Straight White American JesusIn this episode of It's In the Code, host Dan Miller tackles one of the most provocative questions a believer can ask: Did God lie in the Garden of Eden? Beginning with a listener's question about Genesis and God's warning that Adam and Eve would...
Straight White American JesusIn this episode of Axis Live, Brad Onishi and Matthew D. Taylor examine the political and religious legacy of Lindsey Graham following his death, asking how a senator once known for challenging Donald Trump ultimately became one of Trump's most...
New Books in ReligionCan creative writing become a form of biblical interpretation? That is the provocative question at the heart of my conversation with Sarah Rosenson about her new book, Fan Fiction on the Book of Genesis: A Guide to Close Reading of and Creative...
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman Have you ever heard a Christian say something about the Bible and wondered exactly where they were getting their information from? Today we are talking about the most common claims Christians make about the Bible that are not actually based in...
Data > DogmaThis week we're taking on the thought-stopping cliché to end all thought-stopping clichés: "trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding." Is "reading with the Holy Spirit" a special line to God that us dirty scholars just can't...
Bible For Normal People Podcast In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Nathan MacDonald about the origins of Israel’s priesthood, the role of the Levites, and why the Bible’s accounts of priests are far more complex than they first appear....
Home Brewed Christianity 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...
New Books in ReligionHow have Buddhist teachings come to be in modern and contemporary Japan and how are they taught? This pioneering work seeks to answer these questions by highlighting the public teachings of Temple Buddhism institutions, in particular Temple...
Straight White American JesusIn this Sunday Interview, Brad Onishi sits down with historian and former CIA Africa analyst Holly Berkley Fletcher, author of The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism. Drawing on her experience growing up as a Southern...
Straight White American JesusDoug Wilson's recent NPR interview offers a revealing look at how Christian nationalism has moved from the political fringe into the mainstream. In this episode, Brad Onishi and Dan Miller unpack Wilson's arguments about household voting,...
Home Brewed Christianity Bo is back from fishing (tight lines). Kevin Carnahan is back at the table. And the subject is Kevin’s lecture at the Theology Summit, whose central claim is that America was never actually good. The moral America a lot of us grew up thinking...
Home Brewed Christianity 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...
New Books in ReligionWith the plurality of Hinduism in mind, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Hindu Ethics focuses on the human, sociological and situational ethical framework underpinning Hindu ethics. Chapters go beyond the traditional classical sources-such as the Vedas,...
New Books in ReligionNew Perspectives on Old Princeton, 1812-1929 (Routledge, 2024) focuses on Princeton Theological Seminary and the theologians who taught there from the time of its founding in 1812 to the time of its reorganization in 1929. It confronts the...
Straight White American JesusWhy did God allow Satan to punish the biblical character Job, if he was a faithful and righteous man? This is a question that has been asked by Bible readers for centuries. But it’s a question that biblicists and high-control religionists get...
New Books in ReligionIn this episode, host Pierce Salguero sits down with Linda C. Ceriello, a scholar of mysticism and popular culture from Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Linda is one of the foremost scholars of metamodernism, with particular focus on...
Straight White American JesusPatriot Front's July 4 march on the National Mall wasn't an isolated stunt—it was part of a long American tradition of extremist groups using patriotic symbolism to claim ownership of the nation's identity. In this episode of Access Live, Brad...
Classical Ideas Podcast Nalika Gajaweera (Research Affiliate, Walter H. Capps Center, University of California, Santa Barbara; PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, 2013) is an anthropologist of Buddhism, race, and ethics, with a focus on community...
Home Brewed Christianity 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...
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman Have you ever read something in the New Testament, maybe the Book of Revelation, and wondered why on earth it's included in the Bible? Why were these specific books included, and why are they considered inspired by God while the non-canonical...
Religion for Breakfast Straight White American JesusHere's a concise, two-paragraph set of podcast show notes in the style you've been using for Axis Mundi Daily Brief. Violence in Nigeria is escalating, and Christians are undeniably among its victims. But does that mean Nigeria is experiencing a...
