Pod Only Knows

Sarah Posner has been covering the Christian right and Christian Nationalism for more than a decade. A regular contributor to MSNBC, her works has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, The American Prospect, Al Jazeera America, and many other publications. Posner is the author of 2008's God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Value...

For the last couple years, Amanda Moore has spent her time covering the far right on her Substack The Turtle Diaries Amanda infiltrated the far right during the final year of the Trump administration and has written about her experiences in publications like The Nation. She recently went to the Texas border to cover the arrival of "God's Army" - a group of truckers (possibly) who took it upon them...

This week, Kelly and John talk to Dr. Nicole Symmonds, who works as an Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics and, it happens, used to work a few cubicles down from John at Beliefnet a decade and a half or so ago. Dr. Symmonds' work sits at the intersection of Christian ethics and women, gender, and sexuality studies. She explores Black women’s embodiment, particularly the practices of liberative...

As a nice break from all the doom and gloom in the world (and the depressing stuff we often cover), we decided to ask the wonderful Dr. Judith Weisenfeld to come talk to us about her life and work. Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and S...

Is Peloton a cult? Well, Kelly owns one, so she is uniquely qualified to answer. In all seriousness, a Google search for terms like "peloton cult" or "fitness cult" yields a lot of results. Fairly or not, the fitness equipment company Peloton has been accused of fostering cult-like behavior in its customers. And the same can be said for branded workout companies like CrossFit and SoulCycle. But wh...

34 years ago, in December of 1989, Fox aired Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, a Simpsons Christmas special, the de facto pilot to the subsequent primetime sitcom, and a cultural phenomenon was born. To people of a certain age, The Simpsons is part of the cultural DNA. And as an animated sitcom, it had unique license to explore elements of American culture that no other series could. And one of t...

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 spectral hand and one great heap of black. So Charles Dickens described Ebenezer Scrooge's encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in his be...

It's December, which means it's time for everybody's racist uncle's favorite holiday tradition, the War on Christmas. Every year, sure as silver bells chime and lit wreathes line the streets of America's most aggressively white suburbs, Fox News delights eager viewers by trotting out this year's new battlefront narrative: Gay nutcrackers at Target! Insufficiently Christmassy Starbucks cup! Liberal...

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 strangest holiday - a secula...

Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House or Representatives. And what the media seems to think you should know about him is that he's very nice, he's smart. he's well-respected by his colleagues, he's personally liked by Democrats, and he's conservative Christian. Oh, and did we mention he's nice? Mike Johnson - real nice guy! What we think you should know about him, however, is that he is now...

Jenn Tisdale joins John and Kelly to talk about Edgar Allan Poe and the new Netflix series from Mike Flanagan The Fall of the House of Usher Like he did for Shirley Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan's series remixes and reimagines much of Poe's work and life story to create something haunting, timely, and revelatory, exposing themes in Poe's work and digging into the author's sense...

Jason Bivins is a specialist in religion and American culture an is the author of 2008's Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. He has also published multiple articles, review essays, and occasional pieces on religion, politics, and culture in the United States. His most recent book is Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Relig...

Mike Flanagan's "Midnight Mass" revisits a lot of the themes of much of his previous work: grief, death, trauma, loss (and you can listen to our discussion of his "Haunting Of" Netflix series here). But it also covers some a lot of new ground, including the complicated relationship between human beings and the religions they build. It is a show grounded as much in humanity as it is in horror, and...

If you've been feeling a little off lately, it's probably because FEMA recently tested a new emergency alert system and it activated the nanotech in your covid vaccine and now you're a zombie. As least, that's what a disturbing number of people on the right thought would happen. And maybe some of them still think it DID happen? You can find all about that in Matt Shuham's piece in the Huffington P...

Horror would be nothing without Catholic horror. From crucifixes to demon possession, from Dante's "Inferno" to the "The Nun II", Catholic imagery and imagination have shaped horror for centuries. But the intersection of Catholicism and horror has a dark real-world connection, as well. The Hero Priest trope at once masks and alludes to a hidden legacy of clerical sexual abuse, and the threat of he...

In this Weekend Chit-Chat, we discuss: How the Klan of 1920s used mainstream acceptance and the mantle of Christianity to push their agenda in the center of American life, and we ask how the descendants of that group, like the Proud Boys, have altered those tactics in ways that seem radically different on the surface but maybe aren't so different after all. We talk absurd memes, the "it's just a j...

If you happen to fall within a certain (fairly broad) age range, there is a very good chance that somewhere, at some point, you have encountered Chick Tracts. Jack Chick's horrific, over-the-top, feverish warnings about what happens if you don't accept Christ before you DIE!!!! have literally littered city streets and coffee shop tabletops for decades. Chick Tracts are outlandish and, if you don't...

For many, Labor Day is not much more than the end of summer movie season, a reason to have a cookout, or the symbolic beginning of the school year. It's the holiday we talk least about, in large part because the labor movement is one of the most underexamined areas of American history. So in honor of Labor Day, Kelly and John talked to Dr. Heath Carter, who has written extensively about the someti...

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...