Religion, Reimagined

Receipt that I had super fun conversation with The Progressive Christians Podcast. I’ve been doing a ton of podcast interviews recently and I always try to have a real conversation with the host and that usually creates something fun to listen to. But sometimes a podcast interview is special, like it is truly an “INTER-VIEW” where my views (assumptions, beliefs, self-understandings) not only get expressed, but formed through the conversation.

I woke up early this morning because I knew Ross Douthat was posting his Interesting Timesinterview with Bryan Johnson today, and listened to the whole thing before I got out of bed. It was just what I needed to finish this post, which is something I’ve been noodling with all week. Every scholar of religion should have a nemesis.

I wrote today’s post with my clergy subscribers in mind, but I think it will be of interest to everyone else as well. It all starts with a lawsuit I read about last week. Scott Winters, a 55-year-old former pastor in Florida, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on July 21, 2026 and the details are truly wild. He alleges that ChatGPT almost killed him and it used the pastor’s faith to do it. Here’s what happened.

Dr. Thilde Ross and I have daughters who are super close. They met on our town swim team, from different K-8 schools, but now part of the same wonderful friend group that carried them through high school. They just graduated together this spring. Thilde and I connected the way parents do: a parent potluck for our our kid’s sports team (this time crew).

Recording studio for Gentle Noise. A few weeks ago I recorded a podcast with Manoj Dias, who is launching Gentle Noise this September, and he warned me ahead of time that he was going to end our conversation by asking me a question he asks everyone: what song has spiritual meaning for you. I appreciated the warning, because I needed it. If I had gotten that question out of the blue I might have panicked because I don’t really consider myself a music person.

Photo by Curated Lifestyle on Unsplash I’m late to the party, but….happy birthday, America. Also: yuck. Both of those feel right right now, and I’m tired of pretending only one of them is allowed. Every Fourth of July, we host friends at our cabin in northwest Connecticut. College friends and their kids, now the significant others of their kids (shout out to Sam!). This year it was so so hot, the kind of hot where you stop trying to do much of anything. So we sat in the pond. We ate too much.

When I started listening to Ross Douthat’s June 11th podcast last week, which was an interview with a German biotech entrepreneur, I assumed it was going to be like every other tech bro conversation about optimization. Human flourishing reduced to performance metrics, the body as a project, suffering as a problem to be solved. An anemic view of well-being in my opinion.

Last Sunday my family did one of our favorite weekend things and walked the almost four miles from our house in Brookline to Newbury Street in downtown Boston. Our route takes us along the Muddy River, which is well named. It is an almost always muddy ribbon of water winding through the Olmsted-designed parkway that connects the Arboretum to the city.

Brookline High School 2026 Graduation (Photo credit Cecile Braun-Jones) It didn’t occur to me until last week that reunions and graduations happen at the same time. Which is a little silly, given that I work in education and have been on both sides of both of those things at various points in my life. But last week it was much more in my face. My father-in-law was in town for his sixtieth reunion at Harvard, and my daughter graduated from Brookline High School.

Photo by Max Böhme on Unsplash Eschatology was never a concept I cared about in graduate school. It felt too churchy to me. The kind of thing biblical scholars got excited about, while those of us who study the religion of everyday life mostly ignored. If you studied eschatology I thought you probably spent a lot of time on the Book of Revelation, or the Rapture.