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Anselm's God Can't Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That's Good News, Not Cruelty
Saturday, September 12, 2026 • Duration 01:23:11
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
Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed
Empire Goes All the Way Down
Why Religion Matters Now
Theology in the Capitalocene
Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern
the End of Religion & Business as Usual
Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar
Different Gods, Different Religions?
Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes
The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More
Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer
Economics, Theology, and Discipleship
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
Embracing Division: Robert P. Jones on Unity, Justice, and the Lines We Have to Draw
Thursday, September 10, 2026 • Duration 01:28:00
Robbie Jones wrote a book called Backslide, and I went in expecting a chronicle of every way a Southern Baptist kid from Jackson, Mississippi cursed or lusted in middle school. That is not what this book is. Robbie takes a word that in our shared upbringing was entirely personal and entirely theological, and puts it next to the way political scientists now use the same word to describe what is happening to American democracy. The two stories are not separate. He can prove it with the word white Christians used to name their victory over Reconstruction: redemption. This is the fourth book in ten years — The End of White Christian America, White Too Long, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, and now this one, which pops back to the present and asks: okay, now what? We got into the Bright Line Watch numbers, why Martin Niemöller is a more useful guide for American Christians than Bonhoeffer, the finding that made Robbie go home at 2:30 in the afternoon, the estate settlement he added to his family Bible before passing it to his kids, the war on empathy, and then the back half of the book — where Robbie argues polarization is the wrong diagnosis and writes a chapter called "Embracing Division." I pushed back. He was gracious about it.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. Robert P. Jones is the founder and president of PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) and the author of the White Too Long Substack newsletter. He grew up Southern Baptist in Jackson, Mississippi, trained as a mathematician at Mississippi College, attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary during the fundamentalist takeover, and earned his PhD in Ethics and Society at Emory University. He co-hosts The Convocation Unscripted with Diana Butler Bass, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, and Jemar Tisby.
His new book is Backslide— on the interlocking crises of democratic backsliding and Christian apostasy in America. His previous books: The End of White Christian America, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, and The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.
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
Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed
Saturday, September 5, 2026 • Duration 01:15:15
Second live Q&A, and this week we went to Nicaea. Here's the setup, in case you're new: Constantine called the council, funded the bishops' travel, set the agenda, chaired it, and personally suggested the technical term homoousios — that the Son is of the same substance as the Father. Joerg's method is to notice who pays for the trip. The boss funds the conference, the boss owns the product. Which means bringing Jesus up into the Godhead looks like a great move of respect right up until you notice it also removed him from Galilee and assimilated him to an imperial first person. But here's the part that makes this class worth taking: Joerg's move is to read it backwards. Let the second person define the first. Suddenly the creed becomes dangerous to empire, and Constantine — who moved away from Nicaea late in life for reasons nobody fully understands — may have figured out it was blowing up in his face. We also got into the Christological vacuum and what rushes in to fill it, why Chalcedon accidentally underwrote the self-made man, how Hellenization was a class matter, and what the Theodosian Code's protection of church asylum asks of congregations right now. Next week: Anselm. Get ready.
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
Empire Goes All the Way Down
Why Religion Matters Now
Theology in the Capitalocene
Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern
the End of Religion & Business as Usual
Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar
Different Gods, Different Religions?
Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes
The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More
Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer
Economics, Theology, and Discipleship
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
You're Probably Assyria: Anna Sieges on the Book of the Twelve and the Empire You're Actually In
Thursday, September 3, 2026 • Duration 01:36:07
Al Mohler recently let the internet know he finds it a bit sus when a woman talks about the Bible on a podcast. Today's guest is one of four women who just launched a podcast where they talk about the Bible. Four. Plural. It's called Bible Divas, and Anna Sieges says she plans to email Al every time an episode drops so he doesn't miss one — and maybe gets an opportunity to be moved by the Spirit, repent, and embrace the gift of half the species thinking, reflecting, teaching, and wrestling with scripture. Anna teaches Hebrew Bible at Gardner-Webb in North Carolina, and her research love is the Book of the Twelve, which most of us learned to call the minor prophets while memorizing them in order for Bible drill. She wants that name retired, and her argument is good: these are not twelve guys yelling on twelve different street corners. It's a long conversation, stitched together over generations by communities arguing with God about empire, land, and whether mercy actually extends to the people you hate. We got into locust plagues as a table of contents, Jonah as the Colbert Report, why Habakkuk asks God to fix the violence and God says sure, I'll send the Babylonians, why you're probably Assyria and not Israel when you read this stuff, and — at the end — what actual repentance would look like for the harm done to LGBTQ people by a single chapter in a widely assigned textbook.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
About our guest
Dr. Anna Sieges is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where she teaches Hebrew Bible. She grew up overseas in Papua New Guinea, where her father provided counseling support for people on the mission field and her mother worked in HR — and where family Bible trivia on Saturday nights was, in her words, cutthroat. Her research centers on the Book of the Twelve, redaction criticism, and the scribal shaping of prophetic literature.
She is one of the four Bible Divas, with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Angela Parker, and Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars. Go subscribe.
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
Is That Really a High View of Scripture? Craig Allert on Scripture, Canon, and the Story We Weren't Told
Monday, August 31, 2026 • Duration 01:44:37
My dad had a giant church history timeline hanging in his office wall when I was a kid. And if you are a pastor's kid, you learn a lot watching how your parents handle the church member who shows up to run an inquisition. Somebody would come in and say, "You said X, but the biblical answer is not X," and Dad would point up at that timeline and start naming people. What about this guy? What about her? Eventually he would land on the line: "Look, I don't feel like cutting verses out of the Bible or saints out of our history." That is basically this whole conversation. Craig Allert teaches religious studies at Trinity Western University in Canada, he is a friend of Myron Penner (which is its own recommendation), and he has written two books that do the same work from different angles — one on the actual formation of the New Testament canon, and one on how the early church fathers read Genesis 1. The through-line is what D.H. Williams and Robert Louis Wilken call historical amnesia: we do not know who we are because we do not know where we came from, and the version we were handed is not the whole story. The real history turns out to be thicker, stranger, and considerably more invigorating for faith than the drop-out-of-the-sky version. Also, at some point I explain how modern scientific naturalism is a covert theology that kept the cathedral of creation and evicted God from it. Craig, generously, did not stop me.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. Craig D. Allert is Professor of Religious Studies and Coordinator of the Christianity and Culture Program at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. He is a historical theologian specializing in early Christianity, patristics, and the formation of the New Testament canon.
His books include A High View of Scripture? The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon ; Early Christian Readings of Genesis One: Patristic Exegesis and Literal Interpretation; and Revelation, Truth, Canon, and Interpretation: Studies in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho.
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
Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What "Christian Nationalism" Misses
Friday, August 28, 2026 • Duration 01:14:43
This is the first live Q&A for the new class, and Joerg Rieger came ready. Christ and Empire came out during my last year of div school, and that's why I was so excited to try to study with him, until Joerg promptly went on sabbatical. So this whole class is, in a sense, twenty years of making that up. The argument is not that empire won. It's that across two thousand years, empire could never take over. There was always resistance, always alternatives, always a surplus that couldn't be contained. This hour ran through what "empire" lets us see that "Christian nationalism" alone misses, why the German translation of one word cracked open the whole project, why Paul is neither conservative nor liberal, what happens to the middle when the right keeps moving right, and what a confessing moment would actually look like here and now. Next week we go to Nicaea. Those of you who are creedally allergic have been warned — and Joerg says there's a surplus in Constantine's creed next week too.
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
Why Religion Matters Now
Theology in the Capitalocene
Divine Justice & our Ultimate Concern
the End of Religion & Business as Usual
Joerg Rieger: Jesus vs Caesar
Different Gods, Different Religions?
