Holy Heretics: Losing Religion and Finding Jesus

Episode Summary: (CW): Mental Illness, Suicidal Ideation, Depression, and Anxiety) Anna Gazmarian’s new book Devout: A Memoir of Doubt, investigates the overlapping complexities of religious faith, mental illness, and doubt. If you grew up in religiously conservative spaces, odds are you either never talked about mental illness or you were made to believe only people with a demonic spirit could suffer from mental and behavioral disorders. According to research by the National Institutes of Health, evangelical Christians often see mental health as the outworking of a harmful spiritual condition and therefore, the solution is to just have more faith in God. This is not only completely erroneous, it’s harmful. In this deeply personal conversation, Anna shares her struggles with depression, bipolar disorder, darkness, and doubt. For those of us who have lived on the dark side of the human experience, we have gifts to give to the world that only we can give because we know what it is like to lose touch with reality, to be in pain, to question the entire human experiment, to suffer with anxiety, to struggle to get out of bed in the morning, and to fight to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless existence. I’m honored to share this space with Anna and have this needed conversation about mental health and faith. Bio: Anna’s debut, Devout: A Memoir of Doubt is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in March 2024. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her essays have been published in The Guardian, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Sun, and Quarterly West. She works for The Sun Magazine and lives in Durham, NC. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review, or share on your socials 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/Christianity-and-mental-illness Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics | Substack: holyheretics.substack.com Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to Holy Heretics Shorts, premium content, and our online class on faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary: Interviewing Jonathan Merritt felt like having a conversation with myself. His journey out of white evangelical subculture is an almost mirror-image of my journey. My guess is, you’ll find a lot of correlation as well. Jonathan was a card-carrying evangelical who left his Southern roots and evangelical home to find faith, family, and freedom outside the confines and cult-like community of evangelical Christianity. His journey led him from certainty to contemplation, from winning to wisdom, from the shallow end of the pool into the deep waters of Ignatian spirituality, and from exclusion to radical inclusion. As he reminds us, evangelical Christianity is not only a fairly modern invention, it is also a minority movement within global Christianity. Evangelicals do not have a monopoly on God. There are a myriad of spiritual pathways available to you once you leave. So take heart, there is life after evangelicalism. There is faith after evangelicalism. There is new found family after evangelicalism. You get to decide what your future is going to look like. You have the power to form a freer faith and a more inclusive “family.” Four years and seventy-four episodes into Holy Heretics Podcast and I can honestly say I believe this conversation with Jonathan Merritt to be the most helpful and hopeful episode we’ve ever created. I hope you enjoy! Bio: Jonathan Merritt is one of America’s most popular writers on issues of faith and culture. He is author of several critically-acclaimed books, including Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words are Vanishing - and How We Can Revive Them, named “Book of the Year” by the Englewood Review of Books. Jonathan is an award-winning contributor for The Atlantic, a contributing editor for The Week, and a regular columnist for Religion News Service. He has published more than 3000 articles in respected outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today, Buzzfeed, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast and Christianity Today. In addition to the written word, Jonathan regularly contributes commentary to television, print, and radio news outlets. He has been interviewed by ABC World News, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, PBS, and CBS’ “60 Minutes.” Jonathan is also a sought after speaker at colleges, conferences, and churches on topics relating to spirituality, politics, and current events. Whether he is delivering an academic lecture or inspirational sermon, Jonathan’s captivating communication style and powerful presence are well-suited for intimate gatherings of hundreds or arenas filled with thousands. As a collaborator or ghostwriter, Jonathan has worked on more than 50 books, with several titles landing on the New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers lists. Additionally, he trains hundreds of young writers through his Write Brilliant seminars and online course. He is often available for exclusive one-on-one coaching for a select number of advanced writers. Jonathan holds a Master of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Master of Theology from Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, and has done additional graduate work focused on ascetical theology at The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. He is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades including the Wilbur Award for excellence in journalism, and the Religion News Association’s columnist of the year award. Jonathan currently happily resides in New York City. You can find Jonathan’s latest children’s book My Guncle and Me here! For more information about Jonathan and his writings, visit his website. You can also connect with Jonathan on Instagram. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review, or share on your...

Episode Summary: Do you feel spiritually and physically domesticated? Are you struggling to free yourself from the long-term impacts of spiritual colonization? Do you feel disconnected from the natural world? Are you longing for something more than merely reconstruction? If so, spiritual rewilding might be the next step in your faith seeking journey. Though an environmental term—meaning letting nature take care of itself and referring to conservation strategies that reintroduce species to their natural environment, restore wilderness areas and the land to its original state, and create corridors to connect these lands and species with each other—rewilding is a concept that just makes sense at a soul level. The faith deconstruction movement has provided an unprecedented opportunity to rediscover the untamable within, to decolonize our souls, and to free ourselves from a fenced-in faith domesticated by dogma, ideology, whiteness, patriarchy, power, purity culture, and rationalism. We have the opportunity to trade in our certainty for wonder and our literalism for mystery. As stewards of a once-wild faith that has all but been domesticated, we have a duty to free our faith from some of the repressive, world-denying, and destructive practices that have facilitated our spiritual stagnation. This episode with Holy Heretics host Gary Alan Taylor is an introduction to spiritual rewilding through the re-introduction of indigenous spirituality and Creation-centered Christianity. Along the way, we’ll look back at the history of our faith tradition and find examples of how our spiritual ancestors responded to spiritual domestication through their pursuit of a primeval faith. Bio: Gary Alan is the host and co-creator of Holy Heretics Podcast. He spent the first-half of his life in evangelicalism before beginning his faith deconstruction journey in 2020. He started Holy Heretics and The Sophia Society with his friend Melanie to serve the thousands of other individuals leaving toxic Christianity. Gary Alan has an undergraduate degree in History from Milligan University and a Master of Arts degree from East Tennessee State University. An international speaker, content creator, and writer, Gary Alan has over 26 years experience working in nonprofit ministry and higher education. He is in recovery from fundamentalist Christianity and his passion is to see others free themselves from toxic expressions of faith. He and his family live in Monument, Colorado and he works for the University of Colorado. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review, or share on your socials 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/rewilding-christianity Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics | Substack: holyheretics.substack.com Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to Holy Heretics Shorts, premium content, and our online class on faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary: Author Liz Cooledge Jenkins joins us on the show to discuss the harmful effects of patriarchy on men, women, families, LGBTQIA persons, culture, nations, and spiritual communities. With its ties to domination, violence, aggression, militarism, and white supremacy, patriarchy centers white, heterosexual men at the expense of everyone else. Patriarchal communities often tolerate or even condone violence against women, including domestic violence, sexual assault, and honor killings. Patriarchy comes to us in overt and subtle ways, but even nice, churchy patriarchy is toxic AF. How has patriarchy damaged your identity and self-worth? How has patriarchy impacted the assault on women's reproductive rights and what might it look like for you to resist patriarchy in a post-Roe world? How do we use literary criticism to re-interpret those clobber passages in the Bible? Why have we seen an uptick in violent, hyper-masculine, patriarchal expressions since 2016? This episode answers all those questions and more as Liz and I dissect, dismantle, and destroy the theological, social, and sexual manifestations of patriarchal culture. Liz wrote Nice Churchy Patriarchy in the hope of helping evangelical and formerly evangelical women make sense of their experiences in church, feel seen and validated in the frustrations they may have, and be inspired to chart a new way forward. "Oppressive mindsets, theologies, and systems are not okay. Change is needed. We are not asking for too much, too soon. We deserve better. And we have the power to find that better—to build it together," writes Jenkins. This practical conversation addresses the ways you and I can work to dismantle patriarchal structures, theologies, communities, and families to achieve a more just world. Connect with Liz on Insta @lizcoolj and @postevangelicalprayers. Bio: Liz Cooledge Jenkins (MDiv) is a writer, preacher, and former college campus minister who lives in the Seattle area with her husband Ken and their black cat Athena. Liz is passionate about building more just faith communities and a more just world. She has a BS in Symbolic Systems (Stanford University) and a Master of Divinity degree. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, The Christian Century, Christians for Social Action, Feminism and Religion, and Red Letter Christians, among other places. When not writing, Liz enjoys swimming, hiking, attempting to grow vegetables, and drinking a lot of tea. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review, or share on your socials 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/nice-churchy-patriarchy Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics | Substack: holyheretics.substack.com Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to Holy Heretics Shorts, premium content, and our online class on faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary Have you ever wanted someone to sit with you by the fire and watch your old religious beliefs go up in flames? Maybe you’ve longed for a guide or a coach to help you navigate all this wandering in the spiritual wilderness. If so, then this week’s episode is what you need right now! Faith deconstruction coach Angela J. Herrington joins me to talk about life after evangelicalism, and in particular this tender time in your spiritual journey when you feel alone, bewildered, angry, lost, and a bit terrified of what comes next. “There are a ton of people out here in the wilderness trying to figure out what we believe and what faith looks like during and after deconstruction. Together, we slog through the uncertainties and complexities of faith deconstruction. Laughing, crying, and raging against the toxic religious machine together,” she shares. This incredibly practical, approachable, and applicable conversation is a must for anyone in the throes of faith reconstruction. Faith deconstruction is disorienting, it’s painful, it’s also triggering. It’s often hard to find the language to describe what you are feeling, much less to find a way forward. As you navigate this space in between who you were and who you are becoming, may this conversation guide you on the long journey back to yourself as well as to God. Bio: As a certified life coach, seminary-trained online pastor, and a faith deconstruction coach, Angela has a lot of experience helping people connect with God. But this is also a very personal journey for me. For the last decade, I’ve been on my own journey to break free from learned smallness and step into wild sacred holy womanhood. Long story short, after finding faith in my early 30’s I began to realize that what I was hearing from the church about women didn’t always line up with what God was telling me. I loved God but realized the church was teaching some really toxic stuff. So this Enneagram 8, first born, Gen Xer started deconstructing. I questioned and challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, gender, and myself. It was messy and took a lot of work to sort it out. Therapy. Coaching. Bodywork. Spiritual healing. Conferences and retreats. And even a couple of college degrees. But the thing that made the biggest difference was the presence and support of wise people who helped me up when I didn’t know where else to turn. Which is just one reason why I became a faith deconstruction coach, to help people just like me make their way through the wilderness of deconstruction. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/reconstruct-faith-your-way Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics | Substack: holyheretics.substack.com Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes! and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary Have you ever paused long enough to consider why you continue pursuing the spiritual path? After all the scandals, abuse, religious trauma, and oppressive theology, why are you still here? This same question hit me last week during church and I didn’t have a profound answer. For whatever reason, I just can’t quit my search for the Sacred. I bet you’ve asked a similar question, or at least had the honesty to wonder just what the hell you are still doing in a movement that has caused you so much heartache. If eternal punishment is off the table, why even bother? I believe our latest episode on Holy Heretics provides an answer. According to today’s guest, spirituality isn’t about escaping the fire of hell, it is about your personal transformation. In short, you must become fully human in order to become fully divine. Sounds like the historical Jesus doesn’t it? A closer look at ancient Christianity reveals a novel truth—what Jesus was attempting to create was not a path to heaven but the revelation of the Way to birth a fully divine human race, a people as radically alive, compassionate, and enlightened as he is himself. What Jesus lived into and enacted was a new life of “kingdom consciousness,” available now to every person willing to claim their divine inheritance. The invitation is clear: you can walk the same road Jesus walked and attain the same deification he attained. The point to all your spiritual seeking isn’t to sin a little less, or ensure your spot in heaven, it is to become like Jesus himself. That, my friends, is the point. In today’s episode with monk and mystic Father Brendan E. Williams, we attempt to show you how to walk that road, what spiritual tools you will need along the way, and how to begin the practice of daily contemplation and meditation in our modern world. If you are seeking a more contemplative pilgrimage back to God, if you are ultimately wondering why to continue the spiritual journey, this conversation will provide a more mystical pathway forward, allowing you to discover the divine secret within you. Bio: The Rev. Father Brendan E. Williams, CMR is a monk and a priest of the Episcopal Church, and serves as Prior of the Episcopal monastic order, The Communion of the Mystic Rose. He also serves in chaplaincy, parochial ministry, and retreat leadership. Father Brendan is a scholar of religion and mystical theology, a yogī, a professional spiritual director and meditation instructor. He frequently writes and offers teaching in comparative religion, ascetical theology, contemplative practices, Indo-Tibetan and native Gaelic traditions. He can be found online at: www.brendanelliswilliams.com. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/this-is-the-way Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics | Substack: holyheretics.substack.com Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes! and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary: Living in the United States is a daily dose of trauma. Our nation is philosophically and pragmatically built on injustice, coercion, lies, oppression, exploitation, violence, dehumanization, and planetary destruction. Do we ever stop to think about how messed up the world is? The answer, of course, is an overwhelming no. We are living in what theologian John Dominic Crossan called a domination system—shorthand for a way of organizing society in a hierarchical, patriarchal, power-driven arrangement where the masses are politically oppressed, economically exploited, and socially marginalized. This same system has an almost demonic disregard for the environment. Worse yet, the largest Christian movement in the United States (white evangelicals) can be counted on to support it all. It’s madness writ large dressed in drag as the “American Dream.” We don’t seem to realize it, but most of us are suffering from Complex PTSD simply for existing in this dirty, rotten system. Worse, we live in a culture of lies. As today’s podcast guest Derrick Jensen writes, “In order for us to maintain this way of life, we must tell lies to each other, and to tell lies to ourselves. Truth must be avoided at all costs.” The truth about our economy, about our dying planet, about violence and domination at the family and cultural level; truth about the daily injustices that rule our lives in this decaying empire. Life doesn’t have to be this way. We can work together to create a more just and equitable world. We can carve out subversive spaces even if we will never be able to leave these shores for a different home. But, how do we do it? How do we speak truth to power? How do we challenge a culture that silences the least of these? How do we push back on the religious, political, economic, and social domination systems that rule our lives and malform our bodies and our planet? How do we confront evil and injustice without losing our souls? How, as Christians, can we resist the dominant culture and live into what Dr. Martin Luther King called “the beloved community?” As theologian Marcus Borg writes, “Jesus wasn’t talking about how to be good within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.” Today’s conversation on Holy Heretics with eco-philosopher and environmentalist Derrick Jensen invites us to envision this way of life. A way that will take great courage, but is necessary for the life of every sentient being on this planet. Jensen’s visceral, biting observations and stories always manage to lead back to his mantra: 'Things don't have to be the way they are.' I think this is the most profound conversation we’ve had to date on the show. I hope you enjoy! Bio: Hailed as the philosopher poet of the environmental movement and a leading voice in cultural dissent, Derrick Jensen is is an American eco-philosopher, writer, author, teacher and environmentalist. He explores the nature of injustice, how civilizations devastate the natural world, and how human beings retreat into denial at the destruction of the planet. author of twenty-one books, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He was named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Jensen unflinchingly examines the culture’s darkest corners while searching for a way forward. In A Language Older Than Words, he draws on his own experience of childhood abuse to examine violence as a pathology that afflicts every life on the planet. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/we-dont-have-to-live-this-way Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast |...

Episode Summary Have you ever paused long enough to consider that maybe, just maybe you are living a lie? Is it possible that your outer shell, or your outer identity isn’t really you after all? What if all your coping mechanisms that have come to shape your identity isn’t the real you? Maybe you’ve spent your life operating out of your false self based purely on survival, but is that who you were born to become? I hope not. At some point, if you don’t examine your false self, the real you will die. Father Richard Rohr writes, “Too much of both religion and common therapy seem to be committed to making people comfortable with what many of us call our “false self.” It’s just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, which is going to sink anyway. To be rebuilt from the bottom up, you must start with the very ground of your being.” I’m not sure why it’s this way, but your true self is oftentimes hidden and must be sought out and cultivated. Your true self is who you are in God and who God is in you. Truth be told, you don’t need to create your true self, you simply need to awaken to the you that you already are. This is the point of real conversion, that moment in your life when you wake up to who you were made to be. As you listen to Heather’s story of awakening to trauma and discovering the still, small voice within her, ask yourself what you need to do in order to be reborn from the false self that dominates your life and into your true self hidden all these years under the weight of ego, defense mechanisms, and posturing. Being human, or finding your true self, is a constant search for our divine nature as “children of God,” an eternal journey that will one day end back where it started, in mystical union with our Creator. Thankfully, you’ll know you are on your way to becoming your true self when love, compassion, grace, beauty, and truth take root in your soul and become actualized in your daily life. Our choice in life, C.S. Lewis says, is either “to be like God”—by sharing the divine life—or to be miserable. Bio: Heather first cultivated her storytelling skills through video production and editing. By listening to thousands of people share their stories, she learned to listen for authenticity and confront difficult realities. The collision of certain truths with her religious worldview led Heather on a search for clarity and understanding. She prioritizes truthful answers over personal comfort. Heather writes honestly about the power of love, fear, beauty, angst, and courage. Heather’s background gives her a unique ability to pull up what is real from underneath the stories we tell ourselves about God and our lives. Heather lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and three precious children. She sometimes forgets to do basic things like put conditioner in her hair while showering or start dinner on time because her mind is busy pondering how the Universe works and why humans behave like they do. You can connect with Heather on her website www.ReturningToEden.com or on Instagram @heatherhamilton1 or on Facebook: Facebook.com/heatherhamiltonauthor. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/finding-your-true-self Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes! and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith...

Episode Summary One of the paths available to you post-evangelicalism is mysticism, a spirituality that in many ways is almost the direct antithesis of evangelical Christianity. If evangelicalism was all about certainty, apologetics, Biblicism, and defending your faith at all costs, Christian mysticism can be defined by unknowing, mystery, paradox, and direct experience with the Sacred. Mystics know something the rest of us don’t know. God is right here with us, right here inside us, right here hidden in plain site just waiting on us to have the eyes to see that this tired old world is filled to the brim with Divinity. A mystic is anyone who has moved beyond the basic understanding of faith as a belief system and into a deeper level of spirituality, recognizing faith as an intimate relationship with the divine through direct experience. They have a “thirst to taste both the holy and the human with unmediated directness,” in the words of Harvard scholar Harvey Cox. The mystical life has less to do with brief moments of divine euphoria and more to do with the realization that through practice, meditation, silence, contemplation, service, and prayer, God is a lived and present reality in daily life. To the mystic, God is no longer some external object to be studied from a distance, but rather an immediate reality to be known, loved, and communed with. Mystics typically inhabit the border streams of faith, existing on the margins, often running afoul of institutional religion. The telos or end goal of their faith is loving union with God, a kind of returning home to your maker and sustainer. Mystics embody what orthodox Christianity has been preaching from the beginning—that God is both transcendent (other worldly) and immanent (present), beyond us yet with us, unknowable yet utterly known. Simply, mystics understand that “knowing” God goes beyond the intellectual and the rational to include intimacy, like a bride “knows” her husband. Bio: Keith Giles is a former pastor who left the pulpit to follow Jesus and start a house church where no one takes a salary and 100 percent of all offerings are given to help the poor in the community. He has been a published writer since 1989. He is the author of several books, including: "Jesus Unbound: Liberating the Word of God from the Bible" and "Jesus Untangled: Crucifying Our Politics To Pledge Allegiance To The Lamb." Keith is the co-host of the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast which has featured interviews with Bart Ehrman, John Fugelsang, Richard Rohr, Brad Jersak, Greg Boyd, and many others. Keith also teaches several online courses including "Square 1: From Deconstruction to Reconstruction" and other courses based on his many books. You can follow him online and find out more about his books at www.KeithGiles.com Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/what-is-christian-mysticism Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: garyalan@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes! and premium content like our online class on deconstruction! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary Authoritarianism is on the rise all across the world. Here in America, the leading proponents of anti-democratic ideology are evangelical Christians who have been swept up in the cult of Donald Trump. Driven by a dominator theology and good old-fashioned white supremacy, conservative Christians can be counted on as the leading supporters of dictatorial politics. As Dr. David Gushee writes in his book Defending Democracy From It’s Christian Enemies, “Our current democratic crisis reveals a need to revisit the very meaning of democracy…Concerned citizens should care about the direction of movement in their own country. Ours is trending in a bad direction.” And that trend is leading many Christians to embrace what Gushee describes as “Nazified Christianity.” Since the 1960’s, much of American public life has been moving toward greater freedoms, greater inclusivity, greater access to power, self-determination, and wealth for underrepresented populations. The Civil Rights Movement, feminist movement, sexual revolution, LGBTQIA movement, and the #METOO Movement have leveled the playing field. And who does that threaten? White, male Christians who are reacting to those new freedoms with violence and extremism. So, how do we work to not only save our democracy from it’s Christian enemies, but to awaken our friends and family who have been taken captive by the rise of totalitarianism and the despotism of the Republican Party? This scholarly, yet practical conversation provides you with the resources and tools to have transformational conversations about the politics of Jesus as well as helping to equip you with the action-steps to save democracy during this political season. Bio: Rev. Prof. Dr. David P. Gushee (PhD, Union Theological Seminary, New York) is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, and Chair of Christian Social Ethics at Vrije Universiteit (“Free University”) Amsterdam, and Senior Research Fellow, International Baptist Theological Study Centre. Gushee is the elected Past-President of both the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, signaling his role as one of America's leading Christian ethicists. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 28 books and over 175 academic book chapters, journal articles, and reviews (see his full academic C.V.). His most recognized works include Kingdom Ethics, and Changing Our Mind. His other most notable works are Introducing Christian Ethics, Still Christian, After Evangelicalism, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, and the forthcoming Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. Altogether his books have sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into a dozen languages. With his works read around the world, and an active lecturing schedule on several continents, he has global impact in the field of Christian ethics. A leader in the growing post-evangelical movement, he has also put feet to his faith in several activist campaigns. David and his wife Jeanie live in Atlanta. He is a classic novel reader, world traveler, and tennis player, and awaits a call from his beloved Atlanta Braves to resume the baseball career he abandoned in college. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/saving-democracy-from-her-christian-enemies Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon or Substack and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith...

