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Tripp Fuller
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There Was a Time When God Was Gods with Ilia Delio
4d ago01:24:42Tap to summarizeIlia delivered the Axial Age lecture this past week from her temporary post in Germany, and the questions came in fast enough that we ended up touching the third rail of the whole class — the rise of monotheism. Yes, there was a time when God was not. Yes, there was a time when God was gods. Yes, Psalm 82 is in your Bible, and yes, Yahweh shows up at the divine council to judge the other deities. If that sounds sacrilegious, you might be exactly the right person to take this class. The Axial Age is when the I gets invented, the score gets written, the disengaged knowing that becomes science comes online, and 60,000 denominations begin arguing over whose copy of the score is correct. We are still inside its inertia. We are also — Ilia argues, and I think she is right — already past its hinge. Highlights from the conversation Pre-axial identity was a strand of wheat in a field of wheat. Ilia’s image for the kind of personhood we cannot easily imagine — where the self did not exist apart from the group, where “who am I” would not have parsed as a question, and where the question of interiority does not yet arise. The Axial Age is where the I gets born, and with it, almost everything we now take for granted as religious. Psalm 82 and the divine council. Read the actual psalm: Yahweh shows up where all the local tribal deities are gathered, indicts them for letting injustice run their territories, finds them guilty, and claims the throne as the God of all the nations. The Hebrew Bible itself contains the receipts on the move from henotheism to monotheism. “There was a time when God was not. There was a time when God was gods.” Ilia, on the third rail. How forests think. Tripp on Eduardo Kohn and the ontological turn — how literacy hijacked parts of our brain that other humans used to read a forest, and why most humans who ever lived were not literate. What our consciousness is for depends on what we have been trained to attend to. The Native American hearing birds while the American hears coins jingling in his pocket is not a metaphor. It is what cognitive evolution actually looks like. Consciousness lag dressed up as holy war. Hannah’s question and the answer that ties this Q&A back to the last one. We are trying to hold what cannot be held. Most of our religious conflict is the lag of an Axial consciousness fighting to remain normative inside a world that has already moved. The 60,000 denominations are the score wars. The future is not a better score. It is remembering what music sounded like before there was a score. Incarnation is a cosmic event, not an exception. Nancy’s question, and Teilhard’s both/and: the moment the incarnation is no longer the great exception breaking into the natural world from outside, the incarnation has to be an expression of what the cosmos is already doing. From the leap of the quark, Teilhard insists, everything is incarnation. There is no such thing as stuff. “We are not religious. We are becoming religious.” Ilia’s closing reframe. Religion in the making. The wheel hit a pothole at the Axial Age and we got stuck inside it for two thousand years. There are no signs that say you are entering the second Axial Age. The class is, in part, practice in reading the unsigned shift. The Future of Religion is a six-session class Ilia and I are teaching together this summer — Tripp on religion before belief and the train wreck of the present, Ilia on the Axial Age and what comes next. It is donation-based, including zero (we accept anything up to one million dollars per registration — we have standards). Register at www.thefutureofreligion.com and respond to the class emails with your questions for the next Q&A, after Ilia’s Axial Age lecture next week. 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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Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
2w ago01:21:05Tap to summarizeThis is the first Q&A of The Future of Religion, and the questions did exactly what good questions do — they pulled the lecture into places I had not planned to take it. Ilia opens by reframing my religion before belief lecture in her own cosmological key, and then we are off: three centimeters per second and the C-fibers, the knife edge at fifty bodies where the old bonding mechanisms fail and religion has to be invented, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, the Baptist accidentally serving Eucharist at an Episcopal cathedral, and the line that closed it — what if success as clergy is not rewriting the score, but learning to play the music that is already in the room? More than a thousand of you are in this class now. The questions are doing the work. Highlights from the conversation Three centimeters per second, revisited. Ilia (PhD in pharmacology before she ever wrote a word of theology) walks back through the C-fibers, the unmyelinated nerves that carry pleasure or pain, the endorphin physiology of bonding — and gives Candace Pert her Nobel back along the way. The same neurochemistry is firing when your phone dings. Religion has a physiology. It always did. The knife edge at fifty. James asked the right question: why do mammalian bonding mechanisms fail exactly at the group size we need to survive? Tripp’s answer: the cognitive evolution of fifth-order thinking and the discovery of the shared third referent — something non-material that two people can know they both believe in. Religion was that third thing. Ilia adds the move into the Axial Age, when for the first time there is