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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

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

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 watching the generational transfer happen in real time. I spent it half-yelling at Morning Joe. We came back together to answer two of the … Read more about The Second Naivete of a Nation: Diana Butler Bass on America 250, Anger, and Believing Again

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. We tracked how the natural-supernatural binary got constructed — Hume locks God out, German biblical critics build the distinction to … Read more about The Allergy to Otherness: What Modernity Did to the Pew Next to You with Ilia Delio

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 November happened again. So volume one of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason lands as the book on this moment — the one I have … Read more about Its Gates Will Never Be Shut: Scott Paeth on Eschatology, the Statue of Liberty, and Patriotism at America 250

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 answering a single question: what is the one thing you want people to know about America at 250?  We compared the bicentennial summer of … Read more about We Are Back in 1850: Master Signifiers, Heritage Americans, and the Confession We Stopped Saying with Diana Butler Bass

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 built there is the most useful integration of psychological science and Christian theology I have come across — six facets that spell THRIVE, … Read more about Thriving Is Climate, Flourishing Is Weather with Pam King

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 technology with the seriousness Teilhard would have. It opens with the interview Bob conducted with a young Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 — now … Read more about If a Silicon God Arrives, It Will Be the God We Deserve with Robert Wright

Dr. Everett Worthington spent thirty years building the most rigorously tested forgiveness program in psychological science — and the day he turned in his first book on the subject was the day his mother was murdered in a home invasion. Three years later, his brother, who had discovered her body, … Read more about Decisional vs. Emotional Forgiveness: The Distinction Most of Us Have Been Missing with Everett Worthington