OK, I'll admit it right up front, this is a heavy episode. This one feels like a therapy session processing through the anger, the rage, the bitterness, and all your past complicity in white evangelical Christianity. If you haven't noticed yet, one of the pit stops on the deconstruction road is animosity. You finally wake up to all the harmful ways evangelical Christianity has impacted your life and the lives of others and sometimes all you can feel is resentment. It's easy to get stuck here, raging against the evangelical machine. But what might it look like to fuel your anger for something good, beautiful and true? Author Marla Taviano helps us unlearn our past by learning how to heal and move forward, channeling anger into transformative love. Ultimately, how do you stay emotionally, spiritually, and mentally healthy as you process the grief of growing up evangelical? We also discuss what it means to be a real ally, how to decolonize the deconstruction space, and ways you can center marginalized voices in your daily life. Bio Marla Taviano (she/her) is into: books, love, justice, globes, anti-racism, blue, rainbows, poems (and a hundred other things). Reads and writes for a living (and a life). Mom to some freaking awesome kids. Wears her heart on her t-shirts. On a mission/quest/journey to live wholefarted (not a typo). (Big fan of parentheses—and em dashes.) Connect with her on IG: @marlataviano and @whitegirllearning or marlataviano.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/a-reckoning-with-white-evangelicalism Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics or subscribe to our Substack to gain access to subscriptions and online classes in faith deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary In the second-part of our conversation about the Divine Feminine, we look at the ramifications of believing God is a guy. Institutional Christianity has given us God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, a triune male God with “He/Him” pronouns. And this male dominated theology has created a male dominator culture that manifests itself politically, socially, sexually, religiously, and economically in pragmatism, patriotism, persecution, capitalism, greed, aggression, egoism, hierarchy, oppression, exclusion, bigotry, ignorance, and emotionally stunted men. All of which has the planet on the brink of destruction. But what if we’re wrong? What if God isn’t a guy after all? And how would seeing God in female form change the way we understand ourselves and the world around us? Rediscovering the Divine female attributes of God is one of the first steps toward our collective liberation from the dominant power structures that rule our lives. In this episode, we uncover all the ways God is referenced in female language throughout Scripture and church history. We also look at Jesus’ primordial identity as Holy Wisdom, or the Sophia of God, making the historical Jesus the personification of the Divine Feminine. Quotables “If God is male, the male is God.” “Domination of women has provided a key link, both socially and symbolically, to the domination of earth.” “The symbolic evidence of women’s invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers, even by exclusively male images of God.” “There has always been a vocal minority recognizing the many pronouns for God, including “He/Him,” “She/Her,” “They/Them.” “All Language about God is metaphorical, but those metaphors matter.” “One of the most ancient metaphorical understandings and expressions of Divinity is God as womb of the world.” “How can women be made in the image of God if God cannot be imagined in female form?” “What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.” “Sophia is the first of God’s works, God’s female companion in the creation of the cosmos.” “Sophia became flesh and dwelt among us.” “Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother.” Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/what-are-gods-pronouns Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes, and sound engineering is by Joshua Mudge (currently accepting new clients: josh.mudge09@gmail.com).

Episode Summary Have you ever paused to wonder why it was always God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—a trio of divine beings known only as “He” and “Him?” This should cause us to ask a basic question. Why is God so overwhelmingly referred to as a He in institutional Christianity, as well as in Judaism? Did you know that from ancient times God was first known as our Mother, and sustainer? Over the next two episodes we’re going to discuss what I believe is one of the most important spiritual conversations we’ve ever had on the show, the Divine Feminine. What might it look like to see God in female form and through female language? How would your relationship to the Divine change if you were equipped to see the other side of God? And how has knowing only God the Father warped our souls, impoverished our theology, and deadened our spirits? As Sister Joan Chittister writes, “It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.” I hope this episode will introduce you to the Divine Feminine, to God our Mother, and how reframing your image of God will change how you view yourself, the world, and your neighbor. Bio Gary Alan Taylor is the Co-Founder of The Sophia Society and Host of Holy Heretics Podcast. Gary Alan has an undergraduate degree in History from Milligan University, a Master of Arts in Holocaust Studies from East Tennessee State University, and worked on a PhD at The University of Tennessee. Gary Alan has spent his life in faith-based organizations and began deconstructing his faith about ten years ago when he was introduced to a theology of liberation and nonviolence. With his friend and colleague Melanie Mudge, Gary Alan created The Sophia Society to be a sacred space for the spiritual formation of post-evangelicals. Since then, The Sophia Society has served thousands of “exvangelicals” through it’s monthly Liminal Spaces publication, podcast, articles, online classes, and community spaces. You can plug in or simply learn more about The Sophia Society here! Gary Alan is passionate about overcoming his own religious trauma by pursuing a more mystical form of faith. Additional Reading Woman Strength by Joan Chittister The Divine Feminine by Virginia Ramey Mollenkot Thy Queendom Come by Kyndall Rae Rothaus God is a Black Woman by Christena Cleveland She Who Is by Elizabeth A. Johnson Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/god-our-mother Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary We continue our march toward the marginalized this week with another conversation with Dr. Miguel De La Torre about the future of American political identity. As a Lantinx scholar, Miguel sees a future in which American society is run by white Christian nationalist elites at the expense of everyone who is 'the other.' Much like South African Apartheid, America could become a nation controlled by a very powerful and violent minority all supported by