- 1 hour 27 minutesThe MLK Monument Has No Jesus on It: Vincent Lloyd and Luke Bretherton on Secularism as Ideology
Political theology is finally having its moment — every op-ed columnist reaching for Christian nationalism, every neoreactionary tech founder invoking the katechon, every mainline pastor watching JD Vance lecture the Pope about just war doctrine, every abolitionist community organizer working the intersection between the sacred and the political. And yet almost no one seems to know what political theology actually is. Luke Bretherton and Vincent Lloyd — two of the three co-authors of a genuinely important new Columbia University Press book, What Is Political Theology? — sat down with me to explain what they had done. The book itself models the thing it argues for: three scholars from three disciplines refusing to synthesize their differences and instead sitting inside the productive tension. In one hour we cover why the standard Carl Schmitt genealogy needs to be de-centered, what from above and from below are actually good for, why secularism is not a neutral space but an ideology, what Peter Thiel's Antichrist lectures accidentally reveal, why Richard Dawkins now identifies as a cultural Christian, and what the difference between apophatic and cataphatic is currently doing to Luke's and Vincent's friendship. Live disagreement, on tape. The nice version.
You can watch the video on YouTube
Dr. Luke Bretherton is Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, one of the most senior chairs in British theology, appointed by the Crown. Previously, he was Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke Divinity School. An ordained Church of England priest.
Dr. Vincent W. Lloyd is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, and an editor of the journal Political Theology.
The book at the center of this conversation is What Is Political Theology?, co-authored with Dr. Valentina Napolitano, Professor of Anthropology and Connaught Scholar at the University of Toronto, whose chapter offers an anthropological political theology out of her research on global Catholicism, migration, and the U.S./Canada borderlands.
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
24 July 2026, 8:48 am - 1 hour 5 minutesAl Mohler's Nightmare: Interpreting Scripture While Female with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is back, and her timing is, as always, impeccable. We recorded this conversation about her new book on biblical interpretation right after Al Mohler announced that women cannot, in fact, teach the Bible on podcasts. So we did the only honest thing. We talked about scripture for an hour. Serving Up Scripture is the book Jennifer co-wrote with Aaron Higashi, and it uses a cooking metaphor that does what good metaphors do — gives you somewhere to stand while you realize the kitchen has been on fire the whole time. We walked through the four questions every passage requires (historical, literary, ideological, theological), put the woman saved from stoning on stage one more time, read Cato's instructions to Roman husbands whose wives commit adultery (a useful reminder that the Pastorals were the moderate position in their cultural context), and ended up where we always do — at the very different things you find in Paul depending on which Paul you are reading. Plus the news Al Mohler should have led the broadcast with: the Bible Divas podcast just launched, and all four are coming to Theology Beer Camp in October.
Here’s the Bible Divas on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
16 July 2026, 3:51 pm - 1 hour 32 minutesWinter in America: The Double Deac Deans on the 250th, Christian Nationalism, and the Questions That Do Not Get Answered
This was a live one, recorded on the eve of the 250th at Wake Forest Divinity School with the Double Deans in the room. Corey Walker's Theology Summit lecture — which spent six hours at the top of Substack the week we recorded — uses two moments in American history to name where we are: James Duane's October 1775 letter hoping this winter would bring revolution, and Gil Scott-Heron's 1973 album Winter in America, a lament for the arrested development of democracy after Nixon. Corey's argument is that 2026 is another winter. Bill Leonard, the founding dean who trained a generation to think about dissent, added the second layer: a perfect imperfect storm in which Christian nationalism has fused with authoritarian government and the church is the least helpful it has been in his lifetime. Three questions run through the conversation — Is God dead? (Sojourner Truth to Frederick Douglass in 1850), Is America possible? (Vincent Harding), and What does our religion say to those with their backs against the wall? (Howard Thurman) — and none of them get answered. What they get instead is Corey's proposal that the 250th is calling us to a counter memory — not the memory of those who prevailed, but of Miss Audrey, Mister Pugh, and Mister Linwood, the neighbors whose first names were their titles. Plus the Snake Handler Fund is officially open.
