Accidental Tomatoes

In this episode from the midst of COVID-19 shelter in place protocols, Joe reflects on what it means to experience the presence of the divine in a real, sensory manner in the mountains of West Virginia.

In this final part of our "Deconstructing Lent" series, Joe looks at some of the often-misused passages from Matthew 7 and places them within Jesus' larger context of deconstruction and reconstruction at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

In Part 3 of our Deconstructing Lent series on the Sermon on the Mount, Joe unpacks the way Jesus moves his 1st Century Jewish audience from deconstruction toward reconstruction in Matthew 6.

In Part 2 of our Deconstructing Lent series, Joe provides more cultural and historical content for the Sermon on the Mount and talks about how Jesus begins to deconstruct his listeners' understanding of Torah, the Jewish legal code of the time.

For Christians, the season of Lent is a time of reflection. But it can also be a time for those of us on the outside of religious traditions to deconstruct some of the myths that often hold us captive. Episode 9 is the first in a four-part series aimed at deconstructing Lent through the lens of one of Jesus' most well-known and important teachings: the Sermon on the Mount from chapters 5, 6, and 7 of the book of Matthew in the New Testament. In this episode, Joe breaks down some of the preconceptions of the language used in the text leading up to the Sermon on the Mount and its opening sections to help us see that there may be a better story to be found than the one we have often been given from traditional ways of teaching. Much of the source material for this series comes from Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy as well as other commentaries by theologians such as Pete Enns, Rob Bell, and NT Wright.

In this Black History Month episode of the podcast, Joe talks about how white privilege happens, how he discovered his own privilege, and why it's so important for white people to recognize privilege and help to re-center the stories of people who have been harmed by it.

More and more we meet people who have experienced or are experiencing some type of spiritual or religious trauma. Our special guest on this episode is Emily Stuart, a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling who has done some very important research into spiritual trauma...and who shares her own story of experiencing it herself firsthand. If you or someone you know has been shamed or ostracized by a religious community or institution, or if you feel like you just don't fit in those places anymore, this episode is for you.

In this week's episode, Joe talks about the statement, "God is Love." Is it really true? And if it is really true, then what does it really mean? Does it make our concept of God too small? Or does our concept of love need to be bigger?

Guest host Anna Webb of Remember That Time: An Historical Podcast joins Joe for a conversation about how the language we use in the church can create unintentional barriers to people's experience of the divine, and how we can learn to be more intentional about the words we choose to create deeper and more meaningful relationships.

Sometimes our expectations can cloud our view of reality. On this episode of the podcast, Joe uses a creative interpretation of a story about Jesus and John the Baptist to talk about how we can be imprisoned by our expectations and how deconstruction and reconstruction can help us see reality more clearly.