an I inside the us. Rituals are upstream of beliefs. Priya’s question on what Whitehead actually means in Religion in the Making. Doctrines committing suicide vs. doctrines tuning the music. The analogy that does the work: the difference between holding the perfect score and being in the room when the orchestra plays — which is also the spine of Tripp’s June continuing-ed lecture at Luther, Wired to Believe, Struggling to Belong. The Baptist who served Eucharist in an Episcopal cathedral. A short Tripp story about what the fallacy of misplaced concreteness costs in practice — when the metaphysical footnote arrives a hundred years after the meal, and you have to choose between protecting the doctrine and feeding the people who finally came back to the table. Can a screen groom you? Grace and Daniel ask the AI questions. Ilia: relationships are not contingent on embodied presence — the same endorphin biology is firing through the screen — and writing already disrupted the small-group bonding world long before the algorithm did. The harder question is whether AI can prehend, and what kind of cybernetic loop of human formation we are already living inside. Church-shopping is another form of individualism. Olga asked how to belong when you have outgrown one tradition and are drawn to many. Ilia, plainly: the imperfect community that calls you out of yourself does more for you than the perfect community you compose. Tripp closes the hour with the move that ties everything back to the opening lecture — most clergy were formed because the score worked for them. What if our job is to learn to read the room and play the music that is already there? The Future of Religion is a six-session class Ilia and I are teaching together this summer — Tripp on religion before belief and the train wreck of the present, Ilia on the Axial Age and what comes next. It is donation-based, including zero (we accept anything up to one million dollars per registration — we have standards). Register at www.thefutureofreligion.com and respond to the class emails with your questions for the next Q&A, after Ilia’s Axial Age lecture next week. 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. 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The Machine Is a God Image with Ilia Delio
2w ago01:31:31Tap to summarizeIlia Delio and I sat down a week before The Future of Religion class opens, in front of 500 people who already knew what they were signing up for. The conversation ranged — from the brain mutation she underwent when thirteen years of neuroscience gave way to a monastery (“Thomas Merton was my concussion”), to the single verb she would change in Pope Leo XIV’s brand-new AI encyclical (turn remain into become), to why she keeps insisting both the problem and the cure are religious. AI is not what is annihilating us. Our refusal to acknowledge the divine ground within us is what is annihilating us. The machine is just where we have been projecting the search. The class opens next week. This conversation is the on-ramp. Highlights from the conversation Thomas Merton was her concussion. How Ilia left her Alzheimer’s postdoc mid-stride and joined a monastery, the left-brain-to-right-brain transition she only named in hindsight, and what thirteen years of neuroscience actually equipped her to do as a theologian. “I spent a lot more time feeling God than thinking about God.” “We shrunk-wrap religion in Glad wrap.” Why religion is not a sealed package of doctrines but the depth dimension of communal life — and why the discovery that there are 190,000 years of religion before belief should restructure how we read the encyclicals. Bellah is right. Religion at its root is play. It should animate, not box in. Remain or become. Ilia’s central critique of Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical: change one verb and the whole architecture of the document shifts. The Pope sat in Jack Caputo’s Heidegger seminar — and you can hear Heidegger in the line “technology is never neutral” — but he keeps the Thomistic frame that cannot account for evolution. The encyclical names the problem. It does not invite a different relationship. Moral blindness, Ilia says, is reflective of metaphysical emptiness. AI as the return of the repressed divine ground. Jung, Tillich, Teilhard, and Schelling on what happens when Western Christianity tells us God is outside, up there, somewhere else — and we go looking for the sacred in the only place that is left. The machine has become a god image precisely because the tradition forbade us from finding God within. The remedy must therefore be fundamentally religious. Not the old religion. A reconciled one. From monotheism to cosmotheandrism. Teilhard’s three laws (complexity-consciousness, recurrence, creative union); the noosphere as a new level of evolution; the move from the axial-age I-and-Thou God to the collective consciousness God now emerging; the hyper-personal person Teilhard called the ultra-human. Why young people who are wired for community are evolutionary news from the next stage. What gets you up in the morning? Ilia’s question to her students for decades, and the closing reframe of the whole conversation: eternal life is the energy of love, and every algorithm we have built will disappear. The only thing that remains is what each person uniquely contributes to that energy. Hope in a world of becoming. 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" 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leHQlMjIlM0ElMjIlMkMlMjBhbmQlMjBtb3JlISUyMCUyMiU3RCUyQyU3QiUyMnR5cGUlMjIlM0ElMjJsaW5rJTIyJTJDJTIydXJsJTIyJTNBJTIyaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZ3d3cudGhlb2xvZ3liZWVyY2FtcDIwMjUuY29tJTJGJTIyJTJDJTIyY2hpbG...
