PZ's Podcast

Realism is exactly correct in our observation of life as it is, and especially of human nature as it is. So-called "film noirs", produced right after World War Two, were right to present life, and human nature, as it really is -- which is "noir" (i.e., dark), confused, self-serving and ultimately futile, both in detail and in the big picture. But reality can be saved! Reality can turn bright. It c...

PZ sets considerable store on the difference between "Either-Or" and "Both-And". 'The world' likes to interpret reality in terms of "Both-And" -- fatal adjectives like "complicated" and "nuanced" abound! The Reality of Life, however, is different. The Reality of Life is "Either-Or Resulting in Both-And'. The reason I say that is because Only Love Creates (Lasting) Reality; and all else -- alonenes...

An interesting new book from Germany has just been translated into English and a review of it in the Times Literary Supplement (August 21, 2026) concludes with a most consequential sentence. The book is entitled Soul Magic: A Century of Psychotherapy , and the author is Steve Ayan. The consequential sentence at the end of the review, which was written by Jack Goulder, is this: "Ayan finishes with...

'Love is the Answer' to almost all human problems; but more accurately stated, 'Belovedness' is the Answer. Love springs from belovedness, and almost every rock song that has ever been sung echoes this. It's an important distinction, tho', between love and belovedness , because love is almost always a response to belovedness In other words, belovedness comes prior to love. You cannot tell someone...

A special cross-posting of PZ's appearance on Directed by God, a podcast and YouTube show produced by and 'starring' Reagan Wells and Seth Farmer. PZ was served as guest host for their episode on The Searchers , the 1956 film directed by John Ford. The episode was filmed in Cathedral Church of the Advent. Watch on YouTube here . Reagan Wells is chief videographer for The Center in Birmingham, whic...

Here is the first time back after several months,and I couldn't be happier! It took a new computer (and system), acute in-person IT aid from Mockingbird's own Will McDavid; and the moral support of Mockingbirder and friend Hewes Hull. But "I'm Flyin'" ('Peter Pan', 1952) -- again. This brand new episode concerns personal belovedness (i.e., Grace) and its fruit (i.e., Christian compassion and all t...

Why does one love rock 'n roll so dearly? Well, of course, the quality of a given favorite song -- its bass line, the vocals, the guitar solo, etc. -- connects with you(r ears) and makes you love it. But there's more to it than that: The real ground of one's love for a particular song is * Where you were when you first heard it. * And by that I mean: Where you were emotionally when you first heard...

Always searching for the words to describe breakthrough -- opening doors -- divine intervention in our 'safe-rooms' of pain and loss. Always searching for words, and also actions. How can you and I, dear listener, become like Edwin Starr in 1965: our own "Agent Double-O-Soul" for the sake of ... the world? Well, first, you need to be an object of love. Not the subject of love -- i.e., the lover. N...

Rod Serling was born on Christmas Day (Squeeze, 1996) and that fact forever touched him. He wrote three scripts for the original 'Twilight Zone' that have a Christmas context, as well as the mother of all Christmas screenplays (of his genre) entitled "The Messiah of Mott Street". The latter he wrote for the 1969 anthology 'Night Gallery'. During the next two weeks I will be showing the two best of...

How do you help someone who is being pummeled by a persisting circumstantial or psychodynamic problem? Do you "advise" them? (Don't Do It - The Band, '72) Do you try to talk them out of it? (Again, don't -- Talk Talk, '82-'84) Do you avoid them? (Again, don't -- Animotion, '84. They won't let you, anyway.) What do you do? How do you actually help someone you love -- maybe it's you ("Baby It's You"...

I feel like I see more acutely than ever into the backing track of human experience. There is the "outside" of how our lives are going within givens and events, but then there is the "backing track" -- the enabling part, the staying part, the... well, the (kind of) Eternal Part. The two parts, the outside and the backing track, are separate. "Phosphorus" is a word one sometimes uses for this, but...

One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What ? I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison. His song "Into the Mystic", from 1970, started to play inside my mind. Then a phras...

