PODCAST · religion
Between Bread and Stone
by Stephen Brewer
Between Bread and Stone is a weekly reflection from Stephen Brewer — a baptized human trying to live in the way of early Christians — exploring the tensions between institutional faith and radical love. Rooted in scripture, personal experience, and spiritual discernment, each episode invites listeners into the spaces where ritual breaks down, hospitality is tested, and grace persists. With a voice shaped by study of world religions, lived exclusion, and unwavering hope, Stephen challenges the boundaries of belonging and bears witness to the sacred in the margins. This is not a podcast of easy answers, but of honest questions, and of trust in the Christ who walks outside the gates. percival84.substack.com
Episodes
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The Coin in His Hand
I began this episode expecting to challenge a documentary about the Episcopal Church’s treatment of traditionalist clergy. Then I heard a priest describe an experience remarkably similar to what Episcopalians endured during the San Joaquin schism. My understanding of the conflict began to change....
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The Corner of the Stage
My pilgrimage took me to St. Thomas the Apostle in Hollywood for National Coming Out Day. Getting there involved a mutinous windshield, a mysterious freeway stoppage, and three attempts at parking. Inside, I found one of the most magnificent High Masses I have ever attended, a remarkable history…
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The Robe on the Hook
On National Coming Out Day, Matthew’s Gospel gives us a troubling wedding banquet. The invitation eventually extends to everyone on the streets, yet one guest is bound and expelled for arriving without the proper clothing. I have some questions about that king. This week on Between Bread and…
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The People Had a Mind to Work
I went to Taft looking for St. Andrew’s. The doors were locked on a Sunday morning. By lunchtime, a woman at a diner counter had given me sixty-one years of the town’s history instead. Episode 79 follows a quieter kind of pilgrimage: through fading adobe, oilfield signs, old paintings, racial...
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Two Vineyards
The Francis most of us inherited is harmless: a garden statue, a bird on his shoulder, and pets lined up for a blessing. The man himself was considerably more dangerous to imperial Christianity. Francis renounced property, refused the logic of possession, called creation his kin, and told his...
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What Cannot Be Taken
This week, my pilgrimage through the Diocese of San Joaquin took me to St. Michael’s in Ridgecrest, where a congregation once displaced from its church, a deacon’s work at California City, and a wall of artwork made by detained children began to converge around the same question: what remains…
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The Three Shortcuts
Episode 76 is about three shortcuts offered to Jesus in the wilderness: provision without dependence, protection turned into a guarantee, and dominion without faithfulness. From rapture theology to the phrase “God will provide,” this episode asks what happens when faith becomes a mechanism for...
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The Second Castle
Sometimes you arrive somewhere convinced that preparation will keep you from getting the important thing wrong. Then somebody tells you what happened there, and the whole architecture changes. Episode 75 is about a mountain congregation, a priest nearing the end of a very long ministry, and the...
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Pharmakeia
What is the difference between prayer and a procedure? Episode 74 of Between Bread and Stone follows one question through scripture, Christian spiritual warfare, Andean practice, psychology, and sacrament: are we inviting, or are we invoking? Invitation leaves room for relationship, freedom,...
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Grandma’s Garden
Dear Father Luis, You asked me to share with you what I learned on this pilgrimage. I have finally started doing that properly. This week’s letter comes from Sonora, where I went looking for the oldest Episcopal church building in California and came home thinking about a silent organ, a...
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The Ledger and the Gift
This Sunday in Between Bread and Stone, I sit with one of the hardest passages in Matthew: the parable of the unforgiving servant. At its center is an impossible debt, a gift freely given, a servant who rebuilds the very system that released him, and an ending that appears to place torture in the...
