PZ's Podcast

Experiencing a massive re-think just now concerning world cinema! This has been occasioned in part by watching every disc one can get one's hands on of the recently released catalogue of British "Vintage Classics". Have you ever heard of "Mandy" (1951)? Or "The Captive Heart" (1946)? Or "The Sound Barrier" (1952)? Or "The Maggie" (1954)? Or "The Angry Silence" (1960)? Or "Melody" (1971)? -- which,...

This is a kind of "work-book" question for the listeners to this podcast. The issue of romantic love is to the fore again, but the question is other: Why is there general radio silence on the vital point; or rather, why is there not more active concurrence in relation to it? The point I've been making is this: the dynamic in individual human beings that drives us to want to connect with another hu...

We're talking about love today -- wouldn't ya know -- and the relation of divine love to romantic love. It's a familiar, but one that remains very fresh, at least as long as human memory and human loss remain conscious. Here is the key line, from a kind of monologue that occurs towards the end of "Revenge of the Creature" (1955), a sequel that's even better than the original. The young female scie...

Everyone was young once. Adolescence, which is roughly the period between ages 16 and 25, is THE time in your life when you experience the strongest emotions, emotions contingent on loss but also fulfilment, expression but also suppression. You could almost say that one's adolescence is failed if you haven't felt the strongest degree of pain and also of pleasure that it is possible for a human bei...

Mrs. Zahl recently used the word "periphery" to describe our attitude, mine and hers, to increasing numbers of institutions, groups, and schools of thought to which we have been attached and for which we have been engaged for a long time. It's not that one has changed one's mind, or believes differently. Rather, it's just that human institutions and associations, over time, tend to disappoint. You...

Donovan's odd and brilliant song from 1970 entitled "Atlantis" is a good example of what PZ's Podcast is all about. And what is that?: Well, if you get to the heart of what's really on your mind, what's really bothering you, then you are almost home. Moreover, if you can give it up to God, He always deals with it, and for your good. Making the connection between your reality and God's Reality: tha...

Pastorally -- and generally -- it is easy to miss the core of what's going on with a person in pain. You may see some symptoms -- tho' sometimes even the symptoms are hidden -- and may sub-rationally understand that something bad is taking place under the surface. But when it comes to the "Heart of Darkness" inside a sufferer, it may be very hard to fathom and to surface. Yet surfacing that "Heart...

No finer Southern prep ever hit the scene than the Sewanee graduate Tupper Saussy. His two albums produced under the name "The Neon Philharmonic", with Don Gant, are supreme examples of symphonic rock. More than that, however, the songs are profound. Saussy's track entitled "Something to Believe In" speaks the voice of a questing human soul, "riding the wind" of life and searching for "something t...

Shibboleth's are often true in part. Maxims are true in part. But they are never, or at least rarely, wholly true. One such maxim is a current fashionable imperative, Face the Cannons. The idea is that when you are confronted with opposition or antagonism, your best bet is to look it squarely in the face and permit it to do its worst. Somehow in that acquiescent transaction, your foe will lose its...

In a quote that's been making the rounds recently, Rudolph Bultmann wrote, "When we encounter the words of Jesus in history, we do not judge them by a philosophical system with reference to their rational validity; they meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own mode of existence. That we ourselves be deeply disturbed by the problem of our own life is the indispensable condition...

Benjamin Britten's 'Spider and the Fly' number from his Suite for "Johnson over Jordan", by J.B. Priestley, takes you by surprise. It sounds like Gershwin at the start, then becomes a kind of danse, and is ultimately sinister. The composer meant it like that, for he was drawn to Priestley's play because it concerns life after death; and Britten was interested in life after death during this period...

This is a short riposte to the politicization of basically everything just now; but not in the way of taking sides, but rather in the way of digging deeper. I mean, digging deeper to the best and true interests of human beings. The best and true interest of human beings, the necessary condition for our welfare, exists in the direction of connection with another person; and, most typically (tho' no...

