Shows / Homebrewed Christianity
Homebrewed Christianity
Our goal is to bring the wisdom of the academy's ivory tower into your earbuds. Think of each episode as an audiological ingredient for your to brew your own faith. Most episodes center around an interview with a different scholar, theologian, or philosopher.
Episodes
Homebrewed ChristianityProgressive Christians Need a Little More Heaven with Andy Root
Andy Root is back. The last time he was on, he told progressive Christians they might need a little more heaven, and some of you are still emailing me about…
Homebrewed ChristianityA Space but Not a Place: The Convocation Live at Theology Beer Camp
The Convocation came to Theology Beer Camp, minus one sociologist. Robbie Jones picked a tux and an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences…
Homebrewed ChristianityTolkien Heads: A Rings of Power Season 3 Primer for People Who Bailed
Amazon has basically admitted some of you bailed on The Rings of Power, and they're telling you to just start at season three. Like starting Star Wars at…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Camp Beer Arrived with Three Seconds to Spare: Behind the Curtain at Theology Beer Camp
After more than three hours of podcasting in one day, I did the smartest thing a host can do: I handed the mic to our camp director, Josh Patterson. This is…
Homebrewed ChristianityDesire Got There First: Paul Hoard on Lacan, Faith, and What’s Actually Driving You
Paul Hoard is back — solo this time, since Michael Morelli is off doing something in Canada that surely involves hockey and maple syrup — and he came on to…
Homebrewed ChristianityUnite and Conquer: What the White Christ Costs White Workers
This is the final Q&A of the class, and the story doesn’t end where the book did. Christ and Empire came out in 2007, right before Obama was elected and a lot…
Homebrewed ChristianityWe Are the Miracle: Schleiermacher and Soft Empire
This is the fifth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep in which Joerg and I got to Friedrich Schleiermacher: the father of liberal theology, the DNA…
Homebrewed ChristianityBiblical Womanhood Came from a New Thought Press: Kristin Du Mez on Live Laugh Love
Kristin Du Mez signed the contract for this book about a week before Beth Moore tweeted about Jesus and John Wayne, and that book took on a life of its own…
Homebrewed ChristianityEmpire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice
This is the fourth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we're in the Americas with Bartolomé de las Casas — Joerg's pick over Martin…
Homebrewed ChristianityEvery Empire Thought It Was the Exception: Barry Harvey on the American Shelf Life and What the Church Does Now
Barry Harvey is back with a book that puts madness, theocracy, and anarchism in the title. It's a collection of essays developed over his career, and beneath…
Homebrewed ChristianityAnselm's God Can't Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That's Good News, Not Cruelty
This is the third live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we did everyone's favorite theologian: Anselm. Here's the setup for those who've…
Homebrewed ChristianityEmbracing Division: Robert P. Jones on Unity, Justice, and the Lines We Have to Draw
Robbie Jones wrote a book called Backslide, and I went in expecting a chronicle of every way a Southern Baptist kid from Jackson, Mississippi cursed or lusted…
Homebrewed ChristianityWho Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed
Second live Q&A, and this week we went to Nicaea. Here's the setup, in case you're new: Constantine called the council, funded the bishops' travel, set the…
Homebrewed ChristianityYou're Probably Assyria: Anna Sieges on the Book of the Twelve and the Empire You're Actually In
Al Mohler recently let the internet know he finds it a bit sus when a woman talks about the Bible on a podcast. Today's guest is one of four women who just…
Homebrewed ChristianityIs That Really a High View of Scripture? Craig Allert on Scripture, Canon, and the Story We Weren't Told
My dad had a giant church history timeline hanging in his office wall when I was a kid. And if you are a pastor's kid, you learn a lot watching how your…
Homebrewed ChristianityEmpire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What "Christian Nationalism" Misses
This is the first live Q&A for the new class, and Joerg Rieger came ready. Christ and Empire came out during my last year of div school, and that's why I was…
Homebrewed ChristianityAncient Israelite Religions, Plural: Cynthia Shafer-Elliott on Household Shrines, Figurines, and Yahweh's Asherah
There is an entire content industry built on "biblical archaeology" right now — TV shows, YouTube channels, the House of David series on Amazon, all of it…
Homebrewed ChristianityTripp Hijacks Religion on the Mind with Dr. Dan Koch