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The Pope, the Plantation, and the Algorithm: A Theology Nerds Throwdown
2w ago02:05:47Tap to summarizeBo and I started with bikes, a Pentecost-red pair of glasses, and my new Crazy Chicks ballcap. We did not stay there. By the end we had hit the evolutionary anthropology of religion before belief, Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical, Gandalf telling Denethor exactly where he can put his stewardship, and the working thesis of the my AI book in process — the platform is the plantation. The connective tissue: we are inside a transition the old institutions cannot speak to, the technology is rewriting the very interiority Whitehead says religion grows out of, and the resources we actually need are older than we think. Three centimeters per second of grooming older, in fact. This is the nerdiest TNT we have recorded in a while. Come for the social-bonding endorphins. Stay for the encyclical. Highlights from the conversation Religion before belief. A lecture-prep riff from the class I am teaching this fall with Ilia Delio: how social grooming at three centimeters per second triggers the bonding endorphin that lets mammals scale past fifty without killing each other, how humans developed laughter, then song, then ritual, then religion to do that grooming at distance — and why religion is 190,000 years older than belief. The rowers study and the naltrexone studies are the spine. Bonus: it also explains Pentecostal worship and the preacher’s flow state. Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical. Released on the same day in May that Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum 134 years ago — and you should read it as the AI version of that document. Babel or Jerusalem. The idolatry of profit. “Technology is never neutral. It takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” Why the Pope can say what neither political party can, when both have taken billions from AI. Gandalf vs. Denethor. From Barry Harvey’s episode and my current Lord of the Rings re-read: “Mine is a rule of no realm, but all worthy things that are in peril.” The church’s stewardship is Gandalf’s, not Denethor’s. Every AI company and every nation-state is currently making Denethor’s argument — I am the steward of this realm, my responsibility ends here — and calling it realism. The platform is the plantation. The working thesis of the next book, laid out for the first time in any detail. Five hundred years of extractive economic order, in sequence: land, then labor, now interiority. Captive bodies. Surveillance regimes. Absentee ownership. Racial ideology. Religious sanction. The algorithm has the same five-element architecture. Liberation must now be structural and contemplative — because the territory being annexed is the inner room from which liberation becomes thinkable. Privacy is a luxury good now. Bo’s off-the-record story about his town’s largest employer, a lawyer, an accountant, a medical professional, and a college all paying for AI tokens to keep their data from training the model. The default used to be privacy. The default is now surveillance. You buy your way out. That is exactly backwards. The grandma’s granddaughter. Rejected by every medical school she applied to because the AI screened her out. She physically walked into the admissions office of her first choice and got in. The new pastoral move: find the human, go around the algorithm. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow <a class="e-91036-text-link e-91036...
