Show Notes
Text us your questions! What happens when political labels lose their meaning? Dr. Laurie Johnson, political philosopher and president of the Maurin Academy, joins us to unpack the tangled roots of America's culture wars and explore pathways toward overcoming our divisions. We discuss her book The Gap in God's Country: A Longer View on Our Culture Wars. The conversation begins with a clarification of political terminology. Laurie explains how American understandings of "liberal" and "conserva...
More from A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Text us your questions! A single footnote in Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Live Laugh Love sent us down a rabbit hole we didn’t know existed: organized evangelical gay activism in the 1970s and 1980s, and the effort by white American evangelical leaders to erase it, discredit it, and clamp it down. We’re joined by historian of religion and sexuality Dr. William Stell, author of Born Again Queer, to map the people, institutions, and arguments that shaped the bedrock positions many of us grew up assum...
Text us your questions! We sit down with Kristin Kobes Du Mez to talk about her new book Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. We discuss how what looks like consumer fluff often hides a dense system of theology, discipline, and power. If you grew up around evangelical culture, charismatic spirituality, Christian bookstores, or influencer Christianity--especially if you're a woman--a lot of this will probably feel uncomfortably familiar. ...
Text us your questions! Randy and Kyle get brutally honest about the moment doubt stops feeling like “questions” and starts feeling like unbelief, including what it’s like to say that out loud when you’re a pastor with a church, a family, and a job that takes for granted that you believe in God. We dig into the philosophy and the lived spirituality behind the words we toss around too easily: belief, disbelief, doubt, and faith. Kyle unpacks the senses in which belief is (and isn't) an attitu...
Text us your questions! Prayer can fall apart slowly. One day you are sure your words move heaven, and eventually you can't tell if you're talking to anyone at all. We return to the topic of prayer to discuss what happens when it stops feeling natural, when the old charismatic certainty no longer fits, and when trying to pray the way you used to would feel performative instead of real. We dig into how Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity formed us with beautiful gifts as well as disappoi...
Text us your questions! We wanted something different from our usual fare, so we invited musician David Gungor to help us see spirituality through an artist’s eyes: beauty, story, woundedness, and play. What starts as a talk about music becomes an exploration of navigating Christian deconstruction, church hurt, and the fear that life’s best days might already be gone. David shares his pastor’s kid upbringing, the family fallout that reshaped his world, and how his songwriting moved from evan...