Fireside with Blair Hodges

David Dark seems hard to pin down. He's a professor of religion and the arts, he's a Christian, and also a self-identified agnostic. He engages readers all along the spectrum of belief by claiming that everyone believes in some sort of scripture, even if it's a sci-fi novel or a Radiohead album. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/dark. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.o...

Elaine Pagels is a ground-breaking scholar of Christianity. Back in the Sixties she was a student at Harvard when long-forgotten ancient texts re-emerged, secret gospels challenging old religious ideas. That research shook up Christian history, but for Pagels, it was also really personal. And unlike most scholars, she decided to take her intensely personal stories public, writing about the incredi...

Kiese Laymon is a writer and professor of English who believes time travel is possible. It's as easy to access as human language. Laymon discusses his re-released novel, 'Long Division' and his memoir 'Heavy.' Transcript at firesidepod.org/episodes/laymon Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store

Things were falling apart in Mary Rakow’s life. Her writing was stagnating, her marriage was falling apart, and she broke up with God. Then Mary picked up a pen and created one of the most religiously rich books I’ve ever read in my life. Transcript at firesidepod.org/episodes/rakow Buy the book at firesidepod.org/store

If you ask philosopher Adam Miller what he thinks the end of the world will be like, he’d tell you it looks like the day his son turned fifteen years old. Not because anything remarkable that happened that day, but because it wasn’t remarkable at all. It was a day that came and went and then it was gone. And it’s never coming back. We face the end of worlds like this every day. But rather than des...

Family history can be delightful, but it can also be heart-wrenching. Nora Krug was born in Germany decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth. In her award-winning graphic memoir 'Belonging,' she struggles under the weight of catastrophic history and reflects on the responsibility we all have as inheritors of our peoples' pa...

Do you think of yourself as spiritual but not religious? Or maybe you feel more religious than spiritual. Or maybe you're not quite sure what labels fit you best because things go back and forth--like, it depends on the day, and you've felt all of it or none of it. But most of all you're really interested in thinking about religion, spirituality, and culture. There's a seat for you at Fireside, wi...