I’m thrilled to have made friends with Dr. Amy Laura Hall. Not only is she back on the podcast to talk about Stanley Hauerwas’ influence on her work and theology, she’ll be our special guest in June at our annual live podcast at Annual Conference in Roanoke, Va. Amy Laura Hall was named a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology for 2004-2005 and has received funding from the Lilly Foundation, the Josiah Trent Memorial Foundation, the American Theological Library Association, the Child in Religion and Ethics Project, the Pew Foundation and the Project on Lived Theology.At Duke University, Professor Hall has served on the steering committee of the Genome Ethics, Law, and Policy Center and as a faculty member for the FOCUS program of the Institute on Genome Sciences and Policy. She has served on the Duke Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board and as an ethics consultant to the V.A. Center in Durham. She served as a faculty adviser with the Duke Center for Civic Engagement (under Leela Prasad), on the Academic Council, and as a faculty advisor for the NCCU-Duke Program in African, African American & Diaspora Studies. She currently teaches with and serves on the faculty advisory board for Graduate Liberal Studies and serves as a core faculty member of the Focus Program in Global Health.Professor Hall was the 2017 Scholar in Residence at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington D.C., served on the Bioethics Task Force of the United Methodist Church, and has spoken to academic and ecclesial groups across the U.S. and Europe. An ordained elder in the United Methodist Church, Hall is a member of the Rio Texas Annual Conference. She has served both urban and suburban parishes. Her service with the community includes an initiative called Labor Sabbath, an effort with the AFL-CIO of North Carolina to encourage congregations of faith to talk about the usefulness of labor unions, and, from August 2013 to June 2017, a monthly column for the Durham Herald-Sun. Professor Hall organized a conference against torture in 2011, entitled “Toward a Moral Consensus Against Torture,” and a “Conference Against the Use of Drones in Warfare” October 20-21, 2017. In collaboration with the North Carolina Council of Churches and the United Methodist Church, she organized a workshop with legal scholar Richard Rothstein held October, 2018.Amy Laura Hall is the author of four books: Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love, Conceiving Parenthood: The Protestant Spirit of Biotechnological Reproduction, Writing Home with Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers, and Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich. She has written numerous scholarly articles in theological and biomedical ethics. Recent articles include "The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagements in Sociobiology," which was a keynote lecture given with Kara Slade at the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics in 2012, and "Torture and American Television," which appeared in the April 2013 issue of Muslim World, a volume that Hall guest-edited with Daniel Arnold. Her essay “Love in Everything: A Brief Primer to Julian of Norwich" appeared in volume 32 of The Princeton Seminary Bulletin. Word and World published her essay on heroism in the Winter 2016 edition, and her essay "His Eye Is on the Sparrow: Collectivism and Human Significance" appeared in a volume entitled Why People Matter with Baker Publishing. Her forthcoming essays include a new piece on Kierkegaard and love for The T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard, to be published by Bloomsbury T&T Clark.Laughing at the Devil was the focus of her 2018 Simpson Lecture at Simpson College in Iowa and has been chosen for the 2019 Virginia Festival of the Book. She continues work on a longer research project on masculinity and gender anxiety in mainstream, white evangelicalism.

Thomas Lecaque teaches Religious History at Grand View University in Iowa. He recently authored an article in the Washington Post that caught our attention, entitled “The Apocalyptic Myth that Explains Evangelical Support for Trump.” You can find the article here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/26/apocalyptic-myth-that-helps-explain-evangelical-support-trump/

Dr. Sutton recently wrote an article in the Washington Post that got our attention for this episode:https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/21/explaining-unbreakable-bond-between-donald-trump-white-evangelicals/Matthew is the Edward R. Meyer distinguished professor of history at Washington State University. The author of award-winning books, including American Apocalypse, and the recent book, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War, he lives in Pullman, Washington.

