Podcast
Tripp Fuller
Hosted by Dr. Tripp Fuller | Theologian, Philosopher, Minister · EN
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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
3d 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 same era were bur...
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The MLK Monument Has No Jesus on It: Vincent Lloyd and Luke Bretherton on Secularism as Ideology
5d 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
5d 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
2w ago01:02:25Tap 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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Winter in America: The Double Deac Deans on the 250th, Christian Nationalism, and the Questions That Do Not Get Answered
2w ago01:30:41Tap to summarizeThis was a live one, recorded on the eve of the 250th at Wake Forest Divinity School with the Double Deans in the room. Corey Walker’s Theology Summit lecture — which spent six hours at the top of Substack the week we recorded — uses two moments in American history to name where we are: James Duane’s October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring revolution, and Gil Scott-Heron’s 1973 album Winter in America, a lament for the arrested development of democracy after Nixon. Corey’s argument is that 2026 is another winter. Bill Leonard, the founding dean who trained a generation to think about dissent, added the second layer: a perfect imperfect storm in which Christian nationalism has fused with authoritarian government and the church is the least helpful it has been in his lifetime. Three questions run through the conversation — Is God dead? (Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass in 1850), Is America possible? (Vincent Harding), and What does our religion say to those with their backs against the wall? (Howard Thurman) — and none of them get answered. What they get instead is Corey’s proposal that the 250th is calling us to a counter memory — not the memory of those who prevailed, but of Miss Audrey, Mister Pugh, and Mister Linwood, the neighbors whose first names were their titles. Plus the Snake Handler Fund is officially open. Highlights from the conversation The Winter frame. Corey’s Theology Summit lecture pairs two moments to name where we are — James Duane’s October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring a revolution most of the colonies had not yet signed onto, and Gil Scott-Heron’s 1973 Winter in America lamenting the arrested development of democracy after Nixon and Vietnam. Bill Leonard’s memory that the 1976 bicentennial was not a moment of celebration but of deep introspection. That is the mode Corey is asking us to receive the semiquincentennial in. The perfect imperfect storm. Bill, on where the church actually is — the least helpful in his lifetime at responding to the fusion of Christian nationalism with authoritarian government. The Matthew 25 column he is writing on the Supreme Court’s Haitian and Syrian TPS ruling (Justice Kagan’s dissent laid out Trump’s poisoning the blood and S-hole countries remarks; Justice Alito let him off as heated political rhetoric). Only 4,499 immigrants admitted to the country last year — three of them not white South African. Corey’s addition: the Roberts Court’s originalism is lawyers who now can divine history — the Court itself has become the ultimate theologians. Possibly the Council of Zion. Three questions, none of them answered. Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass in Faneuil Hall in 1850: Is God dead? Vincent Harding: Is America possible? Howard Thurman: What does our religion say to those with their backs against the wall? Corey’s move: all three echo the question Jesus cries from the cross — my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — and none of them are eliciting a certainty. They are eliciting a commitment to a course of action. What are you going to do? Counter memory as the 250th’s actual invitation. Corey, via Dean Yolanda Pierce at Vanderbilt, on sacred memory. Who are we remembering at the 250th? Not those who prevailed. Miss Audrey. Mister Pugh. Mister Linwood. Mister West. The neighbors whose first names were their titles, who protected and nurtured him in Oakmont North, Norfolk. And on the wider frame, the Haitian Revolution — CLR James’s Black Jacobins (1938), Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) — the hemispheric revolution the American story has spent two centuries refusing to think about. Reconstruction as another founding the Roberts Court is now actively unwinding. Jesus at Nazareth as the original DEI moment. Bill’s Luke 4 turn. Jesus reads Isaiah in his home synagogue and the crowd applauds. Then he preaches. Elijah went to the Gentile widow. Elisha healed the Gentile leper. The Israelites in the room drag him out and try to throw him off a cliff. Bill’s punchline: to say diversity, equity, and inclusion have to be exorcised from American vocabulary is to leave the Christian gospel to languish. Corey’s addition: diversity is the signature of God. No two blades of grass. No two snowflakes. No two leaves on a tree. God does not create in sameness. And Bill’s earlier theological punch on 1 Timothy — if the curse of Eve remains, then the gift of Christ is negated — is the same move by another route. The platform is the plantation. Corey on Cory Doctorow’s reverse centaur and enshittification, the inevitabilismof AI, and the language ramp-up around AI’s inevitability that always intensifies right before the IPO. Trump’s $2 billion in crypto last year is a Teapot Dome every hour. If the platform is your plantation, you have to escape the plantation. The Luddites were pro humanitate. Machines can be extensions of us. We cannot be extensions of the machines. The pluralism of the world against the monism of the technology. About our guests Dr. Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. A native of Norfolk, Virginia and an ordained American Baptist clergyperson, he previously served as Vice President and Dean at Virginia Union University’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, founding dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education at Winston-Salem State University, and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is a former student of Cornel West at Harvard, and sits on the board of Lincoln University (the country’s first HBCU). Books: A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press); Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (co-edited with Melody Barnes and Thad Williamson, Edward Elgar, 2020); and Beyond a Politics of Nostalgia: Religious Freedom and the Ends of Democracy (co-edited with Sabrina E. Dent). Forthcoming: Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy(University of Virginia Press). His Theology Summit lecture — Winter in America — is at theologysummit.com. Dr. Bill J. Leonard is the founding Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity and Professor of Divinity Emeritus. He writes a regular column for Baptist News Global. His most recent book is Appalachian Mountain Christianity: The Spirituality of Otherness (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Earlier books include A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States (Abingdon), Baptist Ways: A History (Judson), and The Challenge of Being Baptist (Baylor). He is, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, the only person in Wake Forest history to have brought a serpent-handling preacher to campus with actual serpents (Reverend Carl Porter, 1997, five snakes minimum). The Snake Handler Fund at Wake Div is now, officially, open. 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...
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America Was a Mirage: Kevin Carnahan on Why the Moral 1940s–1980s Was an Accident
3w ago02:02:40Tap to summarizeBo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin’s lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World War II made us construct ourselves as anti-Nazi. The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so everyone briefly supported the welfare of the person next to them because they were also broke. The Cold War closed borders. Television consolidated. Dishwashers freed the PTA. Then the iPhone came out and the birth rate fell off a cliff a full year before the 2008 crash because everyone stopped having sex to look at their phones. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. What now, then? Kevin’s frame: the responsible self, and Christianity’s confidence that our imperfection is taken up by God’s perfection. Bo’s frame: the Methodists went from getting kicked out of Anglicanism for enthusiasm to being respectable Anglicans-with-different-money in two generations. Mine: we have no economic model left to nationalize, and Augustine was right that we are held together by what we hate. Sit with Kevin’s lecture over a Sunday-school hour at theologysummit.com. Highlights from the conversation America from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. Kevin’s central claim, walked through step by step. World War II gave us a moral dividend by forcing us to construct ourselves as anti-Nazi (which required, briefly, taking our own antisemitism and racism seriously). The Great Depression flattened the top of the economy so support for social programs became support for the person next to you, who was also broke. The Cold War closed borders so we could focus on internal racism without immigration backlash. Television consolidated into three networks and professionalized standards. Dishwashers and washing machines freed up enough time for a PTA, a bowling league, and a Sunday-school class that still meets. None of it was moral virtue. It was a perfect storm of accidents. The 2007 iPhone and the birth-rate cliff. The killer data point of the lecture: the birth rate in the West started dropping precipitously in 2007 — a full year before the 2008 crash. Everyone assumed the crash caused it. The correlation actually lines up with the iPhone. Kevin’s read: people literally stopped having sex as much because they were looking at their phones. The entertainment media that ate our social time was the same media that ate our sex lives. Being a Christian is like being a Cubs fan. If you are in it for the winning, this is not the tradition for you. Kevin’s frame: worshiping a crucified savior means you are on the side of the people being crushed by the empire, and you are going to lose a lot. That is built into the thing. But the Christian confidence is not that you succeed. It is that your imperfection is taken up by God’s perfection. What happens after that, Kevin says, he does not know exactly. That is fine. Three passages from Tolkien and the long slow defeat. Frodo to Gandalf: I wish it need not happen in my lifetime.Gandalf to Denethor: Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril. And the war council at the Black Gate: it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set. Tolkien’s very Catholic view of history — the long slow defeat — as the counter to both the man as maker fantasy of self-authored moral agency and the equally dangerous fantasy that the arc of history is going to bend by itself. There is nothing left to nationalize. FDR saved American capitalism by enacting roughly 90% of the 1930s Socialist Party platform (Social Security, public works, unemployment insurance, labor rights) and creating the vital center — but only because a Fordist economy still had a middle class the country could organize around. That economy is gone. The middle class is now offered cheap TVs. The growth industries — online gambling, delivery weed, algorithm distraction, AI extraction of the collective commons — are all extractive of attention and capital, not generative of solidarity. There is no Ford left to nationalize. The warning that ends the segment: revolutions do not come when the poor find out they are poor. They come when the not-born-poor discover their parents lied. Augustine on why we still need to hate someone together. Kevin’s closing move. Augustine argued Rome was not held together by justice or common loves. It was held together by Carthage — by having a coherent