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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

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 in middle school. That is not what this book is. Robbie takes a word that in our shared upbringing was entirely personal and entirely … Read more about Embracing Division: Robert P. Jones on Unity, Justice, and the Lines We Have to Draw

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 agenda, chaired it, and personally suggested the technical term homoousios — that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Joerg's … Read more about Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed