Homebrewed Christianity Podcast

In this audio essay from my SubStack ⁠,Process This,⁠ I take Stephen Miller's claim that the "real world" is governed by strength and force and use it as a window into something much bigger than one political figure—a diagnosis of the soul of America. Drawing on the thesis Tom Holland developed in ⁠Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World⁠, Reinhold Niebuhr's ⁠The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness⁠, and the Black prophetic tradition of King and West, traced by Gary Dorrien in his ⁠3 volume history of the Black Social Gospel movement, ⁠I argue that what we're witnessing isn't actually Christian nationalism triumphing—it's post-Christian nationalism wearing Christian clothes. The cross is still everywhere, but the crucified one has been removed, and what's left is just Rome again: empire, domination, and the ancient lie that might makes right. But here's where it gets really interesting—Niebuhr doesn't let progressives off the hook either, naming them as "children of light" who kept

In this first live Q&A of our Lent 2025 series ⁠Jesus in Galilee⁠, Dom and I work through 35 questions from the more than 2,000 people who have joined the class — and true to form, Dom tries to honor every single one of them. The conversation ranges from the silver cups of Boscoreale to the Gulf of Mexico, from Josephus's gritted-teeth defense of Judaism to what a State of the Union address might look like if Jesus gave it tonight. Dom argues that the apocalyptic imagination is, bluntly, a loss of faith; that coinage was the only real mass media of antiquity; that nonviolent resistance was invented — not borrowed — in first-century Judea; and that if you want to understand what an autocrat is planning, read very carefully what the autocrat accuses his opponents of. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of conversation I look forward to all year. ⁠If you want in on the rest of the series — the lectures, the live Q&As, and the full archive — head to CrossanClass.com⁠. ⁠You can WATCH the conversation YouTube⁠

My buddy Andrew Davis is back on the pod, and this time we're talking about aliens — yes, that kind. Andrew is a process philosopher who's been publishing serious academic work in astrobiology, and with Obama casually confirming UFOs are real, the Age of Disclosure documentary making waves, and Spielberg's Disclosure Day film on the way, it felt like the right time to ask: how does a Whiteheadian process thinker engage the question of extraterrestrial life? Turns out, with a lot more philosophical firepower than you'd expect. We dig into Andrew's critical engagement with Steven Dick's cosmo-theology and why he thinks Dick is right that humanity is cosmologically peripheral but wrong to draw the metaphysical conclusion that we're therefore insignificant — because we're an anthropo-cosmic expression of what this universe is doing, not an accident in it. Andrew introduces his concept of exo-axiology (the philosophical exploration of value beyond Earth), and we get into why Whitehead's philosophy of organism flip

Philosopher and religion scholar Tad DeLay (author of Future of Denial) drops a guest essay on us this week, and it's a barn-burner. Tad brings together Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, Lacan, Althusser, and Adorno — yeah, the whole squad — to lay out a series of theses on how reactionary consciousness actually works, from repressed sexuality to theological cover stories for raw materialism. He makes the case that white evangelicalism is basically a half-century-old improvisation around whiteness and anticommunism, and that Trumpism is its perfected form — an ecumenical fascism where confessing the dear leader functions like a sinner's prayer. Along the way he unpacks Frank Wilhoit's devastating one-line definition of conservatism, explains why charging evangelicals with hypocrisy is a category error (they simply don't care what they believe), and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to show how shame, guilt, and anxiety keep the whole machine running. Fair warning: Tad doesn't let liberals off the hook either — the e

We lost a giant. Reverend Jesse Jackson has passed away, and I wanted to share this conversation we had with him back during lockdown in 2020 as part of the Black Theology reading group Adam Clark and I were running with over 3,000 people. We were joined by Grace Ji-Sun Kim, who edited a collection of Jackson's sermons and speeches called Keeping Hope Alive, and the Reverend himself showed up and gave us a masterclass in what it looks like when theology breaks out of its bubble — and that bubble image is the thing that'll stick with you. Jackson talked about growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, where the entire Black community lived behind walls that white people set up for exploitation, and how your theology can either reinforce the bubble or blow it apart. He drew a sharp line between piety — behaving, adjusting, staying safe — and power, which is what happens when you follow a Jesus who challenges domination systems instead of one who follows you to the back of the bus. He gave us the real history of

