Homebrewed Christianity
by Dr. Tripp Fuller
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Desire Got There First: Paul Hoard on Lacan, Faith, and What’s Actually Driving You
Oct 19, 2026
1h 40m 32s
Unite and Conquer: What the White Christ Costs White Workers
Oct 15, 2026
1h 26m 12s
We Are the Miracle: Schleiermacher and Soft Empire
Sep 29, 2026
1h 23m 46s
Biblical Womanhood Came from a New Thought Press: Kristin Du Mez on Live Laugh Love
Sep 21, 2026
1h 26m 48s
Empire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice
Sep 18, 2026
1h 19m 13s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10/19/26 |  Desire 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 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, purely to irritate them. Paul teaches counseling psychology at the Seattle School, blends two schools of psychoanalysis that mostly don’t get along, and has published an academic article about Lacan and board games with an organization called the Board Game Academics, which — delightfully — exists. What we got is the best introduction to psychoanalysis I’ve had on this show. The masters-of-suspicion move isn’t a critique of your beliefs from outside. It’s the observation that desire preceded your beliefs, and if you never do the work of looking at what’s actually driving you, something foreign to you is going to be running the show. We went through Freud’s Last Session, the real/imaginary/symbolic explained through chess, disgust as the engine of both MAGA politics and progressive purity tests, Jesus as a contaminant, and then my running worry that the algorithm has colonized the last remaining territory — human interiority. Paul had answers I didn’t expect. Also: my ongoing three-year campaign to get Five Iron Frenzy to Theology Beer Camp continues. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Paul Hoard is a professor in the counseling psychology program at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, and a PhD candidate working on Lacanian psychoanalysis in non-clinical contexts. He writes weekly at Paul Hoard on Substack, and currently runs a series reading AI through a Lacanian lens (previous series: games and virtue). His book, co-written with his sister Billy Hoard, is Eucontamination: Disgust Theology in the Christian Life — which he introduces by noting there probably aren’t many theology books that talk about poop as much as this one does. It reads Jesus’s “I am the way, the truth, and the life” through disgust theory, asking what it means for truth and life to contaminate us. Paul describes it, accurately, as a conversation between Lewis and Lacan conducted through two siblings. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 40m 32s | ||||||
| 10/15/26 |  Unite 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 of people decided empire wasn’t our problem anymore. Then came 2016, and everyone started worrying about empire again. Joerg’s last lecture brought the whole thing into the present: Christian nationalism, the white Christ, and a president posting himself in white robes. He also pushed past the easy targets, because the hard empire is always the easiest one to see. Your questions pulled the whole six-week arc together: the Christological surplus, deep solidarity, and a doctrine of God that starts with the day laborer instead of Caesar. We covered twenty questions in about eighty minutes, and I think it’s the best one yet. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com Previous Episodes w/ Joerg Empire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice Anselm’s God Can’t Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That’s Good News, Not Cruelty Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses Why Religion Matters Now Theology in the Capitalocene Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern the End of Religion & Business as Usual Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar Different Gods, Different Religions? Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 26m 12s | ||||||
| 9/29/26 |  We 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 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 in the liberal tradition feel bad. It's an invitation to dig deeper. There's plenty worth celebrating here, like the leveling of old hierarchies, thinking for yourself, and Christ working by attraction instead of coercion. But Schleiermacher also wrote that "we are the miracle," fantasized about colonies Prussia didn't have, and called Judaism "charming." That's where the soft empire hides, and it's the version American liberals find hardest to see in the mirror. The surplus is still there, and the work is ours. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com Previous Episodes w/ Joerg Empire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice Anselm’s God Can’t Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That’s Good News, Not Cruelty Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses Why Religion Matters Now Theology in the Capitalocene Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern the End of Religion & Business as Usual Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar Different Gods, Different Religions? Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 23m 46s | ||||||
| 9/21/26 |  Biblical 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 inside evangelical spaces. Then January 6th happened. So she wrote Live Laugh Love while still very much living inside the Jesus and John Wayne moment, which is partly her excuse for why it took so much longer than agreed — the other excuse being that once she started tracing what white Christian women were actually reading, buying, and building their lives around, she discovered she had to remap twentieth-century American religion. The neat boxes break down. Fundamentalist, evangelical, charismatic, mainline, Mormon, secular wellness — the women's cultural products cross all of them, and the through-line running underneath is New Thought. Here's the payoff that stopped me: what gets sold today as biblical womanhood traces back through Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman to Helen Andelin's Fascinating Womanhood to a set of 1920s booklets published by a New Thought press. They just added Bible verses to the top. We also got into the Amway tour, the rules against negativity, why toxic empathy makes perfect sense once you see the system, and — at the end — what she learned studying the German Christian movement that she cannot stop thinking about now. She's at Beer Camp in a few weeks. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Dr. Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Professor of History at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute. She holds her PhD from the University of Notre Dame, with doctoral work on twentieth-century Germany and the German Christian movement. She writes Du Mez CONNECTIONS on Substack and co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Robert P. Jones, and Jemar Tisby. Her new book is Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 26m 48s | ||||||
