Lauren Peiser has spent time making wine in Italy, working at a seminary, and writing a Substack that will make you use your imagination. In this episode, she brings a concept called "wild magic," the kind of transformation that can't be packaged into a sermon or a stage talk. She talks about Mary not as the untouched ideal of purity culture but as someone who chose to birth Christ in the dirt, in relationship, in the wild. She talks about Jesus not as the individual savior of white American Christianity but as a guy whose whole resurrection depended on everyone around him. And she makes the case that contamination, the bacteria, the yeast, the mess, the people who ruin your clean theological identity, is exactly what makes anything worth drinking. If your faith reconstruction is still mostly happening in your head, Lauren is here to remind you there's a whole body attached.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/MRbSfOcRenw

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

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Lauren's Substack: https://laurenaltimont.substack.com/

What do saints, sinners, and zombies have in common? In this episode, Jeremy sits down with author Matthew DiStefano to talk about his book on The Last of Us, the video game that somehow became one of the most philosophically serious explorations of what it means to be human. This conversation goes places you won't see coming: the MLM structure of Christian nationalism, why empathy is more dangerous than we admit, why our morality is less about our convictions and more about our context, and what it feels like to play a character you hate, only to discover you've started rooting for them. You don't need to be a gamer. You need to be someone who's ever wondered what you'd actually do when the world falls apart.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/tGczdlIaiPw

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Ben introduces the idea of the "feral spirit," a way of understanding spiritual encounter that doesn't require institutional scaffolding to be real. He talks about what happens when churches try to manufacture the Spirit's presence instead of simply making space for it, the difference between rituals that help us remember and rituals that help us control, and why a thousand dolphins playing in the ocean off Santa Barbara is actually a decent theology of joy. There's poetry, there's a 26-year-old Bordeaux, there's Walter Brueggemann on the freedom of God, and somehow it all holds together. If you've ever felt like the Spirit left the building long before you did, this one is for you.

Watch the episode on video: https://youtu.be/xWAjix_cyVo

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My new book, The Edge of the Inside, is now available. You can get a signed copy or in whatever form you prefer: https://www.edgeoftheinside.com/

Join the online community and get access to exclusive content and experiences: https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/online-community

Trying to make sense of faith? Download my free Deconstruction Field Guide. It's a ten-page resource to help you navigate what's next so you don't have to do it alone. https://www.jeremyjernigan.com/opt-in

Join us for the Wine and Whiskey trip in Oregon on September 25-27: https://communionwineco.com/events/wine-and-whiskey/