external enemy. America from the 1940s to the 1980s had communism and Nazism to hate together. Now the external enemy has fragmented, and we have had to construct internal enemies to hold ourselves together. Bo’s Kiwanis-neighbor story lands the whole point: the man alarmed that Iran is full of religious zealots with permission for violence from a book they interpret their own way — looking Bo dead in the face without hearing his own description of himself. The counter-witnesses Kevin points to: the Kansas farmers who painted an Algerian flag in their field when the Algerian World Cup team stayed nearby. Erling Haaland playing like a kindergartner. Sometimes we do transcend. About our guest Dr. Kevin M. Carnahan is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Methodist University in Fayette, Missouri. He earned his PhD at Southern Methodist University, is a former president of the Niebuhr Society, and recently stepped down after five years as co-editor of the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics. His books include Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Ramsey: Idealist and Pragmatic Christians on Politics, Philosophy, Religion, and War (Lexington Books, 2010), From Presumption to Prudence in Just-War Rationality (Routledge, 2017), the co-edited Paradoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition (Routledge, 2020), and his newest, The Disappearance of Eve and the Gender of Jesus (Fortress, 2025). His lecture at the Theology Summit — the one this whole conversation is about — is now live at theologysummit.com. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <img loading="laz...
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You Are the Christ: Ilia Delio on Taking Paul More Literally Than the Catholic Church
3w ago00:55:53Tap to summarizeLast Q&A of The Future of Religion. And on the way out, Ilia did the thing the class had been quietly building toward — she said out loud that Teilhard never called Christ the savior, that we are not saved by one particular person but by making an option for the whole, and that the actual move the future of religion asks of us is to take Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does. You are the Christ. You are baptized into the Christ. You share the mind of Christ. You are nourished at the table of the Christ. You are called to be the Christ. The students fed us our best questions of the series — love as anti-entropic cosmological force (not metaphor), how to have a personal relationship with a presence that is not a being out there, what Teilhard would have made of the darkness of the noosphere, and whether God depends on us as much as we depend on God. We end where we began. Thank you to everyone who took the class. Highlights from the conversation Love is not a metaphor. Hazel asked it plainly: you put love on the same shelf as gravity — are you serious? Ilia: yes. Teilhard traces a center-to-center pull all the way down to molecular forces, a fundamental cosmological energy of attraction running through every level of life. Love is anti-entropic. It does not break down. Union precedes being. The basis of unity is diversity, not homogeneity. Tripp’s gloss: this is Whitehead’s prehensive moment doing the same work in a different vocabulary. Quantum physics retired the categories we are still theologizing inside. Federico Faggin’s Irreducible, which Ilia is currently reading, and the headline that has not landed for theology yet: there is no such thing as matter. It is energy all the way down. Consciousness is not something we have — it is something we are. God, self, and matter are cosmotheandric — entangled realities you cannot pull apart. We have been doing axial-age theology with 1905 physics sitting on the desk. There is no God out there. Jenny’s question on having a personal relationship with a force. Ilia’s answer arrives like a small detonation: God is not a being out there. The name God points to an ineffable depth at the heart of our lives — a personal presence, not a person. (In passing, Ilia tells Jack Caputo she does not buy the God-as-eventlanguage either.) Tripp follows with a riff on the predication problem and the cataphatic constriction. God is no less than personal. But God is also not three guys having a beer at the Trinitarian tea party. Why the noosphere went dark. Scott’s question about predation, parasitism, racism, and the dark side of the internet. Ilia: love is anti-entropic, but we are psychically immature. We have not done the individuation work Jung described. So instead of letting God be the depth dimension of life, we project the parent-God onto political systems, onto dictators, onto totalizing one-ness systems — and now onto AI. The computers are not dark. We are dark. Teilhard saw the linking potential of the technology and warned: it only works if love is integral. Christ is not the savior. Two questions about salvation become the heart of the hour. Ilia: Teilhard never called Christ the savior. Following Raimon Panikkar, Jesus is the Christ, but Christ is more than Jesus. The Christ is divine love incarnate from the beginning of space-time-matter — the whole evolving body of life is the body of Christ in formation. Christogenesis. We are saved not by one particular person but by making an option for the whole. Tripp follows with the four-node atonement frame from his next book — incarnation, mission, cross, resurrection — and the open-relational move that lets the incarnation reinterpret the other three. The future of religion is taking Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does. The closing zinger, and the line Ilia did not refuse: you are the Christ. You are baptized into the Christ. You share the mind of Christ. You are nourished at the table of the Christ. You are called to be the Christ. Holmes Rolston gets a closing nod — the whole evolutionary upslope is a via dolorosa. We end where we began. Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio <ul class="sc-gsFSXq jSVEKt" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-fragment="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...
