Faith Improvised

I reflect a bit about why this is my favorite week of the year, I talk about Molly Worthen’s book, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and I share a personal story about reconnecting with an old friend.

I recommend a powerful new book by Anthea Butler called White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, and I reflect for a bit about the terms “exvangelical” and “deconstruction.” I also mention a few other books: Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know; Crystal M. Fleming, How To Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide; Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America.

I share some random observations from the past week, I recommend Educated: A Memoir, which is a brilliant and quite compelling coming of age narrative, and I talk about Paul’s vision of the church as God’s public justice.

I share some thoughts from the past week, I recommend Heather McGhee's brilliant new book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, in which she elaborates the zero-sum logic that distorts our racial and political imaginations, and I share some ideas from my book, Power in Weakness: Paul's Transformed Vision for Ministry, especially how Paul experienced a conversion of his ministry imagination.

In this episode I share some random observations, I recommend Jason Hickel's brilliant book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, and I talk about the politics of abortion and how this issue has shaped the culture of white evangelicalism in America.

In this brief episode, I share some thoughts from the past week and I recommend Jason Stanley's fascinating book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. 

I offer some reflections on music, sports, and the challenge of self-awareness among athletes, I recommend Daniel Radosh's fun and enlightening book, Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, and I respond to some questions about what I've been saying about God's sovereignty and what that looks like in our world.

I respond to a bunch of questions I received based on the previous episode, and I recommend Kate Bowler's wonderful memoir, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, which is a personal and theological reflection on so many of the poor ways Christians have come to think about God in relation to human suffering.

I reflect on the character of antagonism and how patterns in evangelical culture make evangelicals susceptible to being drawn easily into antagonistic postures and patterns in the larger culture. I also recommend Manoush Zomorodi's fascinating book, Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, and I talk about how the Bible depicts God's sovereignty and how that relates to human suffering, among other dynamics in our experience.

I have a conversation with my friend Steve Watkins about a variety of topics: how our thinking has developed over the years, what to do about misinformation and conspiracy theories, and we drop some Coen references along the way. I also recommend Anne Applebaum's important new book, Twilight of Democracy.