Hidden Gems: How deconstruction can help us find deeper meaning

For most churches these days, the Old Testament is a collection of exciting and shocking stories for kids’ Bible class. When we’re older, we assume we’ve learned what the stories have to teach us and we hardly ever revisit them from an adult perspective. An unexpected upside of deconstruction can be that, when we DO re-think these OT stories, there are layers upon layers of meaning.

Intro

Story of Uzzah

Why Uzzah?

Why tear things down?

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Breaking the Belief Box: How the protective walls we’ve built can hurt more than help

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Sermons We Hear: What are American Christians hearing from the pulpit?

We discuss a recent study about the content, length, and focus of sermons preached in American churches these days. Which churches talk about what? What does that say about them? What can we learn from the various types of sermon?

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Who Wrote It?: Digging into false claims of authorship in the Bible with Trevor Thompson

New Testament scholar Trevor Thompson joins us to discuss pseudepigraphic texts in the Bible. We talk about what they are, how they're determined, and we talk a lot about what that means for our faith in scripture and in God.

Special Guest: Trevor Thompson.

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Yay – Nathan is back! In this episode we follow up with some explanation behind the claims Steve made in the previous episode about how the Bible is not as “inerrant” as we think, although we just scratch the surface. Unfortunately, Steve breaks the rule of only one heresy per episode.

Some sources on Steve’s crazy claims: (There are many more than these, but these are all a good start/summary of the topic. Also, there are obviously many opinions on these things, so please search out and read multiple sides of the arguments)

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Steve goes solo this week for his hot take on how the American Evangelical / Fundamentalist belief in biblical inerrancy (a relatively new concept, actually) has led to the era of Trump and conspiracy theories ruling the church

Some sources on Steve’s crazy claims: (There are many more than these, but these are all a good start/summary of the topic. Also, there are obviously many opinions on these things, so please search out and read multiple sides of the arguments)

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We're taking the week off, but we wanted to announce our next book for the book club: "Faith After Doubt" by Brian McLaren

You can buy it here: https://amzn.to/39UHbZj

Music on this episode by Daniel Wheat. Check him out on Spotify!

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Doppelgänger: The faith journey of ANOTHER Steve Martin

Steve couldn’t believe it when he came across ANOTHER guy named Steven D. Martin who is ALSO a podcaster, a pastor, is passionate about social justice, and the similarities keep going. We just had to have him on the show to tell his faith story. It starts in small town Tennessee, goes through his time as a pastor, how he ended up at the Charlottesville race protests, and now running an institute for training churches to deal with our new reality.

Special Guest: Steven D. Martin.

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Book Club: “The Making of Biblical Womanhood” by Beth Allison Barr

Special Guest: Alison Buxton.

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(show notes coming soon)...

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