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
Dr. Corey D. B. Walker is Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, and inaugural Director of the Program in African American Studies. A native of Norfolk, Virginia and an ordained American Baptist clergyperson, he previously served as Vice President and Dean at Virginia Union University's Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, founding dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, Business and Education at Winston-Salem State University, and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University. He is a former student of Cornel West at Harvard, and sits on the board of Lincoln University (the country's first HBCU). Books: A Noble Fight: African American Freemasonry and the Struggle for Democracy in America (University of Illinois Press); Community Wealth Building and the Reconstruction of American Democracy (co-edited with Melody Barnes and Thad Williamson, Edward Elgar, 2020); and Beyond a Politics of Nostalgia: Religious Freedom and the Ends of Democracy (co-edited with Sabrina E. Dent). Forthcoming: Disciple of Nonviolence: Wyatt Tee Walker and the Struggle for the Soul of Democracy(University of Virginia Press). His Theology Summit lecture — Winter in America — is at theologysummit.com.
Dr. Bill J. Leonard is the founding Dean of Wake Forest University School of Divinity and Professor of Divinity Emeritus. He writes a regular column for Baptist News Global. His most recent book is Appalachian Mountain Christianity: The Spirituality of Otherness (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Earlier books include A Sense of the Heart: Christian Religious Experience in the United States (Abingdon), Baptist Ways: A History (Judson), and The Challenge of Being Baptist (Baylor). He is, to the best of anyone's knowledge, the only person in Wake Forest history to have brought a serpent-handling preacher to campus with actual serpents (Reverend Carl Porter, 1997, five snakes minimum). The Snake Handler Fund at Wake Div is now, officially, open.
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
12 July 2026, 7:02 am - 58 minutes 52 secondsYou Are the Christ: Ilia Delio on Taking Paul More Literally Than the Catholic Church
Last Q&A of The Future of Religion. And on the way out, Ilia did the thing the class had been quietly building toward — she said out loud that Teilhard never called Christ the savior, that we are not saved by one particular person but by making an option for the whole, and that the actual move the future of religion asks of us is to take Paul more literally than the Catholic Church does. You are the Christ. You are baptized into the Christ. You share the mind of Christ. You are nourished at the table of the Christ. You are called to be the Christ. The students fed us our best questions of the series — love as anti-entropic cosmological force (not metaphor), how to have a personal relationship with a presence that is not a being out there, what Teilhard would have made of the darkness of the noosphere, and whether God depends on us as much as we depend on God. We end where we began. Thank you to everyone who took the class.
Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.
Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio
- There Was a Time When God Was Gods
- Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
- The Machine Is a God Image
- Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
- the Future of Religion
- The Not Yet God
- Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
- Catching a Cosmic Faith
- the Entangled God of my Heart
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
7 July 2026, 6:54 am - 1 hour 3 minutesGuilty of Its Own Innocence: Cornel West on Baldwin, Matthiessen, and America's Peter Pan Problem
Cornel West is coming to Theology Beer Camp with his neighbor, Gary Dorrien, this October, and this hour is the on-ramp. It also happens to be a full one-hour preview of the America 250 conversation every clergy person I know is currently trying to write a sermon around. Brother West walked us through 1776 as an interruption of empire that was itself built on the preconditions of Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement (not the moral lapses around the edges of the founding — the actual foundation of it); through James Baldwin on how a country can be guilty of its own innocence; through the walking nihilism, the decline of courage, and the syncretism with economism that F. O. Matthiessen, Solzhenitsyn, Christopher Lasch, and Byung-Chul Han diagnosed long before the algorithm made it worse; and through why the Black Christian tradition rescued a love-centered gospel that Protestant faith-obsession had quietly abandoned. The whole thing wraps at Richard Rorty, Walter Rauschenbusch's grandson, at the end of his life confessing his utopia was a world in which love is the only law. Cornel: it sounds very Rauschenbuschian to me, Brother Rorty. If you want thein-person hang and conversation with Gary, register for Theology Beer Camp 2026 in Kansas City, October 8–10. Cornel and Gary have been trying to steal away for coffee for fifty years. Come watch them get to keep going.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
