Pub-table theology with a political pulse.
Pub Theology LIVE treats theology as a live conversation, not a lecture. Its recurring speakers move from snacks, drinks, weather, and stray jokes into pointed arguments about Christian nationalism, public life, scripture, protest, and conscience.
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Pub Theology LIVE is a conversational theology show with a pub-table rhythm and a political conscience. The mood is loose at first. Someone is joking about communion wafers, pint glasses, caffeine, poetry, dry January, or a regular lake that tradition insists on calling a sea. Then the room pivots into something sharper. Recent episodes use those ordinary openings to talk about Christian nationalism, presidential loyalty, ICE, clergy arrests, public protest, peace, scripture, and the moral imagination of Christianity. The speakers are comfortable thinking in public. They interrupt, agree, correct themselves, repeat a phrase until it has weight, and let jokes hang around long enough to expose a serious point. That gives the show a live, lightly messy energy rather than the feel of prepared commentary. Its Christianity is engaged with daily life, not sealed off from it. Politics is not treated as a separate category from faith, especially when religious language is used to bless power, restrict culture, or turn opponents into enemies. The show can be warm. It can also be impatient. That impatience usually lands on hypocrisy, authoritarian instincts, and narrow claims about what a Christian society should look like. The theology is accessible without being shallow. It reaches for examples from nature, church practice, biblical geography, pop culture, public hearings, and street protest. Humor keeps the conversation human, even when the topic is grave. The result is a show for listeners who want faith talk that can laugh at itself and still argue hard about conscience, justice, and truth.
Made for: For listeners who want Christian conversation that is informal, politically alert, and willing to question religious power in public life. It fits people who prefer dialogue, humor, and moral argument over polished sermonizing.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge comes from the way casual banter becomes theology without losing its conversational looseness. It treats jokes, headlines, church habits, protest footage, and scripture as material for the same live moral conversation.
Beer, Conversation, and God. People have been gathering in pubs and public spaces for ages, talking about life, philosophy, faith, and deep questions of meaning. Now we're bringing the conversation to the interwebs. Visit pubtheology.com for more info and to start a gathering of your own. Visit patreon.com/ptlive for more content including pre and post show discussions and interviews with special guests.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Candid clergy conversation brings Christian theology into contact with political power, cultural norms, doubt, and everyday humor.
Pub Theology LIVE turns current events and Christian questions into an informal roundtable led by the reverends Shannon Weston, Ogun Holder, and Brian Berkoff. Their drinks-on-the-table ease does not soften the disagreements.
A "regular ass lake" is your cue that reverence here leaves room for a laugh.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Ogun Holder and Brian Berkoff discuss a Trump-as-Jesus meme and how far religious language about a leader can go.
Pub Theology LIVE begins with a sermon line about someone raised to fear an all-powerful God, then discovering that they are the all-powerful being. Ogun Holder and Brian Berkoff take that idea into a discussion of a Trump-as-Jesus meme.
A wry conversation about Christian culture, public life, and loving one's neighbor.
Pub Theology LIVE takes on a familiar religious shortcut: treating calls for a Christian nation as a push for one narrow Christian culture. Reverends Ogun Holder and Brian Burkoff separate belief from culture, then press the phrase against restrictive norms around gender,…
A loose, funny theological conversation about nature's balance and the human difficulty of making peace.
Episode 336 turns a joke about tapping peace into a wider theological conversation about violence in nature, fragile harmony, and the human effort to live with more awareness.
A Sea of Galilee joke runs through political frustration and a tribute to Jesse Jackson.
The hosts are still laughing about the Sea of Galilee being a "regular ass lake" when the conversation turns to a political hearing and Jesse Jackson. The shifts are quick, but the theological perspective gives the humor and political frustration a shared footing.
A candid, conversational look at clergy, protest, and moral pressure around ICE.
Pub Theology LIVE frames Episode 332 around a hard question for religious communities: how clergy should respond when a pastor works for ICE, and what responsibility follows when public faith moves into protest.
A supper with the dead leads into a loose, searching conversation about meaning, randomness, and divine desire.
Episode 239 begins at the strange, intimate table of the Dumb Supper, a Middle Ages tradition in which ancestors were invited to dinner, spirits were addressed, the dead were entertained, and the year's news was shared with them.
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Live sermons with Easter-shaped urgency.
In the first episode of 2025, hosts Brian, Shannon, and Ogunholder discuss New Year's practices like letting go of unhelpful habits and cultivating gratitude.
In episode 239 of Pub Theology LIVE, hosts Brian Berkoff, Ogun Holder, and Shannon Weston discuss Halloween's origins, including the medieval Dumb Supper tradition where families invited ancestors to dinner.
Pub Theology Live episode 338 opens with Artemis 2, Victor Glover's reminder that 'the most important mystery on earth' is love, and the hosts' reaction to seeing Earth from the Moon.
Pub Theology Live episode 337, "Let's Not Blame God," uses James 1:13 to ask who gets blamed for temptation and why agency matters.
["Pub Theology Live episode 336, \"Tap that Peace,\" opens on St.
A theological discussion critiquing certain eschatological beliefs within Christianity, hosted over drinks.
A theological discussion about the concept of suffering in communion, framed around the phrase 'taste and suffer' instead of 'taste and see.'
Episode 333 of Pub Theology LIVE finds hosts Shannon Weston, Hogan Holder, and Brian Burkoff recording on Fat Tuesday to catch up on several weeks of news, including Jesse Jackson's death, a racist social media post depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, the Winter Olympics' most memorable interview, and a theological debate over Jesus walking on what Shannon calls 'a regular ass lake.' The death of Reverend Jesse Jackson prompts Hogan to read a tribute from Reverend Otis Moss III cataloguing all the social movements—from anti-apartheid to Palestinian dignity to DEI on Fortune 500 boards—that Jackson preceded by decades.
In Episode 332 of Pub Theology LIVE, hosts Shannon Weston, Hogan Holder, and Brian Burkoff examine Martin Luther King Jr.
The hosts of Pub Theology Live joke about writing poetry and welcome listeners to a new year of theological discussion over drinks.
A theological discussion framed around the phrase 'the hill Jesus died on' and its implications for faith and life.
A theological discussion about the challenges of being a woman throughout history, framed around a casual conversation over drinks.
A theological discussion about Harrison Butker's controversial views on women, framed within a casual podcast conversation over drinks.
Reverends Ogan and Brian discuss how Jesus consistently challenged the status quo, coining the term 'Punchy Jesus' in a casual conversation over drinks.