Dr. Timothy Larsen writes about serious, energetic faith in the places other historians assume the faith cannot really be. A Victorian Christian fantasist. A Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came … Read more about Doubt Is the Door: Chaplains in the Trenches, George MacDonald, and the Bebbington Quadrilateral w/ Timothy Larsen
What 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 counterfactual we have ever discussed on the podcast. Standing in the death-row hallway at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, the prison where the leaders of … Read more about What If the American Revolution Had Failed? with Diana Butler Bass
Thank 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 finally arrived, courtesy of Thomas Jared Farmer, a fellow Claremont alum who wrote the book at the University of Münster and now works at … Read more about Thank God I Am an Atheist: Thomas Jared Farmer on Gianni Vattimo’s Weak Thought
Puff, Puff, Passages: Bo and Tripp on the Bible, the Ban List, and the Books We Would Take to a Desert Island
Bo had a week. So did I. He is running a plumber-exterminator-HVAC gauntlet and moving eighteen pews for the new community center. I flew across the country for the funeral of one of my best friends from div school. We came back to the table anyway. What we got is one of the wildest, most … Read more about Puff, Puff, Passages: Bo and Tripp on the Bible, the Ban List, and the Books We Would Take to a Desert Island
The 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 katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the … Read more about The MLK Monument Has No Jesus on It: Vincent Lloyd and Luke Bretherton on Secularism as Ideology
The Angel of History, the End of History, and the End of the Liberal Subject
Bo drives this week. He has spent seven days chewing on Kevin Carnahan's visit — the America 1940s–1980s was a mirage argument — and comes back with a run of philosophical frames he wants to test. Walter Benjamin's Angel of History (the 1940 essay on the Klee painting where the angel is being blown … Read more about The Angel of History, the End of History, and the End of the Liberal Subject
Al 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 after Al Mohler announced that women cannot, in fact, teach the Bible on podcasts. So we did the only honest thing. We talked about scripture … Read more about Al Mohler’s Nightmare: Interpreting Scripture While Female with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Winter 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 — which spent six hours at the top of Substack the week we recorded — uses two moments in American history to name where we are: James … Read more about Winter in America: The Double Deac Deans on the 250th, Christian Nationalism, and the Questions That Do Not Get Answered
America Was a Mirage: Kevin Carnahan on Why the Moral 1940s–1980s Was an Accident
Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin's lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking existed from the 1940s to the 1980s was a mirage. World … Read more about America Was a Mirage: Kevin Carnahan on Why the Moral 1940s–1980s Was an Accident
Guilty 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 preview of the America 250 conversation every clergy person I know is currently trying to write a sermon around. Brother West walked us … Read more about Guilty of Its Own Innocence: Cornel West on Baldwin, Matthiessen, and America’s Peter Pan Problem
You 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 called Christ the savior, that we are not saved by one particular person but by making an option for the whole, and that the actual move … Read more about You Are the Christ: Ilia Delio on Taking Paul More Literally Than the Catholic Church
If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?
Bo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery store, to whether thin places are actually thin or … Read more about If an AI Says It Loves God, How Would You Test It?