Freestyle Theology

Bradley Melle
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The Christian Faith is more mysterious and, quite frankly, weirder than we think. But the way we talk about it is often insipid and inaccessible, using tired words and ideas from the 16th century that nobody uses anymore. Freestyle Theology is a space for us to wonder freely out loud, to take our faith seriously in *this* time and place, and to wander down all sorts of fascinating rabbit holes. Get ready for another out of the box conversation about Christianity with Brad Melle and friends! Freestyle Theology is sponsored by Daily Breadth, the Christian meditation app that works. Learn more at dailybreadth.app or try it for free by downloading it in the Apple App Store or on Google Play.

  1. vor 17 Std.

    Let's Talk About: My Origin Story (How I Became a Historian of Christian Dysfunction)

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! I've never been able to explain how I became a historian of Christian dysfunction - until I sat down to record this. This week there's no guest and no lesson plan. It's just me in my office, tracing how church history went from meaning absolutely nothing to me to becoming my life's work, and how I ended up studying the church's dysfunctions instead of its glories. I go back to being a teenager sitting on a 56k modem in 1999, reading about the origins of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam for hours, while never *once* searching for the history of my own Christian faith. I talk about why evangelicalism gave me nothing but a 2,000-year blur where a story should have been: apostles, then static, then a flicker of Constantine, then static, then Luther. The Christian history I'd absorbed was nothing but decay and deviation from the pure New Testament church. There was nothing worth being curious about, so I wasn't. You'll hear about the Moravian church I grew up in - gentle, campfire Christianity - and how stadium megachurch evangelicalism came in loud enough to drown everything else out. About purity culture, about being a good kid who desperately wanted to do what was right, and about the anger I still carry from those years. And I ask the question that I can't get out of my head out loud: how much of what I called "faith" was actually just anxiety, dressed up and given a name, scanning for relief? I describe waking up every morning to pray with my feet ratcheted up tight toward the ceiling, apologizing to God for nothing in particular. I talk about seeing the same anxious energy surfacing in my daughter now, and what's different about the fact that she says it out loud. Then the turn: my history professor at Redeemer teaching Byzantine and Eastern European history. Christianity suddenly has origins, development,and  alternatives. Serbs and Croats, one people split by a line between Orthodox and Catholic. Missiology, contextualization, Andrew Walls decentring Western Christianity. My masters on Africa and colonialism, my doctorate on Indigenous peoples and the church, and not finding the beautiful diversity I went looking for but instead a machine built to re-engineer human beings. This process left me with two questions that continue to fuel my work. First: how could Christians have done that and called it God's will? And then the one I'm still living inside everyday: "Church, who hurt you, bro?" That question is why I now read church history the way I've learned to read my own body: not as a record of correct and incorrect belief, but as a record of pain, fear, and protection. Where did it start? What is it trying to tell us? If that's the kind of thing you're interested in: my free online seminar, The Traumatized Church: How Christianity's Painful Past Still Haunts and Harms, is tonight, Tuesday, July 28 at 8pm EST. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. If you can't make it, register anyway and I'll send you the replay! Registration for the next cohort of The Body of Christ Keeps the Score - my four-week course through the church's trauma history - opens this week. Details at the seminar.

  2. 21. Juli

    Let's Talk About: The Civilizing Mission

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Register now for Dr. Bradley Melle's upcoming online seminar @ bradleymelle.com/learn Let's Talk About: The Civilizing Mission (feat. Ngofeen Mputubwele) What does a civilization do after everything fails? Between 1350 and 1500, the West lived through a genuine polycrisis. The Black Plague, a church with two and then three popes, peasant revolts, the fall of Constantinople, and gunpowder rendering every castle wall obsolete. In this episode, journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele and I finally name the thing this series has been circling: the civilizing mission. Most commonly associated with colonization, “civilizing” actually began as a massive project of “tidying up” that emerged from the wreckage of the late Middle Ages. Censuses, surnames, etiquette manuals, official languages, manicured lawns, and mandatory daily dance lessons where a sagging elbow was corrected like a moral failure. Along the way: how the Vatican held the official contract for colonial education in the Belgian Congo (Ngofeen's own family story), the man who invented "social studies" as a tool of colonial control on two continents, why the canonical Cinderella was written at Louis XIV's court (and what its actual moral is) and how the Puritan's journal of relentless self-examination is ballet performed on the soul. A traumatized civilization reaching for control in order to feel safe. Sound familiar? Topics discussed in this episode: ·       Semester recap: from Constantine to the fall of Rome to the medieval world [4:26] ·       Islam, the Reconquista, and why 1492 sent Columbus [6:14] ·       The Jesuits: the church's "shock troops" who became its most radical cultural translators including De Nobili in India, Ricci's Confucian Christianity, the Wendat missions [8:11] ·       Ngofeen's family story: born on a Jesuit mission, how the Vatican held the contract for education in Belgian Congo, and the fifth-grade ceiling unless you entered the priesthood [11:45] ·       Thomas Jesse Jones: the one man behind colonial education curricula in both Africa and Indigenous America and the invention of "social studies" [14:12] ·       The polycrisis of 1350-1500: plague, labor collapse, peasant revolts, the printing press as the first internet [23:27] ·       The Ottoman ascent, the fall of Constantinople, and the terror of the Christian nervous system [~28:00] ·       The "threshold of visibility": why the medieval church tolerated carnival, festival, and local religiosity and why that world ended [~32:00] ·       Why the church's system failed during the Black Plague and how the plague birthed individualism [38:03] ·       Avignon, three popes, and Jan Hus burned at the stake after a promise of safe passage [40:39] ·       "Make Rome Magnificent Again": the beautification of Rome, the Renaissance as post-catastrophe hope and a surprising 2026 New York analogy [44:54] ·       Indulgences as "the premium package": exploiting a traumatized population, and what Luther crashed into [49:33] ·       The Renaissance as golden-age nostalgia, not a turn away from God [52:02] ·       How civilizing colonized everyday life: the royal court, the prestige shift, and the etiquette explosion [55:51] ·       Louis XIV's system: Versailles, official French, and the academies that standardized everything including dance [58:57] ·       "Your dancing master is the most important man in Europe": Lord Chesterfield's letter to his nephew [1:01:19] ·       Walking turned out, walking like a rustic and why orthopedics was invented to fix noble children [~1:06:00] ·       Cinderella, written at Louis XIV's court: the real moral is grace [1:08:45] ·       Rustic, grace, affectation: the chart that sorted humanity [1:10:41] ·       Is Calvin's grace the same word as the court's grace? An open question we're now chasing [1:11:00] ·       The medieval body vs. the Reformation body: when going through the motions became illegitimate [1:12:50] ·       The Puritan journal and the ballet correction: self-examination at the granular scale [1:16:59] ·       Coming next week: the Reformation and a forecast of dance's death by French Revolution [1:19:26] Resources mentioned in this episode: ·       The Traumatized Church: my free live seminar, Tuesday, July 28th at 8pm EST on Zoom. Register at bradleymelle.com/learn. Replay sent to everyone who registers ·       When Did White People Stop Dancing? Ngofeen Mputubwele's play-in-progress, the origin of this series ·       Becoming a French Aristocrat: the primary-source study of aristocratic child-rearing Ngofeen references [58:57] ·       Lord Chesterfield's letters to his nephew (1768) [1:01:19] ·       Register free for The Traumatized Church: Tuesday, July 28th, 8pm EST: bradleymelle.com/learn. Live Q&A included; can't make it live? Register anyway and get the replay ·       New to the series? Start with Part 1 (Augustine and the medieval body) and Part 2 (the Black Plague and the Danse Macabre) ·       Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology ·       Send me a message directly through the link at the top of this episode description

  3. 14. Juli

    Let's Talk About: Is Christianity Good?

