So Dom Crossan (JC) and Philip Clayton (PC) came together for this conversation I've been hoping would happen for a year and a half, and it was everything I wanted. We started with this question about why atheist political philosophers like Badiou and Žižek are turning to Paul because they need someone who has a militancy about being human that can resist civilization's death-dealing power. Dom and Phil had this beautiful back-and-forth about whether we should start with Cosmology or the Bible - Dom says both, simultaneously, which is a contradiction but he owns it. They talked about civilization as fundamentally violent since Mesopotamia, whether we're a sustainable species, and what it means that we can finally ask that question seriously. The Kingdom of God language came up as "kin-dom" - returning to our evolutionary origins where we lived in groups of about 200 people, before agriculture trapped us in civilization. Phil made this point about how our brains were formed on the grasslands of Africa for hundreds of thousands of generations, and now we're living in a hyper-civilized world where the devil looks primitive compared to OpenAI's $500 billion valuation. The hope is in asking the right questions, in returning to a kin-dom structure, and in Jesus sending out his disciples to do healing, not setting up a healing shop in Nazareth.
As a scholar, Philip Clayton (Ingraham Professor, Claremont School of Theology) works at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology. As an activist (president of EcoCiv.org, President of IPDC), he works to convene, facilitate, and catalyze multi-sectoral initiatives toward ecological civilization. As a disciple of Jesus, he finds himself energized by the Spirit in the Quaker community.
John Dominic Crossan, professor emeritus at DePaul University, is widely regarded as the foremost historical Jesus scholar of our time. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Historical Jesus, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian, God and Empire, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, The Greatest Prayer, The Last Week, and The Power of Parable. He lives in Minneola, Florida.
Join the Online Lenten Class with John Dominic Crossan!
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.
This Lenten class begins where all of Dom’s work begins: with history. What was actually happening in Galilee in the 20s CE? What did Herod Antipas’ transformation of the “Sea of Galilee” into the commercial “Sea of Tiberias” mean for peasant fishing communities? Why did Jesus emerge from John’s baptism movement proclaiming God’s Rule through parables—and what made that medium so perfectly suited to that message?
Only by understanding what Jesus’ parables meant then can we wrestle with what they might demand of us now.
Preview Livestream - Watch the replay here!
4 Visual Lectures - Each pre-recorded video lecture features Dr. Crossan’s masterful teaching, drawing on decades of historical research and his many visits across the Holy Land.
5 Livestream QnAs - Each week includes a live question and answer session with Dr. Crossan and Dr. Tripp Fuller—your chance to engage directly with one of the world’s leading Jesus scholars.
Online Group - Connect with other participants in the private Facebook group and access all lectures and livestream replays on the Class Resource Page.
Join Us at Theology Beer Camp 2026!
And if you want to experience conversations like this in person—if you want to sit with scholars and pastors and poets and weirdos and talk about the biggest questions over good beer—you need to be in Kansas City next fall.
Theology Beer Camp 2026
October 8-10
Kansas City
This is what we do. We take theology seriously and we take community seriously and we take good beer seriously. It’s church for people who are done with bullshit but not done with the sacred.
