Crackers and Grape Juice

“Both sides are thinking that some how or another getting this or that party elected is good for Christians. I think my point of view is neither side is good for Christians. Because effectively they have become idolatrous powers that christians are looking to for salvation”

What is Post-Liberalism?
What does "apocalyptic" mean?
How is justice central to Paul's understanding of the Gospel?

Our guest today is Dr. Douglas Harink, a theologian whose work has been important to me for a while now and who intersects with many of our favorite folks like Stanley Hauerwas, Karl Barth, and Fleming Rutledge.

Douglas Harink (PhD, University of St. Michael's College) is professor of theology at The King's University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of Paul Among the Postliberals and 1 & 2 Peter in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. He is also the editor of Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

Friend of the podcast and commentator at The Dispatch, David French, has a new book out that couldn't be more timely and bracing. It's called Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. As a preview, here's a conversation Teer and Jason had with David when Divided We Fall was being written.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

Our guest today is David Gushee, whose new book is "After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity."

Dr. David P. Gushee (BA, College of William & Mary; Master of Divinity, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy, Union Theological Seminary in New York) is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, where he has served for eleven years.

Widely regarded as one of the world's leading Christian ethicists, he is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 25 books and approximately 150 book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. His most notable books include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, Still Christian, Moral Leadership for a Divided Age, and the new After Evangelicalism.

Dr. Gushee was elected by his peers to serve as President of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, a very rare combination for any religion scholar.

A devoted teacher, Professor Gushee offers courses to seminary students at Mercer's McAfee School of Theology, and to college students in Macon. Over a busy 27-year career, he has written opinion pieces or given interviews to almost all major national and religion media outlets in the United States and many around the world. He has also been heavily involved in numerous activist efforts for peace, justice, human dignity, and the integrity of God's creation, most notably in addressing torture, climate change, and the continued harm being inflicted on LGBTQ persons by Christian churches and families.

Along with his friend Jeremy Hall, David runs a popular podcast called "Kingdom Ethics."

Dr. Gushee and his beloved wife Jeanie live in Atlanta, where they are happily surrounded by four generations of family members, including his father, sister, three children, and two grandchildren.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

"Saints and sinners, all jumbled up together." That's the genius of Johnny Cash, and that's what the gospel is ultimately all about.

Johnny Cash sang about and for people on the margins. He famously played concerts in prisons, where he sang both murder ballads and gospel tunes in the same set. It's this juxtaposition between light and dark, writes Richard Beck, that makes Cash one of the most authentic theologians in memory.

In Trains, Jesus, and Murder, Beck explores the theology of Johnny Cash by investigating a dozen of Cash's songs. In reflecting on Cash's lyrics, and the passion with which he sang them, we gain a deeper understanding of the enduring faith of the Man in Black.

Jason and Johanna talk with out latest guest, Richard Beck, who is an award-winning author, speaker, blogger and Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University. Every Monday Richard leads a bible study for fifty inmates at the maximum security French-Robertson unit. And Monday-Friday on his popular blog Experimental Theology Richard will spend enormous amounts of time writing about the theology of Johnny Cash, the demonology of Scooby-Doo or his latest bible class on monsters.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

"In many cases, particularly in the case Wesley, teaching on sanctification leads to versions of piety that border on individual narcissism...renditions of sanctification as a process or journey of the believer moving towards ever ascending degrees of holiness, of the Christian life as defined by growth or transformation, cannot be supported by the biblical texts, all of which testify that God's work in Jesus is finished and perfect, that on account of it we are already justified AND sanctified, and that God is the one who sanctifies- God can sanctify even inanimate objects. Because of God's completed work, we are already IN Christ and on that basis, not on the basis of our growth or transformation, we are saints."

On the podcast this week, is Dr. Don Payne, Professor of Theology at Denver Theological Seminary, on his new book, Already Sanctified: A Theology of the Christian Life in Light of God's Completed Work.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

More than half of American adults, including 30% of evangelicals, say Jesus isn’t God but most agree He was a great teacher, according to results from the 2020 State of Theology survey. So, back on the podcast is our friend, Ken Jones, to talk about the importance of catechesis in the Church! Along the way, Ken talks about how to equip Christians for civic engagement without the Church becoming partisan and why otherwise conservative African American Christians still vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates ("Because I'm free").

Ken Jones is the Pastor of Glendale Baptist Church in Miami Florida. He's the current host of the Saints and Sinners podcast and a former cohost of the famed White Horse Inn radio broadcast.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

""God is love," Who's he kidding?"

Fritz Bauerschmidt is a Catholic deacon and a professor of Theology at Loyola University in Baltimore. His newest book, in the tradition of Lewis and Chesterton, is a treasure.

“God is love is the radical claim of Christianity,” writes Frederick Bauerschmidt at the beginning of this little meditation on the essentials of Christian faith. Throughout The Love That Is God, Bauerschmidt goes to work breathing life back into that claim, drawing from Scripture, great Christian and non-Christian writers of the past, and his own lived experience to show just how countercultural and subversive Christianity is actually meant to be.

(Fritz) Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He holds a BA from the University of the South (1984), an MAR from Yale Divinity School (1989) and a PhD from Duke University (1996). He has worked in a seafood processing plant in Alaska, hitchhiked from British Columbia to east Tennessee, and once slept under a bridge in Germany. In more recent years he has led a quite life.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

In between weeks when the DNC and the RNC will showcase two divergent portraits of Christianity in America, our guest is filmmaker Martin Doblmeier. The founder and CEO of Journey Films, Martin's latest documentary is Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story.

We talk to Martin about Day, the blues, Cornell West, and what its like making a film with President Jed Bartlett.

How to describe Dorothy Day? Grandmother, anarchist, prophet, journalist, pacifist, saint? The FBI once considered her a threat to national security. Now the Catholic Church is considering her for sainthood.

REVOLUTION OF THE HEART: The Dorothy Day Story profiles one of the most extraordinary and courageous women in American history. She was co-founder (along with Peter Maurin) of the Catholic Worker Movement that began as a newspaper to expose rampant injustices during the Great Depression. It soon expanded to become a network of houses of hospitality to welcome the poor and destitute.

Over the years, Dorothy Day developed her understanding of how to follow the Biblical challenge to be “peacemakers” by resisting all forms of military intervention. She protested America’s involvement in World War II and was severely criticized. Day was arrested multiple times for protesting America’s nuclear buildup and she led nationwide resistance against the war in Vietnam.

Now nearly a century after they began, the number of Catholic Worker houses continues to grow and the newspaper is still speaking truth to power.

REVOLUTION OF THE HEART includes rare archival photographs and film footage plus interviews with actor/activist Martin Sheen, public theologian Cornel West, popular author Joan Chittister, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and many others.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe

Jamie Howison struck up an unlikely friendship with the irascible Robert Farrar Capon just before Capon's death, and he's on the podcast to talk about it, ministry, Cornel West, and John Coltrane.

https://mbird.com/2018/04/the-man-who-ate-with-capon/

Jamie Howison is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada and the founding pastoral leader of saint benedict's table in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His most recent book is I Will Not Be Shaken: a songwriter’s journey through the Psalms (Signpost, 2015), co-authored with Steve Bell. His book God’s Mind in that Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane (Cascade, 2012) had its genesis in an essay written for the Collegeville Institute summer 2008 writing workshop, Writing and the Pastoral Life, with much of the book’s first draft written during a short-term residency at the Collegeville Institute in 2011. Jamie also participated in summer writing workshops in 2012 and 2015, and completed short-term residencies in 2009 and 2014.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit crackersnjuice.substack.com/subscribe