The Biggest Table

Host Andrew Camp welcomes Lauren Peiser to The Biggest Table to discuss food, hospitality, and experiencing God’s love, focusing on disrupting coloniality in food and wine. Lauren shares a childhood shaped by control and “food as fuel,” then describes how studying in Italy transformed food into a sensual, communal, relational practice tied to neighbor, land, self, and God. They critique purity culture applied to eating, using fermentation metaphors and emphasizing right relationship over ethical perfection. Lauren also recounts disillusionment in industrial winemaking—profit-driven practices, additives, and inequitable treatment of migrant workers—while still valuing wine’s spiritual and Eucharistic meaning. They explore taste, class posturing, accessible good wine, and colonial narrative control in food systems, urging curiosity, truth-telling, and learning to be guests at others’ tables and on the land.

Lauren Peiser is working to disrupt coloniality by asking questions about food, wine, gender, religion, and hospitality. Through her writing, research, and everyday encounters she explores how to use food as a tool to recreate practices of the community that center liberation and confront programmed ways of whiteness. She is currently a masters student in Boston University's Gastronomy program. 

She is also the Director of Partnerships at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology where she focuses on cultivating mutually beneficial collaborations with outside organizations. Lauren is passionate about linking together interdisciplinary partnerships where new understandings and discoveries emerge from places that could not be found alone. 

Before working at The Seattle School and starting her masters program, Lauren worked for a food studies center at a community college in Arkansas. She also spent multiple years working in the food and wine industry (including harvesting grapes and making wine in Sonoma and New Zealand!) and she holds multiple certificates in wine education. The intersection of collective liberation, magic, spirituality, and food is something that she is always trying to learn more about.

Lauren's Substack: @laurenpeiser

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Meet Lauren Peiser

Host Andrew Camp interviews Ian Simkins, lead pastor of The Bridge Church near Nashville and author of “Every Table an Altar,” about how food and tables form people and reveal God’s heart. Simkins describes being raised as the oldest of seven in a home marked by biblical hospitality, then explores how first-century table fellowship signaled power and exclusion, making Jesus’ frequent, often subversive table practices—eating with “those people” while not cutting off Pharisees—statements about the Kingdom. They discuss modern screen-driven isolation, the table as an antidote that fosters curiosity and in-person connection, and practical ways families and churches can build formative rhythms. They address communion’s past-present-future meaning, misconceptions about “unworthy” participation, and hospitality as philoxenia rather than entertainment, including justice, sacrifice, and feeding the hungry.

Ian Simkins is the lead pastor of The Bridge Church just outside Nashville, Tennessee and the author of Every Table an Altar (Zondervan). He and his wife, Katie, have three boys who keep their home incredibly loud and their table beautifully full.

Follow Ian Simkins: 

• Instagram - @iansimkins
• Website - iansimkins.com
• Every Table an Altar Book - everytableanaltar.com 

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Welcome and Ian’s Story

Andrew Camp (The Biggest Table) and Mark Grapengater (Feast Days) introduce a collaboration episode about food, hospitality, and the table as a place to experience God’s love. They share how both attended seminary and worked in fine dining, then recount their personal journeys: Mark’s interest in cooking grew in seminary and was shaped by a formative Chicago fine-dining experience, while Andrew’s lifelong family table practices deepened through ministry in China, Eugene Peterson’s writing on Jesus’ table fellowship, and meals with his grandfather, eventually leading to his podcast and training work. They discuss failure and repair in kitchens versus churches, the need for grace, and the table as counterformative to busy American life, consumerism, and “empire” metrics, emphasizing lingering, presence, and being both host and guest. They also talk about wine, travel, and practical rhythms like menu planning and family meals, and share where to find their ministries and podcasts online.

Follow Mark Grapengater: 

• The Table Denver - thetabledenver.org
• At the Table Project - the-table-project.org
• Substack - thetableproject.substack, 
• Feast Days Podcast - wherever you find your podcasts

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Meet the Hosts

Host Andrew Camp welcomes Andy Littleton to “The Biggest Table” to discuss friendship, grief, and hospitality as places to experience God’s love. Littleton shares losing his best friend Sam 20 years ago in a car accident and how it shaped his longing and questions about friendship. Encouraged to write about it during the relational strain of 2020–2021, he organized a 2025 road trip in Sam’s 1971 Volkswagen from Tucson to Wrigley Field with friends old and new, resulting in a manuscript titled “2,000 Miles to Wrigley.” The trip included reconnection and deeper understanding with friend Sean, insights about power dynamics and differentiation in friendships, and “resonance” versus control (influenced by Andrew Root and Hartmut Rosa). At the game, shared, shoulder-to-shoulder experiences fostered new bonds, and a dramatic Cubs win felt like a gift. Littleton argues friendship grows through simple shared activities (even hot-dog-making) and calls the church to take relational risks and tell stories of repair.

