Pod Only Knows

Did you know A.I is not just the title of one of the best movies of the 21st century - it's a also a thing that's making a lot of news?? Well, we did, because we're very young and hip and with it. In this episode, we consider the implication of some of the emerging areas of A.I. - like ChatGPT - on religion. First, Kelly spent some time chatting with Jesus on two different platforms - a text based...

It's Kelly's birthday (John's was yesterday...) and so we decided to talk to one of her favorites - Solomon Missouri, known to those in the know as Twitter's Pastor. In his own words, Rev. Solomon Missouri's ministry focuses on sexuality and spirituality outside and beyond church walls. We talk about how he stumbled into his role as Twitter's favorite spiritual leader, where Christianity is going,...

Dr. Bradley Onishi is the author of the recent Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism and What Comes Next as well as the co-host of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, which focuses on the the state of Christian Nationalism from a variety of angles. He joined John and Kelly to talk about his book, his experience growing up in California and converting to eva...

On this chit-chat, we try to define what we mean when we say "authentic", what is "the true self", and we are all so prone to dividing religion into "real" and "fake". Also - fitness cults, the console wars, Coke and Pepsi, and Haruki Murakami. For this episode, we looked at work by Chrissy Stroop (https://religiondispatches.org/christian-nationalism-is-authentically-christian-and-according-to-a-n...

Shreena Gandhi is a part of the Religious Studies Department at Michigan State University, where is primarily teaches classes on religion and race in the Americas. She is currently finishing up edits on a manuscript, A Cultural History of Yoga in the United States, which looks at the impacts of race, gender and class on how yoga is practiced and commodified in religious and secular spaces. And she...

This week, Kelly and John take on July 4th and ask if it's possible to wrestle it away from the darker side of American history as well as its increasingly Christian Nationalist connotations. Even though (or maybe because) America is not, in fact, a Christian nation and has no official religious identity, is July 4th a religious holiday? Has the project of state that (purportedly) guarantees freed...

Toby Ball is the host and creator of the series Strange Arrivals, a production of iHeart Radio an Aaron Mahnke's Grim and Mild. The recently-concluded third season of his show looks at UFO researchers who developed theories to explain the phenomenon and the consequences those theories had for people who believed they had experienced the paranormal. In the finale, Toby explores the ways in which be...

This week was the tenth anniversary of the release of the The Last of Us on PlayStation 3. The critically-acclaimed HBO television adaptation aired earlier this year, and so we thought it would be a good time to take a look back at its themes and messages, especially where it concerns religion. Visions of the apocalypse can serve as great platforms to explore ideas about human nature, but, while t...

When you work in religious studies, sometimes you get to work on really cool subjects, like Dr. Shaily Patel, who works on magic. For centuries, magic had been an integral part of religion. So much so, in fact, that it's hard to really see it as a separate category. So when did we start removing magic from religious practice and putting into the wands of boy wizards and teenage witches, or the han...

In the first weekend episode, John bring Kelly the topic of the Buddhist teaching of The Middle Way. One of the first breakthroughs in Siddhartha's journey to become the Buddha, the Middle Way reminds us that in order to be successful in our quests, we must center ourselves in moderation. This means avoiding the pitfalls of thinking in terms of extremes - that the answer to our problems is probabl...

This week, Kelly and John talk to Dr. Megan Goodwin about the importance of getting religious studies out to the public and the challenges and tools for doing so. Dr. Goodwin is the co-host of the podcast Keeping it 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion. Her formal expertise is in issues of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and American religions. She is the author of the 2020 book Abusing Re...

Mike Rothschild, author of the acclaimed 2021 book The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, is set to publish his follow-up, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, in September. The book covers the history of the antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding the Rothschild (to whom Mike is not related) family an...

Next week, we release the first official episode of Pod Only Knows. But to ease the transition from Hard to Believe, Kelly and John took some time to explain the idea and format of the new show and to let listeners get to know them both a little better.