| 9/18/26 |  Empire 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 BartolomĂŠ 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 working for him. He was, in Joerg's words, a slave driver. Then he woke up, gave the land away, freed the people, and spent the rest of his life arguing against the conquest. Gustavo GutiĂŠrrez read him as a precursor to liberation theology, and when Joerg got into the sources, he thought: not so fast. Because what Las Casas actually represents is the pivot from empire hard to empire soft — from fire and sword to kindness and charity, which is nicer, preferable, and still empire. The whole session is about learning to tell soft empire from the way of Christ when they look almost identical. We got the charity/advocacy/solidarity distinction, the flip on anthropology (not others are like us but what if I were like them), why converting from one God to another is harder than converting from no God at all, why land back needs labor back alongside it, and Joerg's answer to the flag-wrapped warrior Christ, which is two words long. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com Previous Episodes w/ Joerg Anselm’s God Can’t Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That’s Good News, Not Cruelty Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism†Misses Why Religion Matters Now Theology in the Capitalocene Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern the End of Religion & Business as Usual Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar Different Gods, Different Religions? Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keepâ â â â â â â â â â â Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at â â â â â â â â â â â HomebrewedClasses.com.â â â â â â â â â â â This podcast is a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Homebrewed Christianity â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â production. 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Join over 75,000 other people by joining our â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Substack - Process This!â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Get instant access to over 50 classes at â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â www.TheologyClass.comâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Follow the podcast, drop a reviewâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , send â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â feedback/questionsâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â or become a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â member of the HBC Communityâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 19m 13s | ||||||
| 9/14/26 |  Every 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 them all sits one assertion: the church is not a subsystem of civil society. It has its own integrity, its own allegiance, and its own context for rethinking how it relates to everything else. The preface opens with Justin Martyr noting that second-century Christians were charged with madness for putting a crucified man right next to God. Barry's point: if the church has a healthy understanding of itself, it already is a resistance movement — rooted in scripture, liturgy, and tradition, and located, as Bonhoeffer put it, in the middle of the human village. We got into ecclesial solidarity and the ordo amoris (and the administration official who thinks he can do Catholic theology), the American form of cheap grace, the neoliberal collapse of state and market into one thing, and then — because Barry has multiple music degrees and I have no self-control — Bonhoeffer's polyphony, Tolkien's Silmarillion, the long defeat, eucatastrophe, and Gandalf's ecclesiology. I skipped every one of my Richard Rorty questions the moment Tolkien came up. I regret nothing. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Barry Harvey is Professor of Theology in the Honors College and the Department of Religion at Baylor University, where he has taught since 1988. He holds an MDiv from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a PhD from Duke University. His new book is Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism: Political and Cultural Reflections on the Church. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 30m 52s | ||||||
| 9/12/26 |  Anselm'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 carried atonement baggage since youth group. The angry God demanding a victim is not Anselm. That caricature is a later invention, and Joerg asks why contemporary conservative theology needs a version of the tradition that the tradition never actually taught. His answer: because empire reshapes God's image in the image of the powerful, to celebrate the top and keep the bottom in check. And here's the surprise — Anselm's God cannotjust forgive and forget, and that's not cruelty; it's the opposite. The tyrant can forgive and forget because the tyrant answers to nothing. Anselm's God is bound by the order of creation. A God who follows the rule of law. (Imagine.) So the satisfaction theory becomes an argument against the Norman practice of bloody revenge, written by a man who watched William the Conqueror's troops cut off the right hand and right foot of every male inhabitant of a village that gave offense. We also got into the feminist divine-child-abuse critique, whether reason is a gentler instrument of empire or just a more effective one, Brecht on banks, techno-feudalism, and a closing riff on economic democracy that got Joerg going and ran out of clock. Next week: BartolomĂŠ de las Casas. The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keepâ is running now. Sign up at â homebrewedclasses.comâ — you don’t have to donate anything. You’ll get access to all the lectures, you can send in questions by replying to any class email (that’s where every question in this Q&A came from), and you’ll be connected to the online community working through the material together. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the â â Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justiceâ â . For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including â â No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Futureâ â ; â â Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalitiesâ â (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and â â Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Contextâ â (with Jin Young Choi). â â www.joergrieger.comâ â Previous Episodes w/ Joerg â Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed Empire Goes All the Way Downâ â â Why Religion Matters Nowâ â â â Theology in the Capitaloceneâ â â â Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concernâ â â â the End of Religion & Business as Usualâ â â â Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar â â â â Different Gods, Different Religions?