The Unintentional Heretic
The Unintentional Heretic is a podcast for spiritual explorers, questioners, and ever-expanders who believe faith should be deep enough to survive honest inquiry. Together we’ll explore theology, spirituality, doubt, and the evolving search for truth—trusting that God is not threatened by our questions, and that sometimes heresy is just tomorrow’s orthodoxy.
Episodes
47 episodes
The Mystery of the Eucharist: Becoming What We Receive
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores the Eucharist as a spiritual practice and means of grace that is both transcendent and deeply human—bread, wine, bodies, memory, presence, and mystery meeting at the same table. Drawi...
The Christian Myth: Taking the Story Seriously Without Needing It All to Be Literally True
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how Christian stories can carry profound truth without requiring every detail to function as literal history, and how the rise of fundamentalism helped turn certain doctrines into tes...
When the Cross Came with a Sword: Christianity and the Spanish Conquest
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how Christianity became entangled with Spanish conquest, colonial power, and the extraction of wealth—often using the language of faith to justify violence and domination. It also lif...
Polydoxy: Is God Bigger Than Christianity?
What if Christianity can be deeply true without claiming that God is only at work within Christianity? In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores polydoxy through process and open and relational theology, asking how we might r...
Is Jesus God? Arius, Nicaea, and the Question That Changed Christianity
Was Jesus always understood by Christians to be fully God—or did that belief emerge through centuries of argument, Scripture, politics, and theological struggle? In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores Arius, the Council of...
The Freedom of Forgiveness: How Self-Compassion, Truth-Telling, and Letting Go Can Loosen the Grip of Resentment.
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores forgiveness not as forgetting, excusing, or reconciling at all costs, but as a practice rooted in self-awareness, self-compassion, and truth-telling. Drawing on Jesus, modern psycholo...
Breath as Prayer: Opening to the Spirit One Breath at a Time
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores breath practice as one of the simplest and most ancient ways of praying, rooted in the biblical image of God breathing life into creation, the Hebrew word ruach as breath, wi...
Plato’s Gospel: How Greek Philosophy Shaped Christian Theology
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, profoundly shaped Christian theology, often giving the church helpful language for truth, beauty, God, the soul, and doctrine, wh...
Spiritual Practice: Stepping Off the Hamster Wheel
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores spiritual practice as a way of stepping off the hamster wheel long enough to become aware of our already existing connection with God, one another, and creation. Drawing from Thomas K...
Liberation Theology: When the Marginalized Become Our Teachers
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores liberation theology and the way the Gospel sounds different when it is read from the underside of power, among the poor, oppressed, excluded, and marginalized. Rather than replacing f...
Interview with Karla Sikaffy duPlantier
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, I sit down with National Latino Missioner for the Episcopal Church Karla Sikaffy duPlantier to explore how Latino ministry is reshaping the Episcopal Church through hospitality, shared leadership...
Can You Be Christian and Buddhist? What Mindfulness, Compassion, and Non-Attachment Can Teach Followers of Jesus
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how Christianity and Buddhism can speak to one another without forcing either tradition to become something it is not. Rather than treating Buddhism as a threat to Christian faith, this conver...
Baptized Patriarchy: When Toxic Masculinity Hides Behind Scripture
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how “biblical manhood” often baptizes patriarchy and toxic masculinity with sacred language, constricting men, silencing women, and hiding domination behind claims of biblical order. But Scrip...
The Cloud of Unknowing: Losing Your Grip on God to Fall Deeper into Love
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores The Cloud of Unknowing and its invitation into a faith that moves beyond analysis, certainty, and the need to master God with the mind. This anonymous medieval text reminds us that Go...
Jesus as Wisdom Teacher: Beyond Belief and Into the Kingdom’s Way of Seeing
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores Jesus as a wisdom teacher who came not simply to give us more religious information, but to disrupt our inherited lenses and invite us into the expansive paradigm he called the kingdom of God....
The Lost Art of Mysticism: Encountering God Beyond Certainty, Control, and Words
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores the lost art of Christian mysticism and why contemplative voices like Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Thomas Merton still matter for a faith often s...
The Desert Will Tell You the Truth: The Desert Mothers and Fathers, the Shadow Self, and the Search for an Undivided Life
In this episode, The Unintentional Heretic explores how the Desert Mothers and Fathers left the growing power and respectability of empire to seek a more honest and transformed faith. Their practices of silence, solitude, prayer, and self exami...
Interview with Josh Patterson - The God Who Loves Without Control: Open and Relational Theology, Suffering, and the End of Omnipotence
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, I sit down with Josh Patterson, host of of the popular podcast Rethinking Faith and Director for Creative Content for Ilia Delio’s World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture...
The Gospel of Thomas: Heresy or Hidden Wisdom?
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, we explore the Gospel of Thomas, an ancient collection of sayings attributed to Jesus that did not make it into the Bible but still asks deeply Christian questions about wisdom, awakening, ...
Left Behind: The Modern Myth That Terrified a Generation
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, we explore how the rapture, often assumed to be ancient Christian teaching, is actually a modern theological invention that reshaped the imagination of generations of evangelicals through f...
Interview with Bishop Sam Rodman: The Problem with Certainty - Truth, Faith, and the Lenses We Live By
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, I sit down with Bishop Sam Rodman, the 12th Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina, to explore epistemology, the deeply human question of how we know what we know. Together we talk about t...
America at 250: Gratitude, Truth, and Hope
In this brief Fourth of July reflection, The Unintentional Heretic explores how Christians can love their country with both gratitude and honesty, celebrating America’s ideals while telling the truth about its contradictions. True patriotism is...
God Is Not in Control, and That Might Be Good News: Omnipotence, Suffering, and the Power of Uncontrolling Love
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, we explore whether God must be understood as all powerful in the traditional sense, especially in light of suffering, tragedy, and the painful claim that even the death of a child is someho...
When the Flag Replaces the Cross: Christian Nationalism and the Gospel According to Empire
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, we explore Christian nationalism as a distortion of the Gospel that confuses love of country with worship of country and replaces the way of Jesus with the logic of empire. From Pharaoh to ...
Mary Magdalene: Apostle, Sinner, or Threat?
In this episode of The Unintentional Heretic, we explore how Mary Magdalene was transformed by centuries of church tradition from the first witness to the resurrection into a symbol of sexual sin and repentance. Her story reveals how e...