Pod Only Knows

In May, Pope Leo released his first Papal Encyclical. Its focus was on the moral and material threat posed by AI. Journalist Nitish Pahwa, whose normal beat is technology and business, read the whole thing and shared his thoughts in a great piece for Slate: I Read the Pope’s Encyclical on A.I. I’m Astounded By What He Wrote. This week, we talked about Leo's recent excommunication of the Society of...

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...

We're joined by our friend Shaily Patel who last joined us for our discussion of HERETIC to talk about a movie that has a lot in common with HERETIC - Bill Maher's 2008 "documentary" RELIGULOUS. Both feature and insufferable asshole who has figured out religion by researching the internet and wants all you foolish believers to know about it! But the difference is that RELIGULOUS is bad. We talk ab...

Kelly has officially mastered the fine arts, so after a half year break, we're back! We'll have real episode coming up in a week or so, but for now we catch up on where we've been as Kelly talks about finishing her MFA and John talks about the World Cup and how England is definitely going to win it all for real this time.

Friend of the pod Sarah Posner joins John to discuss her great new podcast, Reign of Error. They also look at the various ways of understanding new developments in the Epstein case through the religious studies lens. *IMPORTANT PODCAST UPDATE* Kelly will be taking a few months away from the show. We plan to get back to normal rotation in the summer. In the meantime, John will be joined by some fri...

Kelly is away, so our next new episode will be released in two weeks. This is a rerelease of an episode originally published on December 19th, 2023. But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky shroud there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a s...

The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring human treasure Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, is a lovely bit of an anachronistic historical revisionism (though, to be fair, it gets a number of things right both in fact and in, pardon the pun, spirit). But it also perpetuates an increasingly popular myth - that Charles Dickens...well...invented Christmas. At least, that is, Christmas as we...

Dr. Vaughn Joy's new book, Selling Out Santa, explores the role Christmas movies played in shaping American culture (and vice-versa) during the Cold War. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, Selling Out Santa offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion p...

RERELEASE FROM 11/2023 What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than to have Kelly and John ruin it for you? Just kidding! We're not here to cancel Thanksgiving and we hope you have a lovely one. But holidays are weird things - we often celebrate them without really examining why, or how we arrived at the myths and rituals that emanate from their core. And Thanksgiving is, in many ways, our stran...

It's been a heck of a week on the internet! Marjorie Taylor Greene went from MAGA darling to MAGA outcast and from Georgia Congresswoman to Soon-to-be-Former Georgie Congresswoman in record time. We look at her attempted redemption/resurrection story with a skeptical eye, muse on what this means for the future or MAGA. Plus - Silicon Valley is suddenly obsessed with the End Times and Peter Thiel i...

Last episode we discussed The Exorcist, so this time we're taking a closer look its impact on our culture and religious beliefs as explored in The Exorcist Effect by Eric Harrelson and our guest Joseph Laycock. Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He holds a MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University and has written several books...

1973's The Exorcist is a landmark film for any number of reasons (many of which we get into here). It's also a film Kelly had never seen, and a favorite of our friend Matthew J. Cressler. Matt talked to us about Catholic horror and The Exorcist two years ago, but we really wanted to dig into the film in detail, so here we are. The Exorcist is one of many examples of art imitating life imitating ar...

It's spooky season, and to start off our spooky and spooky-adjacent episodes, Kelly and John talk to scholar Darryl Caterine, author of 2011's Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America which explores the meaning of our nation’s fascination with paranormal phenomena through a series of thick descriptions and analyses of a Spiritualist camp in upstate New York, the Roswell UFO Festival i...

Due to some scheduling difficulties, we're pushing back this week's episode to next week and then going back-to-back Tuesdays. In the meantime, enjoy this episode from last Halloween with Kathleen M. Brown on the Salem Witch Trials _____________________________ The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massac...

As soon as Taylor Swift announced her engagement to podcast host and occasional football player Travis Kelce, the weirdest weirdos on the Christian right burst into excitement over the possibility that Swift might finally, finally be morphing into one of them, urging her to "submit" to Kelce as a TradWife. It seems unlikely that a billionaire in her mid-30s like Taylor Swift will feel inclined to...

Given recent events, we have decided not to release a new episode this week. Instead, given rising concerns about state retribution to political violence and the weaponization of law enforcement, we are re-releasing our conversation with Lerone A. Martin from February, in which he discusses his book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover. _________________________________________________________ This week,...

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and author of many popular books about "Christian parenting", died in late August at the age of 89. Dobson's death was celebrated by many ex-Evangelicals of a certain age who were raised in part or in total by Dobson's teaching and methods. He leaves behind a complicated and questionable legacy, including a generation of ex-Evangelicals who despise...

Heretic was released in theaters in 2024 and quickly developed something of a cult fandom, especially among religion nerds. Starring Hugh Grant in a rare villainous dark turn, Heretic tells to story of two young Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, who find themselves forced to defend their faith (and their lives) against the human manifestation of dickish online atheist bros. Whe...

We're back, and we're catching up on the things we missed this summer: Woke Superman, Ryan Walters' porn crisis, the DHS's weird fascism Twitter posts, and more! Kelly tells us about her surgery and recovery. John talks about his trip and getting a ridiculous amount of poison ivy on him. And they both talk about how Ryan Walters, the notorious Christian Nationalist in charge of Oklahoma schools, g...

This week, Richard Saville-Smith joins Kelly and John to talk about his book Acute Religious Experiences – Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Saville-Smith is an independent researcher who focuses on the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. He earned his PhD in Philosophy and R...

Apple TV's Severance wrapped its long-awaited 2nd season recently and left us with more answers than questions. But some answers! We (sorta) know what Severance is really all about, and we (sorta, maybe) know what Lumon is up to now! So while we wait the ungodly eternity for Severance to return, John and Kelly invited scholar Niki Dolfi on to talk about the cults, religious allusions, identity, an...

Last week, the Catholic Church absolutely shook the world by electing Robert Prevost - an Augustinian from Chicago - Pope Leo XIV, making him the first ever American pope. Immediately, MAGA lost their collective minds, calling Leo XIV a woke Marxist and an anti-Trump liberal. Leo XIV's election was, without question, a statement by the Church directed squarely at MAGA and Donald Trump, but so many...

This week, author and journalist Annika Brockschmidt joins John to talk about the perception of the American Christian Right in Europe, the possibly intentional downplaying of Christian Nationalism in Trump 2.0, and Pete Hegseth's tattoos. Annika Brockschmidt studied History, German Studies, and War and Conflict Studies in Heidelberg, Durham and Potsdam. She is a freelance journalist and author, W...

William Golding's 1952 novel Lord of the Flies is one of those books most of us of a certain age were forced to read in high school and pretty much universally hated. Often presented as a bleak meditation on human nature, Lord of the Flies certainly isn't that. But why were its real themes - the destructive nature of colonialism, the inconsistency between the ideals of democratic nations and their...

Higher education is under attack in a way few saw coming. Maybe they should have, and maybe that's part of the problem. Institutions of higher education have been a laser target of the Trump administration's authoritarian project in its first two months. And while authoritarians have long prioritized going after and dismantling academic institutes, this strategy also includes the cynical use of ma...