â â â â Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townesâ â â â The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & Moreâ â â â Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringerâ â â â Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keepâ â â â â â â â â â â Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at â â â â â â â â â â â HomebrewedClasses.com.â â â â â â â â â â â This podcast is a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Homebrewed Christianity â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â production. 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Join over 75,000 other people by joining our â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Substack - Process This!â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Get instant access to over 50 classes at â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â www.TheologyClass.comâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Follow the podcast, drop a reviewâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , send â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â feedback/questionsâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â or become a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â member of the HBC Communityâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â . 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| 9/10/26 |  Embracing 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 in middle school. That is not what this book is. Robbie takes a word that in our shared upbringing was entirely personal and entirely theological, and puts it next to the way political scientists now use the same word to describe what is happening to American democracy. The two stories are not separate. He can prove it with the word white Christians used to name their victory over Reconstruction: redemption. This is the fourth book in ten years — The End of White Christian America, White Too Long, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, and now this one, which pops back to the present and asks: okay, now what? We got into the Bright Line Watch numbers, why Martin NiemĂśller is a more useful guide for American Christians than Bonhoeffer, the finding that made Robbie go home at 2:30 in the afternoon, the estate settlement he added to his family Bible before passing it to his kids, the war on empathy, and then the back half of the book — where Robbie argues polarization is the wrong diagnosis and writes a chapter called "Embracing Division." I pushed back. He was gracious about it. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Robert P. Jones is the founder and president of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and the author of the White Too Long Substack newsletter. He grew up Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, trained as a mathematician at Mississippi College, attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary during the fundamentalist takeover, and earned his PhD in Ethics and Society at Emory University. He co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby. His new book is Backslide— on the interlocking crises of democratic backsliding and Christian apostasy in America. His previous books: The End of White Christian America, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keepâ â â â â â â â â â Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at â â â â â â â â â â HomebrewedClasses.com.â â â â â â â â â â This podcast is a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Homebrewed Christianity â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â production. Follow â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â the Homebrewed Christianityâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Theology Nerd Throwdownâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , & â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â The Rise of Bonhoefferâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Substack - Process This!â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Get instant access to over 50 classes at â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â www.TheologyClass.comâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Follow the podcast, drop a reviewâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , send â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â feedback/questionsâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â or become a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â member of the HBC Communityâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 28m 00s | ||||||
| 9/5/26 |  Who 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 agenda, chaired it, and personally suggested the technical term homoousios — that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Joerg's method is to notice who pays for the trip. The boss funds the conference, the boss owns the product. Which means bringing Jesus up into the Godhead looks like a great move of respect right up until you notice it also removed him from Galilee and assimilated him to an imperial first person. But here's the part that makes this class worth taking: Joerg's move is to read it backwards. Let the second person define the first. Suddenly the creed becomes dangerous to empire, and Constantine — who moved away from Nicaea late in life for reasons nobody fully understands — may have figured out it was blowing up in his face. We also got into the Christological vacuum and what rushes in to fill it, why Chalcedon accidentally underwrote the self-made man, how Hellenization was a class matter, and what the Theodosian Code's protection of church asylum asks of congregations right now. Next week: Anselm. Get ready. The Christ Empire Couldn’t Keep is running now. Sign up at homebrewedclasses.com — you don’t have to donate anything. You’ll get access to all the lectures, you can send in questions by replying to any class email (that’s where every question in this Q&A came from), and you’ll be connected to the online community working through the material together. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com Previous Episodes w/ Joerg Empire Goes All the Way Down Why Religion Matters Now Theology in the Capitalocene Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern the End of Religion & Business as Usual Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar Different Gods, Different Religions? Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 15m 15s | ||||||