Wild Goose Theology Happy Hour with Joerg Rieger and Emilie Townes
The Economy, Election, Ayn Rand-Ryan-Romney, Occupy, & More
Occupy the Church! Rita Nakashima Brock, Joerg Rieger, & Christophe Ringer
Economics, Theology, and Discipleship
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
Ancient Israelite Religions, Plural: Cynthia Shafer-Elliott on Household Shrines, Figurines, and Yahweh's Asherah
Thursday, August 27, 2026 • Duration 01:37:21
There is an entire content industry built on "biblical archaeology" right now — TV shows, YouTube channels, the House of David series on Amazon, all of it running on big Nephilim energy. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott does not watch any of it, because it makes her yell at the screen. (Her husband, however, likes to watch her watch it.) She is a professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor and an actual field archaeologist, and here is what she would rather you get excited about: in one of her first seasons at Tel Rehov, in a square she had been working, they found hundreds of ceramic beehives — industrial apiaries. Which means the land of milk and honey had actual honey. Not date syrup, not wild honey. Real, farmed, bee-produced honey. She also personally uncovered a household shrine with a lion's face carved into it, tongue out, human faces cowering under its paws. That one is in the Israel Museum now, and she says hello to it whenever she visits. We got into what "back in Bible times" and "biblical worldview" actually obscure, what household archaeology reveals about women's authority that the text buries, why ancient Israelite religion should always be plural, why lentils deserve more respect than they get, and yes — the residue analysis at Arad confirming THC at an official Israelite worship site. She is one of the four Bible Divas, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
About our guest
Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott is Professor of Hebrew Bible at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in the religion department. She holds her PhD from the University of Sheffield, where she studied with Philip Davies, and specializes in Iron Age archaeology of ancient Israel and Judah with sub-specialties in household archaeology, food, and gender. She has excavated at Tel Rehov, Tell Halif, and currently at Tel Abel Beth Maacah in northern Israel — the site of the wise woman of Abel in 2 Samuel 20, who talks a general out of destroying a city. Check out her book: Food in Ancient Judah: Domestic Cooking in the Time of the Hebrew Bible.
The Bible Divas Podcast — Cynthia with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Anna Sieges, and Angela Parker. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars, one of them an archaeologist. Go subscribe.
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
Tripp Hijacks Religion on the Mind with Dr. Dan Koch
Monday, August 24, 2026 • Duration 47:57
Dan Koch just finished a seven-and-a-half-year process and came out the other side a fully licensed clinical psychologist. So I did what any friend would do — took over his podcast, gave him a week off from prepping, and made him answer every question I've been saving. He did zero prep on purpose. What we got is the conversation you have with someone you've known long enough to skip the throat-clearing: what existential therapy actually gave him clinically, why permission structures are the hidden architecture of both clergy and therapy work, why he's moved from the big abstract questions toward attention and embodiment, and what it means that a psychologist with ADHD is trying to work out how attention relates to love. Plus: the oral history of the Enneagram I am definitely writing, why he'd take the drum stool for Against Me! on the White Crosses tour, and Lars Ulrich in Moscow as the runner-up. And there's a whole extra hour of this — music, movies, punk as a theology of human dignity, and the story of when Rob Bell hijacked a Homebrewed episode live.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Get the extra hour
This conversation keeps going for about another hour, and the second half is the part where we stop behaving. Dan's theory of punk's irreducible amateurism as a kind of human dignity. The psychology of music project he's building — endorphins, synchronicity, mosh pits at fifteen, and what it has to do with what mainline worship gave up. Byung-Chul Han's hell of the same, and Dan cutting my doom with whole milk. Robert Eggers. The Refused frontman walking backstage before "New Noise" to tell my thirteen-year-old do you want to know why I do this? And my ongoing public campaign to get Five Iron Frenzy to play Theology Beer Camp.
Join the Process This Substack at processthis.substack.com to get the full extended conversation, plus every episode ad-free, bonus content, and the classes. It's how the podcast keeps running, and it's where the good stuff lives.
