A Substack subscriber named Jennifer recently emailed me a list of thirty questions she had wanted to ask in the live chat but never got to. So we did the only honest thing — pulled in Josh Patterson from Rethinking Faith as a third voice (he just took a job working with Ilia Delio, so he had earned it), let Bo pick the numbers, and turned this TNT into the most confessional one we have recorded in a while. By the end, Bo had told the story of the year he almost broke, Josh had confessed his half-joke that if Calvinism is true he is clearly not elect, I had said out loud that the truly frightening question is whether I would actually pray for the defeat of my own country the way Bonhoeffer did — and we had ended up somewhere I did not see coming, in a soliloquy about why the body of Christ is still the most beautiful story I have access to. Pull up a chair.

Highlights from the conversation

The format and the trap. Jennifer’s thirty questions, Josh Patterson as Jennifer’s proxy, Bo picking numbers, and the recurring bit where Bo asks Josh to live-take the seven Methodist ordination questions — including the one Bo can confirm Methodism cannot survive without: Are you in debt so as to embarrass you in your work? Josh nearly passed.
The Holy Spirit likes to clean house. Bo, on praying Come Holy Spirit as the answered prayer that still unsettles him — and the discomfort of his actual priorities getting uncovered one by one. Tripp confesses to praying to be made genuinely uncomfortable about something that demands he grow, and would like to formally regret the efficiency with which the divine lure answered that one.
“I’m unsinkable. I’m already dead.” Bo on the season when his mother had died, his wife’s chronic illness had turned debilitating, his PhD had stalled, the Loft had outgrown his job description, and someone else’s marriage crisis was unfolding in his own house. The grief therapy his father paid for (which Bo mostly used to talk about his father). The freedom that comes from already having survived the worst.
The Tripp soliloquy on the body of Christ. Why the world is better off with a community that transcends nation-states and languages, whose identity is being brought into the body of Christ, nourished at the table, and invited to meet the coming of God in the face of every other. Why the alternative narratives in the West are so thoroughly hijacked by idols, and idols always demand sacrifice. The kind of TNT moment Bo says he is going back to listen to twice.
Bo’s hyper-sacramentality. Communion as re-singing rather than re-membering — when the bread is broken, the song that is being called back is sung again. The implication: every table, every cup, every day, every body becomes sacred. Josh extends it into Thich Nhat Hanh and mindful drinking — the universe in a glass.
Sam and Lois Bloom. Tripp’s answer to the question about a regular person who shaped his faith. The couple in LA who lost a son to suicide and ran a grief group for more than twenty years for anyone — congregant or not — who walked through similar pain. Hundreds of families whose stories got re-narrated because two people made a space and stayed in it.

Join our upcoming online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION

Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.com

Theology Beer Camp 2026 — The God-Podcalypse — hits Kansas City October 8–10, exactly one month before the election. Thirty scholars (Ilia Delio, Cornel West, Diana Butler Bass, Gary Dorrien, and a stack more), thirty God-pods, four post-apocalyptic stages, and the community everyone keeps telling us is the real reason they come back. Come find your people at Theology Beer Camp

This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow