Freestyle Theology

About Freestyle Theology

The church that shaped you came from somewhere. Usually somewhere older, stranger, and more wounded than anyone ever told you. Freestyle Theology is a podcast about the history of Christianity, and about what that history did to people's bodies, families, and nervous systems. Bradley Melle is a historian of Christianity with a PhD from the University of Toronto, where he studied the entangled history of Christianity, colonialism, and Indigenous peoples. Every week he and his guests take one question and walk it back as far as it goes. When did white people stop dancing? Where did Hell actually come from? How did the church get so good at finding enemies? What did plague do to the western imagination? Why do purity, punishment, and control keep resurfacing in the same places, century after century? The method here is simple: Approach the dysfunction you see with curiosity. Then go looking for the catastrophe that formed it. These aren't lectures. They are conversations with people who know things, and love to wonder and wander. That's the freestyle part. For anyone rethinking faith, anyone deconstructing, anyone who left the church, anyone still in it and quietly wondering, and anyone who just wants to understand how the West turned out like this. Wondering freely, out loud.

Publisher

Bradley Melle

Category

religion & spirituality · religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

22 Oct 2022

Latest episode

21 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

47 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   21 Oct 2026

   Let's Talk About: Death and Dying

   A few months after my mom died, my daughter and I were looking at the Find My Friends app. Beside my mom’s name it said: "Location not found." And my daughter looked at me like, "Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it, Dad?" This week marks one year since my mom passed. So I'm soloing on the mic today in a classic Freestyle Theology way, wondering freely out loud about death, dying, grief, and hope. My mom is the one who taught me how to wonder out loud without any judgments. So this is my way o...

2. 

   13 Oct 2026

   Let's Talk About: Controlling the Whole World

   In 1661, Louis XIV founded the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris. In that same year, the English colony of Barbados passed its slave code. One wrote down how a body should move. The other wrote down who counted as fully human. This week, Ngofeen Mputubwele and I finally stop in the century we’ve been skipping: the 1600s. It’s the century of religious war, the scientific revolution, Versailles, Baroque music, and the plantation. It turns out it’s where a lot of what we’ve been tracing gets lo...

3. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Let's Talk About: Evangelicals & Emotions

   In 1738, John Wesley went to a meeting and came out saying his heart had been “strangely warmed.” My guest, Ngofeen Mputubwele, puts it best: “So he had a feeling…” And that experience was enough to start a massive religious movement that still impacts us today. Today Ngofeen and I are taking another run at 1700s. On the one hand, yes, this is the century where the European elite were obsessively perfecting how they held and moved their bodies (with grace!). But there’s another 1700s: t...

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.9 / 5

7 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

7 ratings

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