1010 episodes
- 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
The Convocation is the shared Substack and podcast (The Convocation Unscripted) from Diana, Jemar, Kristin, and Robbie: convocation.substack.com
Diana Butler Bass, historian of American religion and author of Freeing Jesus, writes The Cottage, including her Sunday Musings on the lectionary.
Jemar Tisby, historian and author of The Color of Compromise and The Spirit of Justice, writes Footnotes, current events with historical context, including the History Rhymes series he discusses here.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Professor of History at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne and Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made, writes Du Mez Connections.
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 The Camp Beer Arrived with Three Seconds to Spare: Behind the Curtain at Theology Beer Camp
29/10/2026 | 1h 27 mins.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/adchoicesDesire Got There First: Paul Hoard on Lacan, Faith, and What’s Actually Driving You
19/10/2026 | 1h 40 mins.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
Empire Hard, Empire Soft: Joerg Rieger on Las Casas and the Conquest That Learned to Be Nice
Anselm’s God Can’t Just Forgive: Joerg Rieger on Why That’s Good News, Not Cruelty
Who Owns the Creed? Joerg Rieger on the Conservative Gimmick and the Surplus They Missed
Empire Goes All the Way Down: Joerg Rieger on What “Christian Nationalism” Misses
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
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Our goal is to bring the wisdom of the academy's ivory tower into your earbuds. Think of each episode as an audiological ingredient for your to brew your own faith. Most episodes center around an interview with a different scholar, theologian, or philosopher.
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