Theology with history, bite, and patience.
The Pugcast brings pastors, historians, theologians, and guests into long-form conversations about Christianity and culture. Its best episodes move patiently from a book, film, article, or public argument toward larger questions of sin, creation, grace, mortality, and hope.
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The Pugcast is a Reformed theological conversation with a wide intellectual appetite and little interest in smoothing off its edges. Episodes usually start with a book, article, documentary, public trend, or historical figure. From there, the discussion opens into doctrine, ethics, history, culture, and the shape of ordinary Christian judgment. The pacing is deliberate. Arguments are allowed to breathe. A guest may take a long run at critical theory, tracing its view of systems, sin, and human responsibility, while the hosts press for what a Christian account sees that the theory cannot. A conversation about pints, pipes, and pubs becomes a reflection on health, mortality, conviviality, and the goods that modern anxious living can flatten. A treatment of the Shakers can criticize Mother Ann Lee sharply while still lingering over the elegance of Shaker furniture and the way theology leaves marks on craftsmanship. Tolkien opens onto courage, evil, pagan fatalism, and the Christian West. Bioethics raises questions about transhumanist medicine and the moral imagination behind research that feels both fascinating and disturbing. Nature and grace leads into resurrection, creation, continuity, and the danger of treating God as though he were in competition with the world he made. The show’s strength is not speed but judgment. It brings together churchly experience, historical memory, and theological categories in a way that can sound like a pub table, a seminar, and a pastors’ study all at once. The humor is dry. The claims can be pointed. The best moments come when a side road through furniture, classrooms, pubs, surgery, or old controversies suddenly clarifies the main line of the argument.
Made for: For Christians who like doctrinal conversation with historical range, cultural argument, and enough edge to keep it from sounding sanitized. It especially suits listeners drawn to Reformed theology, church history, Christian ethics, and critiques of modern cultural assumptions.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by letting serious theological arguments run at full length while still grounding them in lived details: pubs, books, bodies, churches, furniture, classrooms, and public controversies. It is less a news reaction show than a habit of Christian interpretation applied to whatever the week brings.
The Pugcast is produced by The Logos Center and features Dr. Thomas Price, Dr. Glenn Sunshine, and Pr. C. R. Wiley. The Pugcast is recorded at The Corner Pug--a well-known watering hole in tony West Hartford, Connecticut. (Hence the name, "pugcast"--also the reason there is so much background noise.) The show could be described as "3 over-educated Reformed guys riffing on philosophy, theology, and stuff that bugs them." Each episode they invite you to take a seat in their booth and listen in on their conversation.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Christian doctrine meets literature, intellectual history, and cultural criticism in an informed, candid conversation among C.R. Wiley, Tom Price, and Glenn Sunshine.
The Pugcast turns Christian theology into a running conversation with history, philosophy, literature, and contemporary culture. C.R. Wiley, Tom Price, and Glenn Sunshine move easily from moral freedom and critical theory to the Shakers, Tolkien, C.S.
Shaker furniture sends you into theology before you've decided where it goes in the room.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A Christian critique of critical theory that shifts the focus from systems back to the human heart.
Bradley Green brings critical theory into the Theology Pugcast as a Christian problem of diagnosis. The conversation turns on a sharp contrast: an outlook that finds the world's trouble chiefly in systems and inherited reality, and Solzhenitsyn's claim that the line of evil runs…
A Christian reflection on pints, pipes, pubs, and the mortal limits of hyper-health.
The Theology Pugcast turns Malcolm Guite's In Defense of Pint and Pipe into a wry, reflective discussion of what hyper-health culture can miss: people are mortal, embodied creatures who often receive good things through ordinary life. C.R.
A sharp Shaker discussion links heresy, theology, and the beauty of disciplined craft.
Mother Ann Lee is presented as the founder of the Shakers, with C.R. Wiley describing her in blunt theological terms before the conversation widens to the movement that followed her. C.R.
Tolkien opens a serious discussion of pagan courage, Christian hope and responsibility without a guaranteed cultural comeback.
Tolkien anchors a searching conversation about Christianity, pagan courage and the preservation of Western civilization. Glenn Sunshine brings David Engels's article on Tolkien and Nordic neo-paganism into the discussion, while C.R.
A thoughtful discussion of grace, resurrection and redemption as the transformation of creation rather than its disposal.
C.R. Wiley, Tom Price and Glenn Sunshine consider what salvation does to human beings and, eventually, to creation itself. Starting with post-fall human nature and the Catholic formula that grace perfects nature, they turn to bodily resurrection, the sacraments and the renewal…
A grounded Magdalen College conversation that situates C.S. Lewis in the Oxford rooms, syllabus, and pub culture around him.
The Pugcast goes to Magdalen College in Oxford for a conversation with Simon Horobin, a professor of English language and literature whose work ranges from medieval literature to C.S. Lewis. Speaking from that college setting, Horobin discusses C.S.
A focused Christian reading of freedom as rightly ordered self-government, with real philosophical weight and one troubling moral turn.
Brad Littlejohn frames freedom less as personal latitude than as a matter of moral formation and self-government. Working through Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of the rightly ordered soul, he brings appetite, intellect, authority, and virtue into a Christian account of moral…
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Live sermons with Easter-shaped urgency.
The Pugcast hosts interview Brad Littlejohn about his new book 'Called to Freedom'.
Dr.
A theology podcast episode introducing Saint Anselm of Canterbury, discussing his contributions and criticisms as an 11th-century theologian and philosopher.
The hosts of Theology Podcast interview Brian Sauvé and Ben Garrett from Haunted Cosmos about their new book.
C.R.
The Theology Pugcast episode on Malcolm Gite's In Defense of Pint and Pipe argues that affluent-West wellness culture turns health into a mechanistic, reductionist project.
A new Mother Ann Lee biopic and Damian Thompson's Spectator World review send The Theology Podcast back to the Shakers and to the question of why the NPR crowd likes them.
David Engels's claim that J.R.R.
A discussion on disturbing trends in modern medicine and transhumanism, inspired by a First Things article on zombie bioethics.
Dr.
C.R.
A panel of theologians and historians interview Paul VanderKlay about his background and unexpected YouTube ministry.
Hosts introduce themselves and their backgrounds before discussing a recent tour of Ireland focused on early Celtic saints.