features

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 witness to me in the name of Lacan. Here’s the setup: I collect Lacanian friends and have a running bit where I refuse to actually read Lacan, … Read more about Desire Got There First: Paul Hoard on Lacan, Faith, and What’s Actually Driving You

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 of people decided empire wasn’t our problem anymore. Then came 2016, and everyone started worrying about empire again. Joerg’s last … Read more about Unite and Conquer: What the White Christ Costs White Workers

Joerg and I got to Friedrich Schleiermacher: the father of liberal theology, the DNA of American mainline Christianity, and yes, a card in my theologian baseball card collection. (Joerg wants to trade for it. Negotiations are ongoing.) Joerg started by saying this session isn't meant to make anyone … Read more about We Are the Miracle: Schleiermacher and Soft Empire

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 inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne … Read more about Biblical Womanhood Came from a New Thought Press: Kristin Du Mez on Live Laugh Love

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 Luther for the Reformation-era chapter, and the hinge of the whole course. Here's why. Las Casas owned an encomienda. He had Native people … Read more about Empire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice

Barry Harvey is back with a book that manages to put madness, theocracy, and anarchism in the title — three despised words, deliberately chosen. It's a collection of essays developed over his career, and beneath them all sits one assertion: the church is not a subsystem of civil society. It has its … Read more about Every Empire Thought It Was the Exception: Barry Harvey on the American Shelf Life and What the Church Does Now

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 carried atonement baggage since youth group. The angry God demanding a victim is not Anselm. That caricature is a later invention, and … Read more about Anselm’s God Can’t Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That’s Good News, Not Cruelty