Pop Culture Pastors Hour Podcast

Our “America 250” draft was a blast! Thanks to Marlon Weems for joining us for this exploration of the theme. Each of us built a “team” consisting of one movie, one TV show/episode, one book, one piece of music, and one wild card, designed to convey the breadth of what our country is about—the good, the bad and the aspirational. So how did we do? Below are our picks. Vote for your favorite lineup...

Friends, we are right in the middle of Pride Month - a month to honor the LGBTQ community. There are Pride events taking place all over the world this month and PCPH wanted to join in on the celebration. This is not only a time to celebrate but also to learn - to hear the stories and experiences of those in this beautiful community of people. For our conversation, we were excited to welcome Dr Seb...

No pulling the wool over your eyes as we ask the important question… “Will it preach?” about the recent film, The Sheep Detectives. We shear-ly had some great conversation about this fun film and there were only a few baaaaa-d puns throughout the episode. We cover a lot of areas from the film but mostly we spend time with the flock. As always, you can find past episodes here on Substack or on Appl...

Ok - full disclosure… the “movie” poster on the cover image for this episode was created by Anthropic’s Claude AI. I gave it a prompt describing the three of us and the name of the podcast and this is what it came up with. I have much that could be said but I am really not sure what’s happening with MaryAnn in this and how it seems to have tried to represent her hair. Phuc also commented on the “E...

That was one fast paced conversation! We laced our shoes up, stretched a bit, and then ran our own 10K through a whole slew of sports and running movies. A special thank you to Terrell Johnson of The Half Marathoner for joining us yesterday! I think we set a few PRs along the way! Here are the films/shows/books that we taked about: * Unbroken ( book | movie ) * Seabiscuit ( book | movie ) * Moneyb...

We have loved the AppleTV show Shrinking since it first premiered three seasons ago and w’re finally talking about this comedy-drama centering (mostly) on a group of therapists (and their associated circles of family and friends). The show deals with grief, loss, community, healing, and so much more. And it has a stacked cast with people like Jessica Williams, Harrison Ford, Christa Miller, and Ja...

Just a quick conversation with the excitement of the 4th season of Ted Lasso coming out later this summer! So just our quick histories with the Richmond crew, what the original meant to us, what are hopes are for S4, and also some of the things we noticed in the teaser. And a quick reminder that our next “full” episode is this coming Wednesday (5/6) at 12:30pm ET as we talk with Amber Groomes,Ph....

What a wonderful conversation with Fr Pete the Wilderness Priest as we talked about getting into Nature - Pop Culture Style. Father Pete Nunnely is an Episcopal priest in the Washington DC area and is on the cusp of his first book being released out into the wild! Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing We round-robin’ed it with three nature-centric Pop Culture items for each of us -...

This may have been MaryAnn’s favorite episode so far. The Pitt is a hyper-realistic peek into a trauma ED (emergency department, not the co-host), with lots of wisdom and heart—deserving of its many accolades—and it was awesome to hear from Amy Snow and Christine Vaughan Davies, two chaplains with deep experience, about the work chaplains do in all kinds of hospitals and contexts. As mentioned at...

Amaze amaze amaze! Directors Lord and Miller hit it out of the solar system with this creative and heartfelt adaptation of Andy Weir’s warm-hearted and science-stuffed novel. The conversation explores Ryland’s bravery, the power of friendship, the nature of sacrifice, and more. There’s also a little bit of conversation about cilantro too! Yum! Articles referenced in our conversation are here and h...

This. Was. So. Fun! Three days and counting until we get to see Andy Weir’s charming, funny, optimistic, humanity-affirming book brought to life on the screen. In this conversation we recommend some space fiction and discuss our favorite Project Hail Mary themes, our hopes for the film adaptation, and more. We started our conversation by talking about some of our favorite “space” books, so if you’...

Today, we welcomed Marlon Weems of The Journeyman substack to PCPH to talk about the Ryan Coogler film, Sinners . Wide ranging conversation from the technical aspects of the film to theology to racial histories to how this film can be a side door into conversations about race, oppression, diversity, and cultural identity. As I said...wide-ranging! This is a public episode. If you would like to dis...

Pluribus, Season One! It’s the mark of a good show that we talked for almost an hour, going deep on a number of themes in the show, and somehow didn’t get to some major plot points, like how the Others get their sustenance. I’ll just leave it at that. But we did talk about the show as commentary on AI, what makes a human a human, and the appeal of complex characters. Plus: how would we preach this...

We have come to the end of our journey (for now) through Middle Earth! After our first week of “Will it Preach?” and our second week of the “BIG Themes of the Stories” we come to “Category Crowns” - discussing a bit more light-hearted topics like: * Best/Worst change from books to movies * Which “villain” do you like the most, and which “hero” annoys you? * Best music cue * What meal (or scene?) t...

Mae govannen , friends! Haha so… MaryAnn could not see anyone logged in to this conversation due to some quirk of Substack, but they were there! We ran the themes of Lord of the Rings through Ed’s standard signoff on his posts: GPLHJ, or Grace Peace Love Hope Joy. Book recommendation: Everything Is a Story by Kaitlin Curtice And here’s the quote MaryAnn read from Return of the King: But even as ho...

The Oscar nominations are out and Sinners dominated, Pluribus continues to confound and intrigue audiences, and we are… spending three episodes talking about movies that came out 25 years ago. What can we say? The nerdery must flow. And the themes in the Lord of the Rings are RICH. In honor of the LOTR trilogy’s re-release in theaters, we begin our series with a few rounds of “Will It Preach?” in...

Thanks for joining us this afternoon! Before we dive in, here’s the audio of Dr. King reading Letter from Birmingham Jail , as Ed referenced. And there’s a lot of videos of Willie Pearl Mackey King telling the story of putting together the letter from the scraps of paper Dr. King had available while in the jail, and her work for civil rights in general. Here’s one. So, Carrie Newcomer has a song c...

What a great conversation about a great movie! We had a wide-ranging conversation about Wake Up Dead Man - we spent time with H Richard Neibuhr’s Christ and Culture concepts, Fr. Richard Rohr’s Four Shapes of Transformation , congregational dynamics, pastoral relationships, and so so so much more! Oh and we talked about the movie too!!!! There was even some Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Rickro...

The first of two PCPHs this week (second one is about Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on Wednesday, Dec 31 at 11am)…this one is our respective favorite portrays of clergy / pastors / religious figures in media (mostly movies and TV but a few books as well). We had a great conversation around all the different figures that we had come up with (knowing there’s lots of others that we didn’t ge...

Heya - this is just testing things out to get ready to go “official” come January 1 as the Pop Culture Pastors Hour Podcast! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit pcph.substack.com