminate the friction and chosen the frictionless comfort of the self. What we get instead is the hell of the same. Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another is the anchor citation. Ryan Burge’s data on how congregations used to be where you sat next to people who cancelled your vote — until we self-sorted them into age-and-politics-and-demographic tribes and started cancelling each other for the smallest heresy inside our own. Infarctions, not infections. Han’s core diagnostic move. The elevated rates of depression, burnout, loneliness, ADHD, and narcissism running through late-modern culture are not infections from something external — they are infarctions, internal blockages caused by excess positivity. Without the resistant presence of the other to give the ego form and measure, the self exploits itself. It burns out under a culture that mistakes constant self-optimization for freedom. You track your steps. You track your workouts. You are your own surveillance state. Bo’s Strava confession — and why the app becomes the master. Twenty years ago Bo gave up his watch collection (calling them chrono handcuffs) as part of an early conversion into rhythms of time. But Strava kept sneaking back in. Turn on GPS to turn on Strava to know how far and how fast — and Bo caught himself performing for the digital slave master. The longer and faster he rode, the more shareable the numbers became. He turned Strava off. His friends thought he had stopped biking. The subsequent conversations with them about performing for smartwatches and step counters are the point. The smartphone as modern rosary. Han’s central image, unpacked. Hard, smooth, compliant. Sits in your hand and mediates every encounter with the world. In three minutes you swipe from a Palestinian child burned by bombs we paid for, to your friend’s new puppy, to a hair-loss ad, to a Peter-Thiel-hating Lord of the Rings meme. The medium has already filtered the encounter, held your attention, and monetized it. And the tragedy never gets to be metabolized. Communication without community. The swarm without the soul. Absolute zero degree of perception. Scent time and point time. Han’s last-slide contrast. Scent time is narrative time — anchored by rituals, overarching narratives, and durable things that hold memory (your mother’s hymnal that still smells like her). Point time is the frantic succession of unmoored moments — the feed, the whizzing by, the endless acceleration. The end of memory is one of Han’s most useful moves for clergy: the undead archive of big data replaces living memory, which is why the tradition still has to live in a person. Han’s constructive answer is not Luddism. It is the recovery of friendliness — the practice of lingering, listening, welcoming boredom, welcoming the other, silencing the ego machine so that the world can speak again. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. <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-inli...
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Faith Has Been Snorting Modernity This Whole Time: James K.A. Smith on the Trad Wife, the Manosphere, and Hegel
2w ago01:28:43Tap to summarizeJamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, more than a decade ago, when Jamie was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. What that began — St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Merton — is what this book bears witness to. It is a book about the mystics saving Jamie’s faith. It is also a Reformed philosopher’s argument that the cultural liturgies project he is best known for needs a prior undoing before its formative work can do anything at all. As I told Jamie in the hour, this is a book that made me feel uncomfortable about how much I enjoyed it. We covered the apophatic/cataphatic distinction with the twist Jamie puts on it, the way certainty is still Cartesian even when it calls itself pious, the trad-wife/manosphere as snorting modernity while claiming to have escaped it, Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections as the real sequel to A Secular Age, and what to do when Distraction Inc. has fully occupied the inner room. The platform is the plantation. Come sit with this one and check out the book. Highlights from the conversation The garage-sale Dark Night of the Soul that started the book. Jamie’s decade-long journey into the Catholic contemplative tradition began when he was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. Neither of them knew, at the time, what that would mean. What it meant is the book — Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark — and the line Jamie now uses regularly with straight faith: the mystics saved my faith. The twist on the apophatic. Continental philosophy’s re-engagement with negative theology (via Derrida’s How to Avoid Speaking, Marion’s God Without Being) tends to read the mystics’ injunction to silence as a rule against transgressing God’s otherness. Jamie, coming back to the mystics not as a graduate student but as a survivor, offers a different read. The silence is not a prohibition on speech. It is an incubator for attention. Not rule: receptivity. Borrowing Fred Moten’s term, he calls it an anepistemology — a mode of being that transcends the subject-object binary, in which silence becomes a discipline you submit to in order to receive presence. Both certainty and skepticism are still Cartesian. Jamie’s diagnosis of two failures that both wound the church: philosophy’s quest for certainty (God as an object we can master with concepts) and religious fundamentalism (which borrows philosophy’s tools for anti-intellectual counter-modernity). Both domesticate the divine. Both leave us as the source of everything, still holding the scaffolding. And, Jamie argues, a certain form of continental apophaticism just becomes high-powered pious skepticism on the same Cartesian field — the mystics never left the field