Straight White American JesusIn this Sunday interview, Brad Onishi is joined by historian and author Warren Throckmorton to discuss his new book, The Christian Past That Wasn't: Debunking the Christian Nationalist Myths That Hijack History. Together they examine some of the...
Data > DogmaThis week we crack open the Epistle of James — a letter that may claim to come from none other than James the brother of Jesus — and wade into one of Christianity's oldest arguments: faith versus works. Does James contradict Paul on how a person is...
New Books in ReligionMolly Crabapple joins Michael Stauch to discuss the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund (Random House, 2026). Once the most influential Jewish political...
Religion for Breakfast Religion for Breakfast Home Brewed Christianity Bo went fishing. Josh Patterson came over. If you take Bo Daddy and divide by two, you get J Paddy — which is how we know the substitution worked. In two hours we somehow got from Johnny Depp in half his Jack Sparrow makeup at a Los Angeles grocery...
Home Brewed Christianity 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...
New Books in ReligionTamil Śiva Temples, Āgamas, and Śivabrāhmaṇas/Ādiśaivas addresses the issue of whether members of all castes can become priests in Tamil Śiva temples. The history of the Śivabrāhmaṇas or Ādiśaivas as priests in Tamil Śiva temples is described using...
Home Brewed Christianity 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,...
Religion for Breakfast Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman Did you know that scribes made changes to all of the books of the New Testament? Some of them were accidental, but some of them were very deliberate. The gospel of John is no exception - but what was changed, and why?
Classical Ideas Podcast Tara Isabella Burton (DPhil, University of Oxford; Visiting Fellow, Mercatus Center, George Mason University; Visiting Research Fellow, Institutional Flourishing Lab, Catholic University of America) is a theologian and culture critic, and the...
The Revealer PodcastWhat are the limits of today’s wellness culture and how might thinking about the religious roots of wellness trends give them more meaning? Liz Bucar, author of Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us,...
Religion for Breakfast Data > DogmaThis week the Dans try to count to twelve — and find that the number matters a lot more than the names. We dig into the twelve tribes of Israel: how Levi quietly drops out and Joseph splits into Ephraim and Manasseh to keep the total at twelve, why...
Home Brewed Christianity 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...
Bible For Normal People Podcast In this week’s episode of Pete Ruins Everything, Pete talks with Dale Allison about the strengths and limits of biblical scholarship. They explore what historical research can and cannot tell us about Jesus, the Bible, and the ancient world, while...
Home Brewed Christianity Bo and I leaned all the way into the wacky-morning-sports-talk-radio format this week — over/unders, a Mount Rushmore or three, and a Name That Name segment where I almost broke Bo with clues about a French Catholic medievalist who turned into one...
Religion for Breakfast Classical Ideas Podcast A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse. Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we've built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate...
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman Atheists often accuse people of religious faith of uncritically accepting a bunch of myths - but do atheists do the same? How closely do people actually examine their dearly-held views and beliefs, regardless of their religious persuasion?
Data > DogmaSenator Mike Lee keeps accusing his opponents of sacrificing children to Moloch, so this week we ask who — or what — Moloch actually was, why abortion and child sacrifice are not the same thing, and the uncomfortable places child sacrifice really...
Religion for Breakfast 
Madang Podcast Welcome to Madang.Madang is the outdoor living room of the world. Here, we invite you to sit and tune into unreserved, remarkable conversations with renowned authors, leaders, public figures, and scholars on religion, culture, and everything in...
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman In the gospels, Jesus' suffering is on a sliding scale - from sweating blood, to calmly accepting his fate. What did Jesus think about his own suffering, and is it even possible to answer that question from the evidence we have?
Data > DogmaThe sins of the fathers! It's a phrase you've heard a thousand times, but did you know it comes straight from the Bible? This week it's Bible versus Bible, and the topic is generational punishment: God visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the...
Bible For Normal People Podcast In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Jared continues his tour through the history of modern biblical scholarship, exploring five (or six) more “aha moments” that transformed how scholars understand the Bible. From Rudolf...
Classical Ideas Podcast Ira Helderman PhD, LPC (Adjunct Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, Vanderbilt University; PhD, Religious Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2016) studies how psychotherapists' definitions of what is and is not religious shape their...