Bo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century. (You will not guess.) Underneath the games, though, we got into the parts of being a pastor and a theology nerd in 2026 that are actually hard. Bo confessed to having reached peak woke in West Los Angeles before any of us knew the phrase, and rubber-banding back. The birth of ABV rules for the podcast. Bo proposed a theory that political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. And after I went full crotchety-Gen-X-dad on online gambling, marijuana delivery apps, and dating apps, we ended up agreeing that the practice the next generation has most lost is friction. Also: the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions reveal. Which one are you?

Highlights from the conversation

Bo’s peak-woke confession. When he moved from upstate New York to Olympia to Claremont to Westwood, Bo realized he had always been the most progressive person in any room — and only when he hit the beaches of Santa Monica did he run out of ocean to keep moving. He has been rubber-banding back toward communitarian (not libertarian) ever since, and his question to me is whether I ever experienced the same. I had to confess that the answer involves Alicia, a hot-take camera, and a cautionary tale about ABV levels and pride flags.
Name That Name. I ran Bo through ten clues about a French Catholic medievalist who came up studying paleography in Paris, made his name as a literary critic reading Cervantes and Dostoevsky, accidentally introduced Derrida to America at a 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, gave us mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism, and ended up writing I Saw Satan Falling Like Lightning. Bo almost broke himself trying to guess. The name lands somewhere in the middle.
The state-of-the-state question. Bo asks: true or false, American Christianity in both its identitarian-mainline and its nationalist-evangelical expressions works best when you live in a state that legislates your convictions? My answer is the inverted one — it works best when the other tribe is winning, because then you have to actually translate the gospel to neighbors you cannot legislate over. Adam Hamilton running for Senate in Kansas is doing something a Bay Area progressive could not do. Brian Zahnd in Missouri makes Doug Wilson irrelevant in a way no Massachusetts mainliner ever could.
The silent word theory. Bo’s most consequential move of the hour: the phrase political violence is missing a word the way the K is silent in knife. That word is gun. We are awash in language formed by gun culture — lock-stock-and-barrel, bite the bullet, smoking gun, take dead aim, the whole kit and caboodle, even bullet points — and so we can talk about rhetoric, ideology, video games, anything but the thing actually doing the killing. Caputo, Elizabeth Johnson, and Whitehead’s misplaced concreteness all get a turn in three minutes.
The Bonhoeffer / Hitler analogy collapse. A Texas Republican told Fox News that if the rhetoric on the left keeps getting worse, the left is going to think it needs a new Bonhoeffer. I respond with a full unspooling of the actual Bonhoeffer arc — Harlem, Rome, working-class Nazi-friendly youth work, his French friendship with Jean Lasserre, the conviction that the state had failed its citizens and the church had forsaken the gospel and he had learned to pray for the defeat of his own country — and the observation that if the analogy works at all, the rep just compared his own party’s president to Hitler. Bo congratulates me on coming in slightly under three minutes.
Old Man Tripp on friction. Online gambling apps that throttle you if you bet too well and call you with perks if you bet badly; marijuana delivery in ten minutes; dating apps that have replaced the self-domestication humans used to acquire by getting rejected in person (the $50-per-rejection bet for sons makes its debut); Chromebooks eliminating the friction of group work; AI eliminating the friction of reading and writing. Bo offers a C.S. Lewis line. Alicia offers a better one — don’t put the ‘er’ on it. And we close with the Theology Beer Camp 2026 factions: Sand Walkers, the Fleet, the Remnant, and the Witnesses. They know what Valhalla means.

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.

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