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The Problem Is Not Poverty. It Is Wealth w/ Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty
2w ago01:19:28Tap to summarizeSome conversations want to be in a coffee shop, not a studio — and this is one of them. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty and I share a particular endangered species of Baptist heritage, the small, ecumenical, justice-formed wing whose patron saints include her father, Glenn Hinson, the Baptist church historian who taught half my div-school professors how to take the contemplative tradition seriously. So before we got anywhere near the politics of freedom, the problem of wealth, or the murderus super chickens of late-stage neoliberalism, we sat in her father’s legacy for a while. The conversation took a different shape because of it. What follows is a slow take — on the perversion of freedom in white Christian America, the way our politics has lost any room for loss or failure, and what theological education has to do now if it is going to do anything at all. Highlights from the conversation Glenn Hinson and the Jordan River. What it meant to grow up with a Baptist historian father who wore a “Fundamentalist Anonymous” ballcap and stopped his seven-year-old from being baptized on religious enthusiasm. His final words — “I’m ready to step out into the overflowing love of God” — frame the whole conversation. Freedom is not what we think it is. Her new book Authentic Christian Freedom takes the culture-war binary apart and rebuilds freedom from the ground up — grounded in interrelatedness, not individual liberty, with Pauli Murray as the guide. The problem is not poverty. It is wealth. Her award-winning The Problem of Wealth is the self-convicting book she has not stopped writing. We talk about why Charlotte’s 38th-place national ranking in economic mobility is a theological problem, and what her seminary course More Than Money, Math and Markets is teaching pastors-in-training who used to work at banks. The space we do not have anymore. A long riff on the way late-modern neoliberalism keeps us dynamically unstable — you stay upright by pedaling faster. Elizabeth extends the diagnosis: there is no public space left to acknowledge loss, and no space to admit failure either. The story of the family that threw parties when things failed earns the bullet. Murderous super chickens. A metaphor from an evolutionary study where selecting only for the super-laying hen breeds killers. The flock with the highest output had no super-chickens at all. It becomes the parable for what mainline congregations have been quietly forming our kids to become. “I exist to be respected.” Her father’s maxim. Elizabeth’s closing reflection on the cost of being theologically clear in pastoral spaces, and why telling your own story is the door back to connection. About our guest The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is the J. Roy Davis Family Chair of Theology and History at Union Presbyterian Seminary’s Charlotte campus, where she teaches theology and ethics. Ordained in the PC(USA), she previously taught for nearly two decades at Bellarmine University, and earned her PhD from what is now UPSem. The books that anchor this conversation: Authentic Christian Freedom: Deconstructing the American Gospel of Liberty (the newest, on freedom’s misuse in white Christian America); The Problem of Wealth: A Christian Response to a Culture of Affluence (Orbis, 2017 — winner of the Catholic Press Association’s first-place prize in Catholic Social Teaching); and Dutiful Love: Empowering Individuals and Families Affected by Serious Mental Illness. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a ...
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Preaching in the WTF Zone: Leah Schade on Saying Something True When the News Will Not Stop
3w ago01:07:54Tap to summarizeThe volume of “I genuinely don’t know what to preach anymore” emails landing from clergy has become its own data set. Pastors are not okay. So I did the only honest thing — I outsourced your questions to the one person whose books, research, and classroom hours have been training people for exactly this moment. Leah Schade is back on Homebrewed, and she has spent the better part of a decade surveying thousands of preachers about what it actually costs to stand up on Sunday and tell the truth. We talked about fear, the unity trap, the cut-flower problem in progressive preaching, the assessment tool that turns courage into context, and the very specific reasons your sermon last week left your stomach in knots. This is the conversation I would want sitting next to me on a Saturday night when the sermon will not come and the news will not stop. Highlights from the conversation The cut-flower problem in progressive preaching. Heavy law, anemic gospel. We keep the ethics and quietly bury the theological roots that give them life, and then we wonder why people are exhausted. Leah names exactly how this happens and how to climb out of the soul-sucking quicksand. The unity trap. “Unity” is almost always code for no conflict. Leah distinguishes the unity of the church from the relationships