# Thank God I Am an Atheist: Thomas Jared Farmer on Gianni Vattimo's Weak Thought Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917/thank-god-i-am-an-atheist-thomas-jared-farmer-on-gianni-vattimo-s-weak-thought Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917/thank-god-i-am-an-atheist-thomas-jared-farmer-on-gianni-vattimo-s-weak-thought.md Podcast: [Homebrewed Christianity](https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917) Published: 2026-07-28T13:45:00+00:00 Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NAANT9245517150.mp3 Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NAANT9245517150.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/homebrewed-christianity-723917/episodes/thank-god-i-am-an-atheist-thomas-jared-farmer-on-gianni-vattimo-s-weak-thought Duration seconds: 6408 ## Resource Gianni Vattimo — the Catholic-communist-gay Italian pioneer of pensiero debole (weak thought) — died in 2023, and the intellectual biography he deserved has finally arrived, courtesy of Thomas Jared Farmer, a fellow Claremont alum who wrote the book at the University of Münster and now works at Emory Law School. Vattimo is not the household philosopher he should be in English, and this book fixes that. Farmer weaves the biography I did not know — five-year-old Vattimo under British bombs in Turin, his Calabrian accent he could not shake, his flight from a Red Brigades hit list of his own former students, his letter-writing relationship with Pope Francis, his friendship with Umberto Eco — into the four big ideas that make Vattimo essential right now. What weak thought actually is. Why metaphysical certainty always ends in violence. Why secularization is the fulfillment of Christianity, not its enemy. And why hermeneutic communism is what the anti-authoritarian imagination needs. One of the most fun conversations I have had all summer. You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube Dr. Thomas Jared Farmer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law, where he works with John Witte on the intersection of philosophical hermeneutics and legal theory. He completed his MA in philosophy of religion at Claremont Graduate University (studying with Ingolf Dalferth and the late Anselm Min) and his PhD at the University of Münster in Germany under Hans-Peter Grosshans. He grew up in the International Pentecostal Holiness Church in upstate South Carolina. His new book is Gianni Vattimo: Philosopher, Communist, Catholic, Nihilist (Columbia University Press, 2025) — the defin… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/homebrewed-christianity-723917/episodes/thank-god-i-am-an-atheist-thomas-jared-farmer-on-gianni-vattimo-s-weak-thought/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/homebrewed-christianity-723917/thank-god-i-am-an-atheist-thomas-jared-farmer-on-gianni-vattimo-s-weak-thought.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.