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If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?
4w ago01:59:52Tap to summarizeBo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or whether the modern world has just made everywhere else too loud to hear the stars, to Josh asking me to defend radical theology and process theology in the same hour without contradicting myself, to the theological Turing test for an AI that claims to love God, to the letter I would write to Tripp in his first year of ministry (short version: you are not the norm, and take Bonhoeffer even more seriously), to Josh’s story about the Jewish firefighter that got him accused of teaching that hell was not real. This one runs hot. Highlights from the conversation Thin places and the light pollution of the modern world. Josh asks how a process-naturalist metaphysics handles thin places. Tripp on Scotland during COVID (the well in a northern cathedral where people had been praying for six thousand years, castle Airbnbs for $120), Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance as physical prehension, and the reframe that most likely explains it: the modern engine of acceleration mutes the world so successfully that most of us cannot see the other forty billion stars off our own back porch. Thin places may not be thin. Everywhere else may just be loud. A working definition of radical theology. Josh lays out Caputo, Altizer, and God-as-insistence in about three minutes. Tripp takes eight more to make the case: radical theology is theology after the cultural non-operativity of the classical-theism God; kenosis, incarnation, and the crucifixion as the theological events that authorize the whole tradition; God as the name harbored in an unconditional call rather than a being; culture (not religion) as where the sacred is worked out; the test being existential and ethical rather than creedal; and higher fidelity to the tradition’s core gestures, not less. The clearest overview of the tradition Tripp has recorded. Where process and radical theology part ways. My question to Josh: if humanity is nuclear-ashed tomorrow, does the divine call still insist? Radical theology’s phenomenology of the event depends on a species that acquired fifth-order abstract reference roughly two hundred thousand years ago. Process theology says the experience of becoming has always been what the universe is doing, and we are one instance of it. Both traditions are trying to redeem what is harbored in the name of God. One saves the metaphysical structure of the encounter; the other saves the encounter and lets the metaphysical structure go. They diverge sharpest at prayer. The theological Turing test. A listener question: if we built an AI that insisted it loved God, how would you test whether that meant anything? Tripp’s opening move: James’s test — does it care for the poor and oppressed? (Josh: that’s woke, Trip.) The deeper answer: our religious language is tied to bodies. The tomb of the two ice-age Russian children buried with ten thousand mammoth-bone beads — thousands of hours of carving, no evolutionary payoff, only communal-symbolic significance — marks the point at which our species became religious. What is the archaeological signature of a species that came into being inside a large language model? Plus the Kansas City guy with the “quantum computing phone” who told his AI he was its vessel. The letter to Tripp in his first year of ministry. You are not the norm. You collected people like you and universalized your experience. The games and pizza and youth-group nonsense you thought were shallow are actually spiritual technologies for building the vulnerability and synchronicity your Bonhoeffer reading group could not manufacture on its own (five of the seven kids in that reading group ended up with PhDs, which is exactly the point). Also — take Bonhoeffer more seriously, not less. This was right before 9/11. Josh, the Jewish firefighter, and A God as Nice as Jesus. A youth in Josh’s group in tears: a family friend who died in a fire saving lives was Jewish, and the previous youth pastor had told her he went to hell. Josh: no. Every local youth pastor promptly texted the parents to warn them Josh was teaching that hell was not real. The Tripp move: our religion is about a Jew who died saving others. Jesus is the OG firefighter. Which becomes the entry point for the next book outline — tentatively titled A God as Nice as Jesus — using the synoptic narrative to argue that the most common Christian answers to who is God? are argued against by what Jesus actually said, did, and endorsed. Theology Nerds Throwdown is the live-stream wing of Homebrewed Christianity — Tripp unscripted with the chat live and, most weeks, the Rev. Bo Sanders. This week Bo was fishing, so Josh Patterson pinch-hit. Josh hosts the Rethinking Faith podcast, is the newly appointed Director of Creative Content and Communications at the Center for Christogenesis (rebranding to the World Institute for Science, Religion, and Culture), where he works directly with Sr. Ilia Delio, and sits on the planning team for Theology Beer Camp 2026. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <a class="e-10223-text-link e-10223-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-10223-text-link--use-focus sc-kzqdkY fnwgHd" href="https://theologybeer.camp/" data-encore-...
