What Jesus do we worship? And how does our picture of Jesus shape the faith we live? In this episode, we continue our conversation with Dr. Reggie Williams, but now exploring "white Jesus" and the ways in which we have inherited a broken and diseased theology that rewrites and controls the scripts we live into.

If you’re new to the podcast, or forgot what we do, in each episode we explore culture and theology like they matter, because they do. Maybe that sound strange, but often it the way we learn and talk about our faith can feel abstract, like ideas that are “good to know” but hard to apply. Which leaves a lot of us feeling like our faith is empty when we need it the most.In this episode we begin a conversation with Dr. Reggie Williams, social ethicist and author of Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus. I first had an opportunity to engage with Dr. Williams in a doctoral seminar and have been a fan ever since. Through his research and writing on Bonhoeffer’s engagement with the black church, his theological journey, and his activism in Nazi Germany Williams provides us with an imagination to make our own faith matter.

Brand new episodes of The Peoples Theology are coming soon!

The People’s Theology is a show exploring theology and culture. In each episode, we explore a question, theme, or topic in dialogue with our faith. Today that question is, “how do we count?” Maybe that sounds weird, but we all have a way of “counting” especially when it comes to success. We believe, as Chris Hughes noted, that the hustle is holy and that hard work should lead to more and higher. That’s the underwriting narrative of the American story; Zuckerberg and Facebook, Apple and even Enron. And like with those examples, sometimes we love it the result and sometimes we hate it but for some reason, we rarely ask was the “direction right?” Is the Hustle virtuous? Is 10 always greater than 1?  Why do we count that way? And more importantly, is it good?

Season 3 of The Peoples Theology is coming. Here, as a bonus is an interview with author and lawyer Luke Goodrich about his new book, Free to Believe.

In this episode of The Peoples Theology we are talking to Leonce Crump former player for New Orleans Saints, founding pastor of Renovation Atlanta, and author of the book Renovate (2016).

Our history is full of saints and radicals who have asked the question, “is this how it has to be” and then revealed to us that it doesn’t. If the only image of the “Church” we have is the modern American white evangelical community than, well, we should all go home and give up. I’m not interested in that. But that isn’t the only image nor is it even the primary image of the church. Our history is full of communities of dissent that have revealed, if even for just a moment, the Kingdom of Jesus because they had no other option.

What do we do about our world? How do we change it for the better? In our final episode of 2018, we look at one of our primary tools of defiance and protest. Something we desperately need, especially at this time of year.

In this season of The Peoples Theology we’ve been asking two questions: why is the world the way that it is? And what can we do about it? But the truth is, we haven’t really been asking the first question instead we’ve asked “why is the West the way that it is?” We have a habit of prioritizing and privileging our experience but it comes at the cost of missing and ignoring the stories and experiences of the global Church. And we don’t want to miss that because if we start paying attention we might just being to see what God is doing in this world.

Interview with Dan Stanford author of the book, Losing the Cape. What kind of person does it take to impact the world? Do we need to be powerful, wealthy, charismatic? Or is there another option? In our interview with Dan we talk about the difference between the kind of people our world celebrates and the kind of people God calls and uses.