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Where Two or Three Are Gathered
Last week, the pilgrimage took me into a room where the Church had once hurt people and called it healing. This week, I found another church room. Behind its doors was a kitchen that has been feeding Hanford for forty years. Church of the Saviour is small. The work it has built is not. People…
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The Slow Repair
Sometimes the clearest theology arrives slightly out of tune. Episode 70 begins with a pipe organ that has developed a habit of landing certain notes a half step off, including one spectacularly unresolved Easter chord. From there, “The Slow Repair” turns toward Ordinary Time, the long green…
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The Window in the Door
There is a building in the corner of a cathedral campus in Fresno. Inside that building is a door. In that door is a window. According to the history shared with me there, people once stood on one side of that glass while conversion therapy happened on the other. Episode 69 of Between Bread and...
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The Word That Wasn't Rest
Father Luis would like everyone to know that he is absolutely, categorically, not going on sabbatical. He is going on renewal. This distinction matters enough that he preached about it before leaving, which is exactly the sort of thing that happens when a priest deeply devoted to Julian of…
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The Name That Wasn't Mine
A cruel joke. A federal court case involving another man with my name. Twenty years of silence I could never explain. This episode asks what happens when reputation outruns Truth, and what the Gospel requires before we decide who another person is. Matthew 16 begins with Jesus asking, “Who do...
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The Refuge of Beauty
I found St. Timothy’s in Winston-Salem, and I became suspicious of it. The incense, brocade, chant, bells, and Solemn Mass looked so far outside what I knew that my first instinct was to ask whether this parish even belonged in the Episcopal Church. Then, I kept looking. What I found was…
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The Man They Told To Be Quiet
A man danced during evening prayer, and my first instinct was to keep an eye on him. That reflex has bothered me ever since. This week on Between Bread and Stone, Bartimaeus cries out from the roadside, the crowd tells him to be quiet, and Jesus stops the entire procession. What happens when we...
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The Choreography
This week’s Between Bread and Stone begins with gratitude for Bishop Jerry Lamb, whose courage helped hold this diocese together when almost everything visible had been stripped away. From there, Episode 64 turns toward the strange, beautiful choreography of worship: standing, sitting, kneeling,...
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May The Force Be With You
Comic-Con is a room full of strangers who somehow already speak the same language. So is a church, at its best. This week’s episode moves from Anime Expo and a homemade Gogo costume to Star Wars, Star Trek, and a wedding at St. Paul’s. Along the way, it asks what resistance is for, what comes…
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The Park With the Conqueror's Name
Balboa Park has been sanctuary, civic icon, Pride gathering place, and a garden carrying the name of a conqueror who never set foot in California. This week on Between Bread and Stone, I trace the story behind that name, cross-examine the Spanish account of violence attributed to Vasco Núñez de...
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Scattered Seeds
One year ago, Between Bread and Stone began with an empty chalice, an alley behind a church, and a question about whom sacred things are meant to serve. This anniversary episode brings the sower in Matthew alongside Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes, who looks at work, wisdom, legacy, and the human need…
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The King on the Donkey
America turned 250 with a cage fight, a plywood fair, thin crowds, AI presidents, and an AI-generated multitude where a real one should have been. Episode 60, “The King on the Donkey,” sits with Zechariah’s humble king and Jesus’ promise of a light yoke, then asks what kind of power Christians…
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The Cup of Cold Water
This week closes the Pride month arc with Matthew’s smallest, clearest image of grace: a cup of cold water. Romans gives us two economies. Wages are earned, counted, and paid out. The gift arrives freely, without price. Matthew makes that gift concrete in the simplest act of care: water handed to...