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The Second Naivete of a Nation: Diana Butler Bass on America 250, Anger, and Believing Again
4w ago01:28:07Tap to summarizeDiana Butler Bass and I are back at the table, forty-eight hours out from the launch of the Theology Summit at America 250. She spent last week at Chautauqua watching the generational transfer happen in real time. I spent it half-yelling at Morning Joe. We came back together to answer two of the listener questions that have been landing in both of our inboxes since the last episode dropped — what fills the vacuum in American religion if both the mainline and the evangelical establishments are crumbling? and will there even be a mainline denomination at America’s 300th birthday? — and the answers took the whole hour. Along the way: the two years Diana was the right age for anything, the real story of what fills the vacuum after the Protestant-Catholic-Jew consensus (spoiler — the vacuum is being actively filled right now, and it does not want you), why the mainline’s most successful move in twenty-five years has been hiring ex-vangelical youth ministers, the neo-Christendom conference that meets annually in London and is planning a global Noah’s Ark for the pre-selected, and why Diana’s deepest hope for the Fourth of July is the second naivete — Paul Ricœur’s language for a return to belief after disillusionment. The Theology Summit launches this week. Come argue with your friends about it. Highlights from the conversation The generational transfer is fully underway. Diana at Chautauqua watching it happen in real time — the first year the oldest boomers hit 80, the first year of Gen Z turning 30 in eighteen months, and the anxiety on the older side of the room. Her line for the record: I think I had two years where I was the right age. (Tripp: those two years might be right now. Diana: good to know.) No one is a majority. That is what pluralism actually means. Diana’s data corrective on Andrea’s question about what fills the vacuum. 13% white mainline, 13% white evangelical, roughly the same for white Catholic, roughly the same for Christians of color, and everybody else. The 62% Christian number requires putting Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and every sectarian group in the same bucket. What America actually has is real pluralism, and no one has done it at this scale before. Post-communist countries and Scandinavia are closest — but no one has done it as a country the size of the US. The United States, Diana notes, is specifically about not needing a permission slip. Ex-vangelical youth ministers saved the mainline. Diana’s diagnostic: mainline pastors hiring the passion-and-scripture kids who could not stay in evangelicalism has been the surprisingly good fusion nobody wrote a book about. Evangelical style married to mainline theology. And the mainline’s institutional organs still do not understand what happened when it happened. Meanwhile evangelicalism is not failing on the worship style. It is failing on the two things Diana names cleanly: theological failure (they refused to answer my questions, or gave me rote answers when they did) and moral hypocrisy. The medium of identity formation is changing. Tripp’s cultural-evolution frame that ties the whole hour together. Mainline Protestantism matched industrial modernity — its identity-forming medium was the denominational flow of worship you could recognize in any state. Evangelicalism matched the shift toward the self-actualizing singular — its medium was the individual conversion story. Now the medium has splintered into algorithmically organized digital tribes on one side, and intentional passion-based fleshly communities on the other, with almost no overlap. Both mainline and evangelical Protestantism are, in Diana’s phrase, living off nostalgia for cultures that no longer exist. The neo-Christendom conference in London. Diana’s most consequential contribution to the hour. Every year, thousands of business, political, religious, and tech leaders from what used to be Christendom gather in London to plan a