HeyJaredThinking Christian: Clear Theology for a Confusing World
Christians shouldn’t just think. They should think Christian. Join Dr. James Spencer and guests for calm, thoughtful, theological discussions about a variety of topics Christians face every day.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 26
- Latest publication
- Sep 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 3, 2026
Latest episodes
No Nation Can Be the City of God | Faith & Politics #4 (opens the original)
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James Spencer and Ashish Varma reflect on the previous episode's conversation with Veronica Roberts Ogle — and on what happens when Augustine gets recruited for arguments he was writing against. The starting point is a claim James has encountered in political speeches: that the two cities can be collapsed, and that a nation might become the city of God. Both men think this misses Augustine's whole point. The cities are distinguished by their loves, and a community formed by self-love doesn't gra
Artificial Intelligence and the Church: Troy Miller on Tools, Teammates, and Human Flourishing (opens the original)
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AI is already cutting the audio, designing the graphics, and answering questions people used to bring to their pastors. Troy Miller, president and CEO of National Religious Broadcasters, joins Dr. James Spencer to talk about what happens when a productivity tool starts getting marketed as a teammate. Miller lays out three buckets: AI as production efficiency for ministries and nonprofits, the industry push to make the tools feel more human, and the legal and ethical tangle of intellectual proper
Augustine's Two Cities: Veronica Ogle | Faith & Politics #3 (opens the original)
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Veronica Roberts Ogle teaches at Villanova and wrote Politics and the Earthly City in Augustine's City of God . She joins James Spencer for the third episode in the faith and politics series. She begins with why the book exists. Rome was sacked in 410, the first breach of the city's walls in centuries, and Romans wanted to know whether Christianity had cost them the protection of the old gods — while Christians, riding the high of a converted emperor, were asking why their God hadn't defended th
Politics Is Bigger Than Voting | Faith & Politics #1 (opens the original)
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The first episode in a series on faith and politics running through the midterms. James Spencer and Ashish Varma set the terms before the guests arrive. Ashish starts with the word itself: polis , the city — the shared life of a community, of which party politics is only a narrow slice. That opens the question the series will keep returning to. Paul had no power to abolish slavery, but he could tell Philemon that Onesimus was returning as a brother, and in doing so redraw a line the empire had d
Liberalism Isn't Cruciform. Neither is Conservatism. (opens the original)
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A Billy Graham Center survey of Gen Z reported that nearly half of respondents agreed that Christian support for Trump has made them less likely to attend church. The survey offers no follow-up on why — whether the objection is to a candidate, to partisanship generally, or to something deeper about how the church understands its own order. James Spencer and Ashish Varma take the finding as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The conversation reaches back to Constantine and the first counc
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