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What I Tell You in the Dark
This week’s episode is the most personal reflection I have shared in Between Bread and Stone. The Gospel gives us Matthew’s words: “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light.” For Pride month, I am taking those words seriously. This episode tells my coming out story, a locked journal…
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Freely You Received
This week’s episode asks what kind of love can actually hold a person when every other economy starts ranking them. The readings from Romans and Matthew give us agape: the love poured out before worthiness, price, performance, or desirability enter the room. For Pride month, I sit with agape…
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Called Daughter
This week, we sit with Matthew 9:9-13, 18-22: Jesus calling Matthew from the tax booth, eating with the people respectable religion avoided, and turning toward a bleeding woman who reaches for the fringe of his cloak. The first Sunday after Pentecost opens the long green season with a question…
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The God Who Is Not a King
Trinity Sunday is often treated as the most abstract day of the Christian year. Three persons, one God. Councils, creeds, and theological vocabulary that can feel far removed from ordinary life. This episode takes a different path. What if the Trinity is not a puzzle to solve but a revelation…
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Speaking So They Hear
For Whitsunday, this episode returns to Acts 2 and asks a simple question: what if the miracle of Pentecost was about comprehension? The Spirit did not arrive to make faith mysterious for insiders. She arrived so Parthians, Medes, Egyptians, Romans, Cretans, Arabs, and strangers from every nation...
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The Prayer We Walked Into
On the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Church stands in the strange gap between Ascension and Pentecost. Jesus has gone. The Spirit has not yet arrived in flame. The disciples wait in the upper room, carrying words they could not fully understand when they first heard them. John 17 lets us overhear...
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Ideas Are Bulletproof
The Ascension is often treated as a spatial puzzle, as though the point were to determine whether Jesus literally floated upward and where, precisely, the cloud went afterward. I think the angels are telling us to stop looking in that direction. The Ascension is about anti-capture. Rome killed...
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I Will Not Leave You Orphaned
This week’s Gospel returns us to the upper room, where Jesus tells his friends he is leaving and promises they will not be orphaned. In John 14, love is not reduced to rule-following. It takes the shape Jesus has already shown at the basin and the table: foot-washing, bread-breaking, abiding...
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Many Dwelling Places
Some verses arrive already carrying history. John 14:6 is one of them: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” For many Christians, those words are comfort. For many queer people, they were turned into a lock. In this episode, I return to the passage that was weaponized against me by...
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The Voice You Learn Slowly
Good Shepherd Sunday is often softened into stained glass: a gentle man, a crook, a lamb over his shoulders. John’s Gospel gives us something sharper. The shepherd is known by voice, by patience, by presence over time. The thief moves quickly. The shepherd stays. This week’s episode follows the...
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Known in the Breaking of the Bread
Two disciples leave Jerusalem after the crucifixion, speaking the language of disappointment: “we had hoped.” Jesus meets them on the road before they recognize him, listens to their grief, opens the scriptures, and is finally made known in the breaking of the bread. This episode asks what it…
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Peace Through the Wound
Thomas is usually remembered as the doubter. This episode takes him more seriously. His insistence on seeing the wound keeps Easter from floating away from history. The risen Jesus still bears the marks of imperial violence, and that continuity matters. The episode also explores the late…
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Easter Day
Easter Day begins in John’s Gospel with darkness, grief, and an open tomb. Mary Magdalene arrives before understanding catches up, and the resurrection breaks into the world as disruption rather than slogan. This episode reflects on Easter as the Creator’s vindication of Truth and Reality, Jesus…
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Easter Vigil
The moral question in this episode is plain enough: how does a community keep faith in the long middle, when burial looks final, resurrection has not yet been recognized, and private certainty is nowhere to be found? The Easter Vigil answers by refusing isolation. Fresh water and a new heart come...
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Good Friday
What happens when truth stands in front of power and power refuses to recognize it? This episode sits with John’s Passion on Good Friday and follows the arc from arrest to burial, keeping close to the human texture of the day. Fear, cowardice, institutional violence, bodily care, and stunned…
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Maundy Thursday
Maundy Thursday asks a hard question: what happens when authority takes the form of service instead of control? In John 13, Jesus does not answer fear, betrayal, or weakness with distance. He comes closer. He kneels. He washes feet. This episode reflects on the intimacy and difficulty of that...