they were pretending to be on. The mystic move is not to master God with concepts, nor to give up on speech in the face of God’s otherness. It is to be known and held by the God who has emptied Godself into the cross. The trad-wife problem is that modernity is already in the lungs. The nostalgic retrenchment currently marketing itself as a return to pre-modern Christianity does not know how modern it is. Jamie invokes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit on the enlightenment/faith confrontation — faith doesn’t realize how much it’s inhaled. It has just been snorting modernity this whole time. The trad-wife phenomenon is impossible; the manosphere is a modern selection presenting itself as ancient. Wendell Berry on Catholic steroids. The mystics could not have known they were bearing witness to a third way. We can pick up their spirit precisely to imagine what faith could look like without either Cartesian mastery or Cartesian anxiety. Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections is the real sequel to A Secular Age. Jamie’s read of Taylor’s late book: it is a work of autobiography as much as philosophy — Taylor telling the story of the Romantic and post-Romantic poets who helped him back to faith by inviting him to inhabit the world in a way that refused the binary of enlightenment vs. faith. The third way through Taylor’s closed spin on one side and the nostalgic dogmatic retrenchment on the other. Jamie’s own extension: the mystics are the deep well from which those poets drank. Tripp’s addition: Taylor’s chapter on the good lands directly on the Black social gospel tradition — the faithful inheritance of both modernity and Christianity from a community that came to America and to faith under conditions of exploitation. Howard Thurman as the mystic Cornel West is downstream from. Distraction Inc. and the platforms as plantation. Jamie’s term for the current attention economy — with the sharper argument that fascination has replaced contemplation as the default mode of our being in the world. Tripp adds Kevin Hart’s fascination-vs-contemplation distinction and Corey Walker’s line from earlier this year at Wake Div: the platforms are the plantation. Jamie loves it, extends it with Eugene McCarraher’s enchantments of mammon. Neither the Jonathan Haidt just-get-the-phones-out-of-school framing, nor the technology-is-neutral framing, gets at what has actually happened. The inner room — where the Sermon on the Mount says the door closes and the Father is met in secret — has been algorithmically occupied. The muscle for closing the door has atrophied. This is a discipleship crisis, not a screen-time problem. About our guest Dr. James K.A. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He earned his PhD at Villanova University under John D. Caputo. He served as editor of Comment magazine (2013–2018) and as editor-in-chief of Imagejournal (2019–2024). His new book is Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark. His previous books include the Cultural Liturgies trilogy — Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King — as well as You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, On the Road with Saint Augustine, How to Inhabit Time, and his early philosophical work Speech and Theology. He writes at Quid Amo on Substack. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft w...
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Doubt Is the Door: Chaplains in the Trenches, George MacDonald, and the Bebbington Quadrilateral w/ Timothy Larsen
2w ago01:41:43Tap to summarizeDr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us moving through three of his books at once. The Fires of Moloch takes its title from H. G. Wells’s line describing Britain sending its sons into the fires of a false god during the Passchendaele Offensive. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles takes the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish theological turn from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation and shows what happens when a rigorously Calvinist minister-turned-fantasy-writer decides doubt is the door in, and therefore the door out, of a mature faith. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism and asks what it takes to keep that word doing honest work now that polls will code Muslim Trump voters as evangelical. Come for Anglo-Catholic sacramental confession as battle-tested ministry. Stay for the George MacDonald grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much. Highlights from the conversation Seventeen chaplains, one book, one furnace. The Passchendaele Offensive of 1917 — one of the great, seemingly futile battles of the First World War — was the crucible in which seventeen Anglican military chaplains wrote The Church in the Furnace, the book that would in turn generate Tim’s The Fires of Moloch more than a century later. What united them across churchmanship (Anglo-Catholic, evangelical, liberal, broad) was the shared conviction that Church of England ministry, particularly among the working-class men in their care, had been fatally scripted. The burial service, in particular, did not fit the situation. Every chaplain went off script. The Prayer Book revision movement, the Life and Liberty Movement, the Industrial Christian Fellowship, and Anglican support for the League of Nations all trace back to what these seventeen saw in the trenches. Woodbine Willie was in on the marketing. Tim’s revisionist take on G. A. Studdert Kennedy, the most famous padre of them all. The legend: the soldiers gave him the nickname because he handed out free Woodbine cigarettes. Tim’s investigation: soldiers gave deflating nicknames when they gave them at all, and there is no first-hand evidence that any soldier coined this one. Studdert Kennedy gave the nickname to himself. A sacrificial pastoral genius who was also perfectly willing to invent his own persona