The conflict between science and religion? Turns out it's mostly a myth perpetuated by a handful of really loud voices on both sides. Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund has spent 15 years using actual social science to study what scientists and religious people really think about each other, and the results are surprising: nearly half of elite scientists maintain religious commitments, most aren't hostile to faith communities, and there are way more varieties of atheism than you'd think (including "religious atheists" who attend church and pray). We dive into her research on "spiritual entrepreneurs," the eight shared values between science and religion (yeah, doubt is on the list for both), what went wrong during COVID, and why the science-religion conflict narrative is particularly American and Western. Plus, we get super practical about what churches can actually do—spoiler: it starts with honoring the scientists already sitting in your pews. This conversation challenged my assumptions, gave me hope, and reminded m

My friend and filmmaker Sarey Concepción and I got to sit down with Justin Lin — yeah, that Justin Lin, the Fast and Furious guy — but this time he's not racing cars, he's exploring the too-fast-too-furious side of evangelical missions gone to the extreme. His new film Last Days tells the story of John Chau, the young American missionary who was killed trying to bring the gospel to the uncontacted Sentinelese tribe off the coast of India. If you remember, two years ago we screened the documentary about this story at Theology Beer Camp, and this is a totally different angle — a scripted Hollywood film from an outsider to Christianity who read the news story, had the same eye-roll most of us did, and then did what good artists do: made something to understand what he couldn't dismiss. What's remarkable is that Justin took the time to get to know the diversity within evangelicalism, so you get characters ranging from the hardcore adventure missionaries who are basically Carmen San Diego with Bibles, to John's im

I don't remember who first told me to read Yanis Varoufakis's Techno-Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, but whoever you are—thank you and also how dare you. This book broke something in my brain, in that good way where you realize the map you've been using doesn't match the territory anymore and now you have to rethink everything. Varoufakis isn't a theologian, but reading him felt like encountering a prophetic voice—someone naming the powers and principalities of our moment with a clarity that made me uncomfortable in all the right ways. So what you're about to read isn't exactly a book review. It's more like the stuff that ran through my head while I was reading—the connections I couldn't stop making to our faith, our politics, our souls. I kept thinking about Paul's language of powers and principalities. I kept thinking about the psalmist's warning against idols. I kept thinking about Jesus flipping tables in the temple, and wondering what he'd do with an algorithm. Varoufakis gave me a new vocabulary for

This is an audio essay from my Substack, Process This. Look, I wasn't planning to write 5,000 words on Steve Bannon, but then he goes on his podcast and announces that ICE—the same agency that just shot two American citizens in Minneapolis—is going to "surround the polls" in November, and I couldn't help myself. So I went back to Reinhold Niebuhr's 1944 book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, where he divided the political world into naive idealists who think reason and dialogue will save us, and moral cynics who understand power but recognize no law beyond their own will. Turns out Niebuhr basically wrote Bannon's biography eighty years early. This essay traces how Bannon evolved from "flooding the zone with shit" to proposing armed federal agents at polling places—and why liberals kept bringing fact-checks to a knife fight. Niebuhr called the children of darkness "wise" because they understand self-interest, but he also called them "evil" because they serve no good beyond domination. The

