Rethinking Faith

This week on (Re)thinking Faith, Philosopher Myron Penner returns once again to help Josh work through something that’s been bugging him: what happens when attachment theory gets applied to our relationship with God?

The conversation starts from Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw’s Landscapes of the Soul. Josh loves the book’s take on attachment science, but he gets stuck when it turns to “secure attachment” with God. Attachment depends on faces, touch, and co-regulation. Josh’s question is how you do any of that with an incorporeal spirit.

Myron places the question inside the long history of religious language. That history runs from Aquinas and Scotus on analogy to the evangelical idea of a “personal relationship with Jesus.” He argues that every way we talk about God needs an asterisk. He also raises a few complications:

Attachment research holds up better in Western cultures than elsewhere.

Language about “God’s design” can crowd out evolutionary explanations of our psychology.

Theory of mind works differently when we turn it toward God. We can’t check our picture of God the way we check our picture of a friend.

Along the way they discuss:

Tanya Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back and how Vineyard churches train people to hear God

What the cognitive science of religion says about spiritual experience across traditions

The difference between real interdisciplinary work and pastors borrowing authority from fields they haven’t studied

Influencer culture and prestige bias

Whether worship music is “manipulative”

Josh closes by turning the critique on himself. He asks what it means to be an agnostic theist who chooses love, and whether that means he should cut the attachment folks some slack. Enjoy!

RESOURCES:

Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science of Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You Into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God

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*Special thanks to Marty Fredrick, Josh Gilbert, and Dan Koch. Love you guys <3*
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Why would an atheist spend his time with the Bible? Dr. Anthony Pinn is a former AME minister who is now a secular humanist and professor at Rice University. He returns to (Re)thinking Faith to talk about his new book, Biblical Outlaws: What the Bible's Most Despised Characters Can Teach Us. Pinn no longer believes in God, but he still values the Bible as powerful literature that shapes millions of lives. He argues we have to read it differently: "the Bible against the Bible."

We talk about why Lot's wife looking back was a defiant "why?", why Job's wife may be the only character in the book of Job with any integrity, and how Nimrod's tower celebrates human creativity even when it fails. Along the way, they bring in Camus and the absurd, the "economy of giving and receiving," the beauty of defiance, and whether AI is a new Babel. Enjoy!

RESOURCES:

Biblical Outlaws: What the Bible's Most Despised Characters Can Teach Us (Book)

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*Special thanks to Marty Fredrick, Josh Gilbert, and Dan Koch. Love you guys <3*
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This week, Dr. Simon Critchley is back, and this time we try to cover Being and Time in a single episode. (Yes... ridiculous... I know!)

Simon's new book, Heidegger Thinking, grew out of 35 years of teaching Heidegger and a pandemic-era podcast he recorded at his desk. We talk about how Heidegger's break with Catholicism and his turn to Luther, Paul, and Augustine shaped Being and Time into something like a conversion experience with no God in it. Simon sums Heidegger up in three M's: meaning, movement, and mortality. We also get into why he thinks Heidegger's account of death leaves out grief, what "authenticity" meant before it became a buzzword, why the New Atheism has lost its hold, and Heidegger's decision to join the Nazi Party. We end at Simon's dream "reticence bar," where nobody has to say anything at all. Slow philosophy for a fast world. Enjoy!

RESOURCES:

Heidegger Thinking: Being and Time Explained (Book)

The Faith of the Faithless (Book)

Apply-Degger Podcast

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*Special thanks to Josh Gilbert, Marty Frederick, and Dan Koch. Love you guys! <3*
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Dr. Aaron Stauffer — theologian, Presbyterian clergy, and author of Listening to the Spirit: Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-Based Community Organizing — joins Josh to unpack what the Social Gospel actually is, why it became a slur in some corners of American Christianity, and how sacred values (not just political issues) build the kind of relational power that outlasts a news cycle. The conversation moves through Christian social ethics, the difference between relational and unilateral power, worker cooperatives, and a candid take on why progressive Christian influencer culture is failing the movements it claims to serve. Grounded in decades of interfaith and labor organizing, this episode is a wonderful introduction to thinking theologically about power, democracy, and community. Enjoy!

RESOURCES:

Organizing Visions: Social Ethics and Broad-Based Solidarity Activism

Listening to the Spirit: The Radical Social Gospel, Sacred Value, and Broad-based Community Organizing

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*Special thanks to Marty Fredrick, Josh Gilbert, and Dan Koch. Love you guys! <3*
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What happens when the God of "God Can't" meets the God of the Black church's "God Is Able"? This week I sat down with my friend, the Reverend Jill Elizabeth — public theologian, ordained Curian Network board member, and self-described "barbershop theologian".

Together we dig into the real friction between Black church theology and open and relational/process thought, the prosperity-gospel undercurrents nobody wants to name, and why a God who could stop injustice but chooses not to is a harder sell than it sounds. Along the way: a decade-long practice of lament over police violence in Phoenix, the theology of the barbershop as sacred space, storytelling as the doorway to empathy, and why building the kingdom of God always costs us something. This is a conversation about bridges — between traditions, between suffering and hope, and between the ideas we argue about and the bodies those ideas actually affect. Enjoy!

RESOURCES:

The Curian Network

Systematic Geekology Podcast

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*Special thanks to Josh, Marty, and Dan! Love you guys <3*
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