PZ's Podcast

I was listening to a sermon concerning spiritual warfare and my mind went straight back to 1970, to the English film, a psychological thriller, entitled Crescendo . The film stars Stephanie Powers and James Olson and was directed by Alan Gibson. The preacher's passionate evocation of Ephesians 6:12 in connection with current events had brought considerable criticism from many quarters. I wanted to...

I'm trying to understand, in Romans 7 and Mockingbird terms, a phenomenon I currently observe -- and feel -- all around me. It is as if the more control, medically and in terms of hospitalizations, that we are getting over COVID19, the more insistent and pressing are the visible measures a good citizen is supposed to be taking against it. To put it another way, as the actual threat is decreasing,...

There's a truth of life that more and more people are telling me about from their own experience. To be sure, these people are mostly my own age, so we are considering that last third of life with which my Boomer Handbook is concerned. The observed truth of life I am talking about is simply that when you reach a certain age, say from 55 or so on, if you don't move forward, you move backward. Somet...

There's a terrific Sherlock Holmes movie from 1944 entitled The Scarlet Claw . Well, it's actually not that terrific, but the premise is great. In the movie a criminal disguises himself as a kind of glow-in-the-dark swamp creature out on the moors, who murders unfortunate travelers and terrorizes the village. Come to find out, the murderer is putting phosphorus on his hands, his feet and his face...

It's a kind of personal discovery I made last week, when inventorying some more of the songs featured in Peace in the Last Third of Life: A Handbook of Hope for Boomers (Mockingbird, 2020). The discovery was that each song not only connects me with a person and/or connection with that person -- or disconnection from the person; but that each song connotes a place, an actual place. In other words,...

One of the best effects of a positive view of aging, which I have tried to offer in the Boomer Handbook (Mockingbird, 2020), is the unexpected appearance of new material. You find that faith in a "good outcome" to your life seems to bring with it fresh resources, and fresh product. It just happens! Well, thanks to Josh Retterer, to whom this podcast is dedicated , I've run straight into Margery La...

I heard something very helpful recently in a sermon by John Zahl. He said that sometimes in life what seems like the end is really the middle . I think JAZ meant that when your situation feels like -- maybe is -- the end of the world, it may really be the hinge point to "A Whole New World" ( Aladdin , 1992). This insight is true in Christian experience. What looks like the end turns out to be the...

I like Greg Townson very much! He's a guitarist who's been around for a while, but is now a leading member of Los Straitjackets. He combines that great Rockabilly sound of theirs with some really lyrical passages. Townson's track "Speed Bump", an excerpt of which begins this cast, got me started on the theme. It's a familiar theme, especially with Mockingbird; but should never be foregone. A speed...

This is a further thought on "narratives", tho' with a Biblical example (from Jeremiah) and a recent public incident that has me both "stunned and amazed" (Pretenders, 'My City Was Gone', 1984). The President of Harvard has issued a letter announcing the end of the University's sanctions against the undergraduate Final Clubs and all "single gender" organizations on or off campus. These sanctions,...

"Narratives", which used to be called "paradigms", and before that, "preconceptions", are like shackles on human necks. They force one to look down from what is before you, rather than at it. Narratives short-change reality because you either discard things that don't fit your narrative or you alter the facts in order to squeeze them in. I'm not talking about the ideological content of your narrat...

Feelings cover both the personal and the general. They cover both the individual and the collective. So you feel deeply when you are loved and loved back, and you feel deeply when a cause -- political, social, or cultural -- captures your heart's allegiance. We are seeing this dramatically within the current mood and its fiery passions. But wait: I was here before! I was "here", in the Spring of 1...

Mrs. Zahl and I had a sort of 'Abraham/Sarah' moment (i.e., Genesis 17) this week, and it brought to mind an immortal song from 1974, performed by Paul Anka. But it was all because of the virus! This new cast, which is the 300th, talks about the supernatural Power of God in relation to the scourge that is whipping us all. I bring back an 'Oldie but Goodie', William Hale White (aka 'Mark Rutherford...

In the middle of what may be the worst week, or close to it, this cast offers hope of a real breakthrough -- and not just in mental attitude or "approach", but in the substance of the pandemic. At the start there is some slight use of the now-taboo word "over-reaction"; but hey, you can see it either way -- just as long you stay vigilant and wash your hands a lot. No question about that. Yet there...