if it made the ministry connect. Tony Campolo’s line applies: if it’s not true, it ought to be. Neville Talbot and the recovered body. The story Tim tells even at parties. Neville Talbot, from an aristocratic Anglican family whose grandfathers were earls, was a chaplain at the front when his brother Gilbert — a lieutenant, and lieutenants at the front lasted a matter of weeks — was killed in a charge. Neville tried twice to recover his body from the active battlefield, an Iliad-shaped act. He succeeded. He married during the war. His wife died of complications from the birth of their son. He named the son Gilbert, in honor of his brother. His namesake son died at twenty-one in the Second World War. That is a life. Battle-tested ministry. One of the surprising outcomes of the war for the Church of England: practices that had been fiercely contested a generation earlier — you could get an Anglican priest jailed for hearing confession in the late Victorian period — became broadly accepted after the war because they worked in the trenches. Catholic priests scored big with soldiers by their tenacity with last rites, sacramental confession, and physical saints’ medals that functioned as reassurance-in-hand. Tripp’s insight, which stopped Tim in his tracks: Aragorn’s blessing of the dying Boromir in The Two Towers is a last-rites scene — including the pastoral discipline of never speaking of the betrayal again. Tolkien was processing the same trenches the chaplains were, in his own key. The door of doubt, and the piety MacDonald left behind. From Boyd Hilton’s argument that British theology shifted around 1850 from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation, Tim reads George MacDonald as the pastoral hero of the incarnational turn — the Scottish minister raised in relentlessly stringent Calvinism who found the penal-substitution frame morally unbearable and reoriented around the sanctification of all of creation through the incarnation of Christ. From his novel Lilith: a door in and therefore a door out. Doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is how faith becomes adult. The romantic road — love for nature, for music, for another person — is not competition with the love of God but the road toward it. The grandmother who burned her son’s violin because he enjoyed music too much is the picture of the piety MacDonald was resisting. Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien inherit the reorientation. Lewis calls MacDonald my master. What Bebbington’s quadrilateral cannot cover. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim’s PhD supervisor David Bebbington’s famous four-point definition of evangelicalism — crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism, activism. Tim defends it as a way to name what a Korean-language evangelical church in America has in common with an Anglican evangelical in 1740s England and a Nigerian Pentecostal in the 1980s. But he also names the limit: if you start on the ground with people in Arkansas who call themselves evangelical, you are not going to find the love of the cross or the centrality of scripture animating what they are actually doing politically. Polling makes it worse — when the poll defines evangelical by removing non-white respondents on the assumption that race is more determinative than religion, of course the poll produces a monolithic answer. That is called your poll design.Tim’s closing worry, which lands right on Tripp’s own worries about his oldest son heading into a fully algorithmic world: it may be the medium of the in-person weekly gathering, not the message, that is becoming counter-cultural. About our guest Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 2025 he served as President of the American Society of Church History. He has authored or edited more than twenty books. Books at the center of this conversation: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One; George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment ; and Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ ...
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What If the American Revolution Had Failed? with Diana Butler Bass
3w ago01:35:49Tap to summarizeDiana Butler Bass just got back from Ireland, where she and Richard escaped the Fourth of July — and she came home with the most stunning historical counterfactual we have ever discussed on the podcast. Standing in the death-row hallway at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, the prison where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed one by one, Diana asked herself the question that turned her whole trip: what if the American Revolution had failed, and this hallway held Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams instead? The Irish worked on decolonization for four hundred and fifty years. We got there in seven. American history might be a miracle; that is her real takeaway. Along the way: the London Fourth of July party where an American won best costume by going as the reflecting pool; listener questions our friends’ Theology Summit lectures have generated on Jim Wallis’s who must be defeated and who must be persuaded?; on what a congregation can faithfully do before the midterms; on the data centers now colonizing the neighborhoods that did not ask for them; on the day I got a text from David who turned out to be an AI chatbot trained to shift my views on Israel and Palestine; on Ulysses Mejias and Nick Couldry’s Data Colonialism and why our interiority is the resource now being mined — and, at the end, the grief I have been carrying since I flew to Atlanta last week to bury my best friend from div school. Diana’s answer to that grief lands the whole conversation. Come sit at the table. 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. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.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 <span class="sc...