inside it, and explains why protecting people who are doing harm is not the same thing as loving them. Thank them first. When a congregant ambushes you in the handshake line, your instinct is to explain. Leah’s instinct is to say thank you. The reasoning is theologically and pastorally surgical, and it changes how the next twenty conversations go. The fear is rational. The solo posture is the problem. Doxxing, vandalism, ICE, bomb threats, moral trauma in real time. Leah walks through what the Clergy Emergency League she co-founded actually does, and why no preacher should be carrying this weight alone. The assessment tool — gentle, invitational, or robust. Three approaches that turn should I preach this into a contextual question instead of a courage test. The most practical thing in the book, and a tool I wish I had had a decade ago. “Seminary trained me for a congregation that does not exist anymore.” One of you sent that in. Leah answers it without flinching and without selling you a quick fix. Previous Podcast Visits Include: Faith During an Ecological Collapse and Preaching in a time of Crisis from Corona to Climate About our guest The Rev. Dr. Leah Schade is Associate Professor of Preaching and Worship at Lexington Theological Seminary in Kentucky and the immediate past president of the Academy of Homiletics. An ordained ELCA Lutheran minister, she co-founded the Clergy Emergency League, writes the EcoPreacher blog at Patheos, and has been surveying close to 3,000 clergy and 1,000 laity since 2017 on what it actually costs to preach about social issues in American congregations. Her newest book, Preaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice, is the practical, aggressively pragmatic follow-up to her 2019 Preaching in the Purple Zone: Ministry in the Red-Blue Divide. Both are required reading for the moment we are in. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp <span data-slate-node="t...
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The Darkly Radiant Struggle with Gary Dorrien
3w ago01:24:43Tap to summarizeGary Dorrien joins me and Aaron to close out six weeks of Theology for Troublemakers with a session that covered more ground than any before it — Kelly Brown Douglas as the fourth womanist founder, the double negative she cut from Resurrection Hope that contains the argument she’s still wrestling with, Raphael Warnock as the student James Cone staked his hopes for Black theology on, the last conversation Gary had with Cone before he died, and forty unsparing minutes on Niebuhr’s Zionism that ended where Gary needed it to end: Palestinian children are every bit as precious as Israeli children and no less deserving of a decent future. If you want the lectures, the readings, the supplemental interviews, and the discussion guides, head to www.HomebrewedClasses.com. And if you want to ask Gary everything we didn’t get to, come find him in Kansas City at Theology Beer Camp. Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom Social Ethics for This Moment What God Do They Worship In There? The Black Social Gospel and the Crisis of American Christianity Theological Ethics & Liberal Protestantism James Cone and the Emergence of Black Theology The Future of Faith & Justice Theology for Action The Sacred, The Political, and Why We’re All Vulnerable Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. He is also the author of Anglican Identities: Logos Idealism, Imperial Whiteness, Commonweal Ecumenism, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition, American Democratic Socialism and In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent. You won’t want to miss his upcoming theological memoir Over from Union Road My Christian-Left-Intellectual Life. Aaron Stauffer is the Associate Presbyter for Congregational Vitality at Heartland Presbytery, and is an ordained Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), and was most recently was the associate director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Previously, he was the Executive Director and then Special Advisor of Religions for Peace USA, where he helped launch a national anti-Islamophobia program based in the southeast, along with organizing national senior religious leaders on issues of common concern such as mass incarceration, immigration and climate change. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at ? www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at <a class="e-10223-text-link e-10223-overflow-wrap-anywhere encore-internal-color-text-announcement e-10223-text-link--use-focus sc-kzqdkY fnwgHd" href="https://theologybeer.camp/" data-encore-id="textLink" data-slate-node="element" data-slate-inline="true" data-slate-fragment="JTVCJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMnBhcmFncmFwaCUyMiUyQyUyMmNoaWxkcmVuJTIyJTNBJTVCJTdCJTIydHlwZSUyMiUzQSUyMmxpbmslMjIlMkMlMjJ1cmwlMjIlM0ElMjJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnRoZW9sb2d5YmVlci5jYW1wJTJGJTIyJTJDJTIydGFyZ2V0JTIyJTNBbnVsbCUyQyUyMnJlbCUyMiUzQW51bGwlMkMlMjJjaGlsZHJlbiUyMiUzQSU1QiU3QiUyMnRleHQlMjIlM0ElMjJUaGVvbG9neSUyMEJlZXIlMjBDYW1wJTIwMjAyNiUyMCVFMiU4MCU5NCUyMFRoZSUyMEdvZC1Qb2RjYWx5cHNlJTIwJUUyJTgwJTk0JTIw...
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They Love Your Questions — Just Not Your Conclusions: Tim Whitaker on Evangelicalism, Apologetics & the Sleight of Hand
3w ago01:45:32Tap to summarizeTim Whitaker finally shows up on TNT, and I want you to know that within the first five minutes he informed us he was homeschooled and never went to college, that his biggest word is “dispensationalism,” and that he is a type six on the Enneagram who doesn’t know if he can trust people enough to take communion yet, and I was completely at home. Tim is the host of The New Evangelicals podcast, a former drummer in evangelical and charismatic spaces across multiple denominations, a former church planter with the Christian Missionary Alliance, and the guy who got kicked out of his evangelical church in May 2021 for asking — not even fully affirming yet, just asking — whether gay people could be welcomed. He came because Bo and I have been doing this charismatic conspiracy theology series for weeks now and Tim tracks this world the way the rest of us track the weather. He walked us through his own formation — Reformed church with hymns only, charismatic youth group with better music, Assemblies of God, a stint in Finland near the North Pole where headaches were attributed to a heavy shaman presence and a local death metal band with a statue — and somewhere in there the NAR, Peter Wagner, Lance Wallnau, Paula White, and the Cyrus anointing. We talked about where spiritual warfare practices are therapeutic and where they become political machinery, how the prophetic gift Bo had as a charismatic pastor was probably the same neurological scanning system that made him a good point guard, and what it actually costs when the values you were formed in get weaponized against the people you were taught to love. Bo told the story of his brother-in-law’s Bethel satellite church in Montana that had to shut down after 2016 because every prophetic word became a Fox News talking point. Tim told the story of getting his first big boy job at a 24-hour Starbucks and discovering that the gay atheist on the overnight shift was just a normal person. Bo told his story of working security at the city library four nights a week and a gay bar three nights a week, which is not the typical preparation for evangelical ministry and was probably the best possible one. Avalon, The Blessing, CCM music production values, Elevation’s Hallelujah Here Below trailer, Ecamm, a stream deck, Richard Wolff’s undergrad advisor being Paul Tillich, and a benediction involving Valhalla. Raven laid an egg. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & ...
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Religion Before Belief: What’s actually dying and what was always the deeper thing
4w ago00:23:17Tap to summarizeMost weeks now I get an email from someone who’s sure they’ve believed a lie their whole life — that the faith holding their family, their friendships, their sense of self together is collapsing, and they don’t know who they are without it. I’ve been that person more than once. So in this essay I want to say the thing I wish someone had said to me: what’s dying might not be your faith. It might just be your idea of what your faith was. Drawing on Whitehead’s four stages of religion — ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization — I make the case that belief-centered Christianity is a late, late development, maybe 200 years old in its current intensity, not 2,000. For most of human history religion was bodies moving together, food shared, the dead remembered. The relationship was never in the certainty. It was always in the meal. If you’re in the panic right now, this one’s for you. Pull up a chair. If this conversation is interesting, then come join me and Ilia Delio for our upcoming class, The Future of Religion, where we will digging in to the evolution of religion, its current belief centered crisis, and the possibilities on the horizon. This audio essay is the kind of theology you will find at Process This — my Substack. You the join 75k+ subscribers and get them all delievered to your inbox or follow the podcast feed wherever you listen. Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps ...