Andy Littleton has lived in Tucson most of his life and has been in ministry since he was 18 years old. He’s worked and studied in many diverse ministry contexts throughout the years. Andy currently works for Mission Church, Resonate Global Mission, and Calvin Theological Seminary where he loves to teach and invest in the lives of leaders. He is married to Michaela, a nurse, musician, and animal lover, and has a daughter named Abby who is a “kid whisperer.” You can find his book projects and other content he shares from time to time on his personal site.

Follow Andy Littleton: 

• Personal Website - https://andylittleton.com/
• Project Patreon - www.patreon.com/c/AndyLittleton
• Church site - www.missionchurchtucson.com
• Infuse - www.infusetucson.com
• Insta: @2000milestowrigley + @alittlemission + @andygramz
• facebook - https://www.facebook.com/andy.littleton.16 + https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61572270103861
• Medium - https://medium.com/@andy_66884

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Meet Andy Littleton

Host Andrew Camp interviews historian and author Kristin Du Mez about her background in the Christian Reformed Church, her scholarly approach to evangelicalism as a cultural historian, and a pivotal moment watching Donald Trump’s 2016 speech at Dordt University that prompted her to reassess white evangelical values. Du Mez argues support for Trump is not a “betrayal” but reflects deeper values embedded in evangelical subculture, shaped through Christian media, bookstores, and products, especially those marketed to white Christian women. Discussing her forthcoming book Live, Laugh, Love, she connects evangelical women’s culture, multi-level marketing dynamics, and New Thought/positive-thinking theology to prosperity logic, purity culture, and “biblical womanhood,” highlighting Elisabeth Elliot’s complex story. She links domesticity and purity to authoritarian politics and Christian nationalism, notes post–Cold War shifting threats sustaining high-control religion, and closes with cautious hope grounded in truth-telling, faithfulness over winning, and history’s unpredictability.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez is a New York Times bestselling author and Professor of History at Calvin University. She is a Senior Democracy Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. Her most recent books include Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020) and Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made (September 2026). She is a Distinguished Associate at the Institute for Christian Studies (Toronto) and recently served as a Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Philosophy of Religion (2024-2025).

Preorder Live, Laugh, Love (release date: September 15, 2026)

Follow Kristin Kobes Du Mez

• Facebook: kkdumez
• Instagram: @kkdumez
• Substack: Du Mez CONNECTIONS

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Kristin Du Mez Origins

Host Andrew Camp interviews University of Michigan lecturer and food studies scholar Margot Finn about her book "Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution." Finn describes shifting from a post-9/11 media project to food studies, tracing how contemporary “common sense” food ideals—sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism—are learned, historically recurring (notably in the 1920s), and tied to inequality and middle-class status striving, rather than steady progress. They discuss how taste is shaped by context and social cues (including studies on wine perception), and how post–World War II values emphasized reliable, shared abundance over distinction. Finn cautions against individual consumer fixes, critiques simplified organic/local claims and fraud examples, and argues for policy-level change and reform efforts shaped by target communities. They affirm inclusive tables, reciprocity metaphors, and share personal food preferences and a last-meal choice.

Margot Finn holds an MA and Ph.D in American Culture focusing on Food Studies, Media Studies, and 20th Century U.S. History. As a lecturer in Applied Liberal Arts and affiliate of the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative at the University of Michigan, Margot seeks to help students integrate the many different academic disciplines they encounter in their liberal arts degrees and connect their academic work to their personal lives. She encourages students to develop critical thinking skills and more informed perspectives on contemporary food debates such as the ecological impact of Organic vs. conventional agriculture, local vs. imported foods, the biology and culture of fatness, immigrant labor in the food system, and the history of elite food reform efforts. 

Her writing has been featured in the collection Sensory Rhetorics: Sensation, Persuasion, & the Politics of Feeling (Penn State UP 2026, eds. Steph Ceraso and Jonathan W. Stone), the anthology Food Fights: How History Matters to Contemporary Food Debates (UNC Press 2019, eds. Charles Ludington and Matthew Morse Booker), The Breakthrough Journal, Slate, and Vox. She is also co-editor with Mark Johnson of Critical Food Studies, a new series out of University of Arkansas Press.

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Meet Margot Finn

Host Andrew Camp welcomes back psychologist and author Richard Beck to discuss Beck’s recent book on reading the Bible through a hermeneutic of love amid conservative and progressive polarization. Beck describes his journey from a Churches of Christ fundamentalist background through deconstruction and reconstruction, arguing both left and right need better strategies that resist confirmation bias. He frames love as a tension between particular obligations (family, place, patriotism) and universal duties (hospitality to strangers), noting social media intensifies a “digital universal” that can distract from local needs. Beck draws on attachment theory, contending “you can’t read the Bible scared” and that secure attachment requires confidence that God is unconditionally for us and distinct from harm done by church or family. He emphasizes moral self-criticism via the prophets, defines love Christologically as sacrificial, transgressive kindness, and grounds hope in God and eschatology, ending with a prison story of an inmate praying for his victim as a model of bringing moral blind spots into view.

Richard Beck is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Abilene Christian University and is the Senior Fellow of the Saunders Center for Joy and Human Flourishing. Richard also teaches in the Doctor of Ministry programs at Fuller Theological Seminary and Abilene Christian University. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Book of Love, and The Shape of Joy. Richard serves as a prison chaplain at the maximum-security French Robertson unit and has written and spoken extensively about his experiences working among the incarcerated.