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Let’s Talk About: Is Christianity Good? What happens when you stop being able to balance Christianity’s ledger? When “But the church built hospitals” no longer cancels out the crime of residential schools, the crusades, or the doctrine of discovery? In this episode I sit down with my good friend Danielle Steenwyk-Rowaan, who leads Open Homes Hamilton, a multi-church network that welcomes refugee claimants into spare rooms in family homes. We talk honestly about deconstruction, the moment Danielle realized that domination isn’t an aberration in Christian history but a pattern, and why she stopped trying to decide whether Christianity is “net good or net bad.” We get into the ethos of domination, the thing that white Western Christians swim in without noticing, the crusader fantasy behind the “Deus Vult” tattoo, why Canadians don’t get to feel superior to Americans, and the question that won’t leave me alone: Christians have always emphasized Jesus’ identity – but what was his actual method for change? Danielle’s answer runs through radical hospitality: eating with the wrong people, bringing the margins to the centre, and welcoming the stranger into your own house. If you’re carrying the weight of church history and wondering what’s left to hold onto, this conversation is something of a life raft.  Topics discussed in this episode: Why I'm done trying to balance the ledger of church history. No more finding a good deed to neutralize every atrocityDanielle's story: doing denominational justice work, and how everything hit a wall during Trump’s 2016 electionAberrations or a pattern? Residential schools, colonization, and the thread that runs all the way backThe birth of Open Homes Hamilton: Haitian refugee claimants at the border and a coffee-shop idea that became a life raft for a meaningful faithThe Christian penchant for "making the other like us": conversion, crusade, and the doctrine of discovery as one projectAnd why are white people so lame? Cringe, aloofness, and what domination does to a cultureDeus Vult: the crusader tattoo and white Christian masculinity's knight fantasyThe Canadian “Angel Complex”: America might be in chaos, but Canadians don't get off easyDomination's fragility: why the powerful are so easily triggeredProximity as our teacher: what nine months in West Africa revealed to Danielle about the iceberg under every culture"The way of Jesus" vs. Christianity-the-systemJesus’s method for changeEating with the wrong people: Matthew 25 and hospitality as Jesus’s other way of flipping tablesGlimpses of God as gift, not threat: a Sudanese Muslim friend's experience of the divineCalls-to-action: Learn more about Open Homes Hamilton and get involvedFollow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheologyGot Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Click the link at the top of the description to send me a message directly!

  4. 8. Juli

    Let's Talk About: The Disastrous 1300s

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Let’s Talk About: The Disastrous 1300s What happens to a civilization's relationship with the body when a third of it perishes in a few short years? In part two of my ongoing conversation with journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele, we enter the catastrophic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, the Western Schism, and - of course - the Black Plague. I argue that the plague marks one of the great unacknowledged turning points in church history: the moment Western Christianity's understanding of suffering shifted from purgative (cleansing, reparative) to punitive (the raw rage of God poured out on human flesh). Along the way, Ngofeen brings his remarkable personal stew - Congolese Catholicism, the historic Black church, white Reformed evangelicalism, opera, and ballet - to bear on Western Christianity’s suspicion of emotion, movement, and the body itself. We talk Carnival, Calvin's Geneva, the Danse Macabre, rotting tomb sculptures, La Traviata, Hillsong-era worship anxieties, and why there would have been no Reformation without the Plague. Topics discussed in this episode: What’s the West’s deal with emotion? How a high school music course planted a new questionAmazing Grace in white church vs. Black church, and Hillsong-era suspicion of embodied worshipCalvin's Geneva: the theocratic city-state that explicitly outlawed dancingHow the Carnival festival survived: preserved by Black communities in the colonized Americas but not by EuropeansNgofeen's family history: a Jesuit mission in Congo, Gregorian chant and rumba in one household, and the discovery that "the rules of the body are not universal" Emotion as “movement outward”: why cultures of correct doctrine fear what arises without consentThe medieval church as a sin-management system and why Hell felt farther away for a medieval peasant than for a ProtestantCarnival, inversion, and mockery: what the church tolerated and whyThe traumatic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, three rival popes, the Black Plague and Catherine of Siena's prophetic confrontationThe Black Death as theological rupture: from purgative suffering to divine punishmentWhy there would have been no Reformation without the PlagueThe Danse Macabre: the dance with Death that no one - rich, poor, or pope - could refuseDeath dances in opera: La Traviata, Carmen, and the "fallen woman" who must dieRotting bodies on tombs: the transi and the post-plague obsession with mortality, wounds, and blood Ebola, Mpox, COVID, and the modern imagination of "bad death"Questions or Comments?   Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology Send me a message directly through the podcast: tap the link at the top of the episode descriptionHave a question or topic you want us to take up in a future episode? Message me and let me know!New to the series? Go back and listen to Part 1: "Let’s Talk About: The Medieval Body"

  5. 3. Juni

    Let's Talk About: The Medieval Body

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Playwright, journalist, and podcaster Ngofeen Mputubwele is writing a play about a deceptively simple question: when did white people stop dancing? What began as a conversation about medieval bodies quickly became something much large: a history of how Western Christianity came to distrust its own flesh, and how that distrust got exported around the world. In this first conversation, Ngofeen and I trace the origins of the Western church's conflicted relationship with the body: the fall of Rome as a civilizational 9/11, Augustine's personal war with his own desire becoming the theological architecture of an entire tradition, and the earthy, embodied fusion of Augustinian theology with the "indigenous" place-based spirituality of ancient Europe that gave medieval Christianity its sensory richness (the relics, pilgrimage, a whole cabinet full of ways to do something with your shame) Then the Reformation arrives and strips it all bare. What's left when you take away the rituals? You turn inward, which has huge implications for the body.

