Crackers And Grape Juice Podcast

"In their language of warfare spiritual and secular, Trump’s evangelical allies have been playing with a fire that may continue to burn long after they give up this contest...History is a wasteland of religious justifications for political activism, identity, and violence. On the other hand, Christianity, and American Christianity especially, has arguably possessed more than its fair share of these unions of political thought and religious belief."Our friend Thomas Lecaque is back on the podcast to talk about his latest article at The Bulwark (you really should subscribe to it) entitled, "Spiritual Warriors on Behalf of Donald Trump:Putting the recent rhetoric of some of the president’s evangelical supporters in historical context."Thomas Lecaque is a professor of history at Grand View University. If you've not yet moved to Parler, you can follow him on Twitter: @tlecaque

Our guest for episode #284 is Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal, Professor of Homiletics at Duke. I had looked forward to talking with her. I left our conversation feeling grateful and delighted. I hope you enjoy it. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Neal shares connections and affinities with a number of friends from the podcast, including Beverly Gaventa, James Kay, and Karl Barth. Her new book is The Overshadowed Preacher: Mary, the Spirit, and the Labor of Proclamation. It breaks open one of the most important, unexamined affirmations of preaching: the presence of the living Christ in the sermon. Jerusha Matsen Neal argues that Mary’s conceiving, bearing, and naming of Jesus in Luke’s nativity account is a potent description of this mystery. Mary’s example calls preachers to leave behind the false shadows haunting Christian pulpits and be “overshadowed” by the Spirit of God. Neal asks gospel proclaimers to own both the limits and the promise of their humanness as God’s Spirit-filled servants rather

Our dear friend of the podcast and overall muse, Fleming Rutledge called in to offer a prayer for Election Day. As are all her prayers, this one is special. Fleming is the author of many books including "The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ." You can find her at www.generousorthodoxy.org.

Jason, Teer, and Taylor had a conversation with Gretchen Purser about the changes to the Republican Party throughout her career.“’Trump says all the things we’ve always wanted to say.’ Really? Then what does it say about us as Americans if Trump’s outer monologue is our inner monologue?”Our guest for episode #282 is former Republican campaign operative and fundraiser, Gretchen Purser.Raised a conservative Baptist in Oklahoma, Gretchen retired in 2009 from a 20 year career in politics, raising over a billion dollars for the Republican Party, candidates, and causes. She worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Christian Coalition during the 1996 Presidential Campaign, the President's Dinner, George W Bush's Inaugural. As an RNC consultant and finance director, Gretchen oversaw the McCain Victory finance team as well as the Bush finance team in the 2008 campaign.Donald Trump's Republican Party is NOT her party nor is it the Pro Life, Character Counts, Christian Values party for which she work

"Rather than resorting to Luther's Law-Gospel binary to excuse the Presidents mendacity and self-justify support for him, Protestants should turn to Luther's theology of cross which tells us that we should call a thing what it is...and the thing is only God knows the details and depths of Donald Trump's spiritual life, but Jesus says what comes out of our mouths is the fruit of what's in our hearts, and what Trump routinely says publicly disavows every core teaching Jesus set forth in the Sermon on the Mount."Our guest is Heidi Neumark, an author and Lutheran pastor in the South Bronx. Her new book is Sanctuary: Being Christian in the Wake of Trump.Throughout her nearly forty years in ministry, Heidi Neumark has strived to make communities of faith into sanctuaries amid the turmoils of life. Now, with the social and political upheaval of the years since Donald Trump was elected president, Neumark believes the true Christian calling is to live out a counterpoint to today’s prevailing spirits of exclusion and h

"You are mortal. You are not indispensable to the world. Your life will come to an end. We're not heroes of the world and we can't do much. To what and to whom do we give ourselves in this short life? Lacking a journalistic account of the future leaves us with many unanswered questions: What will 'do' in heaven? What exactly will it feel like and look like? My most basic answer to questions like these is "I don't know." Our hope rests not in a speculative vision of the future but in God and his promise."With COVID having claimed over 200K lives and All Saints approaching, our guest is J. Todd Billings, Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Living with incurable cancer, Billings reflects upon the end in his new book, The End of the Christian Life: How Embracing Mortality Frees Us to Truly Live.

“Both sides are thinking that some how or another getting this or that party elected is good for Christians. I think my point of view is neither side is good for Christians. Because effectively they have become idolatrous powers that christians are looking to for salvation”What is Post-Liberalism?What does "apocalyptic" mean?How is justice central to Paul's understanding of the Gospel? Our guest today is Dr. Douglas Harink, a theologian whose work has been important to me for a while now and who intersects with many of our favorite folks like Stanley Hauerwas, Karl Barth, and Fleming Rutledge.Douglas Harink (PhD, University of St. Michael's College) is professor of theology at The King's University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of Paul Among the Postliberals and 1 & 2 Peter in the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. He is also the editor of Paul, Philosophy, and the Theopolitical Vision: Critical Engagements with Agamben, Badiou, Žižek, and Others.

Friend of the podcast and commentator at The Dispatch, David French, has a new book out that couldn't be more timely and bracing. It's called Divided We Fall: America's Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation. As a preview, here's a conversation Teer and Jason had with David when Divided We Fall was being written.

Our guest today is David Gushee, whose new book is "After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity."Dr. David P. Gushee (BA, College of William & Mary; Master of Divinity, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy, Union Theological Seminary in New York) is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, where he has served for eleven years. Widely regarded as one of the world's leading Christian ethicists, he is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 25 books and approximately 150 book chapters, journal articles, and reviews. His most notable books include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, Still Christian, Moral Leadership for a Divided Age, and the new After Evangelicalism.Dr. Gushee was elected by his peers to serve as President of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, a very rare com

"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 R

"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 A

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 understan

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/crac

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 overv