Beer Christianity

Mar 22 2024 20

Beer Christianity Podcast artwork

Faith, hops and love. Beer Christianity is a progressive Christian podcast that blends faith, politics and culture with pub chat. Interviews with thinkers, artists and theologians. Honest, authentic discussions of theology and society. Almost no real understanding of beer. Expect all this and a bunch of laughs as we try to deconstruct, reconstruct and unf*ck our Christianity with fear, trembling and a couple of drinks. Pour a pint, put your feet up and listen your way into a different kind of Christian podcast. A fresh alternative to conservative Christian podcasts that fail to question anything and deconstructing podcasts that see nothing in evangelicalism worth saving. Expect strong political views, open religious dialogue and the occasional shambles in the ‘studio’.

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Episode 94: The Devil's Passion with playwright, activist and actor Justin Butcher

Mar 22 2024 41 mins

Is evil structural, spiritual, or a bit of both? Do acts of selfishness or sin have cascading effects that reverberate through history? Can we shine a light on contemporary Western politics by imagining how our politicians would react to a figure like Jesus and the movement he inspired? All these questions and more (mostly about Israel and its war on the people of Palestine) are c

Episode 93: Belonging - feeling at home, finding your people

Feb 19 2024 64 mins

Do you feel like you belong at your church? Have you found your people? Do you feel at home? In this episode we explore how much dogma, belief, diversity, relatability and stage of life determine whether we feel 'at home' in church. Along the way we ask what makes a really good home group (spoiler: it may be Jonty and Malky), we discuss wehter the Church of Jesus Christ and the

Leonard Cohen and Saint Paul - Matthew Anderson, Pauline scholar

Feb 08 2024 59 mins

Is the essence of Christianity basically Judaism through a Zen lens? Can we understand some great artists and theologians better if we assume performative masculinity? Is there really a crack in everything? Is it where the light gets in? In Episode 92 of Beer Christianity we answer these and other important questions (like: Is later Leonard Cohen better than his earlier oeuvre? I

Episode 91: AI, ethics and dangers with JL Ecochard

Jan 12 2024 61 mins

AI is going to save the world. Or kill us all. Or another, secret, third thing. Trying to find a pattern of truth within all the cultural noise about Artificial Intelligence is pretty hard right now, so we turned to someone who has been working on and with AI since the 1980s. Jean-Louis Ecochard has been in on the development of everythting from caller ID and online banking to vid

Episode 90: Socialism Q&A with Matt McManus

Dec 22 2023 64 mins

Socialism means 'bad', right? That's what many of our churches assume. Whenever anyone suggests Socialism as an option, many Christians have a set of anti-Socialist questions locked and loaded, ready to fire. We decided to put some of them to an expert. To us, Socialism is really just a system of making sure nobody is left behind, of controlling greed and making sure it doesn't r

Episode 89: Congo crisis explained - Maurice Carney, Friends of the Congo

Dec 04 2023 66 mins

The Democratic Republic of Congo and its citizens should, by rights, be among the richest in the world. Congo is a country with vast and rich natural resources, abundant potential energy and a strategic place in the heart of Africa. And yet, Congo is currently home to one fo the worst humanitarian crises on earth, and its history is littered with genocides and wars that rival the

Episode 88: Jolyon Maugham - Good Law, better world

Nov 23 2023 59 mins

Jolyon Maugham has been called 'Public Enemy No. 1" by terrible right wing newspapers, attacked by Rishi Sunak and belittled with smears by the BBC. And if that wasn't enough to make you love him, he also heads up an organisation that works for justice in our laws and legal system, challenging powerful elites and holding wealthy corporations and careless governments to account

Episode 87: Nice, Churchy Patriarchy - Liz Cooledge Jenkins

Nov 10 2023 59 mins

That's a nice patriarchy you got there. Be a shame if someone were to smash it... Whether your church is complementarian, soft complementarian, egalitarian or has never thought about the distinction, the odds are good that patriarchy is damaging people in your fellowship, and damaging the witness and ministry of your church. In this episode we examine how this happens, and why - a

Episode 86: Post-march clarity - reflections on a Palestine protest

Oct 31 2023 34 mins

A few weeks ago, Malky and Jonty travelled to London to take part in a large (though it turns out not the largest) march to protest the continued Israeli bombing of civilians in Gaza and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine through Occupation and settlements. It was peaceful. It wass diverse. It included Jewish groups, Christians, trade unions, trans people, queer people,

Episode 85: Beer, hymns, refugees and Gaza

Oct 24 2023 77 mins

Steve Tinning is a Baptist Minister, a Public Issues Enabler for the Baptist Union of Great Britain and one of the team that makes Beer and Hymns happen at Greenbelt festival. Steve is a lovely chap and talks to us about his secondment to JPIT (the Joint Public Issues Team of the Baptist, URC and Methodist churches), issues of asylum and refugee response, and about different resp