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Thank God I Am an Atheist: Thomas Jared Farmer on Gianni Vattimo’s Weak Thought
3w ago01:44:21Tap to summarizeGianni Vattimo — the Catholic-communist-gay Italian pioneer of pensiero debole (weak thought) — died in 2023, and the intellectual biography he deserved has finally arrived, courtesy of Thomas Jared Farmer, a fellow Claremont alum who wrote the book at the University of Münster and now works at Emory Law School. Vattimo is not the household philosopher he should be in English, and this book fixes that. Farmer weaves the biography I did not know — five-year-old Vattimo under British bombs in Turin, his Calabrian accent he could not shake, his flight from a Red Brigades hit list of his own former students, his letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis, his friendship with Umberto Eco — into the four big ideas that make Vattimo essential right now. What weak thought actually is. Why metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. Why secularization is the fulfillment of Christianity, not its enemy. And why hermeneutic communism is what the anti-authoritarian imagination needs. One of the most fun conversations I have had all summer. Highlights from the conversation The Vattimo biography I did not know. Five years old under British bombs in Turin. Fleeing to Calabria with his mother and returning with a southern accent he could not shake. Daily communicant through his youth because the ritual was the only stable thing in a world falling apart. Adolescent Maoism. A radical Leninist manifesto at 38 (Il soggetto e la maschera, 1974). Then, on a hit list from his own former Red Brigades students, whose ideological certainty had turned murderous, he fled Turin. His slow return to Catholicism after being asked to review the Italian translation of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — the electrical shock that re-Christianized him. Coming out as gay in the natural-law era. A letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis. The intellectual moves make more sense once you have the life. The end of metaphysics and the birth of weak thought. Farmer’s clearest expository chapter. Weber’s disenchantment, Heidegger’s end of metaphysics, Nietzsche’s death of God, Gadamer’s hermeneutics of tradition — all as one process, the collapse of the modern project of finding the really real behind everything. Radical Orthodoxy’s answer: close the curtain and pretend there is still someone back there. Vattimo’s answer: no, but the categories still function as heritage — traces of what has lived, evoking pietas. Truth is not gone. It is held loosely. Wittgenstein’s language-game as the anchor image: a game needs rules, and the rules are what make play possible. But you can play more than one game with the same deck of cards. Metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. The section that made me lean forward. Vattimo watched his own students — Red Brigades radicals — kidnap and assassinate former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in the name of a certainty they had received from him. The lesson stuck. Whether it is religious fundamentalism, scientific positivism, or orthodox Marxism, the possession of ultimate truth justifies silencing dissent, breaking off dialogue, and eventually reaching for force. Nihilism, in Vattimo’s hands, is not the disease. It is the vaccine. The Michael Anton Flight 93 logic that gave us January 6 is the more recent American version of the pathology Vattimo diagnosed in the Red Brigades. Secularization as the fulfillment of Christianity. Vattimo’s most provocative claim, and the reason he loved Pope Francis. God empties Godself of majesty and becomes human (Philippians 2). The church, dispossessed of its temporal power in the nineteenth century by Italian unification and the loss of the Papal States, was forced into a kenotic analogue — stripped of principality, freed to become salt and light. The Death of God — of the absolute, moralizing, on-high metaphysics — is the final stage of the same self-emptying. God as judge and nomos of order collapses. God as friend, companion, love arrives. The parallel Farmer draws to Bonhoeffer’s line — if you want to understand God, think about the manger and the cross — closes the loop. Hermeneutic communism. Vattimo’s late political project, developed with Santiago Zabala. Not the vanguard-led revolutionary Marxism Vattimo had already renounced. Not the neoliberal capitalist hegemony that took its place. But a democratic-proceduralist, non-violent, mass-resistance politics — strikes, boycotts, labor organizing, deliberative dialogue — that aligns with the marginalized and constantly torments the prevailing order without pretending to install a new absolute regime in its place. The Tolkien moment: you cannot pick up the ring of power to defeat the ring of power. It only serves one master. The revolution has to be permanent haranguing, not a takeover. Bakunin against Marx, resurfacing in the twenty-first century. Natural law, and why Vattimo could never accept it. Coming of age gay in a Catholic milieu where Thomism had been elevated as the church’s default philosophy after Leo XIII, Vattimo could not accept the natural-law claim that a world given in this way could tell him what he was. That experience became the wedge — the point at which the general suspicion of metaphysical closure became personal. And Farmer’s closing move: the same wedge that the current postliberal Catholic and evangelical resurgence is trying to swing shut. Vattimo’s whole life was an argument against that closing. Dr. Thomas Jared Farmer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law, where he works with John Witte on the intersection of philosophical hermeneutics and legal theory. He completed his MA in philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University (studying with Ingolf Dalferth and the late Anselm Min) and his PhD at the University of Münster in Germany under Hans-Peter Grosshans. He grew up in the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in upstate South Carolina. His new book is Gianni Vattimo: Philosopher, Communist, Catholic, Nihilist (Columbia University Pres2)— the definitive English-language intellectual biography of Vattimo. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it’s some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn’t — it’s a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You’ll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It’s free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" cla...
