Pod Only Knows

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.