The Moonshine Jesus Show: Introducing a New Progressive Christian Podcast

A couple of months ago, over drinks and a lot of laughter, Mark Sandlin and I hatched an idea for a podcast and sketched it out on crumpled, damp bar napkin.

I know. It’s a little cliché.

Over the next two months, a number of things have changed. The name of the podcast itself changed. I was ordained a priest in the Episcopal church (more on that next week). Some of the podcast’s content changed. It took longer than we expected to figure out the remote audio (so I didn’t sound like I was talking into a tin can) and it took us awhile to find time in the schedule of two ministers (Mark is a Presbyterian minister, activist and writer) to actually spend an hour in conversation about faith and life.

But, we finally did.

And I’m thrilled with the result: The Moonshine Jesus Show. It’s named in honored of a man of faith he and I both admire — Will D. Campbell, the Mississippi preacher and activist often referred to as the bootleg preacher. Support has already begun to pour in, pushing the cast in its first few days to the New and Noteworthy section of iTunes’ Christianity page. We’ve had artists lend us their music and even compose songs and drops for us.

We had a lot of fun in our first episode, and are looking forward to recording a new podcast next week. The podcast comes in three segments. The first is Spirituality on the Rocks, where Mark and I discuss themes of faith and spirituality in pop culture news. Our second segment is the Political Jesus, where we dig into the intersection between faith and public square. Our final segment, and let’s be honest, our favorite, is Good News | Worst News. Here, we each pick one good news item and one worst news item from the world of American Christianity. It’s kind of like SNL’s Weekend Update or The Daily Show, if it were run by two progressive Christian ministers.

We really love this podcast and we really think it’s got a great room to grow into something unique. There’s not a lot out there like it, really.

So check it out. It’s a little over a half-hour, perfect for almost any commute. We hope you’ll laugh. We hope it’ll make you think. We hope you’ll subscribe, you’ll keep listening, and you’ll share it with your friends and social media networks. If you like it, do us a favor, help us get the word out to others who might like it!