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Puff, Puff, Passages: Bo and Tripp on the Bible, the Ban List, and the Books We Would Take to a Desert Island
3w ago01:49:20Tap to summarizeBo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most tangent-heavy TNTs of the year: Bo listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation and realizing he was a real insider until roughly 2016 and then the whole tribe went somewhere he does not recognize; Ryan Burge’s new Gen Z data showing that half of an entire generation is refusing church because of Donald Trump specifically; a five-books-for-the-rest-of-your-life draft (we are on the same desert island, which lets us share a Lord of the Rings and free up a slot each); a running argument with the recent Atlantic article about how a third of the country has not finished a book in a year; and, at the end, Bo pitching me five different themes for his Beer Camp session (my favorite: emergency politics in a society of spectacle: a survivor’s guide, which is what the chat voted for too), and me pitching a real book to Cynthia Shafer-Elliott based on the archeology of 8th-century Israelite hotboxing. This is a long one. It also contains actual grief. Come sit with us. Highlights from the conversation Bo’s Violent Take It By Force debrief. Bo has been listening to the audiobook history of the New Apostolic Reformation — Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Frank Peretti, Bill Johnson, the 10/40 window, the queen-of-heaven prayer-warrior trip to Nepal — and realizing he was fully inside all of it until roughly 2016, at which point the whole tribe went somewhere he no longer recognizes. The two things he had missed: the FrontLine YouTube channel that has become a major evangelical media force, and Bethel Music’s new worship leader who has become the sonic engine of the movement. The load-bearing detail: the Jericho march at the White House on January 5, 2021, that gave evangelicals permission to participate in what happened the next day. Tripp watched Steve Bannon’s podcast from Scotland the same week and reached the same conclusion by a different route. Half of Gen Z is walking away because of Trump specifically. Ryan Burge’s new data. Not vague vibes. Not deconstruction. The specific answer to why are you not going to a church? is Donald Trump. Tripp shared the piece on personal Facebook and heard back from a beloved family friend who now sends carnival workers to the hospital in her retirement — and also has a MAGA here is what you are voting for list pinned to her feed. The gap between how she still lives and what she now posts is where a lot of the grief in this episode lives. Monopoly vs. Risk. Bo at a local screening of Bad Faith (2024) noticed the audience of well-informed liberals still playing by Monopoly rules — the Constitution says X, the Emoluments Clause says Y — while the game on the field has shifted to Risk. The other side is not playing that game anymore. If your plan against a naked power grab is to quote a good clause at it, you probably need a new plan. Corporate Democrats keep reaching for the rulebook. The rulebook is decor. The Five Books draft. You get five books for the rest of your life. What do you pick? Bo picks Robert Downs’s Books That Changed the World (held together with duct tape); Sheila Greeve Davaney’s Theology at the End of Modernity (the essays in honor of Gordon Kaufman he has been reading for sixteen years); The Lord of the Rings; Graham Ward’s The Postmodern God (which he technically stole from one of Barry Taylor’s Fuller students en route to Tripp’s house years ago); and Walter Truett Anderson’s The Truth About the Truth (the book that woke him up to postmodernism after his denomination told him N. T. Wright, Len Sweet, and Brian McLaren were the outer edge of what he could read). Tripp picks his hand-annotated NRSV Bible, the Silmarillion, a folio Lord of the Rings(later shared with Bo to free up a slot each), Whitehead’s Process and Reality (with the plan to finally crack Part IV), and Gary Dorrien’s Kantian Reason and the Hegelian Spirit — using the enforced isolation to work out his future Gifford lectures. Only two books got banned. Both were poetry. Bo’s observation from his town. The Moms for Liberty in Twin Falls have a list of one hundred books they want out of the public library. Two have actually been pulled. Both were books of poetry — one about children who had been trafficked, one about a trans kid. Bo, who does not write poetry but believes God is a poet: poetry bypasses the cerebral. It gets its finger into some other place and pulls on your brain a different way. That is why they knew to take those two off the shelf first. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott and the hotboxed Israelite temple. Tripp’s closing tangent-turned-book-pitch. Residue analysis on the incense poles at an 8th-century official Israelite worship site has confirmed cannabis and bat dung as the burn mixture. Slow burn, thick smoke. Official Israelite worship space. They were hotboxing the temple. Meanwhile, the Baal temples in the sa...