Follow Richard Beck on Substack: @richardbeck
Listen to my previous conversation with Richard Beck on The Biggest Table

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Reading Scripture as Love

Host Andrew Camp interviews Nephi Craig, executive chef of Café Gozhoo on the White Mountain Apache Tribe, relapse prevention specialist, and founder of the Native American Culinary Association, on the release of his memoir Our Knives Will Save Us. Craig describes writing the book as a tool about the “ingredients of a chef,” linking his 15 years of sobriety, relapse history, and healing to cooking and indigenous foods. He explains how kitchen discipline and mentors shaped him, why indigenous cultivars and foodways connect to public and mental health, and how colonization’s violence and intergenerational trauma relate to addiction and health disparities. Craig details Café Gozhoo as a recovery-oriented, clinically designed, non-hierarchical kitchen emphasizing excellence, work-life balance, and Native values, discusses NACA’s grassroots impact, and answers food questions, including avoiding snake and bear, loving pho, and naming a last meal featuring Apache racket bread.

Nephi Craig is the executive chef of Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, on the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and an advanced certified relapse prevention specialist (ACRPS) and behavioral health technician (BHT) currently serving as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the Rainbow Treatment Center. Craig is the founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA), an organization that is dedicated to the research, refinement, and development of Native American cuisine. His work has been recognized in national and international publications such as Newsweek, Forbes, Food & Wine, and The Guardian.

Follow Nephi on Instagram: @nephi_craig
Buy Our Knives Will Save Us

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

Host Andrew Camp interviews Hugh Hollowell, pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, Mississippi and author of the memoir-essay collection Food Is Love, about how food and tables reveal God’s love, shape memory, and build connection. Hollowell calls the Last Supper his most compelling Christian story, arguing meals are intimate, mnemonic, and inherently communal, and that communion is scandalous because it includes people who fail us. He discusses Southern foodways, the Great Migration’s use of cooking to preserve home, and a long conversation about sweet potatoes with Senator Roger Wicker as an example of food humanizing opponents. They critique privileged food moralism amid Jackson’s food deserts and poverty, describe how “bad” celebratory foods and enslaved people’s ingenuity became valued cuisines, and frame cooking and writing about food as acts of care and political resistance. They close with reflections on church as support for weekday discipleship, lingering meals as welcome, and Hollowell’s favorite foods and stories.

Hugh Hollowell is a sixth generation Mississippian and is the pastor of Open Door Mennonite Church in Jackson, MS – a multiracial peace church formed in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. He is a writer and storyteller and has been the publisher of a weekly newsletter called Life is So Beautiful for more than a decade. Before becoming pastor at Open Door, Hugh spent 12 years working as a pastor among unhoused people and those struggling with addictions. This taught him much of what he knows about both second chances and grace, but not much that is useful at denominational meetings. He and his spouse Renee live in the Fondren neighborhood of Jackson, where they run a small scale kitten rescue and co-parent five house cats and seven chickens.

Hugh's website: hughhollowell.org

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com. 

• (00:00) - Sponsor and Guest Intro

Host Andrew Camp welcomes theologian Andy Root back to The Biggest Table to discuss Root’s recent books, especially Baal and the Gods of More, and what Christian “growth” should mean. Root argues Christianity is about “growing into someone” through relational participation in God’s life, not merely “growing something” like budgets, attendance, or resources, which can become a late-capitalist logic of escalation akin to fertility gods such as Baal or Artemis. Drawing on 1–2 Kings, Brueggemann, Hartmut Rosa, and Robert Gordon’s “special century” of American GDP growth, Root connects church expansion to economic growth and says American Protestantism now faces anxiety and nostalgia on the far side of a golden era. He critiques both techno-optimist innovation and identitarian recognition as susceptible to capitalist dynamics, and calls the church toward the theology of the cross: God’s presence “for you” in sorrow, loss, and shared burdens. Root previews a forthcoming pastoral theology of money.

Andy Root is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, MN. Lately his work has centered around the intersection of faith and our secular age, having completed his six volume series Ministry in a Secular Age. He has written a number of books and has given lectures and presentations across the country and globe both to church groups, universities/colleges, youth workers, and academic communities. He lives in St. Paul, his wife Kara is a Presbyterian minister and they have two kids (Owen and Maisy) and a dog. When he’s not teaching and writing, he watches a ton of TV.

Andy Root's website: andrewroot.org

Listen to my first conversation with Andy on The Biggest Table: Sacred Waiting in the Secular Age (Episode 12)

Follow Andrew Camp

• Facebook: andrew.camp.9
• Instagram: @andrewcamp80
• Substack: @thebiggesttable

This episode of the Biggest Table is brought to you in part by Wild Goose Coffee. Since 2008, Wild Goose has sought to build better communities through coffee. For our listeners, Wild Goose is offering a special promotion of 20% off a one time order using the code TABLE at checkout. To learn more and to order coffee, please visit wildgoosecoffee.com.