In many ways, Advent is a season that pivots not only between two aeons, the old and the new, but between testatments, old and new, and faiths, that of Christianity and Judaism. After all, Advent is largely the time when Christians anticipate the second coming by rehearsing the anticipating of the first coming found in Israel’s prophets. The son of Holocaust survivors, Scott A. Shay has had a successful business career spanning Wall Street, private equity, venture capital, and banking. He co-founded Signature Bank of New York and has served as its Chairman since its formation. He has been a provocative commentator on many financial issues, including among others, how the banking system should best function to help society, the implications of a cashless world, and tax reform. Scott called for the re-imposition of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the big banks at a TEDx talk at the NY Stock Exchange in 2012. Throughout his life, he has been a student of religion and how religion ought to apply to the world outside of the synagogue, church, or mosque. In addition to authoring articles relating to the Jewish community, Scott authored the best-selling Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry (Second Edition, D evora 2008).

Our guest this week is United Methodist pastor Parker Haynes who joins us to talk about his essay “Remember Our Story: Is the Future of Methodism, Anglican?” in which he argues that United Methodism has run aground not because of disputes over sexuality but because, in many core ways, the story of Methodism has come to an end. Our reason for being, that is, is no longer a reason to be a distinct set apart from the Church whence we came.

In the past half-century, few theologians have shaped the landscape of American belief and practice as much as Stanley Hauerwas. His work in social ethics, political theology, and ecclesiology has had a tremendous influence on the church and society. But have we understood Hauerwas's theology, his influences, and his place among the theologians correctly? Hauerwas is often associated―and rightly so―with the postliberal theological movement and its emphasis on a narrative interpretation of Scripture. Yet he also claims to stand within the theological tradition of Karl Barth, who strongly affirmed the priority of Jesus Christ in all matters and famously rejected Protestant liberalism. These are two rivers that seem to flow in different directions. In this volume within IVP Academic's New Explorations in Theology (NET) series, theologian David Hunsicker offers a reevaluation of Hauerwas's theology, arguing that he is both a postliberal and a Barthian theologian. In so doing, Hunsicker helps us to understand better both the formation and the ongoing significance of one of America's great theologians.

Is faith in Jesus enough for salvation? Perhaps, says Matthew Bates, but we're missing pieces of the gospel. The biblical gospel can never change. Yet our understanding of the gospel must change. The church needs an allegiance shift.Popular pastoral resources on the gospel are causing widespread confusion. Bates shows that the biblical gospel is different, fuller, and more beautiful than we have been led to believe. He explains that saving faith doesn't come through trust in Jesus's death on the cross alone but through allegiance to Christ the king. There is only one true gospel and one required response: allegiance.Bates ignited conversation with his successful and influential book Salvation by Allegiance Alone. Here he goes deeper while making his acclaimed teaching on salvation more accessible and experiential for believers who want to better understand and share the gospel. Gospel Allegianceincludes a guide for further conversation, making it ideal for church groups, pastors, leaders, and students.Matthew W. Bates (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is associate professor of theology at Quincy University in Quincy, Illinois. He is the author of Salvation by Allegiance Alone, named the Jesus Creed 2017 Book of the Year and one of the Best Books of 2017 by Englewood Review of Books. He has also written The Birth of the Trinity and The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation. Bates is cofounder and cohost of the popular OnScript podcast.

Fresh on the heels of evangelical preacher John MacArthur saying that evangelical preacher (*a woman*) should “Go home,” we have our friend Rev. Sarah Condon back on the podcast to reflect on what it’s like to be a clergywoman, her recent essay at Mockingbird Ministries, and how inclusion of women in pastoral ministry requires inclusion of LGBTQ Christians.

Dr. Johanna Hartelius, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Texas: Austin, is working with Jason on an article on apocalyptic preaching and, for it, has recently read Will Willimon’s book Conversations with Barth on Preaching. She demanded, as she does, to talk about it with Jason for the podcast.

David Bentley Hart is back on the podcast to talk about his recent review in the NY Times of the new Tarantino film, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” as well as the irrefutability of his new book That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, guns, and baseball.