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The MLK Monument Has No Jesus on It: Vincent Lloyd and Luke Bretherton on Secularism as Ideology
4w ago01:24:13Tap to summarizePolitical theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what political theology actually is. Luke Bretherton and Vincent Lloyd — two of the three co-authors of a genuinely important new Columbia University Press book, What Is Political Theology? — sat down with me to explain what they had done. The book itself models the thing it argues for: three scholars from three disciplines refusing to synthesize their differences and instead sitting inside the productive tension. In one hour we cover why the standard Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered, what from above and from below are actually good for, why secularism is not a neutral space but an ideology, what Peter Thiel’s Antichrist lectures accidentally reveal, why Richard Dawkins now identifies as a cultural Christian, and what the difference between apophatic and cataphatic is currently doing to Luke’s and Vincent’s friendship. Live disagreement, on tape. The nice version. Highlights from the conversation The Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered. The book’s opening move: political theology is not (only) the German reactionary tradition that migrated into continental philosophy in the 1990s. It is a global story. Every time you are told political theology emerges — Iran 1979, Israel, the American Christian Right, the tech oligarchs — the framing of emergence is the tell. It never went away. What went away was the secular academy’s ability to see it. From above vs. from below. Vincent’s methodological handle. Above starts with the state and a God-on-a-throne looking down. Below starts with the neighborhood, the practice, the ritual, the poem. His chapter’s example: reading Aimé Césaire’s Caribbean poetry — from a poet who is not a Christian but ends a poem with a prayer — as a site of political theology diagnosing false gods in a colonized context. Not what political theology says. What political theology does. The four uses of the political. Luke’s typology, which does the work of dissolving the assumption that we already know what political means when we say political theology. One: politics as common life (creation-shaped). Two: politics as friend-enemy relation (fall-shaped — every claim to be human makes a claim that some are not the right kind of human, and that pattern applies as much to universalist Marxism as to any nationalism). Three: politics as sovereignty and order (providential). Four: politics as eschatological horizon — the utopian longing for common life without conflict, scarcity, or the need for sovereignty. Different political theologies foreground different ones. Reading the traffic between them is most of the work. Secularism is not neutral. It is an ideology. Vincent on the MLK monument in D.C. — none of the carved quotations mention God, or Jesus, or divine law. You would not know Martin Luther King had a PhD in theology. Luke on the university strategic-planning meeting at which he said we should think about the meaning and purpose of the university, and his colleagues laughed out loud. Secularism functions to rule out the questions we most need to ask — and produces the reactive political theologies (Christian nationalism, tech-libertarian apocalypticism) that are now naming what secularism refused to name. Badly. Peter Thiel and Richard Dawkins as accidental confessors. Thiel’s Antichrist lectures at Oxford (which Luke happened to be in the room for). At least Thiel is not claiming to be secular — libertarian, hyperindividualistic, apocalyptic, but not disguised. Which is more than can be said for a Heritage Foundation white paper. And Richard Dawkins now identifying as a cultural Christian is the same phenomenon in reverse: the earlier secularization story (leave religion behind, get to rationality) has quietly flipped into a Spengler story (Christianity is the crucible that produced our civilization). Racialized undertones included at no extra cost. Apophatic vs. cataphatic — and what it is doing to their friendship. Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between a problem (which can be solved, like irrigation) and a <span class="_animating_yu34g_10" ...