Dan Koch just finished a seven-and-a-half-year process and came out the other side a fully licensed clinical psychologist. So I did what any friend would do —…
Homebrewed ChristianityConstantine Is a Cipher: Tony Jones on the Emperor Everyone Uses and Nobody Knows
Tony Jones has been getting up early for ten years and refusing to talk to anyone until he has written for hours. Now we know why. Son of Helena is the first…
Homebrewed ChristianityHope Does Not Exist": O'neil Van Horn on Making Hope and the Practice of Resurrection
My friend & Orbis editor, Dr. Tom Hermans-Webster, sent me this book with a note that said, "You're going to love this, Tripp. No, really, you are." He was…
Homebrewed ChristianityWe're the Ones Lamenting: James McGrath on Reading Revelation from Inside the Empire
Welcome to TBC 26 FM, the post-apocalyptic radio station broadcasting from the wasteland of late modern America. James McGrath — the Religion Prof himself —…
Homebrewed ChristianityFaith Has Been Snorting Modernity This Whole Time: James K.A. Smith on the Trad Wife, the Manosphere, and Hegel
Jamie Smith is a Reformed philosopher — one of the first to put a Catholic mystic in the title of a book and then proceed to argue that it was the…
Homebrewed ChristianityDoubt Is the Door: Chaplains in the Trenches, George MacDonald, and the Bebbington Quadrilateral w/ Timothy Larsen
Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A…
Homebrewed ChristianityWhat If the American Revolution Had Failed? with Diana Butler Bass
Diana Butler Bass just got back from Ireland, where she and Richard escaped the Fourth of July — and she came home with the most stunning historical…
Homebrewed ChristianityThank God I Am an Atheist: Thomas Jared Farmer on Gianni Vattimo's Weak Thought
Gianni Vattimo — the Catholic-communist-gay Italian pioneer of pensiero debole (weak thought) — died in 2023, and the intellectual biography he deserved has…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe MLK Monument Has No Jesus on It: Vincent Lloyd and Luke Bretherton on Secularism as Ideology
Political theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the…
Homebrewed ChristianityAl Mohler's Nightmare: Interpreting Scripture While Female with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is back, and her timing is, as always, impeccable. We recorded this conversation about her new book on biblical interpretation right…
Homebrewed ChristianityWinter in America: The Double Deac Deans on the 250th, Christian Nationalism, and the Questions That Do Not Get Answered
This 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityYou Are the Christ: Ilia Delio on Taking Paul More Literally Than the Catholic Church
Last 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityGuilty of Its Own Innocence: Cornel West on Baldwin, Matthiessen, and America's Peter Pan Problem
Cornel West is coming to Theology Beer Camp with his neighbor, Gary Dorrien, this October, and this hour is the on-ramp. It also happens to be a full one-hour…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Second Naivete of a Nation: Diana Butler Bass on America 250, Anger, and Believing Again
Diana 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Allergy to Otherness: What Modernity Did to the Pew Next to You with Ilia Delio
Third 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityIts Gates Will Never Be Shut: Scott Paeth on Eschatology, the Statue of Liberty, and Patriotism at America 250
Scott Paeth wrote Christianity and Identity during Trump's first term, expecting that by the time the book hit shelves the urgency would have passed. Then…
Homebrewed ChristianityWe Are Back in 1850: Master Signifiers, Heritage Americans, and the Confession We Stopped Saying with Diana Butler Bass
Diana and I sat down to launch our summer online Summit — Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 — a video time capsule of scholars and friends…
Homebrewed ChristianityThriving Is Climate, Flourishing Is Weather with Pam King
Pam King is back, and this conversation moved at the pace it wanted to. She runs the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the framework she has…
Homebrewed ChristianityIf a Silicon God Arrives, It Will Be the God We Deserve with Robert Wright
Bob Wright is back, and The God Test is the AI book I had been waiting for someone to write — the only one I have read that takes the spiritual stakes of the…
Homebrewed ChristianityDecisional vs. Emotional Forgiveness: The Distinction Most of Us Have Been Missing with Everett Worthington
Dr. Everett Worthington spent thirty years building the most rigorously tested forgiveness program in psychological science — and the day he turned in his…
Homebrewed ChristianityThere Was a Time When God Was Gods with Ilia Delio