white evangelicals. After all, it was conservative Christians who helped set up South African Apartheid in the 1948. Following these through lines of American racism and oppression, he warns of a decline in democracy and rise in political violence—but equips us with the nonviolent ethical framework to resist this bleak future. If you are a citizen of the United States, have you ever considered what it might look like to become Un-American? Have you ever considered all the ways the American Empire forces you to compromise your faith? As Christian ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote, “Being a Christian is going to put you at odds with a great deal of what it means to be an American.” In this episode, we call upon listeners to consider what it might mean to remake America in the image of the God of liberation, and how do achieve that nonviolently? What role can you play in resisting this dominator form of Christianity and politics? Bio Dr. Miguel De La Torre is Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. He has served as the elected 2012 President of the Society of Christian Ethics and served as the Executive Officer for the Society of Race, Ethnicity and Religion (2012-17). Dr. De La Torre is a recognized international Fulbright scholar who has taught courses at the Cuernavaca Center for Intercultural Dialogue on Development (Mexico), Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (Indonesia), University of Johannesburg (South Africa), Johannes Gutenberg University (Germany). Additionally, he has lectured at Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana (Costa Rica), The Association for Theological Education in South East Asia (Thailand) and the Council of World Mission (Mexico and Taiwan). Advocating for an ethics of place, De La Torre has taken students on immersion classes to Cuba, Guatemala, the Peruvian Amazon, and the Mexico/U.S. border to walk the migrant trails. Among multiple yearly speaking engagements, he has also been a week-long speaker at the Chautauqua Institute, and the plenary address at the Parliament of World Religions. De La Torre has received several national book awards and is a frequent speaker at national and international scholarly religious events and meetings. He also speaks at churches and nonprofit organizations on the intersection of religion with race, class, gender, and sexuality . In 2020, the American Academy of Religion bestowed on him the Excellence in Teaching Award. The following year, 2021, the American Academy also conferred upon him the Martin E. Marty Public Understanding of Religion Award. De La Torre is the first scholar to receive the two most prestigious awards presented by his guild and the first Latinx to receive either one of them. Check out De La Torre's BLOG for additional resources and readings. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/resisting/american/apartheid Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics and get access to our online class Making Sense of the Bible Post-Deconstruction! This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Contrary to what many assume, peace isn’t meekness in the face of evil it is the courageous and oftentimes creative task of disarmament. Active peacemaking is a way to fight against injustice without using violence. It is using the transformative force of love to resist oppression. It says that the means are the ends, that the way to peace is peace itself. “Love of enemies does not necessarily ease tensions; rather it challenges the whole system and becomes a subversive formula for true personal and national liberation,” writes liberationist theologian Gustavo Gutierrez. Therefore we shouldn’t be surprised that peacemakers like Dr. Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi appear as anything but peaceful. But what might it look like for you to live a life of nonviolent resistance to evil? How do you confront evil and injustice without becoming unjust yourself? In this episode with Holy Heretics host Gary Alan Taylor, we discuss ways to take power back from the oppressors through nonviolent, subversive action. We draw on the teachings of Jesus who provided a 'third way' beyond fight or flight that leads to an opportunity for the perpetrator to not only recognize your humanity, but repent of his oppression. For our new patrons, thank you for joining us! Thank you for providing the resources we desperately need to continue creating this sacred, subversive space. Our podcast is an act of nonviolent resistance to dominator evangelicalism. We will not be silenced. We will not be intimidated by the religious establishment. We will continue to speak loudly and proudly for the marginalized, no matter the cost. Your commitment to this work is also an act of resistance, thank you! Bio Gary Alan Taylor is the Co-Founder of The Sophia Society and the Host of Holy Heretics Podcast. Gary Alan grew up in conservative evangelical culture as a preacher boy and his deconstruction journey began way back as an undergraduate at Milligan College when he took a course that changed his life. Taught by Stanley Hauerwas protege Phil Kennesson, Christ and Culture planted seeds that would grow into a subversive faith decades later. Prior to his faith deconstruction, Gary Alan worked in evangelical spaces as a content creator. He has written for RedLetter Christians and Missio Alliance and has a Master of Arts degree in Holocaust Studies as well as PhD work in Colonial American History. Gary Alan and his wife Jennifer live in Monument, Colorado and attend Grace and St. Stephens Episcopal Church. Quotables “Four in ten Americans live in a household with a gun. 44% of Republicans say they own a gun.” “What might it look like to deconstruct your faith nonviolently?” “Here in America, we love our guns, and we love our God given right to blow you away.” “Even out theology is violent. We believe in a violent, wrathful God, so violence is wrapped into the DNA of what it means to be an American.” “When the United States kills it’s enemies, it’s probably a Christian who pulls the trigger.” “What I fear is being in the presence of evil and doing nothing. I fear that more than death.” “We don’t have enough money for healthcare, education and basic human services because we spend billions of dollars on war, and we call that pragmatic.” “For what the world spends on defense every 2.5 hours, smallpox was eliminated.” “We believe that violence saves.” “Can you commit an act of violence for the cause of justice?” “Is there ever a time that you could kill for the right cause?” “What if the people we think are so evil aren’t evil at all?” “Our addiction to redemptive violence is the fault of the church.” “When war is undertaken in the name of God, there can be no limit in the killing, because so much is at stake.” “Nonviolence isn’t an exception to the rule, but is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.” “There wasn’t even a word for pacifism in the early church because to call yourself a Christian meant you lived a life of...