| 9/3/26 |  You'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 launched a podcast where they talk about the Bible. Four. Plural. It's called Bible Divas, and Anna Sieges says she plans to email Al every time an episode drops so he doesn't miss one — and maybe gets an opportunity to be moved by the Spirit, repent, and embrace the gift of half the species thinking, reflecting, teaching, and wrestling with scripture. Anna teaches Hebrew Bible at Gardner-Webb in North Carolina, and her research love is the Book of the Twelve, which most of us learned to call the minor prophets while memorizing them in order for Bible drill. She wants that name retired, and her argument is good: these are not twelve guys yelling on twelve different street corners. It's a long conversation, stitched together over generations by communities arguing with God about empire, land, and whether mercy actually extends to the people you hate. We got into locust plagues as a table of contents, Jonah as the Colbert Report, why Habakkuk asks God to fix the violence and God says sure, I'll send the Babylonians, why you're probably Assyria and not Israel when you read this stuff, and — at the end — what actual repentance would look like for the harm done to LGBTQ people by a single chapter in a widely assigned textbook. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Dr. Anna Sieges is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where she teaches Hebrew Bible. She grew up overseas in Papua New Guinea, where her father provided counseling support for people on the mission field and her mother worked in HR — and where family Bible trivia on Saturday nights was, in her words, cutthroat. Her research centers on the Book of the Twelve, redaction criticism, and the scribal shaping of prophetic literature. She is one of the four Bible Divas, with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Angela Parker, and Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars. Go subscribe. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 36m 07s | ||||||
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| 8/31/26 |  Is 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 parents handle the church member who shows up to run an inquisition. Somebody would come in and say, "You said X, but the biblical answer is not X," and Dad would point up at that timeline and start naming people. What about this guy? What about her? Eventually he would land on the line: "Look, I don't feel like cutting verses out of the Bible or saints out of our history." That is basically this whole conversation. Craig Allert teaches religious studies at Trinity Western University in Canada, he is a friend of Myron Penner (which is its own recommendation), and he has written two books that do the same work from different angles — one on the actual formation of the New Testament canon, and one on how the early church fathers read Genesis 1. The through-line is what D.H. Williams and Robert Louis Wilken call historical amnesia: we do not know who we are because we do not know where we came from, and the version we were handed is not the whole story. The real history turns out to be thicker, stranger, and considerably more invigorating for faith than the drop-out-of-the-sky version. Also, at some point I explain how modern scientific naturalism is a covert theology that kept the cathedral of creation and evicted God from it. Craig, generously, did not stop me. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Craig D. Allert is Professor of Religious Studies and Coordinator of the Christianity and Culture Program at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He is a historical theologian specializing in early Christianity, patristics, and the formation of the New Testament canon. His books include A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon ; Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation; and Revelation, Truth, Canon, and Interpretation: Studies in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 44m 37s | ||||||
| 8/28/26 |  Empire 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 so excited to try to study with him, until Joerg promptly went on sabbatical. So this whole class is, in a sense, twenty years of making that up. The argument is not that empire won. It's that across two thousand years, empire could never take over. There was always resistance, always alternatives, always a surplus that couldn't be contained. This hour ran through what "empire" lets us see that "Christian nationalism" alone misses, why the German translation of one word cracked open the whole project, why Paul is neither conservative nor liberal, what happens to the middle when the right keeps moving right, and what a confessing moment would actually look like here and now. Next week we go to Nicaea. Those of you who are creedally allergic have been warned — and Joerg says there's a surplus in Constantine's creed next week too. The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep is running now. Sign up at homebrewedclasses.com — you don't have to donate anything. You'll get access to all the lectures, you can send in questions by replying to any class email (that's where every question in this Q&A came from), and you'll be connected to the online community working through the material together. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Joerg Rieger is the Distinguished Professor of Theology and the Cal Turner Chancellor’s Chair of Wesleyan Studies at Vanderbilt University and founding director of the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. For three decades, he has worked to bring together theology and the struggles for justice and liberation that mark our age. His work addresses relations of theology and public life, reflecting on the misuse of power in religion, politics, and economics. His interest is in movements that bring about change and in the positive contributions of religion and theology. His constructive work in theology draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary traditions, with a concern for manifestations of the divine in the pressures of everyday life. Several of his 24 authored and edited books address the topics of this course, including No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future; Unified We Are a Force: How Faith and Labor Can Overcome America’s Inequalities (with Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger); and Faith, Class, and Labor: Intersectional Approaches in a Global Context (with Jin Young Choi). www.joergrieger.com Previous Episodes w/ Joerg Why Religion Matters Now Theology in the Capitalocene Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern the End of Religion & Business as Usual Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar Different Gods, Different Religions? Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer Economics, Theology, and Discipleship JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 14m 43s | ||||||