What happens when our obsession with being better than everyone else destroys both who we are and how we relate to each other? Dr. Miroslav Volf joins us to talk about his new book The Cost of Ambition and why America's comparison culture, achievement addiction, and hardening tribal identities are setting us up for something dangerous. Volf witnessed neighbors turn on neighbors during the Yugoslav wars, and he's seeing the warning signs again—right here, right now. We dive into how striving for superiority traps us in an unstable cycle of pride and inferiority, why our worth can't be based on achievement, and what it means to trust in our naked humanity as the site of God's gift rather than our endless performance metrics. From social media's algorithmic comparison engines to the terror of trusting Jesus to raise our kids, this conversation cuts deep into the spiritual crisis of modern life and points toward a different way—one grounded in the self-giving love of Christ rather than the desperate scramble to s

Friends, this week we're diving into something that's been eating at me for a while now—how the architects of Christian nationalism have had the audacity to claim Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. I'm talking about Project 2025 invoking "costly grace" as if Bonhoeffer wasn't writing about them. Here's the thing: when Bonhoeffer penned those famous words in 1937, he wasn't crafting a devotional for suburban book clubs—he was running an illegal seminary under Nazi surveillance, training pastors who were forfeiting their careers, their pensions, and their safety to follow Jesus instead of the Führer. The German Christians of his day fused faith with national identity, blessed political power, and demanded loyalty to a strongman who promised to make their country great again. Sound familiar? The brutal irony is that those who now quote Bonhoeffer are functionally aligned with the very forces he resisted—they're the German Christians quoting the Confessing Church, and that's about as theologically obtuse as

So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible - Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we're a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as "kin-dom" - returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hund

Okay, so you know that bone-deep exhaustion you feel? That sense that no matter how hard you run, you're still falling behind? What if I told you that's not a personal failure—it's a structural trap? German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has been asking why modern life feels like a whirlpool we can't escape, and his diagnosis is devastating: our growth economy requires our exhaustion. It's a feature, not a bug. But here's where it gets good for us theology nerds—Rosa's solution isn't just slowing down. It's something he calls resonance, and when you hear him describe it, you're gonna think, "Wait, that sounds like prayer. That sounds like what church is supposed to be." This essay is my attempt to lay out Rosa's big ideas and why I think every person of faith should be paying attention to this guy. We're reading his new book Time and World with Matt Segall this February, so consider this your on-ramp and feel the lure. If you want to join the Rosa reading group this February, become a member of the ⁠⁠Process This⁠

In this preview for our upcoming Lent class, Jesus in Galilee, John Dominic Crossan dives into what he calls "A Tale of Two Gods"—Caesar and Christ. He takes on C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma (Lord, Lunatic, or Liar) and asks the question Lewis never considered: what if there were two contemporary claimants to divinity? Because there were. Before Jesus ever showed up, Caesar Augustus was already being called Son of God, Savior of the World, and Lord. Dom walks us through the Battle of Actium and how Octavian's victory became the foundation for a theology of peace through violent victory—and then sets that against the Jesus movement's counter-claim: peace through distributive justice. It's not just ancient history either; as our live audience pointed out, we're watching the "normalcy of civilization" play out in real time right now. The big question Dom leaves us with is whether our species is sustainable if we keep betting on escalatory violence. Heavy stuff, but exactly the kind of thing we'll be unpacking tog

David Congdon came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit, and man, did we get into it. We're unpacking what liberalism actually means - not the Fox News version or the MSNBC version, but the philosophical tradition that emerged because people were literally killing each other over interpretations of the Eucharist after the Reformation. David makes this case for why we need to rejuvenate liberalism as a framework for dealing with diversity, because the postliberals basically want to recreate medieval Christendom through authoritarian power, which is... problematic. We talked about historical amnesia, why privatizing religion isn't the same as excluding it from public life, how both the left and right misunderstand what liberalism offers, and why we can't just abandon institutions even when they're flawed. Plus David schooled me on what he's learned spending eight years working in political theory and philosophy, which has given him a way more nuanced view than most theologians have

