Episodes

In 1942, Karl Barth was asked to write to Christians in the United States. He didn't know the American context well, so he asked his hosts to send him the questions they were actually wrestling with. James Spencer and Ashish Varma work through the first of them: how can a Christian be a loyal citizen of a national state and a loyal member of a church that transcends national interests? Barth's answer turns on a distinction between the national state and what he calls the righteous state — the G...

Michael McDuffee — formerly professor of historical theology at Moody Bible Institute, now living in Germany — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the seventh episode in the faith and politics series. The conversation starts with an essay by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas, a lifelong child of the Enlightenment, found himself after 2001 asking whether reason alone could carry the weight of a public ethics, and began describing modern societies as post-secular. McDuffie uses that as a way into th...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma debrief their conversation with William Cavanaugh, and work out what he was and wasn't saying. They start with a tension: Cavanaugh sounded gentler in conversation than his books read, and both men try to account for it. The answer they land on has to do with audience — that Torture and Eucharist and Being Consumed are written to people who need to resist, while the broader project is aimed at those of us sitting near the center of a global economic order who don'...

William T. Cavanaugh — professor of Catholic studies at DePaul, director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, and author of The Uses of Idolatry, Torture and Eucharist, Migrations of the Holy, and Being Consumed — joins James Spencer and Ashish Varma for the fifth episode in the faith and politics series. Cavanaugh begins where politics itself begins: not with elections, but with how people organize a shared life. He traces how the sacred trappings once belonging to t...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma reflect on the previous episode's conversation with Veronica Roberts Ogle — and on what happens when Augustine gets recruited for arguments he was writing against. The starting point is a claim James has encountered in political speeches: that the two cities can be collapsed, and that a nation might become the city of God. Both men think this misses Augustine's whole point. The cities are distinguished by their loves, and a community formed by self-love doesn't gr...

AI is already cutting the audio, designing the graphics, and answering questions people used to bring to their pastors. Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, joins Dr. James Spencer to talk about what happens when a productivity tool starts getting marketed as a teammate. Miller lays out three buckets: AI as production efficiency for ministries and nonprofits, the industry push to make the tools feel more human, and the legal and ethical tangle of intellectual prope...

Veronica Roberts Ogle teaches at Villanova and wrote Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God. She joins James Spencer for the third episode in the faith and politics series. She begins with why the book exists. Rome was sacked in 410, the first breach of the city's walls in centuries, and Romans wanted to know whether Christianity had cost them the protection of the old gods — while Christians, riding the high of a converted emperor, were asking why their God hadn't defended th...

David Koyzis returns to the show for the second episode in the faith and politics series. He's a member of Global Scholars Canada and the author of Political Visions and Illusions, We Answer to Another, and Citizenship Without Illusions — and he spent his first thirty years in the Chicago area before moving to Canada, which gives him an unusual vantage on American national feeling. Koyzis starts with divided loyalties: we belong to families, congregations, workplaces, and nations, and none of t...

The first episode in a series on faith and politics running through the midterms. James Spencer and Ashish Varma set the terms before the guests arrive. Ashish starts with the word itself: polis, the city — the shared life of a community, of which party politics is only a narrow slice. That opens the question the series will keep returning to. Paul had no power to abolish slavery, but he could tell Philemon that Onesimus was returning as a brother, and in doing so redraw a line the empire had d...

A Billy Graham Center survey of Gen Z reported that nearly half of respondents agreed that Christian support for Trump has made them less likely to attend church. The survey offers no follow-up on why — whether the objection is to a candidate, to partisanship generally, or to something deeper about how the church understands its own order. James Spencer and Ashish Varma take the finding as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The conversation reaches back to Constantine and the first coun...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma return to the diagnoses that narrow the church's vision, this time with fragmentation — the way faithful Christians end up separated from one another not by heresy but by tradition, idiom, and the slow drift of communities that no longer talk across their boundaries. James opens with a job interview from 2005 where a pastor announced he wanted no one in the role who wouldn't bleed for the Southern Baptist faith. Both men are clear that boundaries have real value; ...

Karl Marx and D.L. Moody lived at the same time, watched the same cities industrialize, and asked the same question about the poor. One had a doctorate, wealthy patrons, and a theory of history. The other had about five years of formal schooling and a Bible. Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Gregg Quiggle about Marx and Moody: Two Contemporaries. Two Gospels. Two Tombstones. One Choice., the new book Quiggle co-wrote with Erwin Lutzer for Moody Publishers. They work through where Marx's system r...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma close out the series on narrowing with amplification — Marshall McLuhan's insight that technology extends human capacity, and what that means when the capacity being extended is our tendency to forget God. The conversation runs from forks and chopsticks to John Deere, from the fig leaves in Genesis to Albert Borgmann's distinction between things and devices: the wood-burning stove that gathers a household versus the thermostat that anonymizes everything behind the...