4 July 2026, 8:17 am - 1 hour 31 minutesThe Second Naivete of a Nation: Diana Butler Bass on America 250, Anger, and Believing Again
Diana Butler Bass and I are back at the table, forty-eight hours out from the launch of the Theology Summit at America 250. She spent last week at Chautauqua watching the generational transfer happen in real time. I spent it half-yelling at Morning Joe. We came back together to answer two of the listener questions that have been landing in both of our inboxes since the last episode dropped — what fills the vacuum in American religion if both the mainline and the evangelical establishments are crumbling? and will there even be a mainline denomination at America's 300th birthday? — and the answers took the whole hour. Along the way: the two years Diana was the right age for anything, the real story of what fills the vacuum after the Protestant-Catholic-Jew consensus (spoiler — the vacuum is being actively filled right now, and it does not want you), why the mainline's most successful move in twenty-five years has been hiring ex-vangelical youth ministers, the neo-Christendom conference that meets annually in London and is planning a global Noah's Ark for the pre-selected, and why Diana's deepest hope for the Fourth of July is the second naivete — Paul Ricœur's language for a return to belief after disillusionment. The Theology Summit launches this week. Come argue with your friends about it.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
2 July 2026, 6:32 pm - 1 hour 19 minutesThe Allergy to Otherness: What Modernity Did to the Pew Next to You with Ilia Delio
Third Q&A of The Future of Religion. Ilia is back from Germany, the questions came in long and dense, and we ended up doing the thing the lecture had set up. We tracked how the natural-supernatural binary got constructed — Hume locks God out, German biblical critics build the distinction to argue about miracle stories, Huxley grabs the distinction and weaponizes it against the whole of nature. We asked what happens to faith when you realize Jesus would have been perplexed by supernaturalism as a concept. We asked what two million people in the streets of New York celebrating a Knicks playoff win has to do with religion. And we asked what worship would feel like if the people in the pews actually knew what the liturgy was doing. Spoiler — most of them think it is holding the building together until the sermon arrives.
Ilia Delio, OSF, PhD is a Franciscan Sister of Washington, DC, and American theologian specializing in science and religion, with interests in evolution, physics, and neuroscience and the import of these for theology.
Previous Episodes with Ilia Delio
- There Was a Time When God Was Gods
- Religion Has a Physiology: Ilia & Tripp on Why Rituals Come Before Beliefs
- The Machine Is a God Image
- Thinking Theologically about AI with Teilhard de Chardin
- the Future of Religion
- The Not Yet God
- Bonaventure & the Cosmos in Process
- Catching a Cosmic Faith
- the Entangled God of my Heart
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
1 July 2026, 7:49 am - 1 hour 51 minutesIts Gates Will Never Be Shut: Scott Paeth on Eschatology, the Statue of Liberty, and Patriotism at America 250
Scott Paeth wrote Christianity and Identity during Trump's first term, expecting that by the time the book hit shelves the urgency would have passed. Then November happened again. So volume one of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason lands as the book on this moment — the one I have been waiting for someone with Scott's training to write. We start with Y2K as the real end of history (and my confession that peak humanity was 1999 because that is when The Matrix came out), move through the irony Niebuhr would have recognized on sight, name the three threads of authoritarianism Trump has been weaving — theocratic nationalist, technocratic libertarian, conspiracist — and turn toward what Scott is actually constructing: a public theology grounded in the dialectic of universal dignity and particular bonds, rooted in Bonhoeffer's prison poem, pointed toward a New Jerusalem whose gates are never shut. The closing move maps directly onto the Statue of Liberty. Volume two is on economics. I am already in line.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
About our guest
Dr. Scott Ronald Paeth is Professor of Religious Studies and Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, and pastor of Edgebrook Community Church (UCC) on the city's far northwest side. He has authored or edited nine books, including The Niebuhr Brothers for Armchair Theologians; Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology in the Work of Jürgen Moltmann; Public Theology: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse; and Philosophy: A Short, Visual Introduction. The book at the center of this conversation is Christianity and Identity: Public Theology, Authoritarianism, and Democracy — Volume 1 of his new three-volume series Faith and Public Reason, out now from Cascade Books. Volume 2 will be on economics and public theology; Volume 3 on religion and society more broadly. He writes at scottpaeth.substack.com.
Previous Podcast Visits from Dr. Paeth Include
- Close Encounters of the Theological Kind
- The Affinities Between Marxism and Christianity
- Are We in the Midst of a Cold Civil War?
- Why Go Niebuhr?
