Faith after certainty, theology with nerve.
Rethinking Faith treats belief as something examined, stretched, and sometimes rebuilt in public. Josh Patterson hosts conversations and audio essays where process thought, biblical interpretation, mysticism, race, ecology, prayer, and love are brought back to ordinary human stakes.
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Rethinking Faith is a theology and philosophy show for people who still feel the pull of Christianity but no longer want easy answers. Josh Patterson hosts from a place of open tension: former pastor, brewer, process thinker, and someone who admits that Christian language can feel both uncomfortable and deeply baked in. That honesty sets the pace. The show can start with banter and end in metaphysics. It can move from a joke about spring break to the ethics of interpretation, or from a metal song about unanswered prayer to Kierkegaard, Caputo, despair, and sacred lament. Its center of gravity is process relational theology, but the episodes are rarely abstract for abstraction's sake. Ideas keep returning to the body, the land, race, grief, love, prayer, and the ordinary problem of how to live. Conversations about reading the Bible emphasize bias, context, Black readings, womanist readings, LGBTQ readings, and the need to take responsibility for interpretation. Discussions of race examine language, imposed categories, social function, and the danger of letting oppressive systems define identity. Essays on prayer make room for anger and silence rather than forcing consolation. Episodes on the universe and matter borrow from Alan Watts and Whitehead to argue that care is not outside the cosmos but expressed through conscious, vulnerable creatures. Ecotheological conversations ask what Christian sacred texts and process thought might require of people in relation to the land. The show is warm, but not soft. It is accessible, but not thin. It often sounds like someone willing to repeat an idea until the listener can feel its consequence. For deconstructing Christians, progressive theologians, curious skeptics, and spiritually restless readers, Rethinking Faith offers a serious room where doubt is not treated as failure and theology is still allowed to matter.
Made for: Rethinking Faith is for deconstructing or reconstructing Christians, process theology readers, spiritually curious skeptics, and listeners who want serious religious thought without certainty theater. It especially suits people drawn to scripture, philosophy, ecology, prayer, and lived faith as unfinished questions.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by translating dense theology into conversation without flattening it. Its interviews and essays keep linking process thought, biblical interpretation, race, ecology, grief, and love back to the concrete work of becoming human.
A theological journey of becoming. Deconstruction/Reconstruction. Evolution of faith.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Rethinking Faith brings process thought, contested Scripture, and uncertain prayer into patient conversations about how belief changes without disappearing.
Josh Patterson treats faith as a working question, pairing guest conversations with occasional solo audio essays. His discussions move through biblical interpretation, process thought, ecological responsibility, race, inclusive community, and the persistence of prayer after…
A host who hears unanswered prayer in a song's scream might be your kind of Bible study partner.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A candid conversation about bias, responsibility, and the contexts readers bring to the Bible.
Rethinking Faith looks at Bible reading before interpretation officially begins, with Jennifer Garcia-Bashaw and Aaron Higashi focusing on the biases and prior commitments that shape which questions feel natural, urgent, or even obvious.
A careful challenge to race as identity that still takes racialization seriously.
Race is treated here as a matter of language, power, and everyday social formation. John Ivan Gill pushes back on race as a settled identity while still attending to the ways people are racialized in ordinary life.
A furious lament becomes a searching case for prayer that persists when certainty and consolation fall away.
Josh Patterson hears prayer in the raw scream of Suicide Silence's "Unanswered," reading the song alongside Kierkegaard and Caputo. Its fury opens onto a difficult question: can faith begin with the stubborn choice to keep calling when no answer comes?
Alan Watts's ocean metaphor anchors a clear, demanding challenge to cosmic indifference.
Cosmic indifference meets a serious metaphysical challenge here. Alan Watts's image of the wave as something the ocean does frames human consciousness as one of the universe's own activities, rather than an accidental spectator looking on from outside.
A searching conversation about land, Christian theology, and the metaphors faith may need in ecological crisis.
This single episode frames ecotheology as a matter of relationship: to land, to sacred texts, and to the earth at a moment of crisis. The guest moves between process thought, eco-justice, and the influence of Sally and Sayin Hassin Nasser, an Islamic scholar whose critique of…
A thoughtful conversation on reading scripture through voices and lives often pushed to the margins of theological study.
Rethinking Faith frames Liz Charlotte Grant's conversation around what changes when scripture is read through perspectives too often treated as peripheral instead of central to theological reflection.
A warm, searching conversation about making the kingdom of God visible through love, difference, and shared life.
The kingdom of God is treated here less as a slogan than as a test of religious imagination. In this return to open and relational theology, the guest separates it from any political program built on uniformity and points instead to love made visible through inclusion,…
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Live sermons with Easter-shaped urgency.
Host Josh Patterson interviews writer Liz Charlotte Grant about her book 'Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible'.
Josh Patterson interviews Brandan Robertson about his book 'Queer and Christian' and the intersection of LGBTQ identity and Christian faith.
Josh Patterson hosts a theology nerd throwdown with Tripp Fuller and Bo Sanders, discussing process relational thinking and mysticism.
Host Josh Patterson interviews Ulrik Dam for part two of a discussion on applying open and relational theology to church community building.
Rice University humanist Anthony Pinn explains his book Biblical Outlaws and its method of reading 'the Bible against the Bible.' He applies a four-part question (who, what, when and why have we forgotten) to Lot's wife, Job's wife, and Nimrod.
Josh Patterson hosts a conversation with Dr.
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Josh Patterson explores the concept of unanswered prayer through a radical reading of the song 'Unanswered' by Suicide Silence, blending process theology and mysticism.
Josh Patterson interviews Dr.
Josh Patterson introduces the Rethinking Faith Podcast and welcomes guest Will Rose to discuss his project 'Your Matter Matters'.
Whitehead’s ethics claim turns harm into a wound in the universe’s own becoming.
Josh Patterson speaks with Ryan Cagle about Jubilee House in northern Alabama, where a 24-7 food pantry, a community garden, and naloxone distribution all sit inside one ministry.
A conversation exploring a systematic theology of love with theologians Thomas Jay Oord and Julian Oetinger.
Josh Patterson introduces a conversation with Chris Hanson about open and relational parenting within a process relational theological framework.
Live from ORTCon, host Josh Patterson and co-host Joshua Noel introduce a podcast episode exploring process relational thinking and mysticism within Christianity.