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James Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing
4w ago01:24:19Tap to summarizeWeek five of Theology for Troublemakers, and we finally got to James Cone — which meant we got to Charlene Sinclair, and I want you to know that the moment Gary introduced her on this call was one of the more moving things we’ve done in this class. He described her as the student who told Cone she saw something in his early work that nobody else gets — the importance of Fanon to his concept of ontological Blackness — and the way he described the day she defended her dissertation, how he held his one point until the very end so he could announce that this dissertation had explained, like no book ever written, what Fanon actually meant to Cone’s thought, tells you everything about who James Cone was as a teacher and who Charlene Sinclair is as a scholar. We started at the beginning: the three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power — the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning, and the assassination of King — and why Cone said bottled rage would have killed him if he hadn’t written that book. Gary walked us through the satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim versus a racial one, what ontological Blackness actually meant, and why Cone’s sweeping indictment of the Negro church before 1968 was, as Gary put it, seriously flawed even as it produced a towering theology. We got into the womanist challenge — Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing there is nothing redeeming in the cross — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until Delores retired and Emily Towns went to Yale; he needed just enough personal distance to think it through. Then Charlene took us somewhere unexpected on Niebuhr: she asked, quietly, whether there wasn’t a personal parallel between the Niebuhr brothers and the Cone brothers — Richard the better theologian, Reinhold the extravert who needed the crowd — and Gary spun it out for ten minutes in a way that you could tell he had been sitting with for years and had never said in public. We ended with Caleb’s question about what it means for white Christians to actually hear the cry of Black blood, and Charlene answered it by describing her teenage grandson trembling in her arms, his whole body shaking, saying he didn’t want to die. That’s where the class ended. That’s where James Cone’s theology begins. If you haven’t joined the class yet, come find us at www.HomebrewedClasses.com — donation-based, including zero. You get Gary’s full lecture series, Aaron’s supplemental interviews with scholars and organizers, curated readings, discussion guides, and the online community. Last session is next week — social ethics, full circle. And come to Theology Beer Camp, where Gary, Arron, and Cornel West will all be in the same room. In the podcast we discuss… The three moments that produced Black Theology and Black Power: the NCBC manifesto, Detroit burning in 1967, and the assassination of King in April 1968 Why Cone said he could not have written that book in Adrian, Michigan — and why bottled rage would have killed him Ontological Blackness: why Cone’s critics could only hear it literally, and why he usually declined to correct them The satanic nature of whiteness as a theological claim about demonic forces, not a claim about the humanity of white people Cone, Barth, and Tillich: why Jim was mostly on the Barth side, how Tillich saved him from Barth’s narrowness, and why he smuggled Tillich into his intro course by classifying him as neo-orthodox Cornel West, the 1975 Theology in the Americas showdown with Latin American theologians, and why Cone’s one-factor viewpoint finally broke — and what changed The womanist challenge: Delores Williams, Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown Douglas arguing nothing in the cross is redeeming — and why Cone couldn’t start writing The Cross and the Lynching Tree until he had enough personal distance Charlene on Fanon, ontological Blackness, and the Cone she wanted to recapture — the one who was talking about the rats in the communities, not just the interpersonal dynamics of race Victor Anderson: the gay, postmodern scholar hurt by the Black church who cleared room in Black theology for everyone with a constellation of experiences like his The Niebuhr question Charlene had been sitting with since the seminar: whether the Cecil-and-Jim and Richard-and-Reinhold parallelism was something Cone never talked about in public — and Gary saying yes, and then saying more than he’d ever said before Why Niebuhr never risked anything for a Black person — and Gary’s argument about Lutheran false righteousness that Cone heard, acknowledged, and then declined to include in The Cross and the Lynching Tree Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ferguson, and the night Gary walked behind a student holding a sign that said “James Cone was right” How Black Lives Matter revived Cone as a teacher — and the retirement letter he ripped up Charlene’s grandson, trembling, saying he didn’t want to die — and the question she’s still staying up at night trying to answer Jim’s final word to white people who want to be in solidarity: “Try to be one of the white people who don’t ask Black people to take care of you or make you feel better” Previous Episodes with Gary or Aaron Sacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing A Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew What Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom <a href="https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/2026/04/13/theology-for-trou...
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