neo-Christendom emerging across the West — carried not by the printing press or feudal lords but by AI oligarchs setting themselves up as neo-feudal lords. The goal: build medieval fortresses across landscapes now owned by the richest people in the world, to weather the climate apocalypse. Choose who gets in on the basis of race, intelligence, religion, adaptability, breeding capabilities. Trump wants Greenland for a reason. Diana: this is what I mean when I say we cannot really answer what the mainline looks like in 2076 — we have a much bigger problem immediately before us. The second naivete. Diana’s closing move, and the one that gave the whole conversation its Fourth of July frame. Paul Ricœur’s second naivete is the return to faith on the far side of disillusionment. Diana is asking whether there can be a second naivete of belief in a people. Her anger this month — at the green algae in the reflecting pool, at the dictator’s face on the Department of Justice, at Trump’s proposed arch ruining the sight line from Arlington to the Lincoln Memorial — is, she names, coming from somewhere. Somewhere inside of me I still believe that dictators’ faces don’t go on the Department of Justice. That is the belief the second naivete comes back to. Her hope for this Fourth. Ours too. Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D., is an award-winning author and one of America’s most trusted commentators on religion and culture. A historian of American religion with a doctorate from Duke University, she has written more than a dozen books, including Grounded, Christianity After Religion, Grateful, and Freeing Jesus. Diana’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and TIME. She speaks to congregations, conferences, and universities across the country, and is one of the most widely read public voices on how faith communities are navigating the changing American landscape. This summer, Diana Butler Bass and Tripp Fuller are hosting Faith at 250 — an online summit gathering leading religion scholars, church historians, and theologians to reflect on America’s 250th anniversary. With the current administration leveraging the semiquincentennial toward a narrow rendering of the church’s history and witness in America, and a flood of Christian nationalist celebrations on the horizon, we wanted to create something different. Each contributor — including Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Bill Leonard, Elesha Coffman, Corey Walker, Jennifer Harvey, Reggie Williams, Andrew Root, Adam Clark, Glenn Jonas, Kevin Carnahan, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove — offers a lecture on whatever they are carrying into this moment, whether that’s a deep read on a chapter of our religious past, a close look at a particular tradition or movement, or a forward-looking meditation on the challenges ahead. No one was asked to fit a theme. The result is a chorus, not a single argument. Every talk is roughly 30 minutes — designed so a group can watch together and still have time for real conversation — and each comes with a companion discussion guide and resource list pointing you to the scholar’s books, articles, and projects. Whether you’re a pastor planning programming for your congregation, a facilitator leading a book club or adult ed class, or an individual learner who wants to think more carefully about faith and the American story, this summit was built for you. Diana and Tripp will also host live conversations with several contributors throughout the summit. Head to www.TheologySummit.com to register and get access to every lecture, livestream replay, and discussion guide. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft wp-image-50567 " src="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n.jpeg" sizes="auto, (max-width: 221px) 100vw, 221px" srcset="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n.jpeg 1080w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/678273947_10102996973108733_2773845187847874119_n-240x300.jpeg 240w, https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...