- On Reinhold & Richard Niebuhr
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
29 June 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 46 minutesWe Are Back in 1850: Master Signifiers, Heritage Americans, and the Confession We Stopped Saying with Diana Butler Bass
Diana and I sat down to launch our summer online Summit — Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250 — a video time capsule of scholars and friends answering a single question: what is the one thing you want people to know about America at 250? We compared the bicentennial summer of 1976 (gas crisis, Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, mortgage rates at 18% — but neighbors still made colonial costumes) to the bicentennial Trump tried to throw last night but canceled. We argued about whether the Democratic Party is currently sitting in 1850 or 1976. We disagreed about the Eucharist on Zoom. And then, because Diana is Diana, she ended with a poem by Rosemary Wahtola Trommer that I think is the spine of this whole moment: "I want to hear America listening." Strap in, and we will be back next week!
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Join our Online Summit - Unsettled Ground: Faith & the American Story at 250
This summer, Diana Butler Bass and I are launching Faith at 250 — an online summit featuring scholars like Randall Balmer, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Elesha Coffman, and more, each offering their own take on religion and America at 250 years. We built it so faith communities have something honest and substantive to turn to when the nationalist narratives start flying. Sign up at www.TheologySummit.com to get access to every lecture, livestream, and discussion guide. The summit is donation-based, including 0.
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
26 June 2026, 12:49 pm - 1 hour 30 minutesThriving Is Climate, Flourishing Is Weather with Pam King
Pam King is back, and this conversation moved at the pace it wanted to. She runs the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the framework she has built there is the most useful integration of psychological science and Christian theology I have come across — six facets that spell THRIVE, with a telos she calls the reciprocating self. We started with Stanford and seminary and ended with how the church is asking nine-year-olds to defend their interpretation of Torah when what they actually need is a fifth adult who knows their name. In between: the difference between flourishing and thriving, the Altadena fires Pam watched from her office window, how Winnicott's good enough mother maps onto how children come to relate to God, what Mark Labberton's seminary depression taught him about liturgy, why I rebuilt our confirmation class around questions instead of doctrines, and the prayer I have been praying with my daughter Khora since she was an infant. You can check out her previous visit on the podcast here.
Books we touched on:
- The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective, with Jack O. Balswick and Kevin S. Reimer. Her foundational telos book.
- Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, with Justin L. Barrett.
- The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.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
25 June 2026, 8:34 am - 1 hour 37 minutesIf a Silicon God Arrives, It Will Be the God We Deserve with Robert Wright
Bob Wright is back, and The God Test is the AI book I had been waiting for someone to write — the only one I have read that takes the spiritual stakes of the technology with the seriousness Teilhard would have. It opens with the interview Bob conducted with a young Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 — now anointed by The New York Times as the godfather of AI, now also one of its loudest doomers — and pivots into what Bob did not understand in that hotel room forty years ago: that we would build something as powerful as the human brain without ever first having to understand the brain. The bottom-up approach won. We are now inside the consequences. We spent the hour on Teilhard's noosphere acquiring silicon neurons, on why Bob argues accelerationism is lethal, on the difference between cognitive sovereignty and cognitive empathy and why both are now in jeopardy, on whether the algorithm has already occupied the very inner room from which sovereignty would be exercised, and on the closing line of the book — which I will not spoil here, except to say it is the kind of line you stop reading after.
You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube
Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Why Buddhism Is True. His newest book, The God Test, is out from Simon & Schuster in June 2026. He is Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York and president of the Nonzero Foundation. His Nonzero Newsletter and Nonzero Podcast (currently in rotation with Paul Bloom) live at nonzero.substack.com — and yes, I am a paid member. Books surfaced in this conversation: The God Test (the book at hand), The Evolution of God (the silicon-god closing line of The God Test picks up the long arc of Evolution directly), Why Buddhism Is True (the contemplative-traditions stretch of the conversation), and Nonzero (the non-zero-sum framing that runs under everything Bob does).
Previous Episodes with Robert Wright
- Evolution, Empathy, & the Future of Humanity
- From Mindful Resistance to the New Agnosticism
- The Evolution of God
Join our online class – THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
Tripp and Ilia Delio are teaming up for a brand-new four-week online class, The Future of Religion — for everyone who’s read the books, asked the questions, and realized the faith they inherited doesn’t quite fit anymore. Together they’ll trace religion’s evolutionary arc and map what’s emerging on the other side. Includes 4 video lectures, 4 live Q&As (replays available), and a community of fellow travelers. Donation-based, pay what you’re able (including $0). Live sessions start this month — register at www.thefutureofreligion.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
22 June 2026, 8:09 am - More Episodes? Get the App