Christian legal thought with public stakes.
Cross & Gavel Podcast sits at the intersection of law, faith, and public responsibility. Its conversations move from civility in legal practice to AI bias, mass incarceration, natural law, and the daily habits of Christian lawyers.
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Cross & Gavel Podcast is a Christian legal series about how law, faith, public policy, and professional duty meet in actual practice. It is not a quick headlines show. The conversations are patient, argumentative in the best sense, and interested in how lawyers become the kind of people their work requires. Recent episodes move through civility, AI bias, mass incarceration, natural law, religious freedom, beauty, and the integration of faith in legal practice. The show often begins with a theological or literary frame, then settles into concrete legal questions. Civility is treated as more than politeness; it becomes a response to a profession that can reward threats, needless hostility, and professional abrasion. Technology is handled with similar seriousness. In the AI bias conversation, the concern is not only bad outputs but the human choices, data sources, oversight failures, and moral offloading that make those outputs consequential. Criminal justice episodes look directly at prison labor, voting exclusion, structural pressure, and the many discretionary decisions that produce mass incarceration. Faith is not used as decoration. It functions as the show’s working vocabulary for conscience, vocation, neighbor-love, judgment, repentance, and public responsibility. The series also has a strong jurisprudential streak, with natural law, divine law, practical reason, and religious freedom receiving sustained attention. At other points, it turns unexpectedly toward beauty, architecture, planning law, and the claim that legal systems can recognize the true, the good, and the beautiful. The guests are usually scholars, attorneys, or judges with a specific paper, book, practice, or docket under discussion. That gives the show a grounded texture. Ideas are tested against depositions, courts, probation systems, legal education, and daily habits. Its pace is measured but not sleepy. The register is earnest, learned, and sometimes searching. Cross & Gavel Podcast works best for listeners who want Christian legal thought with institutional memory, ethical urgency, and practical friction.
Made for: Built for Christian law students, attorneys, judges, legal scholars, and policy-minded listeners who want serious conversations about vocation, justice, and public life. It also suits thoughtful non-lawyers interested in how faith shapes legal ethics and institutions.
What sets it apart: The show combines jurisprudence, theology, and practice without flattening them into culture-war talking points. Its conversations stay close to real legal settings: courtrooms, law schools, specialized dockets, prison systems, professional habits, and public policy debates.
A production of Christian Legal Society — focusing on the interaction between law, religion, and public policy, with an emphasis on building-up Christian students and attorneys to intelligently engage in public life and better love their neighbors.
A courtroom for your conscience, where AI bias and prison labor face the same moral cross-examination.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A law professor traces AI bias back to data generation, before legal review may arrive too late.
Artificial intelligence lands here as a legal and human question, not just another tool. Anton Sorkin starts from broad concerns about cognitive offloading, natural resources, labor, creativity, and the risk that AI could carry human maliciousness forward.
Jeff Baker connects mass incarceration, prison labor, and disenfranchisement to the moral choices built into criminal justice.
Mass incarceration is framed here as a system made through everyday legal and civic choices: what gets treated as crime, who gets arrested, and how punishment is handed down.
Anton Sorkin and Jeffrey Baker weigh Christian love as a test for law, public life, and political judgment.
Law is treated as a public calling shaped by spiritual duty as well as professional responsibility. Anton Sorkin and Jeffrey Baker draw on Baker's article, "A Sermon on the Law, The Jurisprudence of Love," to think through legal obligation in light of the commands to love God…
Judge Gerald Parker connects a probation audit to the case for specialized treatment for people the system was missing.
The episode follows a specialized Dayton docket as it confronts a plain but consequential gap in treatment access for people on probation. Judge Gerald Parker points to an audit of roughly 3,000 people on probation: more than 40 percent were people of color, yet less than 1…
Mark Fowler links beauty, planning law, and the civic instincts of Australia and America.
Beauty and law come together here as questions of public life: what happens when aesthetics are pushed into private or rarely visited spaces, and how legal institutions might talk about what communities value.
Careful law for digital public life.
Canadian estates law, case by case.
Formal rooms, serious law, full arguments.
UK Supreme Court judgments, rebuilt one case at a time.
David A.
Allen D.
["Anton Sorkin speaks with Sonia Rankin, a University of New Mexico law professor who learned coding in third grade and studied computer science at Morgan State University.", "Rankin argues that AI bias is built into data, model design, and deployment, and she uses Melvin Krantzberg's line that technology is \"neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.\"", "She illustrates the problem with grapes, criminal justice data, facial recognition, and AI-generated fake citations in legal briefs.", "Her practical answer is more transparency and a lawyer sitting beside the developer before AI touches courts, housing, healthcare, or other high-stakes decisions."]
A special episode featuring introductory remarks for a lecture series on law, migrants, and the family of God, with thanks to various supporters.
Vincent Lloyd discusses his new book 'What is Political Theology?' and his vision for the church's role in contemporary political and ethical issues.
Anton Sorkin and Jeff Baker use The Crossing Gavel to unpack Baker's Georgia Criminal Law Review piece on mass incarceration through Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism.
Anton Sorkin interviews Jeffrey Baker on A Crossing Gavel about Baker's article, A Sermon on the Law, The Jurisprudence of Love, and what Christian lawyers owe God and neighbor.
Judge Gerald Parker describes Kushinda Court in Montgomery County, Ohio, a specialized docket for 18- to 29-year-old Black men on intensive supervision.
Cross & Gavel Podcast episode 205 opens with T.S.
Cross & Gavel host Anton Sorkin interviews Alex Deagon, an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology's School of Law, about his book Christian Natural Law and Religious Freedom: A Foundation Based on Love, the True, and the Good.
Attorneys Joe Ruta and Stephen Lyon discuss integrating Christian faith into legal practice, from law school to career, in a special Palm Sunday episode of the Foundations Series.
Kristina Arriaga introduces John Witte's contributions to the history of human rights and religious freedom ahead of the Declaration of Independence's 250th anniversary.
Anton Sorkin interviews Matthew Soerens about the impact of recent executive orders on refugee resettlement and the Christian call to love immigrants.
Legal experts discuss the evolution of religious accommodation protections under Title VII, focusing on recent Supreme Court cases and their impact on workers' rights.
Anton Sorkin interviews Andrea Pin about her book on the development of religion, rule of law, and religious freedom in Middle Eastern societies.