The Magnificast

In the immortal words of Blink 182, "Work Sucks, I know." This week we're talking about Paul Lafargue's book The Right To Be Lazy and working through the mythology and moralism of labor! The Productivity Pay Gap: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

March 24th was the feast day for Saint Oscar Romero and we're celebrating! This week we're talking about Romero's address, "The Political Dimension of Faith from the Perspective of the Option for the Poor." In the episode, we talk about Oscar Romero in relation to liberation theology, the relationship between faith and politics, and what it means for the Church to throw in with the poor.  Read Rom...

This week we're diving into the discourse around Pope Francis' papacy at 10 years. Some people like him, some people don't like him. but the question that no one is asking is what do we think? Listen in as we talk about the good takes, the bad takes, and most importantly our takes on Pope Francis's papacy at 10 years! Here's the bad Ross Douthat article: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/15/opinion/...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 says that "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven." There's a time to talk about Marxism and a time to talk about queer theology. A time to talk about Paul Virilio and a time to talk about communist Saint Francis. But, this week we're entering a new season: getting goofy. This week we're bringing our Patreon only podcast The Lock In out from b...

We've talked about Queer Theology a handful of times on the pod, but in this episode, we go a bit deeper with Shannon Kearns and Brian Murphy, two folks who are building and encouraging others to build queer theology through storytelling and community. Listen in to hear about sacred storytelling, the all-out assault on trans people in this country, and Matt & Dean have their Cishet horizons wi...

You might have caught it on social media, but we're starting a letter-writing campaign for lent that calls on President Biden and Congressional representatives to remove Cuba from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list and to end the US Blockade on Cuba. In this episode, we talk through the lenten practice we're suggesting and giving you the facts about the blockade, the nuts bolts of the legislatio...

This week, Josiah Daniels has joined us from the frontlines of the culture war, where he's been reporting on the He Gets Us campaign for Sojourners. In this episode, we talk about the "elite capture" of Jesus, dark money, and the conservative Christian PR machine.  Read Josiah's piece here: https://sojo.net/articles/what-he-gets-us-ads-get-wrong-about-jesus Listen to Josiah talk about this on NPR:...

Dealing with your evangelical past means that sometimes you have to work really hard to recover particular spiritual practices, like praying. In this episode, we talk about learning to pray again through the Psalms. In this conversation, we learn from Ernesto Cardenal's appropriations of the Psalms from his book, Psalms.  In this episode, we talked about:  Psalms - Ernesto Cardenal  Our May 2021 e...

Last week we chatted about development and liberation, this week we're introducing another big idea in that conversation: dependency theory. Dependency theory has fallen out of style lately, but it's still a useful idea for thinking about the relationships between so-called "developing" countries and the imperial core. Get into it with us! Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong Outro music by theillogic...

Within the orbit of liberation, there's a closely related term that we've never really talked about on the podcast before: development. What does it mean to be a "developing country?" What is that development toward? To get to the bottom of it, we read a chapter from Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation to understand why we need liberation, not development. Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong...

It's time for the second installment of our Monopoly Capital series. In this episode, we talk about the ways monopoly capital reabsorbs all of the surplus it produces in some incredibly frustrating ways! Here's the MR article we mentioned in the show: https://monthlyreview.org/2016/07/01/surplus-absorption-and-waste-in-neoliberal-monopoly-capitalism/

Karl Marx is great, but a few things have changed since he wrote capital. Instead of corporations competing against one another, global corporations have gained monopoly power and are able to set prices with little to no competition. In this episode, we're jumping into Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy's Monopoly Capital! Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong Outro music by theillogicalspoon https://theilla...

Folks, we're bringing 2023 in with a bang. Dean Dettloff, the cohost isn't with us for this one, but don't worry, Dean Dettloff the guest star, is! Tune in (is that what you do with podcasts?) and listen to us chat about Dean's trip to Cuba and what it means for us as Christians in the United States. Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong Outro music by theillogicalspoon https://theillalogicalspoon.band...

