Most people open the book of Revelation looking for the end of the world. That's not what they find. The Greek word behind "Revelation" means "uncovering." What John is uncovering isn't a future timeline, it's who's actually sitting on the throne while everything looks like it's falling apart. In this first video of our Revelation Bible study, we cover:

- What "apocalypse" actually means (it's not what you've been told)

- Who wrote this letter, and why we're not entirely sure

- When it was written, under Nero or under Domitian

- Why this letter almost didn't make it into the Bible

- The two worldviews every reader has to choose between: fallen Babylon or New Jerusalem

If you've ever been called a heretic, or been afraid you might be one, this episode is for you. We're digging into where the word "heretic" actually comes from, what it meant in Josephus, how Paul used it, and how it morphed into the weapon a lot of evangelical leaders use today to shut down anyone who thinks differently. Turns out the original Greek word just means "a choice you made." That changes everything about how we should hear it.

What if the problem isn't that you sin too much. What if the problem is that the conversation about sin has never gone deep enough?

Most of us were handed a version of sin that was flat. A list of things you did wrong, a prayer to reset it, repeat. But the biblical authors were pointing at something way bigger than that. Something that, if left unchecked, slowly makes you into something less than human.

In this video we dig into what sin actually is in the Bible. We look at Lamech in Genesis 4, Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4, the Greek word harmatia, and what Walter White from Breaking Bad has to do with all of it. And yeah, we pour a glass of Ben Holiday along the way.

If you've carried guilt and shame around sin your whole life and it never seemed to actually fix anything, this might be the conversation you needed.

Nate Hanson built one of the most listened-to deconstruction podcasts in the Christian space. Almost Heretical drew over a million downloads from people who were done with the faith they grew up in. Then something shifted. Not a dramatic moment. Not a crisis. Just honest investigation, a lot of rabbit holes, and a slow tipping of the scales. In this conversation, Nate talks about growing up so embedded in church culture that it was his entire identity, throwing himself into street ministry in San Francisco, watching it fall apart in ways that made him question everything, and eventually deciding to actually look at the evidence he had spent years avoiding. We talk about the difference between cynicism and skepticism, what it actually means to read the Bible like an adult, why Almost Heretical became Faith Lab, and what Nate would say to someone three years into deconstruction who genuinely doesn't know if they're coming back. This is not a testimony about returning to the faith you left. It's a conversation about what happens when you stop performing belief and start actually asking whether any of this is true.

Most of us were handed one way to read the Bible. And honestly? It worked. For a while. But if you've hit a wall where the Bible feels stale, or your theology started cracking under the weight of real questions, you're probably not broken. You just might be stuck in stage one or two.

In this video I'm walking through four stages I think we all move through when we engage Scripture. Stage one is devotional. It's the open-eyed, life-is-fresh, underlining-verses phase. Beautiful. But it has a drop-off. Stage two is systematic. You want to know what you believe and why, so you start proof-texting your way to certainty. The problem is that systematic theology can shut your brain off or make you read things into the text that aren't there. Stage three is the stage of questions, where your theology starts to fail you and the cracks get interesting. And stage four? That's the "why didn't anyone tell me this" moment. Welcome to academia. Welcome to the Deuteronomists. Welcome to a bigger, stranger, more honest Bible than the one you grew up with.

Here's something the history of the Bible doesn't get talked about honestly. You've probably heard the version where Constantine got a bunch of bishops in a room, picked his favorite books, and called it Scripture. Clean story. Wrong story. The real history of how the New Testament came together is messier, slower, and honestly? More compelling. It wasn't one meeting. It wasn't one man. It was communities of people, spread across centuries and continents, wrestling with which writings actually held authority for how they lived. In this episode I'm walking through how the 27 writings we call the New Testament actually emerged, why some letters made it and others didn't, and why that messy communal process is actually a reason to trust what we have, not doubt it.

We grew up in it. The WOW compilations, the youth group pecking order, the "on fire" vs. "backslidden" scoreboard. The pressure to show up every Sunday, Sunday night, and Wednesday. The feeling that doubt was failure and the world outside the church was basically the enemy. In this conversation, Joe sits down with his friend Mario to take an honest look back at evangelical Christian culture in the 90s and early 2000s, what it shaped in them, what it cost them, and what they are still sorting through today. This is not a takedown. It is a real, unfiltered conversation between two people who loved a lot of what they experienced and are also still feeling the weight of some of it. If you grew up in church, ever wondered if your doubt makes you a bad Christian, or just need someone to name what you lived through, pull up a chair.

Here's something nobody really says out loud in the pew: everybody around you looks like they've got it figured out. Same songs, same prayers, same language, same faces. And somewhere along the way you start wondering if your experience of God is supposed to look exactly like theirs.

It's not.

The spiritual journey is one of the most personal things a human being can go through. And the church, for all it gets right, has a habit of handing everyone the same map and calling it the only route. But what if your path was always supposed to look different? What if the questions, the doubt, the wandering, the silence from God you weren't supposed to admit to, what if all of that is actually part of the journey and not a sign you're doing it wrong?