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Palm Sunday
Palm Sunday asks a hard question: when Christ comes near, what kind of king are we actually prepared to receive? In Episode 42, Stephen reflects on Matthew 21:1–11 and the strange tenderness of Christ entering Jerusalem in humility while the city is already in turmoil. This episode stays with…
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Unbind Him, and Let Him Go
This week’s Gospel brings us to Bethany, where Martha, Mary, and Lazarus stand at the center of one of the most powerful stories in John. Jesus meets a grieving family, weeps at the tomb, and calls Lazarus out of death, then commands the community: “Unbind him, and let him go.” In this episode…
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Mud in the Eyes
In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind using something unexpected: mud made from earth and saliva. The miracle is striking, but the real drama begins afterward. The people who claim to see most clearly—the religious authorities—cannot recognize what has happened in front of them. The story…
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Living Water in the Children’s Courtyard
In Episode 39, “Living Water in the Children’s Courtyard,” I sit with John 4 and the Samaritan woman at the well, reading the scene against empire’s quiet edits and Jesus’ choice to trust a marginalized woman as the first preacher to her town. I then turn to the Monday pantry at St. Paul’s…
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Born from Above in a World of Barbed Wire
In this episode, we meet Nicodemus after dark and let his quiet conversation with Jesus spill out into detention centers, parish halls, and city sidewalks. We explore what “born from above” might mean in a landscape shaped by immigration enforcement and visible poverty, and we lift up the work of...
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Between Bread and Empire
In this first Sunday of Lent, we walk with Jesus into the wilderness and listen closely to the tempter’s three offers: economic control, religious spectacle, and global power. Rather than treating them as abstract spiritual tests, we track how each one has a modern institutional form, from…
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Return to Me with All Your Heart
This Ash Wednesday, I’m sitting with a hard question: what if the way many of us practice Lent has been shaped more by imperial Christianity than by the early Church? Joel calls for a fast that disrupts an entire society, not a private willpower challenge. Early Christians fasted on days of...
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Get Up And Do Not Be Afraid
When the world finally feels clear for a moment, do we freeze it and worship the memory, or let it send us back down into the hard places where love is needed most? This episode sits with the Transfiguration as a mountaintop experience that many try to immortalize, and asks what happens when…
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Salt and Light in an Age of Extremes
This week’s moral question: What does it mean to be “salt of the earth” and “light of the world” in a country where Christian nationalism wraps itself in the gospel, and secular movements on the left enforce a different kind of unforgiving purity? How have both sides helped empire twist Jesus’...
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Blessed Are The Peacemakers
In this episode of Between Bread and Stone, we slow down with the Beatitudes and hear them as they would have sounded on that first hillside: under occupation, under surveillance, and under the shadow of public violence. We move line by line through Jesus’ blessings, exposing the...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Between Bread and Stone is a weekly reflection from Stephen Brewer — a baptized human trying to live in the way of early Christians — exploring the tensions between institutional faith and radical love. Rooted in scripture, personal experience, and spiritual discernment, each episode invites listeners into the spaces where ritual breaks down, hospitality is tested, and grace persists. With a voice shaped by study of world religions, lived exclusion, and unwavering hope, Stephen challenges the boundaries of belonging and bears witness to the sacred in the margins. This is not a podcast of easy answers, but of honest questions, and of trust in the Christ who walks outside the gates.
percival84.substack.com
HOSTED BY
Stephen Brewer
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Between Bread and Stone have?
Between Bread and Stone currently has 81 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Between Bread and Stone about?
Between Bread and Stone is a weekly reflection from Stephen Brewer — a baptized human trying to live in the way of early Christians — exploring the tensions between institutional faith and radical love. Rooted in scripture, personal experience, and spiritual discernment, each episode invites...
How often does Between Bread and Stone release new episodes?
Between Bread and Stone has 81 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to Between Bread and Stone?
You can listen to Between Bread and Stone on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Between Bread and Stone?
Between Bread and Stone is created and hosted by Stephen Brewer.
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