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The Convocation came to Theology Beer Camp, minus one sociologist. Robbie Jones picked a tux and an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences over hanging out with us in Kansas City, so his chair sat empty on stage, Passover-style. That left three historians. Diana Butler Bass, a camp veteran, hosted. Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby, at their first camp, were fresh off panels that were somehow scheduled at the same time. (We have received the complaints.)
Diana opened with a question she'd been chewing on since her conversation with Bill Leonard: what if American religion is being restructured again? Robert Wuthnow argued in 1989 that it had sorted itself into liberal and conservative political camps. All four Convocation hosts think that map is now wrong. From there it's pyramid versus table, how high-control systems turn ordinary people into enforcers, and Jemar's challenge to the deconstruction crowd: why does the reconstruction still look so segregated? Then they get practical. Can progressives build coalitions with people they don't fully agree with? What can white Christians, feeling powerless for the first time, learn from communities that have resisted state power for centuries? Jemar ends with what that takes: grief, lament, healing, and doing justice because it's right, not because you'll win.
Subscribe to the Convocation and our hosts
Join us at Theology Beer Camp 2027: Sign up at theologybeer.camp for updates on TBC 2027. You'll be the first to hear the dates and location and get pre-sale tickets at the cheapest rate.
Join me in Berlin for the Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Trip
In June 2027, Andy Root and I are leading two Rise of Bonhoeffer travel-learning weeks. The Seminar (June 12–17) reads Bonhoeffer’s sources where they were fought over — Luther in Wittenberg, Schleiermacher and Barth in Berlin, the prison letters in his own house. The Pilgrimage (June 17–22) is for pastors and faith leaders, built around Bonhoeffer as a working minister in a time of resistance. Twenty-two seats each, back to back so you can do one or both. Early bird pricing through January 31. Details and registration at www.BonhoefferTrip.com
UPCOMING ONLINE ADVENT CLASS: Tear Open the Heavens: Advent for Indifferent Strangers
Most of us are running faster just to stay in place, and the one season that asks us to wait gets swallowed by the busiest month of the year. Meanwhile, the neighbors have changed: fewer people argue with the church, and more have simply never heard the story. This Advent, Andy Root and Tripp Fuller take up Isaiah’s prayer, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” and ask what it means to pray it now. One lectionary text a week, timed to land before Sunday, with Taylor, Rosa, Han, Bonhoeffer, Luther, and Schleiermacher brought into the conversation. For pastors who need sermon fuel, readers who want to go deeper, and anyone who never learned the words.Pre-recorded lectures, live conversations based on your questions, a short weekly reading packet, and an online community. Free to join; give if you’re able. Join at homebrewedclasses.com.
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
Amazon has basically admitted some of you bailed on The Rings of Power, and they're telling you to just start at season three. Like starting Star Wars at episode four. So Nick Polk and I sounded the horn of Gondor and recorded the on-ramp: everything you need to know before season three, plus a guided tour of the inside jokes from our 26 hours of talking about the first two. This is also, officially, the Waldreg memorial and/or eschatological hope livestream. You may not know who Waldreg is. He made Mordor. We'll get to that.
Nick walks through the time-compressed Second Age: sexy Sauron as Halbrand, then as Annatar the Lord of Gifts, and Celebrimbor forging the rings and dying for it. From there we hit the show's best moves, especially how it gets Tolkien's big theme right. Every villain starts out wanting to fix something good, then reaches for a shortcut. Adar, the most morally serious character in the series, makes every orc slaughter in Middle-earth complicated. Then we make our season three predictions: a Sauron-versus-Balrog fight with Morgoth's crown, Gandalf redeeming the Dark Wizard, Sauron surrendering to Númenor, and which Númenórean most deserves to become the Nazgûl who sucks. Get me the meat and give it to me raw.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Watch along with us: Season three premieres on Prime Video Wednesday, November 11, with multiple episodes dropping at once. Nick and I will hang out on Monday nights after each drop so you have time to watch twice. Every Tolkien conversation I've done, including our interviews with John Garth, Alan Sisto, and Tom Emmanuel and the Theology Beer Camp sessions with Craig Boyd, is now on its own Tolkien Heads podcast feed. Nick's work lives at the Tolkien Pop Substack and podcast.
Nick Polk is production editor of Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, and hosts Tolkien Pop. He slid into my DMs years ago when I asked if anyone liked both theology and Tolkien, and we've been co-hosting Tolkien Heads, teaching Tolkien classes, and running the Tolkien session at Theology Beer Camp ever since.
