Category: Longform
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I Don't Know Why You're Listening to This: October 9, 2026
I made it almost a whole week without talking theology… almost. Some thoughts on this coming Sunday’s Gospel reading.
A more curious response
Sitting in a work meeting today, a co-worker was describing a presentation he had given and the immediate dismissive response he had gotten from another teammate. While my coworker was clearly a little disappointed in this rejection and disagreed with that teammate’s opinion, I was struck by how he described that negative opinion. He didn’t say it was bad, or foolish, or stupid, or uninformed, or anything else critical or judgmental that way. Instead, he said this:
“A more curious response might have been…”
I love this, because I think it gets to the heart of the issue, which isn’t about the right-ness or wrong-ness of someone’s judgment of an issue. It gets to the person’s willingness to set aside their instinct and judgment for just a moment and consider that the other person just might have a point worth considering.
I want to remember that critique - both for times when it’s an appropriate way to describe others, and when it might be an appropriate way to describe myself.
Ted Lasso’s “Be curious, not judgmental” dictum from the best scene in the whole series has, at least in my circles, been overplayed to the point of becoming trite. Still… it’s wisdom worth remembering.
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.