"Saints and sinners, all jumbled up together." That's the genius of Johnny Cash, and that's what the gospel is ultimately all about.Johnny Cash sang about and for people on the margins. He famously played concerts in prisons, where he sang both murder ballads and gospel tunes in the same set. It's this juxtaposition between light and dark, writes Richard Beck, that makes Cash one of the most authentic theologians in memory.In Trains, Jesus, and Murder, Beck explores the theology of Johnny Cash by investigating a dozen of Cash's songs. In reflecting on Cash's lyrics, and the passion with which he sang them, we gain a deeper understanding of the enduring faith of the Man in Black.Jason and Johanna talk with out latest guest, Richard Beck, who is an award-winning author, speaker, blogger and Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University. Every Monday Richard leads a bible study for fifty inmates at the maximum security French-Robertson unit. And Monday-Friday on his popular blog Experimental Theology Richard will spend enormous amounts of time writing about the theology of Johnny Cash, the demonology of Scooby-Doo or his latest bible class on monsters.

"In many cases, particularly in the case Wesley, teaching on sanctification leads to versions of piety that border on individual narcissism...renditions of sanctification as a process or journey of the believer moving towards ever ascending degrees of holiness, of the Christian life as defined by growth or transformation, cannot be supported by the biblical texts, all of which testify that God's work in Jesus is finished and perfect, that on account of it we are already justified AND sanctified, and that God is the one who sanctifies- God can sanctify even inanimate objects. Because of God's completed work, we are already IN Christ and on that basis, not on the basis of our growth or transformation, we are saints."On the podcast this week, is Dr. Don Payne, Professor of Theology at Denver Theological Seminary, on his new book, Already Sanctified: A Theology of the Christian Life in Light of God's Completed Work.

More than half of American adults, including 30% of evangelicals, say Jesus isn’t God but most agree He was a great teacher, according to results from the 2020 State of Theology survey. So, back on the podcast is our friend, Ken Jones, to talk about the importance of catechesis in the Church! Along the way, Ken talks about how to equip Christians for civic engagement without the Church becoming partisan and why otherwise conservative African American Christians still vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates ("Because I'm free"). Ken Jones is the Pastor of Glendale Baptist Church in Miami Florida. He's the current host of the Saints and Sinners podcast and a former cohost of the famed White Horse Inn radio broadcast.

""God is love," Who's he kidding?" Fritz Bauerschmidt is a Catholic deacon and a professor of Theology at Loyola University in Baltimore. His newest book, in the tradition of Lewis and Chesterton, is a treasure. “God is love is the radical claim of Christianity,” writes Frederick Bauerschmidt at the beginning of this little meditation on the essentials of Christian faith. Throughout The Love That Is God, Bauerschmidt goes to work breathing life back into that claim, drawing from Scripture, great Christian and non-Christian writers of the past, and his own lived experience to show just how countercultural and subversive Christianity is actually meant to be. (Fritz) Bauerschmidt is Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. He holds a BA from the University of the South (1984), an MAR from Yale Divinity School (1989) and a PhD from Duke University (1996). He has worked in a seafood processing plant in Alaska, hitchhiked from British Columbia to east Tennessee, and once slept under a bridge in Germany. In more recent years he has led a quite life.

In between weeks when the DNC and the RNC will showcase two divergent portraits of Christianity in America, our guest is filmmaker Martin Doblmeier. The founder and CEO of Journey Films, Martin's latest documentary is Revolution of the Heart: The Dorothy Day Story. We talk to Martin about Day, the blues, Cornell West, and what its like making a film with President Jed Bartlett. How to describe Dorothy Day? Grandmother, anarchist, prophet, journalist, pacifist, saint? The FBI once considered her a threat to national security. Now the Catholic Church is considering her for sainthood.REVOLUTION OF THE HEART: The Dorothy Day Story profiles one of the most extraordinary and courageous women in American history. She was co-founder (along with Peter Maurin) of the Catholic Worker Movement that began as a newspaper to expose rampant injustices during the Great Depression. It soon expanded to become a network of houses of hospitality to welcome the poor and destitute.Over the years, Dorothy Day developed her understanding of how to follow the Biblical challenge to be “peacemakers” by resisting all forms of military intervention. She protested America’s involvement in World War II and was severely criticized. Day was arrested multiple times for protesting America’s nuclear buildup and she led nationwide resistance against the war in Vietnam.Now nearly a century after they began, the number of Catholic Worker houses continues to grow and the newspaper is still speaking truth to power.REVOLUTION OF THE HEART includes rare archival photographs and film footage plus interviews with actor/activist Martin Sheen, public theologian Cornel West, popular author Joan Chittister, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and many others.