Join me in Berlin for the Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Trip
In June 2027, Andy Root and I are leading two Rise of Bonhoeffer travel-learning weeks. The Seminar (June 12–17) reads Bonhoeffer’s sources where they were fought over — Luther in Wittenberg, Schleiermacher and Barth in Berlin, the prison letters in his own house. The Pilgrimage (June 17–22) is for pastors and faith leaders, built around Bonhoeffer as a working minister in a time of resistance. Twenty-two seats each, back to back so you can do one or both. Early bird pricing through January 31. Details and registration at www.BonhoefferTrip.com
UPCOMING ONLINE ADVENT CLASS: Tear Open the Heavens: Advent for Indifferent Strangers
Most of us are running faster just to stay in place, and the one season that asks us to wait gets swallowed by the busiest month of the year. Meanwhile, the neighbors have changed: fewer people argue with the church, and more have simply never heard the story. This Advent, Andy Root and Tripp Fuller take up Isaiah’s prayer, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” and ask what it means to pray it now. One lectionary text a week, timed to land before Sunday, with Taylor, Rosa, Han, Bonhoeffer, Luther, and Schleiermacher brought into the conversation. For pastors who need sermon fuel, readers who want to go deeper, and anyone who never learned the words.Pre-recorded lectures, live conversations based on your questions, a short weekly reading packet, and an online community. Free to join; give if you’re able. Join at homebrewedclasses.com.
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
After more than three hours of podcasting in one day, I did the smartest thing a host can do: I handed the mic to our camp director, Josh Patterson. This is nearly the whole Theology Beer Camp planning team on one call (Tony Jones was out burning a forest so it can be replanted, which is a sentence I have now said out loud). We pulled back the curtain on how a team that doesn't live in the same state put on the ninth camp. Kansas City, 700 people, five stages, two breakout rooms, 1,600 pounds of ice, and a polka band that played the SpongeBob song.
You'll hear about the camp beer that arrived at 5:59 and 57 seconds, the livestream that ran all weekend off Josh Gilbert's phone hotspot, and Ben the Beer Guy's "so it begins" moment of pouring 500 beers in 30 minutes. There's also the Westboro Baptist protest and the airport teenager who was certain I was Jack Black. Mostly, though, it's the team naming why we do this. A first-timer felt welcome before he got in the door. A woman made sure a hard-of-hearing man could follow every session. And Pastor Chris at Pine Ridge Presbyterian told everyone there's a difference between being welcomed and being wanted. Ninety-seven percent of you gave camp the top score. Next year is the 10th camp, and I have some odd ideas. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube.
Join us for TBC 2027
Camp number ten is coming. Sign up at theologybeer.camp for announcements and early access to the cheapest tickets for TBC 2027. And if you gave us four stars because two sessions you wanted overlapped, come volunteer. You'll get it.
The team
Josh Patterson (camp director, Rethinking Faith), Ben Price (beer coordinator), Bren Newlin (volunteers), Josh Gilbert (AV and livestream), Emily Arnold (marketing, design, photography, and sponsors), Sarah Heath (main stage co-host), Tony Jones (in absentia), and Davey, the team's youngest and most cuddled member.
Join me in Berlin for the Bonhoeffer Travel Learning Trip
In June 2027, Andy Root and I are leading two Rise of Bonhoeffer travel-learning weeks. The Seminar (June 12–17) reads Bonhoeffer’s sources where they were fought over — Luther in Wittenberg, Schleiermacher and Barth in Berlin, the prison letters in his own house. The Pilgrimage (June 17–22) is for pastors and faith leaders, built around Bonhoeffer as a working minister in a time of resistance. Twenty-two seats each, back to back so you can do one or both. Early bird pricing through January 31. Details and registration at www.BonhoefferTrip.com
UPCOMING ONLINE ADVENT CLASS: Tear Open the Heavens: Advent for Indifferent Strangers
Most of us are running faster just to stay in place, and the one season that asks us to wait gets swallowed by the busiest month of the year. Meanwhile, the neighbors have changed: fewer people argue with the church, and more have simply never heard the story. This Advent, Andy Root and Tripp Fuller take up Isaiah’s prayer, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,” and ask what it means to pray it now. One lectionary text a week, timed to land before Sunday, with Taylor, Rosa, Han, Bonhoeffer, Luther, and Schleiermacher brought into the conversation. For pastors who need sermon fuel, readers who want to go deeper, and anyone who never learned the words.Pre-recorded lectures, live conversations based on your questions, a short weekly reading packet, and an online community. Free to join; give if you’re able. Join at homebrewedclasses.com.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
This is the fourth live Q&A for The Christ Empire Couldn't Keep, and this week we're in the Americas with Bartolomé 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 Gutiérrez 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
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
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
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: Bartolomé de las Casas.
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
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.
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