As a theologian, historian, and word enthusiast, I bring insight, knowledge, and humor to Christian history. If that term calls to mind lengthy lists of popes, councils, and creeds, think again. I keep it fresh by demystifying the obscure and remystifying the mundane. “Ritual purity”? It concerns the vessels used at the Temple altar: Are they limestone? A fastidious cult known as Essenes even thought ritual purity required colon cleansing! Something as tedious as dusting bookshelves? Consider it an opportunity for enlightenment.

Present Project: I’m preparing a book-length manuscript to shine light on the wholesale reversal of Jesus’s teachings on violence. The sweet, sardonic Jew opposed both Roman brutality and Temple corruption in no uncertain terms. Unlike other protestors, though, he resisted without taking up arms. “Love thy enemy,” he insisted. “Pray for those who persecute you.” Farmers and fishermen, husbands and housewives dropped everything to hear those words from that man. I dig up an ancient tradition of radical trust that Jesus tapped into.

I bring that message to numerous episodes in my YouTube series “Straight Talk: Religion Observed.” I’m dropping those episodes at the right moment to inform the US national debate on Christianity and war. Other timely segments for the spring of 2026 include “What is an Ayatollah?” and “Was America Founded as a Christian nation?” One playlists examines the messages on war and peace in six major religious traditions. Suffice it to say: it’s full of surprises. I promise my audience intellectual integrity. When facts defy my preconceived beliefs, I change my mind. With that method, I frequently uncover conflicting messages within a religious tradition. That series appears at @susanware1.

A future book will expose the betrayal of Jesus’s non-violent message. Within three hundred years, though, thousands claiming to follow in his footsteps fought in the Roman army. They killed Jews and ransacked pagan temples. Their successors later burned Muslims and heretics alive in the Crusades. Later still, claimants to that tradition kidnapped, tortured, and enslaved natives of lands targeted by European colonization — all with the blessing of the Pope. What on earth had gone wrong?

I trace the betrayal of Jesus’s teachings to bribery, brutality, and ambition by Church Fathers following in the footsteps of Paul. By no means the first to do so, I trace Jesus’s non-violence to forgotten voices within Judaism, finding evidence of its influence in the actions of James the brother of Jesus and others touched by the carpenter who healed souls. I contrast Paul’s letters to biblical Gospels to demonstrate that Paul betrayed the moral teachings of Jesus. Drawing on the stupendous scholarship of Peter Brown, Elaine Pagels, and Paul Fredericksen, I am less forgiving than they when I reflect on the “development” of the tradition. Rather than accepting the historical course taken by Christianity, I summon readers to reclaim the revolutionary kenosis that made Jesus unforgettable, finding new forms for it in today’s violent world.