Ilia 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityReligion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
This 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Machine Is a God Image with Ilia Delio
Ilia 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Problem Is Not Poverty. It Is Wealth. w/ Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty
Some 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityPreaching in the WTF Zone: Leah Schade on Saying Something True When the News Will Not Stop
The 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Darkly Radiant Struggle with Gary Dorrien
Gary 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityReligion Before Belief: What's actually dying and what was always the deeper thing
Most 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityJames Cone Was Right: Gary Dorrien & Charlene Sinclair on Black Theology, the Lynching Tree & the Cry We Keep Not Hearing
Week 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…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Meme, the Madonna & the Fertility God: Andrew Root on Idolatry, the Church & Late Capitalism
Andy Root is back, and this time he's got a fertility god on the cover of his book — which, if you've been paying any attention to his work, is not actually a…
Homebrewed ChristianityBinge-Watching as Spiritual Formation (And Not in a Good Way)
A year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn't notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and…
Homebrewed ChristianityGod Meets Us in Our Suffering: Rolf Jacobson on Cancer, the Theology of the Cross & Three Friends Who Went Through It Together
Rolf Jacobson is back — psalm scholar, dean at Luther Seminary, co-author of the Homebrewed Christianity Guide to the Old Testament, and one of my favorite…
Homebrewed ChristianitySacred Values and Street Power — The Theology of Organizing
Gary Dorrien came to organizing the hard way — canvassing for McGovern in Alma, Michigan in 1972, where people didn't just oppose the candidate, they despised…
Homebrewed ChristianityGlimmerings: Miroslav Volf & Christian Wiman on Friendship, Faith & Letters That Pressed Them Both
Miroslav Volf is back, and this time he brought his friend — poet and theologian Christian Wiman — and their book Glimmerings, collection of letters exchanged…
Homebrewed ChristianityA Story of Being Saved by Love and Grace: Gary Dorrien’s Memoir in His Own Words
Gary Dorrien is spending six weeks teaching the history of Christian social ethics in America — and this week Aaron and I turned the lens on Gary himself…
Homebrewed ChristianityAmerica is Obsessed with Problems but Denies Catastrophe
Cornell West says America is obsessed with problems but denies catastrophe — and the moment you reduce the catastrophic to the problematic, you have already…
Homebrewed ChristianityGary Dorrien on the Niebuhr You Thought You Knew
Gary Dorrien is the Niebuhr Chair at Union, and nobody alive can walk you through the whole arc of Reinhold Niebuhr with his range — from the German-American…
Homebrewed ChristianityThe Power Made Perfect in Weakness: Nonviolence as Metaphysical Revelation
There is a habit in Western theology so old it feels like air: imagining God as the supreme instance of coercive power — the divine despot whose omnipotence is…
Homebrewed ChristianityWhat Would a New Abolition Be? Gary Dorrien on the Black Social Gospel, Ida B. Wells & Reverdy Ransom
This is the first live Q&A for Theology for Troublemakers — the class Gary Dorrien, Aaron Stoffer, and I have been building for exactly this moment — and if…
Homebrewed ChristianityJust War for People Who Actually Know What It Means w/ Kevin Carnahan
So many clergy members and theology nerds messaged me after JD Vance told the Pope to dial back the theology talk that I had no choice — I called my friend…
Homebrewed ChristianityI Thought I Was a Doctor: Trump, the Pope & the Most Chaotic Week in Religion News with Diana Butler Bass
It's Ruining Dinner with Diana Butler Bass on Tax day! Also, apparently, the day the Vice President told the Pope to stop doing theology. Diana Butler Bass…
Homebrewed ChristianityTwo Eyes, One Reality: Toward Fuller Knowing
I've been wearing glasses since seventh grade, when I discovered mid-car-ride that the rest of my family could actually read a license plate and I had no idea…
Homebrewed ChristianityTheology for Troublemakers: Gary Dorrien & Aaron Stauffer on Social Ethics for This Moment
This one is a preview of something I've been wanting to do for a long time — a class on the history of Christian social ethics that's actually useful for the…
Homebrewed Christianitya Systematic Theology of Love with Thomas Jay Oord
Okay, I genuinely don't know how many times Tom Oord has been on this podcasttwenty plus times, but this one felt different, because Tom has officially done…