| 8/27/26 |  Ancient 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 running on big Nephilim energy. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott does not watch any of it, because it makes her yell at the screen. (Her husband, however, likes to watch her watch it.) She is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor and an actual field archaeologist, and here is what she would rather you get excited about: in one of her first seasons at Tel Rehov, in a square she had been working, they found hundreds of ceramic beehives — industrial apiaries. Which means the land of milk and honey had actual honey. Not date syrup, not wild honey. Real, farmed, bee-produced honey. She also personally uncovered a household shrine with a lion's face carved into it, tongue out, human faces cowering under its paws. That one is in the Israel Museum now, and she says hello to it whenever she visits. We got into what "back in Bible times" and "biblical worldview" actually obscure, what household archaeology reveals about women's authority that the text buries, why ancient Israelite religion should always be plural, why lentils deserve more respect than they get, and yes — the residue analysis at Arad confirming THC at an official Israelite worship site. She is one of the four Bible Divas, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in the religion department. She holds her PhD from the University of Sheffield, where she studied with Philip Davies, and specializes in Iron Age archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah with sub-specialties in household archaeology, food, and gender. She has excavated at Tel Rehov, Tell Halif, and currently at Tel Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel — the site of the wise woman of Abel in 2 Samuel 20, who talks a general out of destroying a city. Check out her book: Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Hebrew Bible. The Bible Divas Podcast — Cynthia with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Anna Sieges, and Angela Parker. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars, one of them an archaeologist. Go subscribe. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 37m 21s | ||||||
| 8/24/26 |  Tripp 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 — took over his podcast, gave him a week off from prepping, and made him answer every question I've been saving. He did zero prep on purpose. What we got is the conversation you have with someone you've known long enough to skip the throat-clearing: what existential therapy actually gave him clinically, why permission structures are the hidden architecture of both clergy and therapy work, why he's moved from the big abstract questions toward attention and embodiment, and what it means that a psychologist with ADHD is trying to work out how attention relates to love. Plus: the oral history of the Enneagram I am definitely writing, why he'd take the drum stool for Against Me! on the White Crosses tour, and Lars Ulrich in Moscow as the runner-up. And there's a whole extra hour of this — music, movies, punk as a theology of human dignity, and the story of when Rob Bell hijacked a Homebrewed episode live. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Get the extra hour This conversation keeps going for about another hour, and the second half is the part where we stop behaving. Dan's theory of punk's irreducible amateurism as a kind of human dignity. The psychology of music project he's building — endorphins, synchronicity, mosh pits at fifteen, and what it has to do with what mainline worship gave up. Byung-Chul Han's hell of the same, and Dan cutting my doom with whole milk. Robert Eggers. The Refused frontman walking backstage before "New Noise" to tell my thirteen-year-old do you want to know why I do this? And my ongoing public campaign to get Five Iron Frenzy to play Theology Beer Camp. Join the Process This Substack at processthis.substack.com to get the full extended conversation, plus every episode ad-free, bonus content, and the classes. It's how the podcast keeps running, and it's where the good stuff lives. About our guest and his shows Dr. Dan Koch is a newly licensed clinical psychologist based in Bellingham, Washington, specializing in religious change and deconstruction, working from a cognitive-existential orientation. Before psychology, he spent a decade in an emo band and a decade as a commercial composer. He hosts Religion on the Mind (formerly You Have Permission), on psychology and religion, and Pretty Good Vibrations, his music podcast. Support his work at patreon.com/dankoch. His telehealth licensure covering 42 states is in process. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 47m 57s | ||||||
| 8/18/26 |  Constantine 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 book of a trilogy about Constantine — a figure Tony correctly calls a cipher, the empty container into which everyone who loves or hates the marriage of church and state pours their own opinions — and nobody had ever written the historical fiction. Not one. Twenty-five novels about Julius Caesar, several about Nero, Claudius for Claudius, and nothing on the man whose name gets thrown around in every progressive Protestant conversation about Christendom. So Tony wrote it. Or rather, the muse handed it to him during a hypnic jerk on a plane home from the worst family vacation of his life. What follows is a coming-of-age story that ends in 306 — before everything you think you know about Constantine happens — and centers his mother, Helena, the concubine with an unshakeable faith who is the actual argument of the title. We covered why fiction lets him say things nonfiction can't, why he told almost no one he was writing it, the moral imaginary of Rome and why it is so hard to get modern readers inside it, and then a rapid-fire debunking segment where I brought clergy hot takes from the internet and Tony took them apart one at a time. Bring your church history notes. You will be editing them. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Tony Jones is a theologian, historian, and now novelist — and, by his own count, the most frequent guest in the history of Homebrewed Christianity (he passed Pete Rollins a while back). He was a classics major with Greek and Latin, did a foreign study program in Rome, still leads history tours there, and focused on the early church in seminary. His nonfiction includes Did God Kill Jesus?, The Teaching of the Twelve (on the Didache — whose Eucharistic liturgy shows up in a catacomb scene in this novel), The New Christians, Postmodern Youth Ministry, and his memoir The God of Wild Places. The book at the center of this conversation is Son of Helena, volume one of his Constantine trilogy — available now, with the audiobook out on or before September 1. Volume two, The Sign, releases October 1 and Volume three, The Apostle, releases December 1. All at tonyjonesbooks.com. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 50m 37s | ||||||
