Category: Longform
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I Don't Know Why You're Listening to This: October 6, 2026
Lace up your shoes, talking a little bit about running.
I Don't Know Why You're Listening to This: October 5, 2026
It’s about books, including a couple I’ve read lately.
I Don't Know Why You're Listening to This: October 2, 2026
Every podcast has to have a cringey first episode. This is mine. Fortunately for you it’s very short.
Dan Foster on Christian Universalism
I really appreciate this post from Dan Foster about Christian Universalism: What if Everyone Goes to Heaven - and the Bible Backs That Up?.
He summarizes the basic scriptural arguments for Christian Universalism in an easy way with some illustrations to make it easier to digest. After he gets through those arguments he addresses one last frequent objection: without the threat of hell, why would anyone choose to be good?
I used to think this was the question universalists couldn’t answer. If everyone ends up in heaven, what’s stopping us from doing whatever we like? Surely you need the possibility of punishment to keep people in line.
But if I found out tomorrow that nobody was going to hell, would I suddenly stop caring about my children? Would I feel free to betray my wife? I can’t imagine looking at the people I love and thinking, “Excellent. I can hurt you now.”
I think he’s right on here. There’s more to following Jesus and becoming like Jesus than just fire insurance.
But I’d like to become someone who gives more thought to the person affected than to the punishment I might receive. That seems a worthwhile part of following Jesus, whatever happens after we die.
Dan means this as a nice summary to this section of thought, but it brought me up short in a different way. Because a huge shift in my own theological thinking came at the point where I knew that it was important to continue to love and support people who my evangelical teachers said I should condemn, regardless of what their threatened punishment (both local and eternal) might be.
Six years later I am more convinced than ever that it was, indeed, the most Jesus-shaped way forward, and I have no regrets.
To simply be that part of the world already changed by Christ...
Really appreciate Brian Zahnd’s foray into political theology today.
It’s not our job to change the world. Jesus is the Savior of the world, not us. (The buoyant hope that sustains me in dark days is my conviction that the world really will be saved because Jesus really is the Savior of the world. Apokatastasis, baby!) Changing (or saving) the world is a task belonging to the Son of God. Our task is far more modest: To simply be that part of the world already changed by Christ. As Yves Congar said, “The church is the world as believing in Christ.”
Clarifying our task is important. When we think it is the task of the church to directly change the world, we find the lure of political power impossible to resist. When we assume we are the ones to change the world, we reach for what we imagine to be the most immediate means of effecting change—political power. We’re the good guys, so we should control the sword of Caesar, right? We’re the ethical ones, so we should control legislation, right? We’re the trustworthy ones, so we should be entrusted with coercive political power, right? Wrong! When the church (as an institution) sets out to change the world by political power, it does not change the world, it becomes the world.
Stanley Hauerwas has said it a million times: “The first task of the church is to make the world the world.” To be a faithful church we must be something other than the world. We must be fundamentally different from the world. But there is nothing more worldly than coveting political power. A church prioritizing political power becomes just another religious iteration of the world as it is. Nothing really changes.
(I also really appreciate his caveat that “in the present moment there is no moral equivalency between” the Christian Left and the Christian Right, though he applies his critique to them both.)
The kingdom of Christ, says Zahnd, will never neatly align with any political party in this world, since a political party’s imperative is winning, whereas a Christian’s imperative is love.
Believe me, I have opinions about political parties right now. But sign me up for love - the part of the world already changed by Christ. Amen.
A Dilemma: the damage and benefit of formative experiences
Unpacking a thing I talked about with my therapist not too long ago:
Growing up in fundamentalist evangelical Christianity, I was taught about the immense importance of The Truth, about the need to read, study, parse, understand, explain, and defend a sacred book, and that not getting it right (or at least right enough) had eternal consequences. And I was a good student.
In retrospect, there are all sorts of problems with that approach. It’s not as simple as the teachers said it was. There’s millennia of interpretation around what the things mean. Nobody ever gets it 100% right. The point isn’t about getting it all exactly right, anyway - it’s about loving God and our neighbor.
And yet, let me describe my career niche (certification of safety-critical airborne software), an expertise in which I have risen to the highest levels in my industry.
We have a complicated and somewhat esoteric “sacred book” - an industry standard for how to do safety-critical software. I spent a long time reading and studying that book, understanding the meaning and subtext, teaching that meaning to others, evangelizing its importance, evaluating others’ attempts to meet that standard, and arguing with incredible levels of pedantry about whether the words that a project wrote down actually correctly describe that they demonstrated compliance to the book.
Sound familiar at all?
It’s a complicated thing, trying to pick apart and understand both how the same formative experiences were in some ways difficult and damaging and in other ways created skills that make me very successful in some aspects of my life.
Highly recommended: Amy Grant on Norah Jones' podcast
Amy Grant has been doing a bunch of media lately in support of her new album The Me That Remains. I really enjoyed the podcast interview Andrew Osenga did on The Pivot - their shared Nashville community provided some great shared connections, and Andrew clearly appreciates Amy as an elder stateswoman of the Christian music scene as it has evolved over the decades.
But perhaps even more delightful was Amy’s appearance on Norah Jones’ podcast Norah Jones is Playing Along. Norah - a renowned musician and singer in her own right - is a generation younger than Amy, and describes how her first acquaintance with Amy’s music came with the pop breakout album Heart In Motion in the early 1990s. This provides the opportunity for Norah to ask questions about Amy’s background, her start in Christian music, and her transition into pop music. Undoubtedly Amy has told these stories before to a wide range of audiences, but it’s just so wonderful to hear her so deftly connect with Norah, gently expressing her perspective on faith and God in a non-intrusive way that is at the same time wonderfully inviting and encouraging.
Everyone I’ve heard talk who knows Amy describes her as one of those special people who just has a connection with people, and it comes through clearly here. At the end of the episode Norah says she’ll look Amy up next time she’s in Nashville, and Amy says that the rocking chairs on the front porch are always available. It’s such a genuine and honest invitation, and I hope for both their sakes that one day Norah is able to take her up on the offer.
Amy Grant’s music has been a part of my life since I was a small child. I remember Age to Age on vinyl on our turntable when I was in elementary school. I haven’t followed her music closely through every turn, but it’s so delightful to encounter her now, in her 60s, fully embracing her role as a grandmother, mother, mentor, and friend to generations of musicians who have grown up inspired by her music. What a beautiful example to follow.
Six years out of evangelicalism
My DayOne journal entry reminds me that it was six years ago today that after far too many years of waffling, I finally drafted a letter to the leaders at our evangelical church letting them know we were leaving. A brief excerpt:
…this [leaving] is largely a result of how my theological beliefs have shifted (grown?) over the past decade, pushing a larger and larger gap between the written and unwritten positions of [the church] and where I find myself. This would include Calvinism, the high emphasis on penal substitutionary atonement as the right expression of the gospel, Republican politics, complementarianism, and the need to focus so much on issues of sexuality and gender identity. These combine to form a church culture that I know I’ll never be able to lead in, which has become increasingly uncomfortable to fellowship in, and for which it’s very hard now to justify to my kids why they should be continuing to drink from this stream.
For the next three years we attended only our beloved “zoom church” of distant friends who were similarly exiles, shepherded by a faithful Presbyterian pastor lady who led us in prayer, liturgy, and community.
We always knew that zoom church wasn’t going to be the permanent solution, and in 2023 we started attending our local Episcopal Church. For the past three years they have been a welcoming family, giving us the time and space we needed to heal and then encouraging us to participate in the areas that fit us best. After three years here, my only regret is that we didn’t make the move sooner.