Episode Summary In the second installment of our conversation with Natalie Drew, we move deeper into her gender transition and how it impacted her marriage, career, and spiritual journey. If you haven’t checked out Part One, go back and listen now before moving forward into this episode! We answer several questions including, can you be Christian and transgender and what might it look like to transcend the false gender binary that pervades our social and spiritual spaces? I know you will appreciate the intimacy, honesty, and bravery Natalie continues to show to her online trolls and the theobros who wish her ill. May her grace provide a way forward in your own dealings with individuals who doubt you, question, you, and try to thwart your personal and spiritual path. Bio Despite what many within conservative Christian circles may claim, “Christian” and “transgender” are not mutually exclusive. Natalie is living proof of this, as she navigates life post-transition within conservative Christian circles. She, her wife Heather, and their two teenagers are recent transplants to the heart of Reformed country…west Michigan. Natalie has spent the past 13 years as an HR professional, and currently serves as an HR Manager for a Fortune 500 company in the Grand Rapids area. After 6 years as an infantry soldier in the Army, Natalie has committed her life to advancing an ethic of Christian nonviolence and fighting for the rights of trans people. She is dedicated to elbowing her way in Christian spaces to help make room for her LGBTQIA+ siblings who have historically been rejected and despised by the church. Please follow us on social media (use the buttons below) and help us get the word out! (Also, please don’t hesitate to use any of these channels or email to contact us with any questions, concerns, or feedback.) If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/transgender-and-christian-part-two Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics This episode was produced by The Sophia Society. and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

CW: We discuss trauma, addiction, suicidal ideation, abuse, and other topics that may be triggering. Please listen at your own discretion. A lot of times on our show, we discuss theological matters that mostly reside in your head, but this episode is altogether very different. This conversation is personal, it’s raw, it’s painful, it’s the deeply transformative work of an individual who fought to save her own life by becoming who she always knew she was. It’s not only an episode about gender dysphoria and transition, it’s a conversation about what it means to live peacefully with yourself and the violent world around us. In many ways, Natalie Drew is one of our heroes. Here’s why. Despite what many within conservative Christian circles may claim, “Christian” and “transgender” are not mutually exclusive. Natalie is living proof of this, as she navigates life post-transition within conservative Christian circles. She, her wife Heather, and their two teenagers are recent transplants to the heart of Reformed country…west Michigan. Natalie has spent the past 13 years as an HR professional, and currently serves as an HR Manager for a Fortune 500 company in the Grand Rapids area. After 6 years as an infantry soldier in the Army, Natalie has committed her life to advancing an ethic of Christian nonviolence and fighting for the rights of trans people. She is dedicated to elbowing her way in Christian spaces to help make room for her LGBTQIA+ siblings who have historically been rejected and despised by the church. I hope her personal story of religious trauma, addiction, recovery, and transition will inspire you to live into who God fully made you to be. Especially in a day and age when transgender individuals are thrown into the culture war to chum the water of hatred and bigotry by evangelical Christians and their Republican Party goons, leading to a rise in dehumanizing tactics and strategies aimed at eliminating transgender people from society. Recent laws passed in Bible-belt states like Texas, Alabama, and Florida are making it almost impossible for transgender people to get healthcare, participate in sports, be themselves at school, and even be in an affirming relationship with their parents. And it is Christian organizations helping to write bigotry into the laws of our land. May we, like Natalie, find ways to resist such evil nonviolently, protecting our souls as we fight each day to make the world a better place for everyone. Quotables “Let me wake up a girl…let me be me! Or God, if you are not going to do that, then please kill me.” “I grew up in that world where it was King James version only where women and children were to be seen and not heard…It was a very spiritually, emotionally, and physically abusive world I grew up in both in the Church and at home.” “I didn’t have the vocabulary for it, I just knew I wasn’t like the boys in class.” “I had no safe place…My parents, I could have never taken this to them.” “I did what a lot of young trans girls do. I retreated into myself and became very violent.” “Like any good cult, you go to their schools. You plan to go to their colleges, you marry the person you meet at college and move back and repeat the cycle with your kids.” “I found the perfect job. It’s a job that let’s me be violent without the condemnation of society. And I would be held up as a hero in society. So, I joined the Army.” “There is a higher percentage of former Special Forces soldiers that are transgender than there is in the general population. It’s called the flight to hyper-masculinity.” If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/transgender-and-christian Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes!...

CW: Adult Language. Christians were never meant to be normal, we've always been "holy troublemakers" who do not accept the world as it is but who insist on the world becoming the way God wants it to be. In the words of our friends at The Center for Prophetic Imagination, “A world where all walls of alienation are torn down as we live justly with one another.” From the very beginning, Jesus called us to be a beloved community of resistance to the brutal normalcy of a world dominated by the powers and principalities of darkness. Often, that darkness comes to us cloaked in the status quo, in the normative ideology of white, cis gender, patriarchal ideology. But racism, transphobia, homophobia, economic injustice, violence, patriarchy, and white supremacy are only normal in a world dominated by oppression. In this prophetic episode, we talk with Ashe Van Steenwyk about what it might look like for you and I to "confront not only the institutions and systems and structures that control and constrain our material lives, but also the myths, beliefs, and ideas that shape and bind our imaginations." And what better way to do that than to embody the radical, subversive way of Jesus who came to upend life as we know it. Some of the questions we seek to answer in this episode include: What do we mean when we say Jesus was queer? How do we discern what is real? How do we push back against injustice without losing our souls? How do we not only resist evil, but redeem evil? What does it look like to carve out new possibilities in a world of forced conformity? What if everything we call 'normal' is really just evil in disguise? What if what we believe to be profane is actually holy and what we have been told is orthodoxy is just a set of lies created to keep us in line? How do we resist dominance and power? And where have even liberal and progressive Christians been captivated by oppressive systems and structures? Bio M. Ashe (she/they) is the co-founder of the Center for Prophetic Imagination. She is a writer, teacher, organizer, and spiritual director. For nearly 15 years, she has sown seeds of subversive spirituality throughout North America. Ashe is the author of That Holy Anarchist, unKingdom, and A Wolf at the Gate. You can find out more about Ashe here. The Center for Prophetic Imagination works to subvert the existing social order through deep discernment culminating with creative action. Check out their online resources and online classes to learn more about what it means to be a holy troublemaker in our world. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/queer-jesus Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast | Facebook: @holyheretics Advertising inquiries: podcast@sophiasociety.org Support our work on Patreon and get early access to episodes! https://www.patreon.com/holyheretics This episode was produced by The Sophia Society and written by Gary Alan Taylor. Music is by Faith in Foxholes.