Folks, the holidays wiped us out! We'll be back in the new year with the hot content you crave. Until then, check out this classic episode about David Roediger's essay Making Solidarity Uneasy. ------ One of the big motivating ideas on the left is solidarity. But, what does that really mean? In this episode, Matt and Dean talk through David Roediger's essay Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a...

Back in 2019, we recorded this episode with the incredible Brent Plate about Christmas and media. Don't sleep on it! We're still on this Christmas kick. This week we talk with Brent Plate about Christmas films, the history of Christmas and a lot more! Check out Brent's articles here: https://www.hamilton.edu/news/story/christmas-movies-brent-rodriguez-plate https://religionnews.com/2018/12/07/tech...

Back in 2019, we published this episode with Pamela Klassen about her book: The Public Work of Christmas. It's still a banger! Listen in! Ho Ho Ho, we're back with more Christmas content for all you Whos down in Whoville. This week, we talked with Pamela Klassen, a professor in the study of religion at the University of Toronto. She edited a rad collection of essays called The Public Work of Chris...

Back in 2018, we made this special episode with Hannah Shanks about Mary, materiality and bodies. It's a rad episode! To celebrate Christmas we're bumping this classic episode to the top of the list! Mary did you know that your baby boy would be the king of kings? Yeah, she knew. In this extra credit episode of the Magnificast, Matt talks with Hannah Shanks author of This Is My Body: Embracing the...

It's the last week of Advent! We made it. We're rounding out our series on Cuba with some extremely niche content about Papal visits and Cuba. This is some really in the weeds content, but it shows a real interesting interchange between the Cuban revolution and religion. There's a dialectic at play here that is worth paying attention to! Here was the book we mentioned from Fidel on the podcast: ht...

We've spent a lot of time talking about all of the ways the US is bad, but in this episode, we're going to stop and talk about all the ways the Cuban revolution is good. Literacy, healthcare, global solidarity, and more! Cuba has it all folks. Tune in and listen along with us about the ways we talk about Cuba and what it would mean to be in solidarity with the Cuban people. Here are the books we t...

The United States has meddled in Cuba through clandestine and covert ops for years. They've carried out so many wild missions it's hard to even talk about them all in an hour-long podcast, so we made a list of the 5 wildest covert ops the US has carried out in Cuba. These ops range from goofy to downright evil. But, these stories are important because the main conceit of the US blockade on Cuba is...

It's advent season, but how can we feel excited about the coming birth of Jesus when the United States continues to carry out sanctions and an illegal blockade against the Cuban people? So, throughout this advent season, we're going to focus on stories about Cuba. We're kicking the series off with an episode about the weird narrative about religious freedom that the US pushes. The big weird docume...

Ok, so we know that rich people get rich by exploiting workers, but how does this whole capitalist system get kicked off in the first place? How did the commons become privately owned? In this episode, we answer all o these questions and more! Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong Outro music by theillogicalspoon https://theillalogicalspoon.bandcamp.com/track/hoods-up-the-low-down-technified-blues *Get...

Big revolutions? In this economy? How about a lot of very small revolutions? This week on the 'cast we read Antonio Negri & Felix Guattari's Communists Like Us: New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty and talk a little bit about left-communism, post-Marxism and molecular revolutions! Read the book for free here: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=45 Intro Music by Amaryah Armstrong Out...

This past week, Lula won a historic victory for the left and for Brazil when he defeated Bolsonaro! In light of the big victory, we decided to do a round-up of articles about the victory and reflect on what it all means. We also pay some special attention to Lula's thoughts on religion and, because this is The Magnificast, we throw a weird French philosopher in the mix too. Here are the articles w...

It's important to analyze the story we tell about capitalism. In light of Halloween, it's important to recognize the story of capitalism as a horror story. So, in this episode, we talk through the specifics of how wage labor works and how capitalism is a vampire. Here's what we read in this episode Wage Labor and Capital - https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ Capital Vol 1...