  6. 13. Apr.

    Let's Talk About: Other Religions

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Dr. Bradley Melle sits down again with Fr. Joash Thomas -  priest, author of The Justice of Jesus, and descendant of the ancient St. Thomas Christians of Kerala, India - for a conversation that reframes everything Western Christians think they know about neighbours of other faiths and the afterlife. Why Western Christianity's fear-driven posture toward other religions is historically contingent (it didn’t have to be that way!) and what the 2000-year-old Indian church reveals about a different wayThe Synod of Diamper (1599): how the Portuguese Empire burned the ancient documents of the St. Thomas Christians and declared their form of Christian universalism heresy, because it wasn't Christian supremacist enough to serve colonial interestsThe "Law of St. Thomas" a form of Christian universalist eschatology that predates modern universalist theology by over a millennium, and what its suppression tells us about whose theology gets to count as orthodoxWhat happened to Western Christian theology when Columbus encountered the Americas after 1492 and why the discovery of hundreds of millions of "unevangelized" souls created a psychological and theological crisis that Western Christianity still hasn't fully processedThe Reformed tradition's version of Christian supremacy - more sophisticated, less loud, but structurally the same problemA 15-year-old Brad in suburban Edmonton, a Qigong class, and the moment genuine curiosity about other traditions got shut down, and what that costKerala, India: the first Indian state to eliminate extreme poverty, with near-100% literacy and what centuries of interfaith minority Christian witness had to do with itThis isn't really a conversation about tolerance. It's a conversation about what Christianity looks like when it was never the dominant power, and what the West might learn from that.  For anyone who has ever wondered whether there's a Christianity that doesn't require fear of its neighbours (or fear for them...!) to function.

  7. 25. März

    Let's Talk About: Threat & Theology

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Brad is back down the rabbit hole, and this time, Augustine is the way in. Why Augustine of Hippo is arguably the real founder of Western Christianity, and what that means for everything you think you know about Paul, original sin, and the gospelThe difference between the historical Paul and Augustine's Paul and why most Western Christians have been reading one through the filter of the other without knowing itTheology as historically contingent: what it means that Augustine's system was shaped by his ambition, his mother, his psychology, and his North African Roman world, not just by scriptureThe meadow vs. the perfume bottle: why extracting doctrine from the gospels might be missing the point entirelyWhy the gospels function more like cinema than philosophy and what it would mean to encounter them that way again, in community, without needing a final wordWhy the threat response to historical theology is worth examining and what it's actually protectingThis isn't a tidy episode. It's Brad thinking out loud about Augustine, interpretation, and what it might mean to do theology honestly in 2026. For the historically curious, the theologically restless, and anyone who has ever felt vaguely crazy for asking hard questions about what the gospel actually means.

  8. 19. März

    Let's Talk About: Where Am I?

    What do you think? Text me and let me know! Brad is back, and this episode is an honest account of where he's been. After months of silence, Brad returns to the mic to share what's kept him away: the death of his mother in late October, a brutal flare of his ulcerative colitis, and his daughter's unexpected health issues, all compressed into the same brutal stretch of monthsHe reflects on grief that is "clean but massive." The ache of losing someone you genuinely liked, not just lovedWhy he couldn't bring himself to theologize at his own mother's funeral, and what that revealed about Christianity's complicated relationship with sitting in painThe slow thaw from creative hibernation: the precipitation cycle that froze, and what it feels like as it starts againA shift in posture: from authoritative teacher to honest processor, and why he no longer needs to cap every thought with hopeThis one isn't a history episode. But it is human. And it might be what you need to hear if you've also been somewhere dark and quiet lately.

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The Christian Faith is more mysterious and, quite frankly, weirder than we think. But the way we talk about it is often insipid and inaccessible, using tired words and ideas from the 16th century that nobody uses anymore. Freestyle Theology is a space for us to wonder freely out loud, to take our faith seriously in *this* time and place, and to wander down all sorts of fascinating rabbit holes. Get ready for another out of the box conversation about Christianity with Brad Melle and friends! Freestyle Theology is sponsored by Daily Breadth, the Christian meditation app that works. Learn more at dailybreadth.app or try it for free by downloading it in the Apple App Store or on Google Play.

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  • Erstellt von
    Bradley Melle
  • Jahre aktiv
    2022 - 2026
  • Folgen
    38
  • Bewertung
    Unbedenklich
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Freestyle Theology
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    Freestyle Theology

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