Episode Summary Barbara Brown Taylor is who you want to be when you grow up. Her life is a legacy of wisdom and wonder, walking the long road toward becoming fully human. In this intimate conversation that is more memoir than interview, she looks back on a long pilgrimage of faith while sharing some of the secrets she’s found along the way. As she reminds us, “This is not the life I planned or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine.” Along the way she shares what suffering and pain have taught her, and how life isn’t so much about eliminating the bad but finding a balance between light and darkness, despair and hope. Together, we explore what it means to slow down and listen to your life, to embrace your humanity as you strive for the Divine. As poet Mary Oliver wrote, “To live in this world you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” I hope you will take the time to listen to your life, to see if for all the beauty and agony it brings as you walk this long pilgrimage toward becoming fully human, fully divine. Bio Barbara Brown Taylor is An American Episcopal priest, professor, and New York Times bestselling author who has dedicated her life to the pursuit of becoming fully human. Her most beloved works include An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. She completed her undergraduate work at Emory University and went on to study at Yale Divinity School where she graduated in 1976. In 1996, she was named one of the twelve "most effective" preachers in the English-speaking world by Baylor University. She was awarded the 1998 Emory Medal by the Emory Alumni Association of Emory University for her distinguished achievement in education. She has been an Avon lady, a cocktail waitress, a horseback riding instructor, and a parish minister, but her favorite job was teaching world religions at Piedmont College for twenty years before putting the chalk down in 2017. She now divides her time between writing, speaking, and caring for the land on which she lives. Barbara and her husband Ed tend a small farm in the foothills of the Appalachians. Quotables “I was raised by parents who took me to libraries instead of churches.” “It took teaching world religions to realize Christianity was probably the most diverse, global tradition. And there are hundreds if not thousands of ways of being Christian.” “It’s a wide, wide Christian world and I still identify that way…I’m the kind of Christian who will never be fully cooked.” “I’m clearly a person who believes what we most have in common is our humanity, not our religion.” “Jesus never told me to love my religion…If given the choice between loving my religion and loving my neighbor, I choose the neighbor.” “If we are made just a little lower than the Angels and made in the image of the Divine, it is quite something to be human.” “Both in Christian life and life universally, I keep meeting people who don’t feel fully equipped yet to live their lives.” “If I’m going to love my neighbor, it is extremely important to ditch my stereotypes.” “We do a lot of judging one another by our yard signs, and I am so weary of that dichotomy.” “There was a time when my writing about Nature earned me a kind of outsider status of being pagan or pantheist.” “For the first time I began to see all the people my beloved tradition left out.” “Outsider status really ended up being like pilgrim status.” “As a mainline Episcopalian, what could be further from where most evangelicals started.” “I don’t speak of the Christ, but I’m happy to talk about Jesus.” “I do believe the spirit of God lives in ALL that God has made.” “Darkness is the way of unknowing…It’s the way you set your feet on when you don’t know where you are going.” “You shed a lot of beliefs along...

One of the great ironies of the Christian religion is that the person Christians worship isn’t a Christian. Jesus was born, raised, and died a Jew. He might even find it odd that an entire new religion grew up out of his short life and painful death. He is without question, the most popular person to have ever walked the earth. But what do we really know about this first century Galilean? If we are honest, not much. He was born to humble parents under sketchy circumstances, he grew to become an itinerant preacher and wisdom teacher. The poor loved him, drunks drank with him, and sex workers called him friend. Some believed him a prophet, others thought he was the Messiah. The religious elite saw him as a threat and the Roman Empire eventually murdered him as a political revolutionary. But what cannot be questioned about the historic Jesus is his Jewish identity. He was rooted in first century Judaism. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, he taught in the Synagogue. He was a miracle worker and mystic. If you grew up in the church, Jesus was presented as the first Christian, a man who dedicated his life to dismantling Judaism in route to founding a new religion. But this view is not only historically inaccurate, it fails to account for Jesus’ Jewish identity. In this erudite episode, scholar Amy-Jill Levine helps Christians and Jews understand the "Jewishness" of Jesus so that our appreciation of him deepens and a greater interfaith dialogue can take place. Levine's humor and informed truth-telling provokes honest conversation and debate about how Christians and Jews should understand Jesus in the modern world. How have we gotten him right? How have we gotten him wrong? What might we learn about him by remembering and studying his Jewish identity? What would Jesus have believed about hell, sexuality, women, and the Bible in his first century Jewish context? We’ve all met Jesus before. Or, have we? Meeting Jesus as a first century Jew just might change not only how you see yourself, but your faith tradition as well. Bio Amy Jill Levine (“AJ”) is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita and Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, at Vanderbilt. Her publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; six children’s books (with Sandy Sasso); The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III, the first biblical commentary by a Jew and an Evangelical); The Jewish Annotated New Testament (co-edited with Marc Brettler), The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (with Marc Brettler), The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), and thirteen edited volumes of the Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Along with Introduction to the Old Testament for the Teaching Company, her Beginner’s Guide series for Abingdon Press includes Sermon on the Mount, Light of the World, Entering the Passion of Jesus, The Difficult Words of Jesus, Witness at the Cross, and Signs and Wonders. The first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first winner of the Seelisberg Prize for Jewish-Christian Relations, AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who works to counter biblical interpretations that exclude and oppress. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and a review 🙏 Show notes: http://www.sophiasociety.org/podcast/meeting-jewish-jesus-for-the-first-time Follow us on social media! Twitter: @holyheretics | Instagram: @holyhereticspodcast |...