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The Angel of History, the End of History, and the End of the Liberal Subject
4w ago01:17:43Tap to summarizeBo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan’s visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown backward into the future by a storm called progress while wreckage piles at his feet). Fukuyama’s End of History (the liberal-democratic-capitalist endpoint the fall of the Wall was supposed to confirm). Derrida’s différance (the end is always deferred and always different than you expected). Gordon Kaufman’s Theology for the Nuclear Age (Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel’s). Steve Bannon’s copy of The Fourth Turning. And a Mark C. Taylor line Bo has been carrying since a 2015 Claremont paper: the end is approaching, has always been approaching, approaching from the beginning. My counter-thesis is that all of these frames still assume the liberal subject — the modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy and attention — and I think the actual crisis is that the liberal subject has been algorithmically dismantled. It is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either one. Also, we rehomed a giant rat, Bo hosted a pop-up LGBTQ youth clubhouse at his church, and $1.2 billion in bike lane funding got canceled for DEI concerns. Highlights from the conversation Rats, bike lanes, and a pop-up clubhouse. Bo’s opener: an unusually large rat he humanely rehomed to a nature preserve (his general policy on sin, too), 81 bikes given away this summer through Holy Rollers (plus fifteen more delivered by the local refugee center from a Boise donation that had been sitting in a shed for years), and a Southern Idaho Pride pop-up youth event Bo hosted at First Methodist last Thursday — one of the safe-space clubhouses whose location gets texted to LGBTQ kids only on the day of, so it cannot be protested. The Trump administration also cancelled $1.2 billion in bike-lane funding for DEI concerns, which Bo suspects is about the trans bikes and the more-than-two-gears gradient issue. The Angel of History and weak messianic power. Bo brings Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay on the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus. The angel faces backwards. It sees history not as a chain of events but as one single catastrophe piling wreckage at its feet. The storm blowing from paradise gets caught in its wings and forces it irresistibly into the future, back turned. That storm is what we call progress. Benjamin’s counter-move: the Messiah is not a person walking around history. The Messiah is the fullness of history itself, in which every erased victim is finally remembered — and we, meanwhile, are endowed with a weak messianic power, the power to redeem the past by refusing to forget it. Tripp: this is why last week’s America was never good framing landed the way it did. Not cynicism. Benjamin’s angel refusing to let the death march of history disappear underfoot. Fukuyama, the ten plagues, and Derrida’s laugh. Fukuyama’s End of History thesis was the confident announcement, after the Cold War, of the liberal-democratic-capitalist terminal form. Derrida’s response in Specters of Marx runs through the ten plagues still on the loose in the supposed promised land — unemployment, homelessness, exclusion from citizenship, foreign debt, arms trade, nuclear proliferation, drug cartels shaping policy, inter-ethnic wars, and so on — and asks: if the ten plagues are running around, are we really at the end of history? The tell was always in the empirical record. Différance and the undeconstructable. Bo’s other beloved concept — Derrida’s différance, where meaning is always deferred and always different than expected. Applied to eschatology: the end will always be different than you thought. Tripp’s expansion: Derrida’s later religious turn locates justice as the undeconstructable — the horizon that judges every law and every arrangement, without which no arrangement can even be called unjust. Caputo picks this up as the already-and-not-yet of the kingdom. The kingdom always comes. It never arrives. Gordon Kaufman’s Theology for the Nuclear Age. Bo’s Rushmore book, one of the five volumes he would grab from a burning library. Kaufman’s argument: Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to our concept of God what Auschwitz did to Wiesel’s. Once the species acquires the capacity to end itself, the God-concept has to change. What the analogy makes visible is the existential shift — first the concept of God dies with the bomb; now the liberal subject who could have had a concept of God is dying with the algorithm. That is the harder problem. The end of the liberal subject. Tripp’s counter-thesis, worked out over the second half of the hour. Every framework Bo brings to the table — Benjamin, Fukuyama, Derrida, Kaufman, the Fourth Turning cycle theory — still assumes the liberal subject. The modern individual with an inner room, formed by literacy, capable of freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and a vote and a prayer. All of these freedoms matter to whom? Someone who still has an inner room. If the door has been kicked in by the smartphone, if desire is being generated by an algorithm, if attention itself has been atrophied by a media environment that runs on celebratory narcissism and allergy to otherness — then the crisis is not the death of God or the end of democracy. It is the end of the human being who was built for either. Mainline Protestantism becomes an outpost of nostalgia to a subject our kids and grandkids no longer have. The closing line comes from Bo’s benediction: if the carousel of progress is giving you motion sickness, smash your smartphone, grill a steak, grab a home-brewed beer, and I will see you in Valhalla, brother. 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 <a href="https://tripp-fuller.lpcontent.net/unsett...
