In this episode, I get a little more personal and reflect on a formative experience from my undergraduate years, when a philosophy professor invited me to travel to Villanova University for the 2006 Postmodernism and Religion conference on political theology.

At the time, I was still very evangelical, politically conservative, and, in many ways, armored by certainty. But something about that conference cracked something open in me. I heard reflections on Johann Baptist Metz’s idea of memoria passionis, the memory of suffering, and encountered John Caputo’s emerging work on the weakness of God, which later became deeply important to me.

I reflect on how Caputo’s vision of weakness, vulnerability, compassion, and responsibility helped begin a long process of deconstruction—not as destruction, but as a way of becoming more honest, more human, and more open to the suffering of others.

I also share a story that has stayed with me for years: hearing Caputo’s former female support staff talk about how he actually lived his philosophy, including taking a pay cut so they could be paid more fairly. That testimony still moves me because it raises the deeper question: do our beliefs make us more compassionate, more generous, and more responsible, or do they simply make us more sophisticated?

This episode is about political theology, weakness, memory, vulnerability, and the strange grace of those moments that quietly begin to change us.