| 8/14/26 |  Hope 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 right. O'neil Van Horn's Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate opens on page one by announcing that hope does not exist — which sounds like a branding failure until you realize he means hope is not a feeling or a thing or an object you possess, but an activity. Verbal. Processual. Something we weave together. The book is built in three movements — noticing, gathering, repairing — with nine everyday practices treated as parables: birding, foraging, composting, seed saving, mending, baking bread. It is process theology written for people who do not want to hear the word concrescence ever again, and it does the rare thing of being genuinely usable by a reading group, a Sunday school class, or a preacher looking for a sermon series. We covered why optimism and pessimism are both forms of certainty and hope is neither, why his farmer friend asking who is that? about a birdsong was a revelation, why compost undermines the entire Western notion of essence, why the shame you feel about not knowing your local trees is not your fault, and what it means that the book ends not with a trumpet but with a loaf of bread. My chicken Raven made a cameo. She said it was her favorite. Van Horn is offering to Zoom in with any reading group, discussion group, or congregation working through Making Hope. Reach him through the contact form at oneilvanhorn.com. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Dr. O'neil Van Horn is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in philosophical and theological studies in religion from Drew University (where he studied with Catherine Keller), was a Louisville Institute Scholar from 2021 to 2023, and comes to theology with a background in organic agriculture and sustainability. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 08m 30s | ||||||
| 8/12/26 |  We'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 — was the right guest for the apocalyptic-themed Theology Beer Camp preview, because he wrote Theology and Science Fiction, he loves some Battlestar Galactica, and he spent a full year of sabbatical thinking about nothing but the New Testament's best apocalyptic preacher. We got the post-apocalyptic factions workshopped (James thinks the sorting needs a Hunger Games battle), then we went where the actual apocalypse lives: what John the Baptist was actually preaching in Second Temple Judaism, why apocalyptic literature always gets the end wrong and why that is a feature rather than a bug, why American Christians reading Revelation as horror instead of hope says everything about which side of the ledger we are on, what AI actually is under the hood and what it does to the way we read scripture, how James teaches a course called The Bible and Misinformation by fooling his own students on day one with AI-generated footage of himself announcing the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant, and — the part that will stay with me — what he says to the person whose evangelical faith is collapsing and who wrote me terrified. James's answer: that thing you thought was faith was actually doubt. Come for the Andor riff. Stay for the pastoral turn. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 23m 29s | ||||||
| 8/6/26 |  Faith 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 contemplative tradition that brought him back to a flourishing form of faith on the far side of a series of nerdy dead ends. Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark is his most personal and, I would argue, most beautiful book. It began the day, more than a decade ago, when Jamie was in the depths of a severe depression his analytical philosophical training could not think its way out of, and his wife came home from a garage sale with a battered used copy of The Dark Night of the Soul and told him he should read it. What that began — St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Merton — is what this book bears witness to. It is a book about the mystics saving Jamie's faith. It is also a Reformed philosopher's argument that the cultural liturgies project he is best known for needs a prior undoing before its formative work can do anything at all. As I told Jamie in the hour, this is a book that made me feel uncomfortable about how much I enjoyed it. We covered the apophatic/cataphatic distinction with the twist Jamie puts on it, the way certainty is still Cartesian even when it calls itself pious, the trad-wife/manosphere as snorting modernity while claiming to have escaped it, Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections as the real sequel to A Secular Age, and what to do when Distraction Inc. has fully occupied the inner room. The platform is the plantation. Come sit with this one and check out the book. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube About our guest Dr. James K.A. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he holds the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Applied Reformed Theology and Worldview. He earned his PhD at Villanova University under John D. Caputo. He served as editor of Comment magazine (2013–2018) and as editor-in-chief of Imagejournal (2019–2024). His new book is Make Your Home in the Luminous Dark. His previous books include the Cultural Liturgies trilogy — Desiring the Kingdom, Imagining the Kingdom, and Awaiting the King — as well as You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, On the Road with Saint Augustine, How to Inhabit Time, and his early philosophical work Speech and Theology. He writes at Quid Amo on Substack. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 33m 25s | ||||||