James Spencer and Ashish Varma continue the series on what narrows the church's vision with a look at inversion — what happens when an interpretive grid quietly takes over the authority that belongs to Scripture itself. The conversation moves from the hermeneutical spiral (nobody comes to the text from nowhere) to the passages most of us never work: the command not to destroy fruit trees in Deuteronomy 20, God giving the land little by little in Deuteronomy 7, the instruction not to dispossess ...

More than half of American Christians now say they trust AI with their spiritual life. That is a problem worth taking seriously, and it is also the reason Logos built its AI the way it did. Dr. James Spencer talks with Scott Lindsey, an executive director at Logos, about what happens when a Bible study tool is cut off from the open internet on purpose. Scott walks through the three design commitments behind Logos AI: no connection to the open web, so answers come from commentaries and scholarsh...

Institutions confuse their own survival with the work of God. Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma close the diagnostic arc of this series with transaction, meaning the trade a person or an organization makes when preserving the platform becomes more important than the faithfulness the platform was built for. The anchor text is Jeroboam, who sets up worship at Dan and Bethel not to introduce a different god but to keep his people from traveling south. Varma's reading sharpens it: the question ...

The fear of losing the faith to another culture is producing the very thing it fears. Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma open a series on three forces pressing on the church, beginning with assimilation, and Varma's argument is that syncretism functions mostly as a fear discourse. The word gets aimed outward, at newer expressions of Christian faith in other places, by people whose own expression is so culturally saturated that they have stopped noticing it. He points out that "essence," the ...

The usual complaint about the New Testament's use of the Old is that the apostles play fast and loose. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer thinks the problem runs the other direction. The Old Testament has gone missing from the research, and once you cut it off, ordinary exegetical moves start looking bizarre. Second Temple interpreters and the New Testament authors resemble each other because they were both apprenticed to the same thousand years of Old Testament authors interpreting earlier Old Testamen...

Most readers hear "Old Testament use of the Old Testament" and picture quotations. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer says quotation is the small end of it. An interpretive allusion needs three things: a donor text that gives the language, a receptor text that takes it up, and an identifiable interpretive outcome. That third item is what separates an allusion from an echo, and it is also why later biblical authors so often change the wording. Saying the same thing again was never the point. Moving it fo...

Ezra-Nehemiah opens on a high note. Yahweh keeps the word he spoke through Jeremiah, Cyrus issues the edict, and the exiles go home. By the last chapter, Nehemiah is walking the city alone, pulling out men's hair and cursing them, and the collective repentances that filled the middle of the book have evaporated. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that most of the literature, popular and technical alike, has quietly declined to read that ending as an ending. In this episode, Dr. James Spencer tal...

What does repealing Sunday shopping laws have to do with rising rates of suicide, alcohol deaths, and drug overdoses? More than you might expect. In this episode of Thinking Christian, I sit down with Dr. Tamar Oostrom, health economist at The Ohio State University, to walk through her research on blue laws, religious decline, and what the data reveals about the hidden costs of losing community. The paper's central finding is striking: states that repealed blue laws — the Sunday retail restrict...

Christians have inherited a strange habit of treating the Old Testament as optional. Dr. Gary Edward Schnittjer argues that Jesus and the apostles would not have understood the question. There was a gospel, a Messiah, and a church before there was a New Testament, and none of it was possible without the Scriptures Israel already had. Even the word "gospel" comes to Mark by way of Isaiah. In this episode, Dr. James Spencer talks with Dr. Schnittjer about his new book, Connected: How Scripture Gu...

Can the church learn to follow the Spirit into places it hasn't been looking? In this episode of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Varma sit down with Dr. Oscar Garcia-Johnson — Professor of Theology and Decolonial Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South — for a conversation that will stretch your theological imagination in the best possible way. Oscar unpacks why the Holy Spirit resi...

Is modern life quietly replacing God with something else? In Episode 60 of Thinking Christian, Dr. James Spencer and Dr. Ashish Farma welcome back historian and theologian Dr. Kevin Flatt (Associate Dean of Humanities, Redeemer University) to explore one of the most urgent and underexamined ideas in Christian thought today: Sacred Social Order. Every civilization in human history — from ancient China to Mesoamerican empires to early Christian Europe — understood that human society must align wi...