# Brian McLaren **Summary.** Founding voice of the **Emergent Church** movement; author of more than two dozen books on post-evangelical Christianity, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Currently writing primarily about climate grief and "doom" as a spiritual category (*Life After Doom*, 2023). Functions as one of the early-2000s anchors of what became progressive Christianity, the parallel formation to mainline-traditional religion that emerged from evangelicalism rather than from the historic Protestant denominations. ## Why he matters to this wiki - ***Life After Doom*** (2023) — Readwise source [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/Life After Doom|here]]. Names climate grief and civilizational uncertainty as spiritual conditions requiring discipleship response, not just political response. Was [[Theodicy]] concept-page input source. - **Emergent Church** lineage — his work in the late 1990s and 2000s with Doug Pagitt, Tony Jones, Phyllis Tickle is part of the broader story of how post-evangelicalism became a recognizable tradition. Relevant to deconstruction-trajectory analysis. - **Post-colonial hermeneutics** — McLaren's work engages with the colonial inheritance of Western evangelicalism more substantively than many post-evangelical voices. Relevant to the [[Decolonizing 'The Great Commission']] thread. - Connection to [[Pope Leo XIV]]'s Magnifica Humanitas: McLaren's "doom" framing has structural similarities to Magnifica's diagnosis of contemporary spiritual hazards under technological pressure, though from very different theological floors. Worth a future analysis page comparing. > [!question] > Open: McLaren has been a flagged dead link since 2026-05-27. This stub partially closes it but a full entity page would draw on multiple primary sources (*A New Kind of Christian*, *A Generous Orthodoxy*, *Faith After Doubt*, *Life After Doom*) rather than the current single-book grounding. ## Related - [[Rachel Held Evans]] · [[Pete Enns]] · [[Diana Butler Bass]] · [[Sarah Bessey]] · [[Walter Brueggemann]] · [[Emergent Church]] · [[Deconstruction]] - See also: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/Life After Doom|Life After Doom]]