Our parish's Ash Wednesday service this year made me think of an old "Outer Limits" episode entitled 'Cry of Silence'. That episode concerned alien tumbleweeds -- no kidding -- and a scientist's attempts to communicate with them. What made me associate the Ash Wednesday liturgy with wind-blown tumbleweeds were the changes over the years of my ministry in that service. Now don't worry! This is not...

There is this unexpected plethora of gems coming at me just now in a Mockingbird vein. Last week there was Journey into Light , from 1951; and also The First Legion , also from that year. Today there is Bright Road , also a Hollywood movie, which came out in 1953. I feel like the surface of the moon that is being bombarded by a meteor shower. How, one asks oneself, did one miss these many, explici...

Some startling new material has come down the pipeline this week, and I'm utterly bound to share it with you. Turns out that all sorts of explicitly Christian Hollywood movies have been hidden from view almost since they were made. It's almost as if a 'code' came into force, unspoken but more unwavering than the now notorious Hays Code of the 1930s, which banned directly Christian works of popular...

Just as alien invasion movies break down the "dividing walls of hostility" (Ephesians 2:14), almost invariably uniting the human race/s against the common enemy, so do four facts: 1) Lobo is big in Taiwan! 2) Tracy Hyde is still big in Japan! 3) Karen Carpenter is HUGE in The Philippines!! 4) Jacques Demy spent a lot of time, near the end of his run, making a Japanese movie about an anime heroine...

One of the great things about UFOs and alien contact is that it unnerves and demoralizes the kind of thinking that qualifies everyone in terms of "identities" or predicates. The metaphor of alien-contact movies, from Starship Invasions (1977) to the original Day the Earth Stood Still _(1951) to _Cloverfield (2008), is that of our one planet, our one earth, being instantly united in the face of an...

In the late 1970s The Trammps conceived a brilliant Disco Inferno, in which something would be burned down. Whether they meant the hot performance of a disco dance, or whether the torching of something big and malignant, it probably makes no difference. Something's gotta go, even if it's just lameness and dullness on the "disco round" (Alicia Bridges). This cast contrasts the passing nature of soc...

Sometimes I feel like... a motherless child. No, really: Sometimes I feel like I've been looking in almost all the wrong places for confirmations and traces of my Ur-existential Christian faith. One's been "trolling" almost one's whole life through Truffaut and Dinesen and Kafka and Isherwood and Seneca and H.G. Wells and Stephen King and Val Lewton and Rod Serling and and John Galsworthy and, gol...

The secret that explains life -- I say "secret" because it's an open but denied truth, known most directly in popular music but suppressed in most "narratives" and conceptual systems -- is the aspiration for a connection of love with another human being. This aspiration transcends politics and affinities, affiliations and most "ultimate concerns", and almost all situational circumstances and histo...

A few words about faith, and the future -- and your future, in particular, in individual terms. I was struck recently by a meme I read on Instagram. It read like this: "Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start focusing on what will be!" What struck one about the meme was its departure from what one would almost always and everywhere ( semper ubique ) hear: Stop focusing on what 'wasn't' And start...

To respond to the opening invitation and make a gift in support of PZ's Podcast , click here . The most recent cast, entitled "GPF", has drawn a lot of response. This new cast develops the theme a bit more, and rounds it with memorable music by what Spencer Leffel once called my "house band". The last third of life is characterized, or should be, by increasing dis-engagement, increasing observatio...

This follows from Episode 286, entitled "Sine Qua Non" , and concerns the arrival of gratitude and peace at the end of life -- or, better, way before the end of life -- and the birth of faith for one's safe "arrival" after death. I speak at first about disillusionment with the world, and especially with the world's repetition. "The World Is a Circle" (Burt Bacharach/Hal David, 1973), and come to f...

My subject is the birth of love in human relationships. What causes a person to love (as opposed to being indifferent, or even hostile)? What causes you and me to love another (as opposed to being merely dutiful, or resentful, for that matter)? I recorded the cast because one is bombarded these days, within mainstream Christian circles, with calls to love, summonses to embody the way of Jesus, His...