| 8/3/26 |  Doubt 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 Westminster canon who quietly set aside biblical authority. And, in his newest and most acclaimed book, seventeen Anglican chaplains who came out of the trenches of World War I as radicals. Tim is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College and the 2025 president of the American Society of Church History, and this hour is us moving through three of his books at once. The Fires of Moloch takes its title from H. G. Wells's line describing Britain sending its sons into the fires of a false god during the Passchendaele Offensive. George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles takes the mid-nineteenth-century Scottish theological turn from the Age of Atonement to the Age of the Incarnation and shows what happens when a rigorously Calvinist minister-turned-fantasy-writer decides doubt is the door in, and therefore the door out, of a mature faith. Every Leaf, Line, and Letter returns to Tim's PhD supervisor David Bebbington's famous quadrilateral for defining evangelicalism and asks what it takes to keep that word doing honest work now that polls will code Muslim Trump voters as evangelical. Come for Anglo-Catholic sacramental confession as battle-tested ministry. Stay for the George MacDonald grandmother who burned her son's violin because he enjoyed music too much. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought and Professor of History at Wheaton College, an Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls College, Oxford, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 2025 he served as President of the American Society of Church History. He has authored or edited more than twenty books. Books at the center of this conversation: The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One; George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment ; and Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 46m 27s | ||||||
| 8/1/26 |  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 the 1916 Easter Uprising were executed one by one, Diana asked herself the question that turned her whole trip: what if the American Revolution had failed, and this hallway held Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams instead? The Irish worked on decolonization for four hundred and fifty years. We got there in seven. American history might be a miracle; that is her real takeaway. Along the way: the London Fourth of July party where an American won best costume by going as the reflecting pool; listener questions our friends' Theology Summit lectures have generated on Jim Wallis's who must be defeated and who must be persuaded?; on what a congregation can faithfully do before the midterms; on the data centers now colonizing the neighborhoods that did not ask for them; on the day I got a text from David who turned out to be an AI chatbot trained to shift my views on Israel and Palestine; on Ulysses Mejias and Nick Couldry's Data Colonialism and why our interiority is the resource now being mined — and, at the end, the grief I have been carrying since I flew to Atlanta last week to bury my best friend from div school. Diana's answer to that grief lands the whole conversation. Come sit at the table. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 38m 58s | ||||||
| 7/28/26 |  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 MĂźnster and now works at Emory Law School. Vattimo is not the household philosopher he should be in English, and this book fixes that. Farmer weaves the biography I did not know — five-year-old Vattimo under British bombs in Turin, his Calabrian accent he could not shake, his flight from a Red Brigades hit list of his own former students, his letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis, his friendship with Umberto Eco — into the four big ideas that make Vattimo essential right now. What weak thought actually is. Why metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. Why secularization is the fulfillment of Christianity, not its enemy. And why hermeneutic communism is what the anti-authoritarian imagination needs. One of the most fun conversations I have had all summer. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Thomas Jared Farmer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law, where he works with John Witte on the intersection of philosophical hermeneutics and legal theory. He completed his MA in philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University (studying with Ingolf Dalferth and the late Anselm Min) and his PhD at the University of MĂźnster in Germany under Hans-Peter Grosshans. He grew up in the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in upstate South Carolina. His new book is Gianni Vattimo: Philosopher, Communist, Catholic, Nihilist (Columbia University Press, 2025) — the definitive English-language intellectual biography of Vattimo. JOIN OUR OPEN ONLINE CLASS: The Empire Christ Couldn’t Keep Ever notice how Christian nationalism gets talked about like it's some bizarre new glitch in the faith? It isn't — it's a 2,000-year-old arrangement wearing new clothes, and once you see how the pattern works, you can also spot the Christ who keeps slipping free of it. Join theologian Joerg Rieger and Tripp Fuller for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, a free six-week online class tracing the holy alliances, imperial creeds, and stubborn resistance that have shaped Christianity from Paul to the present. You'll get six lectures from Joerg, six live Q&As, weekly readings from his book Christ and Empire, and a community of fellow troublemakers thinking it through together. It's free to join, every session is recorded, and it kicks off Thursday, August 27. Grab your spot at HomebrewedClasses.com. This podcast is a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Homebrewed Christianity â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â production. 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Join over 75,000 other people by joining our â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Substack - Process This!â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Get instant access to over 50 classes at â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â www.TheologyClass.comâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â Follow the podcast, drop a reviewâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â , send â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â feedback/questionsâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â or become a â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â member of the HBC Communityâ â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 46m 48s | ||||||