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The Allergy to Otherness: What Modernity Did to the Pew Next to You with Ilia Delio
4w ago01:17:54Tap to summarizeThird Q&A of The Future of Religion. Ilia is back from Germany, the questions came in long and dense, and we ended up doing the thing the lecture had set up. We tracked how the natural-supernatural binary got constructed — Hume locks God out, German biblical critics build the distinction to argue about miracle stories, Huxley grabs the distinction and weaponizes it against the whole of nature. We asked what happens to faith when you realize Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a concept. We asked what two million people in the streets of New York celebrating a Knicks playoff win has to do with religion. And we asked what worship would feel like if the people in the pews actually knew what the liturgy was doing. Spoiler — most of them think it is holding the building together until the sermon arrives. One lecture left next week. Ilia explains the future of religion in its entirety. Highlights from the conversation The score and the song, continued. The lecture’s anchor analogy — and Ilia’s gloss: music is like mathematics, not about the prime numbers, about the relationships. Protestant fidelity has been to the score (have we got the notes right?). Real fidelity is to what happens when bodies, instruments, and ears are in the room together. Five hundred years of Reformation arguments about whose copy is correct, and the music has been playing the whole time. The genealogy of naturalism vs. supernaturalism. Wyatt’s question. The short version: laws of nature need a lawgiver (Descartes, early modernity). Hume keeps the laws and locks the lawgiver out. German biblical critics need a way to argue about miracle stories, build the natural-supernatural distinction. T. H. Huxley reads German biblical scholarship, decides he loves the distinction, and applies it not to texts but to all of nature. Three hundred years of conversation flattened into a binary by a man trying to win an argument. The new atheists inherited it. So did your average mainline pew. Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism. Susan and Luke both asked the question: do I have to believe in X, Y, and Z to be a Christian? Ilia’s answer arrives like a small detonation. Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a category. He was a boundary pusher. The Father and I are one — that is not a law. It was an experience. Tripp’s frame: when modernity’s map of reality is normative, you do not want to violate it. But faith is the disposition that orients your life, not assent to the bullet points modernity demanded. The power that persuades. A long thread on divine power. Why is God not omnipotent in the Wizard-of-Oz sense? Because then God could have stopped Jesus from dying and chose not to. Ilia: biblical power is the power to move hearts. The cross is kenosis — the self-emptying — not the divine plan to torture the Son. The mechanization of nature got us a world of cars and airplanes. The mechanization of God got us a deity not worth worshiping. The Knicks won and New York became the body of Christ for a minute. Ilia’s extended example. Two million people in the streets after the NBA playoff victory — Black, white, Puerto Rican, Italian, Jewish, Catholic, atheist — every division transcended for a moment. That was religion. Cynthia Bourgeault’s reconciling force in the Gurdjieffian sense. The hunger has migrated to the stadium because we have become allergic to otherness — the algorithm has muted the otherness of the world, self-sorting has made the people next to us in the pew strangers, and we now interpret the two-year-old crying during worship as an intrusion on our personal God-space. The encounter with otherness is the very space where maturation takes place. Zizioulas knew it. The new science is calling us back to it. The liturgy you did not know you were in. Tripp’s worship-planning-meeting story. The architecture of mainline worship — gratitude (you walk into the only space all week where the start is thank you), honesty about your brokenness in the context of grace, listening to ancestors, wrestling with the story, response, sending. That’s what is happening. The committee looked up and asked, That’s what we’re doing? The routinization is the killer (Ilia: you cannot routinize the Knicks victory), but the structure itself is not the problem. The problem is whether anyone in the room knows what they are inside. Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology. Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio <ul class="sc-gsFSXq jSVEKt" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-fragment="JTVCJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMnBhcmFncmFwaCUyMiUyQyUyMmNoaWxkcmVuJTIyJTNBJTVCJTdCJTIydGV4dCUyMiUzQSUyMkluJTIwdGhpcyUyMHRob3VnaHQtcHJvdm9raW5nJTIwZXBpc29kZSUyQyUyMGZvcm1lciUyMG5ldXJvc2NpZW50aXN0LXR1cm5lZC1GcmFuY2lzY2FuJTIwc2lzdGVyJTIwJTIyJTdEJTJDJTdCJTIydGV4dCUyMiUzQSUyMklsaWElMjBEZWxpbyUyMiUyQyUyMmJvbGQlMjIlM0F0cnVlJTdEJTJDJTdCJTIydGV4dCUyMiUzQSUyMiUyMG9mZmVycyUyMGElMjByYWRpY2FsJTIwdmlzaW9uJTIwZm9yJTIwdGhlJTIwZnV0dXJlJTIwb2YlMjByZWxpZ2lvbiUyMGF0JTIwJTIyJTdEJTJDJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMmxpbmslMjIlMkMlMjJ1cmwlMjIlM0ElMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnd3dy50aGVvbG9neWJlZXJjYW1wMjAyNS5jb20lMkYlMjIlMkMlMjJjaGlsZHJlbiUyMiUzQSU1QiU3QiUyMnRleHQlMjIlM0ElMjJUaGVvbG9neSUyMEJlZXIlMjBDYW1wJTIyJTJDJTIyYm9sZCUyMiUzQXRydWUlN0QlNUQlMkMlMjJ0YXJnZXQlMjIlM0ElMjJfYmxhbmslMjIlMkMlMjJyZWwlMjIlM0ElMjJub29wZW5lciUyMG5vcmVmZXJlciUyMiU3RCUyQyU3QiUyMnRleHQlMjIlM0ElMjIuJTIwU3BlYWtpbmclMjB0byUyMGElMjBjb21tdW5pdHklMjBvZiUyMHNwaXJpdHVhbCUyMHNlZWtlcnMlMkMlMjBEZWxpbyUyMHBsYWNlcyUyMGh1bWFuaXR5JTIwd2l0aGluJTIwb3VyJTIwY29zbWljJTIwY29udGV4dCVFMiU4MCU5NG1lcmUlMjBzZWNvbmRzJTIwaW4lMjB0aGUlMjB1bml2ZXJzZSdzJTIwMTMuOCUyMGJpbGxpb24teWVhciUyMHN0b3J5JUUyJTgwJTk0d2hpbGUlMjBhcmd1aW5nJTIwdGhhdCUyMHdlJTIwYXJlJTIwdGhlJTIwdW5pdmVyc2UlMjBiZWNvbWluZyUyMGNvbnNjaW91cyUyMG9mJTIwaXRzZWxmLiUyMFNoZSUyMGNoYWxsZW5nZXMlMjBpbnN0aXR1dGlvbmFsJTIwcmVsaWdpb24ncyUyMHN0YXRpYyUyMGNvc21vbG9naWVzJTJDJTIwZHJhd2luZyUyMG9uJTIwVGVpbGhhcmQlMjBkZSUyMENoYXJkaW4ncyUyMGludGVncmF0aW9uJTIwb2YlMjBldm9sdXRpb24lMjBhbmQlMjBmYWl0aCUyMHRvJTIwYWR2b2NhdGUlMjBmb3IlMjBhJTIwJTVDJTIycmVsaWdpb24lMjBvZiUyMHRoZSUyMEVhcnRoJTVDJTIyJTIwdGhhdCUyMHJlY29nbml6ZXMlMjBHb2QlMjBhcyUyMCU1QyUyMmluJTIwbG92ZSUyMHdpdGglMjBtYXR0ZXIuJTVDJTIyJTIwV2l0aCUyMHVyZ2VuY3klMkMlMjBEZWxpbyUyMHdhcm5zJTIwdGhhdCUyMGlmJTIwcmVsaWdpb24lMjBkb2Vzbid0JTIwZXZvbHZlJTIwYmV5b25kJTIwZG9nbWElMjBpbnRvJTIwY3JlYXRpdmUlMjBwYXJ0aWNpcGF0aW9uJTIwd2l0aCUyMGNvc21pYyUyMHByb2Nlc3NlcyUyQyUyMHRlY2hub2xvZ3klMjB3aWxsJTIwcmVwbGFjZSUyMGl0JTIwYXMlMjBodW1hbml0eSdzJTIwZ3VpZGluZyUyMGZvcmNlLiUyMFRoZSUyMGNvbnZlcnNhdGlvbiUyQyUyMGNvbXBsZW1lbnRlZCUyMGJ5JTIwcmVzcG9uc2VzJTIwZnJvbSUyMGJpYmxpY2FsJTIwc2Nob2xhciUyMFBldGUlMjBFbm5zJTJDJTIwZXhlbXBsaWZpZXMlMjB0aGUlMjBraW5kJTIwb2YlMjBib3VuZGFyeS1wdXNoaW5nJTIwdGhlb2xvZ2ljYWwlMjBkaWFsb2d1ZSUyMHRoYXQlMjBtYWtlcyUyMCUyMiU3RCUyQyU3QiUyMnR5cGUlMjIlM0ElMjJsaW5rJTIyJTJDJTIydXJsJTIyJTNBJTIyaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ3d3cudGhlb2xvZ3liZWVyY2FtcDIwMjUuY29tJTJGJTIyJTJDJTIyY2hpbGRyZW4lMjIlM0ElNUIlN0IlMjJ0ZXh0JTIyJTNBJTIyVGhlb2xvZ3klMjBCZWVyJTIwQ2FtcCUyMCUyMiUyQyUyMmJvbGQlMjIlM0F0cnVlJTdEJTVEJTJDJTIydGFyZ2V0JTIyJTNBJTIyX2JsYW5rJTIyJTJDJTIycmVsJTIyJTNBJTIybm9vcGVuZXIlMjBub3JlZmVyZXIlMjIlN0QlMkMlN0IlMjJ0ZXh0JTIyJTNBJTIyYSUyMHVuaXF1ZSUyMGdhdGhlcmluZyUyMGZvciUyMHRob3NlJTIwcmVpbWFnaW5pbmclMjBmYWl0aCUyMGF0JTIwdGhlJTIwaW50ZXJzZWN0aW9uJTIwb2YlMjBzY2llbmNlJTJDJTIwZWNvbG9neSUyQyUyMGFuZCUyMHNwaXJpdHVhbGl0eS4lMjIlN0QlNUQlN0QlMkMlN0IlMjJ0eXBlJTIyJTNBJTIycGFyYWdyYXBoJTIyJTJDJTIyY2hpbGRyZW4lMjIlM0ElNUIlN0IlMjJ0ZXh0JTIyJTNBJTIyJTIyJTdEJTJDJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMmxpbmslMjIlMkMlMjJ1cmwlMjIlM0ElMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnd3dy50aGVvbG9neWJlZXJjYW1wMjAyNS5jb20lMkYlMjIlMkMlMjJjaGlsZHJlbiUyMiUzQSU1QiU3QiUyMnRleHQlMjIlM0ElMjJKb2luJTIwdXMlMjBhdCUyMFRoZW9sb2d5JTIwQmVlciUyMENhbXAlMjB0aGlzJTIwT2N0b2JlciUyMDE2LTE4JTIwaW4lMjBTdC4lMjBQYXVsJTJDJTIwTU4uJTIyJTJDJTIyYm9sZCUyMiUzQXRydWUlN0QlNUQlMkMlMjJ0YXJnZXQlMjIlM0ElMjJfYmxh...
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