Jamie Howison struck up an unlikely friendship with the irascible Robert Farrar Capon just before Capon's death, and he's on the podcast to talk about it, ministry, Cornel West, and John Coltrane. https://mbird.com/2018/04/the-man-who-ate-with-capon/Jamie Howison is a priest of the Anglican Church of Canada and the founding pastoral leader of saint benedict's table in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His most recent book is I Will Not Be Shaken: a songwriter’s journey through the Psalms (Signpost, 2015), co-authored with Steve Bell. His book God’s Mind in that Music: Theological Explorations through the Music of John Coltrane (Cascade, 2012) had its genesis in an essay written for the Collegeville Institute summer 2008 writing workshop, Writing and the Pastoral Life, with much of the book’s first draft written during a short-term residency at the Collegeville Institute in 2011. Jamie also participated in summer writing workshops in 2012 and 2015, and completed short-term residencies in 2009 and 2014.

“It is true that theological doctrines and religious practices do shape and form religious experience, but it is no less true that experience tends to resist such shaping and forming. Attention to the complex interaction of these two insights is a key dimension of the account of “grace as experience” that follows below.”Our guest this week is a Simeon Zahl, University Lecturer in Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge. Simeon’s new book, which ranges from Martin Luther to Karl Barth, Sarah Coakley to queer affect theory, is The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience. https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Spirit-Christian-Experience/dp/0198827784Before you listen, do us a solid and help out the podcast.Click over to http://www.crackersandgrapejuice.com. Click on “Support the Show.” Become a patron.For peanuts you can help us out....we appreciate it more than you can imagine.https://crackersandgrapejuice.com https://www.facebook.com/crackersnjuice https://twitter.com/crackersnjuice https://www.instagram.com/crackersandgrapejuicewww.teerhardy.comwww.jasonmicheli.org

For our latest episode, we're bringing you a conversation Jason had with the inestimable Fleming Rutledge, at the beginning of the COVID quarantine, about God's way of rejecting and electing throughout scripture.

Our guest today is Dr. Ryan Newson, Professor of Theology and Ethics at Campbell University, about his new book, "Cut in Stone": Confederate Monuments and Theological Disruption." Confederate monuments figure prominently as epicenters of social conflict. These stone and metal constructs resonate with the tensions of modern America, giving concrete definition to the ideologies that divide us. Confederate monuments alone did not generate these feelings of aggravation, but they are far from innocent. Rather than serving as neutral objects of public remembrance, Confederate monuments articulate a narration of the past that forms the basis for a normative vision of the future. The story, told through the character of a religious mythos, carries implicit sacred convictions; thus, these spires and statues are inherently theological.In Cut in Stone, Ryan Andrew Newson contends that we cannot fully understand or disrupt these statues without attending to the convictions that give them their power. With a careful overview of the historical contexts in which most Confederate monuments were constructed, Newson demonstrates that these "memorials" were part of a revisionary project intended to resist the social changes brought on by Reconstruction while maintaining a romanticized Southern identity. Confederate monuments thus reinforce a theology concerning the nature of sacrifice and the ultimacy of whiteness. Moreover, this underlying theology serves to conceal inherited collective wounds in the present.If Confederate monuments are theologically weighted in their allure, then it stands to reason that they must also be contested at this level―precisely as sacred symbols. Newson responds to these inherently theological objects with suggestions for action that are sensitive to the varying contexts within which monuments reside, showing that while all Confederate monuments must come under scrutiny, some monuments should remain standing, but in redefined contexts. Cut in Stone represents the first detailed theological investigation of Confederate monuments, a resource for the larger collective task of determining how to memorialize problematic pasts and how to shape public space amidst contested memory.