A Pastor and a Philosopher Walk into a Bar
Mixing a cocktail of philosophy, theology, and spirituality. We're a pastor and a philosopher who have discovered that sometimes pastors need philosophy, and sometimes philosophers need pastors. We tackle topics and interview guests that straddle the divide between our interests. Who we are: Randy Knie (Co-Host) - Randy is the founding and Lead Pastor of Brew City Church in Milwaukee, WI. Randy loves his family, the Church, cooking, and the sound of his own voice. He drinks boring pilsners. Kyle Whitaker (Co-Host) - Kyle is a philosophy PhD and an expert in disagreement and philosophy of religion. Kyle loves his wife, sarcasm, kindness, and making fun of pop psychology. He drinks childish slushy beers. Elliot Lund (Producer) - Elliot is a recovering fundamentalist. His favorite people are his wife and three boys, and his favorite things are computers and hamburgers. Elliot loves mixing with a variety of ingredients, including rye, compression, EQ, and bitters.
Episodes
A single footnote in Kristin Kobes Du Mez's Live Laugh Love sent us down a rabbit hole we didn’t know existed: organized evangelical gay activism in the 1970s and 1980s, and the effort by white American evangelical leaders to erase it, discredit it, and clamp it down. We’re joined by historian of religion and sexuality Dr. William Stell, author of Born Again Queer, to map the people, institutions,...
We sit down with Kristin Kobes Du Mez to talk about her new book Live Laugh Love: The Secret History of White Christian Women and the World They Made. We discuss how what looks like consumer fluff often hides a dense system of theology, discipline, and power. If you grew up around evangelical culture, charismatic spirituality, Christian bookstores, or influencer Christianity--especially if you're a woman--a l...
Randy and Kyle get brutally honest about the moment doubt stops feeling like “questions” and starts feeling like unbelief, including what it’s like to say that out loud when you’re a pastor with a church, a family, and a job that takes for granted that you believe in God.
We dig into the philosophy and the lived spirituality behind the words we toss around too easily: belief, di...
Prayer can fall apart slowly. One day you are sure your words move heaven, and eventually you can't tell if you're talking to anyone at all. We return to the topic of prayer to discuss what happens when it stops feeling natural, when the old charismatic certainty no longer fits, and when trying to pray the way you used to would feel performative instead of real.
We dig into how Pentecostal and charisma...
We wanted something different from our usual fare, so we invited musician David Gungor to help us see spirituality through an artist’s eyes: beauty, story, woundedness, and play. What starts as a talk about music becomes an exploration of navigating Christian deconstruction, church hurt, and the fear that life’s best days might already be gone.
David shares his pastor’s kid upbringing...
Democrats can pass huge bills and still lose the argument with the people those bills are meant to help. That’s the tension we dig into with Chuck Rocha, a longtime Democratic strategist, Bernie Sanders alum, and proud “Mexican redneck” from East Texas who learned politics through factory work and union life. He comes in hot on one theme: voters don’t just weigh policies, they decide w...
We continue our conversation with pastor and author Matt Erickson of Eastbrook Church in Milwaukee. The job of many pastors feels like that of a CEO, with a focus on leadership strategy and the "three Bs": buildings, budgets, and butts in seats. This conversation offers a slower, deeper, and more hopeful way to think about church health, discipleship, and long-term spiritual formation.
We dig into the ...
Randy and Kyle sit down with Milwaukee pastor and author Matt Erickson to explore a different vision of pastoral ministry: not the pastor as CEO, brand manager, or religious expert, but the pastor as gardener. Matt’s book, The Pastor as Gardener: A Renewed Vision for Ministry, grows out of real ministry pressure, including moral failures, church decline, the pandemic, and the strain of navigating racial...
We talk with Preston Sprinkle about his book From Genesis to Junia and the long road from a John MacArthur shaped complementarian framework to an egalitarian view that affirms women teaching, preaching, and leading in the church.
We dig into the passages that always show up in this debate (especially 1 Timothy 2, along with Paul’s wider world), but we keep pulling the camera back to ask harder qu...
The news cycle is moving so fast it’s training us to forget. We invited Mike Madrid, a longtime classical conservative political strategist, commentator, and Lincoln Project cofounder, back on the show to help us slow down and put the recent chaos into perspective.
We start with crisis fatigue and the “flood the zone” feeling, then get concrete with the Minneapolis ICE crackdown and w...
Prayer doesn’t always happen in a church. Sometimes it happens under streetlights or beside old trees. We open with Randy’s simple practice of late night walks and how nature has slowly become the place where his spirituality feels dynamic again. That shift also brings a collision with old religious instincts: the inner voice that says connection is dangerous, that wonder is “worship,”...
Bart Ehrman, an atheist New Testament scholar with a penchant for annoying evangelicals, now claims that the teachings of Jesus determined the moral instincts of the West. Bart joins us to talk about his new book Love Thy Stranger and why acts of care for immigrants, refugees, and people outside “our tribe” may be downstream of Jesus, even when the people doing the caring don’t believe in hi...
AI can now generate essays, photos, songs, and video that look real enough to fool experts. This impacts how and whether humans can trust one another, and it’s already reshaping how we learn, create, and relate to each other.
Kyle sits down with Micah Voraritskul, author of Human Is the New Vinyl: Why Human Creativity Still Wins in the AI Revolution, to unpack why the vinyl comeback is more than ...
We recorded this live gathering in Chicago with the Post Evangelical Collective, and it still feels uncomfortably current. Alongside Dr. David Gushee and Keri Ladouceur (director of the PEC), we sit with a question that haunts a lot of post-evangelical and progressive Christian spaces: how do you keep loving the church after trauma, public rejection, and the weaponizing of God-language against vulnerable peop...
We're still here! Stay tuned.
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What kind of God is worth trusting when life falls apart? We pull up a chair with Thomas Jay Oord and guest Chris Lilley for a spirited, vulnerable conversation about omnipotence, evil, and why love may be the only measure of divine power that doesn’t betray our moral core. The stakes are high: beliefs about God’s power shape how we face suffering, talk to our kids about hope, and decide whether p...
Our friend Jeff Cook—writer, podcaster, and Enneagram systems thinker—is back with us to discuss his recent book (volume 1 of a series because of course it is): about the Enneagram. (See our first conversation from S03E26 here.)
Jeff explains how the Enneagram names the “why” beneath our choices, conflicts, faith, and love. Randy shares how the framework has sharpened his self-awareness...
Is the drive to be better than others making us worse? We talk with theologian Miroslav Volf about his book The Cost of Ambition and explore why comparison-based striving saturates our schools, churches, workplaces, and politics. Volf separates healthy aspiration from superiority-seeking and makes a compelling case for excellence without domination, rooted in agape, i.e., unconditional love that affirms peopl...
We talk with political strategist, author, and Lincoln Project member Mike Madrid about data, culture, and why both parties keep getting the Latino vote wrong.
Mike takes us inside the Lincoln Project’s 2020 strategy and the personal costs of resisting Trumpism, then draws a sharp line between principled conservatism and punitive nationalist populism. From energy policy to border security to empl...
Dawne Moon and Theresa Tobin are back to discuss their book Choosing Love, which represents the culmination of their research over the last several years into the community of conservative LGBTQ+ Christians. This book expands on many of the topics we covered in our first conversation while adding insightful material on the varied ways this community understands their conservative Christian identity, how it in...
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