How does someone who is living, like it or not, in the last third of life, address everybody else who is living in the second third? It's an important question, cuz most of the time it's like two ships passing in the night. An older Episcopal priest used to come up to me about once a week -- he was assisting in a busy parish where I was rector -- and say, "Hey, Paul, relax. You're working too hard...

While one was within the second third of one's life, one had all these goals in view, of happy marriage, happy fathering, and (most of all, sadly) successful careering. That was the way it was -- and probably the way it is, at least for some who may be reading this. And in that (now) embarrassing order, too. But at this point it's beginning to look a little bankrupt -- at least the order of valuat...

Every version or tradition of the Christian Faith offers an objective or corporealized dimension within a person's (longed for) relationship with God. For Roman Catholicism, it is the Real Presence of the Lord within the Elements of Bread and Wine. For pentecostalism, it is the embodied Gifts of the Spirit in miracles of healing and divine intervention, and often an accompanying gift of speaking i...

It's been too long but here is my new episode. It started with the second-to-last scene in an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1963 entitled "The Human Factor". Brought yours truly straight to tears. Then we hurtled through time to 1996, to Cliff Robertson's touching redemption at the end of another 'Outer Limits' episode, entitled "Joyride". The combination of these two genius moments equipped PZ to t...

This is a sort of "marker" podcast -- my 400th. It's kind of my summing up on the subject of human identity and the origin of human satisfaction. The cast cites a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, and do note that the interviewer is almost as interesting as the interviewee I also quote John Zahl's distillation sermon from December 29th -- which happened to be Mrs. Zahl's and my 51st Anniversa...

Everyday I see how little I know. Everyday I see how little I've read, or seen, or heard. (Thought I had, but hadn't.) A prime example of this is Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Have you ever heard of Agnes Sligh Turnbull? (You probably have.) She wrote very successful novels in the 1940s and '50s, and later, too. But she was an optimist, she was a Christian, and she believed in redemption. (So she's more o...

There is a roughly four-minute sequence in the middle of the first Superman movie (1978) that hits the stratosphere of movie emotion -- and of real-life emotion, too. It is the scene in which Superman takes Lois Lane's hand and flies her leisuredly over Manhattan Island. As the pair glide over the city, Lois Lane (played by Margot Kidder) confides her innermost thoughts to the viewer: she has fall...

I so want to connect with my hearers when I preach or speak. Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job. J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had basically lost whatever faith he had been exposed to as a child, spent a lot of years looking for... something....

I'm thinking about ecclesiology today. Rarely do. But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham: Well, they got me thinking of what the Christian Church is centrally and anchoredly about....

Can't believe I got to see Irma Thomas in person a few years back. (Saw The Stones performing the same song in 1965 on their first American tour. Have to pinch myself that that really happened. But it did.) But time is on my mind just now. This is for two reasons: 1) Two old friends died under conditions that felt like almost the polar opposite of what we would have expected when we were all very...

Every day these days I seem to find out something important that I didn't know before. For example, that Burton Cummings has just released a new album. Or that one of Joe Dante's favorite movies is a Spanish religious satire released in 1995. Or... that The Fantasticks is really good! Or that the creators of the latter wrote an uncommonly powerful musical about a Christian martyr. As I say, every...

Eliot's line from 'East Coker', "Old men ought to be explorers", never gets... old. It is inspiring, counter-intuitive, awesome, and, yes, within our reach. And everyone's -- not just that of "old men". But I never understood it -- really -- until I met Los Straitjackets: their music, I mean. How did Los Straitjackets "shine a light" (CCR) on Thomas Stearns Eliot? Well, they did so because it does...

Mockingbirder Joey Goodall recently composed a public note of praise for 'PZ's Podcast', and his very act motivated this caster to record a new one. Joey's approbation instantly created within me the desire to put some fresh thoughts out there. Instantly! That's the way love works -- which is to say, "We love" (i.e., embody the fruit of outreach to others) "because He first loved us" (i.e., embodi...