Christianity After Deconstruction: Cabernet and Pray

In part three of our Job in Exile series, we sit with something in the book of Job that most of us were trained to read right past. By chapter three, the patient, pious Job we love to quote is gone. He breaks a week of silence, curses the day of his birth, and starts to notice the suffering of a world he had been too comfortable to see. His own eviction gave him new eyes. And yet the most righteous man in the East owned people the entire time, and even after admitting to God that his slaves were his equals in creation, he kept them enslaved. Leaning on Dr. David Gushee's forthcoming book and a letter Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote at Christmas 1942, I keep circling a question I can't leave safely in the ancient world. What am I still normalizing on behalf of the people who suffer, and where does my empathy quietly hit its ceiling?

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/AdDm9VSK94Q

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

My guest John Doyle has spent forty years paying attention to the moments most of us file away and never mention out loud. The vision. The voice. The thing that grabbed him when no one was there. He holds these stories loosely, with more humility than certainty, which is what makes them worth sitting with. And it opens up the question I keep circling with people who've had a moment like this: how do you tell a real encounter with God from your own brain handing you exactly what you wanted to hear? We leave the door open to mystery rather than trying to land this cleanly. Pour a glass and sit with this one.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/kethXyx5d-E 

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One spot left for the Wine and Whiskey guys' trip. Find out more here: https://communionwineco.com/events/wine-and-whiskey/ 

My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

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Job's friends showed up, tore their robes, and then said nothing for seven days straight. It's easy to rush past that on the way to the arguments that come later, where these three men get almost everything wrong. But for one week, before any of that, they get one thing exactly right. They sit down in the dung heap next to their ruined friend, and they stay. In part two of the Job in Exile series, Jeremy sits with the two kinds of silence we hand each other when life comes apart. There's the silence of presence, the friend who gets on a plane and shows up at your door with no answers and no agenda, just himself. And there's the silence of absence, the community that goes quiet the moment your questions get too big for the room, the people who used to reach out every week and now say nothing at all. If you've ever stepped back from a church and waited for someone, anyone, to notice, you already know how loud that second silence can get. So pour a glass, let it slow you down, and sit with us in Job 2. You'll leave with a question: which silence have you been handed, and which one will you hand to the people still sitting in their own pain?

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/6-zXx_-fazI

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Job had it all. Seven thousand sheep, ten children, and the title of richest man in the entire region, right up until the afternoon he sat scraping his skin with a piece of broken pottery on a dung heap outside of town. In part one of a new eight-week series, Jeremy pours a glass of Burgundy and works through Job 1-2:10, where a blameless man moves from the penthouse to the outhouse and his whole community quietly reclassifies him. If you have ever fallen out of the center of something and watched the invitations stop coming, or heard a sentence that sounded like care but landed like a verdict, you already know this terrain. The book of Job refuses the tidy answer, and so does this episode. Underneath the story sits a question about God's own character: what kind of God can be incited to harm someone who faithfully follows God, and can we still trust that God when the diagnosis lands on us?

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/vkVT_iI6TVw 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Every civilization in history put a temple at its center. America was the first to try to build a nation without one, and Wes Crawford argues that we couldn't stand the empty space, so we made the country itself sacred. The church historian and author of One Nation Over God walks through how the Constitution became scripture, how kneeling during an anthem became sacrilege, and how voting the wrong way became something close to heresy. Wes points toward a different way of loving a country, the kind that lets you critique it from the inside, the way John Lewis did crossing the bridge at Selma. He'll also tell you about the finest glass of wine he ever had, which he never actually drank. If you've felt the pull of American faith and never had words for what was happening, this conversation hands them to you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/MfrBF0wjEAk 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

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Links: 

Keith Giles spent two years digging through gospels that didn't make the cut, the ones buried in a jar in the Egyptian desert in 1945 alongside fifty other texts the church decided not to count. On this episode, Jeremy pours a Bordeaux blend and sits down with the author of the Quantum Gospel series to ask what it means that the people who assembled the New Testament were doing canon math with politics in the room. They get into the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the idea that the Spirit might still be speaking through novels, sunsets, and Alanis Morissette songs, whether the canon ever reopens or not. Jeremy calls Keith a heretic in the first five minutes. By the end, you might wonder if that's just another word for someone who kept reading.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/wby8uEafFKQ

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

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Links for Keith:

Lauren Peiser has spent time making wine in Italy, working at a seminary, and writing a Substack that will make you use your imagination. In this episode, she brings a concept called "wild magic," the kind of transformation that can't be packaged into a sermon or a stage talk. She talks about Mary not as the untouched ideal of purity culture but as someone who chose to birth Christ in the dirt, in relationship, in the wild. She talks about Jesus not as the individual savior of white American Christianity but as a guy whose whole resurrection depended on everyone around him. And she makes the case that contamination, the bacteria, the yeast, the mess, the people who ruin your clean theological identity, is exactly what makes anything worth drinking. If your faith reconstruction is still mostly happening in your head, Lauren is here to remind you there's a whole body attached.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/MRbSfOcRenw 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

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Lauren's Substack: https://laurenaltimont.substack.com/ 

What do saints, sinners, and zombies have in common? In this episode, Jeremy sits down with author Matthew DiStefano to talk about his book on The Last of Us, the video game that somehow became one of the most philosophically serious explorations of what it means to be human. This conversation goes places you won't see coming: the MLM structure of Christian nationalism, why empathy is more dangerous than we admit, why our morality is less about our convictions and more about our context, and what it feels like to play a character you hate, only to discover you've started rooting for them. You don't need to be a gamer. You need to be someone who's ever wondered what you'd actually do when the world falls apart.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/tGczdlIaiPw 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Ben introduces the idea of the "feral spirit," a way of understanding spiritual encounter that doesn't require institutional scaffolding to be real. He talks about what happens when churches try to manufacture the Spirit's presence instead of simply making space for it, the difference between rituals that help us remember and rituals that help us control, and why a thousand dolphins playing in the ocean off Santa Barbara is actually a decent theology of joy. There's poetry, there's a 26-year-old Bordeaux, there's Walter Brueggemann on the freedom of God, and somehow it all holds together. If you've ever felt like the Spirit left the building long before you did, this one is for you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/xWAjix_cyVo 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Join us for the Wine and Whiskey trip in Oregon on September 25-27: https://communionwineco.com/events/wine-and-whiskey/ 

What do you do when the very people who introduced you to Jesus can no longer recognize the Jesus your faith has led you to? C.E. Jarnagin is a priest, researcher, and author who's asking that exact question in his new book The Congruent Life, and he brings a rare combination of Anglican liturgy, pastoral honesty, and zero tolerance for religious veneer to the conversation. In this episode, Jeremy and Chad work through what it looks like to hold your full humanity inside a faith community, why Christian nationalism and the Jesus of the Gospels are not remotely the same, and how a small church of 160 people (including a dozen former pastors) might actually be doing something the megachurch model couldn't. 

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/uTzs1Mo9F2c 

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in 

Links: