Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible - Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we're a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as "kin-dom" - returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hundreds of thousands of generations, and now we're living in a hyper-civilized world where the devil looks primitive compared to OpenAI's $500 billion valuation. The hope is in asking the right questions, in returning to a kin-dom structure, and in Jesus sending out his disciples to do healing, not setting up a healing shop in Nazareth.
Check out Theology Beer Camp 2026 at www.TheologyBeer.Camp
I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 75k+ other people on Process This. processthis.substack.com
Support the podcast: HomebrewedCommunity.com
So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible - Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we're a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as "kin-dom" - returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hundreds of thousands of generations, and now we're living in a hyper-civilized world where the devil looks primitive compared to OpenAI's $500 billion valuation. The hope is in asking the right questions, in returning to a kin-dom structure, and in Jesus sending out his disciples to do healing, not setting up a healing shop in Nazareth.
Check out Theology Beer Camp 2026 at www.TheologyBeer.Camp
I hope you enjoy it and consider supporting my work by joining 75k+ other people on Process This. processthis.substack.com
Support the podcast: HomebrewedCommunity.com
