It’s TNT, it’s a Friday, and Bo came in hot — with a week’s worth of text messages about natural law, JD Vance, and the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary conservatism that started innocently enough and ended somewhere near Bruno Latour and the cloaking of power. Before we get there, I shared a bit about my time at the Futures of Liberation Theology event at Wake Divinity — liberation theology royalty, great hair, genuine questions about what happens to a tradition when it loses its roots in church community and gets handed off to the academy — and whether the baton can be passed when the next generation doesn’t know the story they’re supposed to be running with. Then Bo lays out what he’s been piecing together: that the entire edifice of contemporary American conservatism rests on two foundation stones — natural law and divine revelation — and that when you pair those two things, the same five arguments show up every single time. What follows is an hour of political theology, TNT-style: why natural law is philosophically sloppy in ways that Bruno Latour, Nancy Cartwright, and Denis Noble can all explain, how it functions as a power-cloaking mechanism that launders ideological preferences as biological facts, the historical arc from New Deal liberalism through neoliberalism to the postliberal eruption we’re currently living through, MacIntyre and Hauerwas as compelling diagnosticians whose followers scare Bo, the cut flower problem of progressive churches that have all the openness and none of the roots, and why no one at the truck stop cares.

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The injustices we face are immense—but they are not unique. What theological and ethical tools and ideas can we take from previous generations to confront our social ills today?

For over four decades, Dr. Gary Dorrien has been one of the foremost scholars of liberal theology, social ethics, and democratic socialism—tracing the movements and figures who dared to believe that Christianity demands justice. His multi-volume histories have shaped how a generation understands the social gospel, Black theology, and the ongoing struggle for a more just world.

This course begins where all serious social ethics must begin: with the social movements themselves. What was actually happening when Reverdy Ransom and Ida B. Wells called for a “new abolition”? How did Reinhold Niebuhr’s realism shape—and sometimes limit—Christian engagement with power? Why did welfare mothers become the leaders of a national movement for economic justice? What made James Cone declare that Black Power was the gospel?

Only by understanding what these figures and movements accomplished thencan we wrestle with what faithfulness demands of us now.

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