The Catacombic Machine

In this episode, we revisit a catacomb introduced to the podcast by our friend Timothy Chilvers, who together with David leads the conversation with John Swinton.

In this episode of Freestyle Christianity you will get to listen to a talk by Barry Taylor at Wake in Belfast.

In this episode, Josef, David and Joel catch up on time lost by summarizing the last couple of weeks and especially the events we´ve participated in (Göteborg, Sweden and Belfast, Northern Ireland).

In the second half of the conversation, the triad explore the structure and chaos that is "catacombic theology."

The episode as a whole can be seen as synthesis of the last couple of months of Freestyling, both in texts and podcasts, but also as the start of a new series of podcasts, dedicated to an archeology of the catacombs. A special focus of this episode ended up being a connection between radical theology, the death of god, desiring theology of Charles Winquist,

Join the conversation either by way of critique or commentary, on any of the social platforms associated with Freestyle Christianity; we´d love to hear from you.

In this episode of Freestyle Christianity you will get to listen to a talk given by Kester Brewin at the festival Wake in Belfast. The subject of Kester's talk was his recently published book Getting High: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Dream of Flight.

We are all born flightless, every one. After so many thousands of years each of us still drops into the world smooth-skinned and featherless.' Why have we never been content to keep our feet on the ground? In the 1960s this desire to get high exploded with the LSD counterculture and the Apollo missions. In this unique and dazzling book, acclaimed author Kester Brewin (MUTINY / AFTER MAGIC) explores the history of the human quest for transcendence, and how, following a family tragedy, it blighted his own life. Drawing on a huge cast of characters from the Montgolfier brothers to Renaissance artists, Hells Angels, astronauts, The Beatles, Gonzo journalists and dreaming hippies, GETTING HIGH is a wild trip into the ancient dream of flight, soaring through shamanic ritual, enlightenment science and punching a hole in what we think the 1960s was all about. Interwoven in all of this is Brewin's own story. Growing up in a mining village in Yorkshire, his father was the local vicar, the man tasked with lifting this subterranean community each Sunday and offer it a vision of the above. But this pressure to open heaven has terrible consequences for the family, and a tragic illness sends each of them flying. Skilfully linking ancient history, the story of the 1960s and his own battles with the yearning to 'get high,' this is an important and timely book with an urgent message about religion, the promises of technology, and our need to keep our feet on the ground.

David and Josef speaks to James Heaney about his book Beyond the Body: An Antitheology of the

Peter Rollins and Jay Bakker visited Sweden for our

Josef speaks to Barry Taylor about radical theology, the Internet, Nietzsche, creativity, the pope, True Detective, a radical take on Easter and much more.

Barry is a Brit who has lived in Los Angeles for far longer than he ever imagined, and he likes it. As a writer/speaker/thinker/musician he has talked and played his way around much of the world and can often be found speaking at conferences, teaching classes on art, advertising, theology, religion, technology and all things cultural at various educational institutions in Los Angeles. He is the founder of Lifelabla, a learning environment committed to promoting and nurturing ideas that enrich life and help  people to become self-aware and more focused on creating the lives they want for themselves. He has written a few books, and is writing a new one, a memoir of sorts about epiphanies and catastrophes.  Barry holds his PhD in Theology and Culture, as with most things, very lightly. When he is not working he can often be seen biking around Venice or hanging with friends at a particular unnamed coffee shop and spends an inordinate amount of time exploring LA’s hippest clothing stores. Most Sundays he can be found in West LA making music with friends and talking about life, religion and lots of other things.

Josef talks to Clayton Crockett about his new collaborative project An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics, which also features Ward Blanton, Jeff Robbins, and Noëlle Vahanian. Foreword by Peter Rollins, Preface by Creston Davis, and Afterword by Catherine Keller.

An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger's philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics "after" God.

In this episode, we are invited to the first of a series of catacombic conversations. This time freestylers David, Joel, Tad Delay and Ludvig Lindelöf jam on questions about mythology, doubt, psychoanalysis, theology, Tillich and Lacan.

If you like, or perhaps dislike, what you hear; share comments or thoughts here, one of our Facebook pages, or perhaps in the form of a tweet to @freestylechrist.

Be sure to follow both Tad and Ludvig on Twitter!

Josef and David talks to Peter Enns about his new book The Sin Of Certainty, hermeneutics, inerrancy and a whole lot more.  Peter is the Abram S. Clemens professor of biblical studies at Eastern University and has authored many books including, Inspiration and Incarnation and For The Bible Tells Me So.