Ellis Brazeal recently pointed out a clear-and-present fact about what we call "sanctification". Ellis observed that the moment we begin to think we have it, or have made it, it is completely nullified. In other words, the only actual sanctification at which one ever arrives is un-self-conscious. Another way of putting this would be to say that no amount of or "espece de" virtue-signalling will ev...

Pastoral experience in hospital pre-op units provides abundant evidence for the existence of the soul. I first saw this evidence in Birmingham years ago, when someone we knew and loved was having to go into the operating room twice the same day, because the first "pass" that morning had failed. The situation was in fact do-or-die, and I had never before seen the look of fear which had come over th...

People are constantly trying to shoe horn their search for God into containers too tight for the Object of the search. This is probably true of some of your interests, whether it's food or Hammer horror films or "Philadelphia Soul" -- to name two of my current but chronic faves -- or you name it. On something or someone, you are probably pinning very high hopes. The blogosphere is full of such sho...

One of the best things about the recent Mockingbird conference in NYC was its unerring focus on universals and primary factors in human destiny and identity, rather than on contingencies and elements in life that do not endure, but pass away. Hence one's love for Blue Magic. Blue Magic were a Philadelphia group in the early and mid-1970s who stuck to absolute basics. Which is to say, Blue Magic st...

Well, the short answer, tho' not the whole answer, is: you can't. I wish you could. I can give you a hundred pointers and tips concerning it; and can even print out some prayers for you to say, in hopes of their breaking the soul-tie. But they would all be "tweaks". They would all be wistful hopes that will let you down. This is because in "the natural" -- i.e., within the systems and interactions...

This cast is a kind of summation of my thinking about romantic love in its relation to one's soul's salvation. I have thought about the compelling nature of romance -- between two people, I mean -- in both its positive, inspiring importance and also its possible negative and undermining impact. In fact, one has long searched for a key, the 'haft' that actually opens the door and heals one of scarr...

This cast is about low anthropology, or rather, hidden anthropology. Have you been struck by the comments concerning the Austin bomber in which people near and dear to the young man say they saw no signs or external evidence of any kind that he was thinking about doing this, or about anything, for that matter, out of the ordinary, let alone murderous? My experience of people, especially act-outers...

I'm always surprised when proponents of One Way Love fail to apply it in concrete cases. In other words, we can talk a good game -- about how Christ is always there, gets there first (!), when we are at our lowest ebb, in our worst place of sin and paralysis -- how no sin, no sinner is ever beyond the reach of His "saving embrace" -- but when we or someone close to us -- someone we really KNOW, in...

People are so good at minimizing the human situation. I've encountered this throughout Mary's and my ministry, right from the very start, in Silver Spring, MD. The religious "professionals" detested my message, that the world was in incomparable conflict with itself, and that each human being experiences comparable conflict inwardly. People would say, your message is too "down", and I just don't l...

I don't talk about romantic love because it is worshipful in its own right. I talk about romantic love because it is the closest signpost we have to God. Whether it's the Beatles ("Eight Days a Week") or Hugo ("The Hunchback of Notre Dame") or Wagner ("Tannhauser") or Jimmy Webb ("Wichita Lineman") or James Gould Cozzens ("By Love Possessed"), the inspired listeners of the world have not failed to...

This Christmas cast is about communication between people, and God. Moreover, it’s about the cost of poor communication, which can be suicide, let alone habitual alienation. And the rich advantage of good communication, which can be the difference between life and death, let alone satisfaction and personal happiness. Recently, Tullian Tchividjian spoke at a ‘Broken Christmas’ service in Living Fai...

This is a short talk on motivation and love. What motivates a person to do something — to REALLY do something. As opposed to remaining endlessly exhausted and trapped, within a cycle of inner conflict and desuetude. As usual in PZ’s Podcast, love is the answer. But how? And why? Karl Barth’s decisive mistake is exposed — without animus. Parishioners’ failed self-knowledge, let alone my own failed...

You listen to the group Honey Cone, described today as early feminists, and they are talking about a universal truth and in memorable pop terms. No hatred of men here, just the emotional recognition that if you don’t love her, she can’t really love you. Love between a man and a woman is a two-way street. (Unlike God’s love for us, which at the center is a one-way street.) If you don’t understand t...