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Al Mohler’s Nightmare: Interpreting Scripture While Female with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Jul 1601:02:25Tap to summarizeJennifer Garcia Bashaw is back, and her timing is, as always, impeccable. We recorded this conversation about her new book on biblical interpretation right after Al Mohler announced that women cannot, in fact, teach the Bible on podcasts. So we did the only honest thing. We talked about scripture for an hour. Serving Up Scripture is the book Jennifer co-wrote with Aaron Higashi, and it uses a cooking metaphor that does what good metaphors do — gives you somewhere to stand while you realize the kitchen has been on fire the whole time. We walked through the four questions every passage requires (historical, literary, ideological, theological), put the woman saved from stoning on stage one more time, read Cato’s instructions to Roman husbands whose wives commit adultery (a useful reminder that the Pastorals were the moderate position in their cultural context), and ended up where we always do — at the very different things you find in Paul depending on which Paul you are reading. Plus the news Al Mohler should have led the broadcast with: the Bible Divas podcast just launched, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp in October. Here’s the Bible Divas on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. Highlights from the conversation The cooking metaphor. The book’s central frame — interpreters as cooks, passages as ingredients, hospitality as the goal. Who is at the table? What are you cooking for? Are you celebrating or mourning? Once you start playing with it, the rigid the Bible just says one thing instinct that most of the pew has been trained to accept gets quietly dismantled. The four questions every passage requires. Historical (What does this mean in light of polytheism? What did Cato tell Roman husbands to do about adulterous wives?), literary (What genre, what staging, what devices?), ideological (Who benefits if I read this prescriptively? Who has been harmed by this reading?), and theological(How does this affirm or challenge my view of God?). Most church readings ask the fourth question only. The other three are where everything interesting lives. The woman saved from stoning, on stage. John 8, re-read with the four questions in mind. Adultery in the first-century context (a married woman talking to a man not her husband in public could be accused), Jesus’s choreography (kneeling, writing, standing, shifting the attention off her), and the ideological work of asking how is this passage being used to aid the oppressed? Jennifer’s John for Normal People puts the whole scene on the stage. The closing turn: women are still being made into Jesus’s scapegoat for the sexual sins of their society. Which Paul? Galatians 3:28 vs. the Pastorals. The historical and literary questions applied to the question of women in the church. Galatians (definitely Paul) blows up the household codes. Ephesians (Pauline school) tries to soften the Roman patriarchal structure without dismantling it. The Pastorals (probably written a couple of generations after Paul died) cannot imagine women in the room at all. Jennifer’s diagnostic move when scripture is multivocal: ask what Jesus did. Hard to argue with the resurrection witness list. The thing is rarely the thing. The fear underneath young men’s anxiety about women in the 2026 classroom is not theological. It is the economic vise of a generation handed a vision of masculinity tied to a one-income family that the economy will no longer underwrite. The complaint is women hate men. The actual ache is that the world they were promised does not exist. Jennifer’s classroom turn: the gift of a well-formed question is more useful than the right answer. The Bible Divas launch — and they are going apocalyptic at Beer Camp. The four-scholar podcast Jennifer is launching this summer with Anna Sieges, Angela Parker, and Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Two Old Testament scholars (one of them an archeologist), two New Testament scholars (one of them on Paul and Revelation as revenge fantasy). The pitch: most theology and Bible podcasts are hosted by men. The Bible Divas are putting women in charge of the format, the guests, and the agenda. All four are coming to Theology Beer Camp in Kansas City this October to record a live apocalyptic-themed episode. Revelation as revenge fantasy. Armageddon as archaeology. Apocalyptic as genre. Very possibly on the red carpet. About our guest Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw teaches New Testament and Christian Ministry at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina, and is an ordained American Baptist minister with more than two decades of parish experience. She earned her BA at Baylor, her MDiv at Truett Theological Seminary, and her PhD in New Testament from Fuller Theological Seminary. Her research spans Gospels studies, Girardian interpretation, hermeneutics, and homiletics. Books at the center of this conversation: Serving Up Scripture: How to Interpret the Bible for Yourself and Others (Broadleaf, 2025), co-authored with Aaron Higashi with a foreword by Peter Enns — the cooking metaphor at the heart of the hour; John for Normal People: A Guide through the Drama and Depth of the Fourth Gospel, where the woman saved from stoninggets put on stage; and her earlier Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims. Coming up: a dystopian novel based on the Kingdom of God in the Gospels, and a textbook on Jesus and Christ figures in cinema. Previous Podcasts with Dr. Bashaw Post-Penal Substitutionary Atonement the Gospel through the Eyes of the Victim Critical Scholarship for a Faithful Disciple 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. <div class="x14z9mp xat24cr x1lziwak x1vvkbs xtlvy1s x126k92a...
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