| 7/24/26 |  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 intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what political theology actually is. Luke Bretherton and Vincent Lloyd — two of the three co-authors of a genuinely important new Columbia University Press book, What Is Political Theology? — sat down with me to explain what they had done. The book itself models the thing it argues for: three scholars from three disciplines refusing to synthesize their differences and instead sitting inside the productive tension. In one hour we cover why the standard Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered, what from above and from below are actually good for, why secularism is not a neutral space but an ideology, what Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures accidentally reveal, why Richard Dawkins now identifies as a cultural Christian, and what the difference between apophatic and cataphatic is currently doing to Luke's and Vincent's friendship. Live disagreement, on tape. The nice version. You can watch the video on YouTube Dr. Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, one of the most senior chairs in British theology, appointed by the Crown. Previously, he was Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke Divinity School. An ordained Church of England priest. Dr. Vincent W. Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, and an editor of the journal Political Theology. The book at the center of this conversation is What Is Political Theology?, co-authored with Dr. Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto, whose chapter offers an anthropological political theology out of her research on global Catholicism, migration, and the U.S./Canada borderlands. Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0. This podcast is a Homebrewed Christianity production. Follow the Homebrewed Christianity, Theology Nerd Throwdown, & The Rise of Bonhoeffer podcasts for more theological goodness for your earbuds. Join over 75,000 other people by joining our Substack - Process This! Get instant access to over 50 classes at www.TheologyClass.com Follow the podcast, drop a review, send feedback/questions or become a member of the HBC Community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices | 1h 27m 52s | ||||||
| 7/16/26 | biblical interpretationwomen in ministry+4 | Jennifer Garcia Bashaw | Theology Beer CampFaith at 250+2 | — | Al Mohlerbiblical interpretation+6 | — | 1h 05m 09s | ||
| 7/12/26 | Christian nationalismAmerican history+4 | Corey WalkerBill Leonard | Wake Forest Divinity SchoolWinter in America | — | Christian nationalismdemocracy+7 | — | 1h 32m 47s | ||
| 7/7/26 | theologyPauline interpretation+4 | Ilia Delio | Catholic ChurchThe Future of Religion | — | Christsalvation+6 | — | 58m 52s | ||
| 7/4/26 | American historyBlack Christian tradition+5 | Cornel West | Theology Beer Camp | — | Cornel WestTheology Beer Camp+8 | — | 1h 03m 15s | ||
| 7/2/26 | American religionmainline denominations+5 | Diana Butler Bass | Theology SummitMorning Joe+4 | America | American religionmainline denominations+8 | — | 1h 31m 12s | ||
| 7/1/26 | natural-supernatural binaryfaith and supernaturalism+3 | Ilia Delio | Franciscan Sister of Washington, DCThe Future of Religion+8 | — | modernityfaith+5 | — | 1h 19m 04s | ||
| 6/29/26 | eschatologypublic theology+4 | Scott Paeth | Edgebrook Community ChurchChristianity and Identity+2 | DePaul UniversityChicago | eschatologypublic theology+7 | — | 1h 51m 29s | ||
| 6/26/26 | American historyfaith+4 | Diana Butler Bass | TheologySummit.comUnsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250+1 | — | America at 250faith communities+5 | — | 1h 46m 59s | ||
| 6/25/26 | psychological scienceChristian theology+4 | Pam King | Thrive CenterFuller Theological Seminary | — | THRIVEreciprocating self+4 | — | 1h 30m 17s | ||
| 6/22/26 | AI and spiritualitycognitive sovereignty+5 | Robert Wright | The New York TimesSimon & Schuster+5 | — | AIspirituality+7 | — | 1h 37m 51s | ||
| 6/9/26 | monotheismAxial Age+4 | Ilia Delio | Franciscan Sister of Washington, DCPsalm 82 | Germany | monotheismAxial Age+5 | — | 1h 26m 30s | ||
| 6/2/26 | ritualsbeliefs+4 | Ilia Delio | The Future of ReligionYouTube+1 | — | religionrituals+7 | — | 1h 20m 58s | ||
| 5/30/26 | AI and religionneuroscience+3 | Ilia Delio | Pope Leo XIVHomebrewed Christianity | — | AIreligion+5 | — | 1h 29m 42s | ||
| 5/28/26 | wealthpoverty+5 | Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty | Union Presbyterian SeminaryPC(USA)+2 | — | Christianitytheology+5 | — | 1h 21m 21s | ||
| 5/25/26 | preachingclergy challenges+4 | Leah Schade | Lexington Theological SeminaryPreaching and Social Issues: Tools and Tactics for Empowering Your Prophetic Voice+1 | — | preachingclergy+5 | — | 1h 09m 41s | ||
| 5/23/26 | TheologyBlack theology+4 | Gary Dorrien | HomebrewedClasses.com | — | Theology for TroublemakersResurrection Hope+4 | — | 1h 26m 35s | ||
| 5/18/26 | faithreligion+4 | Ilia Delio | SubstackProcess This | — | faithbelief+5 | — | 23m 51s | ||
| 5/16/26 | Black TheologyTheology for Troublemakers+5 | Gary DorrienCharlene Sinclair | Negro churchNCBC+1 | Detroit | James ConeBlack Theology+8 | — | 1h 26m 08s | ||
| 5/15/26 | idolatrychurch+4 | Andrew Root | Counting CrowsBaal and the Gods of More+1 | Berlin | idolatryfertility god+6 | — | 1h 38m 50s | ||
| 5/12/26 | binge-watchingspiritual formation+5 | — | The Disappearance of Rituals | — | binge-watchingspiritual formation+7 | — | 14m 51s | ||
| 5/4/26 | friendshipfaith+5 | Miroslav VolfChristian Wiman | Glimmerings | — | faithgrace+5 | — | 1h 11m 32s | ||
| 5/2/26 | Christian social ethicstheological formation+4 | Gary Dorrien | Union SeminaryAnglican+10 | — | Christian ethicstheology+6 | — | 1h 27m 03s | ||
| 4/28/26 | apocalyptic theologyresurrection+5 | — | The Last of UsLong, Long Time | — | Cornell Westapocalypse+7 | — | 24m 53s | ||
| 4/26/26 | Reinhold NiebuhrChristian realism+4 | Gary Dorrien | UnionBethel Church+4 | — | NiebuhrDorrien+5 | — | 1h 30m 06s | ||
| 4/22/26 | nonviolencemetaphysical revelation+4 | — | Anabaptist Mennonite Centre at Trinity Western UniversityProcess This | — | nonviolenceChristianity+6 | Humanitas | 39m 52s | ||
| 4/20/26 | Black Social GospelChristian social ethics+5 | Gary Dorrien | Union SeminaryTheology for Troublemakers | — | Black Social GospelIda B. Wells+5 | — | 1h 14m 59s | ||
| 4/17/26 | just war theoryChristian ethics+5 | Kevin Carnahan | Journal of the Society of Christian EthicsCentral Methodist University | — | just war theoryChristian ethics+5 | — | 2h 10m 35s | ||
| 4/16/26 | religion newschurch history+5 | Diana Butler Bass | PentagonAmerican Christianity | — | TrumpPope+7 | — | 1h 28m 51s | ||
| 4/15/26 | philosophyhuman experience+5 | — | — | — | philosophyhuman experience+5 | — | 21m 44s | ||
| 4/13/26 | Christian social ethicsAmerican populism+3 | Gary DorrienAaron Stauffer | Democratic PartyNAFTA+1 | Michigan | Christian ethicssocial justice+3 | — | 1h 22m 00s | ||
| 4/6/26 | systematic theologylove+5 | Thomas Jay Oord | Systematic Theology of Love, Volume OneGino-Theology | — | systematic theologylove+6 | — | 1h 35m 21s | ||
| 4/2/26 | Christian doctrinetheology+4 | Philip Clayton | ClaremontYale | — | Christianitytheology+7 | — | 1h 04m 27s | ||
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Chart history for Homebrewed Christianity
Peaked at #101 in Finland, currently #101 in Finland.
| Market | Genre | Peak | Current | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finland | — | #101 | #101 | — |
| United Kingdom | — | #123 | #123 | — |
| Norway | — | #195 | #195 | — |
Chart Positions
3 placements across 3 markets.
Chart Positions
3 placements across 3 markets.