About our guest and his shows
Dr. Dan Koch is a newly licensed clinical psychologist based in Bellingham, Washington, specializing in religious change and deconstruction, working from a cognitive-existential orientation. Before psychology, he spent a decade in an emo band and a decade as a commercial composer. He hosts Religion on the Mind (formerly You Have Permission), on psychology and religion, and Pretty Good Vibrations, his music podcast. Support his work at patreon.com/dankoch. His telehealth licensure covering 42 states is in process.
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
Constantine Is a Cipher: Tony Jones on the Emperor Everyone Uses and Nobody Knows
Tuesday, August 18, 2026 • Duration 01:50:37
Tony Jones has been getting up early for ten years and refusing to talk to anyone until he has written for hours. Now we know why. Son of Helena is the first book of a trilogy about Constantine — a figure Tony correctly calls a cipher, the empty container into which everyone who loves or hates the marriage of church and state pours their own opinions — and nobody had ever written the historical fiction. Not one. Twenty-five novels about Julius Caesar, several about Nero, Claudius for Claudius, and nothing on the man whose name gets thrown around in every progressive Protestant conversation about Christendom. So Tony wrote it. Or rather, the muse handed it to him during a hypnic jerk on a plane home from the worst family vacation of his life. What follows is a coming-of-age story that ends in 306 — before everything you think you know about Constantine happens — and centers his mother, Helena, the concubine with an unshakeable faith who is the actual argument of the title. We covered why fiction lets him say things nonfiction can't, why he told almost no one he was writing it, the moral imaginary of Rome and why it is so hard to get modern readers inside it, and then a rapid-fire debunking segment where I brought clergy hot takes from the internet and Tony took them apart one at a time. Bring your church history notes. You will be editing them.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Dr. Tony Jones is a theologian, historian, and now novelist — and, by his own count, the most frequent guest in the history of Homebrewed Christianity (he passed Pete Rollins a while back). He was a classics major with Greek and Latin, did a foreign study program in Rome, still leads history tours there, and focused on the early church in seminary. His nonfiction includes Did God Kill Jesus?, The Teaching of the Twelve (on the Didache — whose Eucharistic liturgy shows up in a catacomb scene in this novel), The New Christians, Postmodern Youth Ministry, and his memoir The God of Wild Places.
The book at the center of this conversation is Son of Helena, volume one of his Constantine trilogy — available now, with the audiobook out on or before September 1. Volume two, The Sign, releases October 1 and Volume three, The Apostle, releases December 1. All at tonyjonesbooks.com.
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
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Hope Does Not Exist": O'neil Van Horn on Making Hope and the Practice of Resurrection
Friday, August 14, 2026 • Duration 01:08:30
My friend & Orbis editor, Dr. Tom Hermans-Webster, sent me this book with a note that said, "You're going to love this, Tripp. No, really, you are." He was right. O'neil Van Horn's Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate opens on page one by announcing that hope does not exist — which sounds like a branding failure until you realize he means hope is not a feeling or a thing or an object you possess, but an activity. Verbal. Processual. Something we weave together. The book is built in three movements — noticing, gathering, repairing — with nine everyday practices treated as parables: birding, foraging, composting, seed saving, mending, baking bread. It is process theology written for people who do not want to hear the word concrescence ever again, and it does the rare thing of being genuinely usable by a reading group, a Sunday school class, or a preacher looking for a sermon series. We covered why optimism and pessimism are both forms of certainty and hope is neither, why his farmer friend asking who is that? about a birdsong was a revelation, why compost undermines the entire Western notion of essence, why the shame you feel about not knowing your local trees is not your fault, and what it means that the book ends not with a trumpet but with a loaf of bread. My chicken Raven made a cameo. She said it was her favorite.
Van Horn is offering to Zoom in with any reading group, discussion group, or congregation working through Making Hope. Reach him through the contact form at oneilvanhorn.com.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
About our guest
Dr. O'neil Van Horn is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in philosophical and theological studies in religion from Drew University (where he studied with Catherine Keller), was a Louisville Institute Scholar from 2021 to 2023, and comes to theology with a background in organic agriculture and sustainability.
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