What is up, Theology Nerds! This week I'm joined by my buddy Matthew Segall from the Footnotes to Plato Substack to announce something exciting: we're doing a joint reading group on Hartmut Rosa's new book Time and World. Rosa's a German sociologist who does big-picture thinking—like old school "let me tell you about modernity" stuff—and his work resonates deeply with process philosophy. His diagnosis? We're stuck in what he calls a frenetic standstill—exhausted, burnt out, running faster just to stay in place. I gave Matt my above-ground pool whirlpool metaphor: we're all running in circles, and if you stop, you get pulled under. Modernity promises us the good life through control—making everything available, accessible, attainable—but the cost is a mute world and the birth of monsters. Rosa's antidote isn't slowing down; it's resonance—a mode of relationship where we're genuinely touched, we respond, we're transformed, and we accept it's all gloriously uncontrollable. Process folks will eat this up: it's Wh

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ⁠⁠You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay⁠.⁠ I grew up as a Baptist church planter's kid, and the church gave me everything that matters most to me—my faith, my love of Scripture, my relationship with Jesus. But for over two decades now, I've watched the tradition that formed me transform into something I barely recognize. In this essay, I explore the concept of "sequential complicity"—how small, seemingly reasonable compromises lock communities into escalating patterns of moral accommodation. Using research on how ordinary German Christians became bystanders during the Nazi era, I trace a similar pattern in white American evangelicalism: from the real origins of the Religious Right in the 1970s (hint: it wasn't abortion), through Reagan, through the Iraq War, and into the Trump era. The data is stark—white evangelicals have undergone the most dramatic ethical shift of any religious group in modern polling history. And the most devout ch

Marvin Wickware came on to talk about his lecture from the Democracy in Tension summit and his book Loving Through Enmity, and we got into some really beautiful and difficult territory. Marvin's story is powerful - raised by an interracial couple in 1980s Indiana who were treated terribly by churches, converted through evangelical campus ministry, ended up at Union studying with James Cone, and that's where his faith, his values, and his intellectual work all clicked together. We talked about need-based love as an ethical framework, how both democracy and Christianity are aspirational projects that we're always falling short of, and how to navigate the gap between ideals and reality without either abandoning the dream or using it to mask our failures. Marvin shared about being a black theologian in predominantly white mainline spaces, the importance of having people on your side who can tell you you're not crazy, and how to practice love toward enemies without being naive about power and harm. It's the kind o

This is an audio essay from my SubStack, Process This. ⁠You can head over here to read or watch the entire essay.⁠ In this episode, we explore Paul Tillich's largely forgotten 1933 work The Socialist Decision, written as Hitler rose to power and costing Tillich his professorship and homeland. Here, I explore what it reveals about the current crisis of American Christianity. Tillich argued that authentic human existence requires holding two roots in tension: the "powers of origin" (belonging, tradition, community) and the "prophetic demand" (justice, critique, openness to the stranger). When we collapse into one or the other, we get either authoritarian tribalism or rootless abstraction, and Tillich saw both failures at work in Weimar Germany. The parallels to our moment are striking: white Christian nationalism offers powerful symbols of belonging without prophetic self-criticism, while progressive Christianity has often provided critique without the embodied community and sacred symbols that move the human

In this first session of "The Rise of the Nones" online class, I am joined by Ryan Burge, Tony Jones, and Sarah Lane Ritchie to introduce findings from the largest survey ever conducted on religiously unaffiliated Americans—over 15,000 participants. The research, funded by the John Templeton Foundation's Spiritual Yearning Research Initiative, used machine learning to identify four distinct categories of "Nones": NINOs (Nones In Name Only, who are actually quite religious), Spiritual But Not Religious (the largest group), the Disengaged (content secular individuals far from any religious or spiritual practice), and Zealous Secularists (a small but vocal group actively encouraging others to leave religion). The conversation explores what these categories reveal about American religious identity, why traditional survey methods may be undercounting Christians, and the surprising finding that many "happy atheists" report life satisfaction comparable to religious Americans. Join us for the remaining sessions of th