PZ's Podcast

“Psychosis” is a very strong word for a cultural phenomenon. But it allows us to speak of a fissure over against reality, when groups of people see things around them in a way that is divorced from the facts. You can apply the phenomenon of group fissure from reality, to anything you like. I can see it in the way a very specific historical reality, the Anglican Church as the English expression of...

I’m talking about pastoral contact, which is just another way of talking about personal contact. How do you get through to somebody? How do they get through to you? What establishes direct contact with the person that you really are? The music of my casts almost all concerns that point of contact. Music can do it! Movies can do it. Cable can do it. It’s got to happen, by the way; or you perish fro...

We’ve all got a story in our eyes! The Moody Blues, and in particular their inspired songwriter Justin Hayward, caught that “Silent-Running” fact in the 1971 single that starts this podcast. We’ve all got a story in our eyes. Characteristically, the story results from pain, and, also characteristically, from pain suffered in earlier life. At the time, it seemed, at least in many cases, to be overc...

This theme of the insuperability of at least one problem in your life continues to absorb me — and in the light of hope and hopefulness. I tell the story of a woman who recently attended a meeting of church executives, almost all of whom are absorbed by current issues and questions of identity in political terms. This person said to me afterwards, “It seemed like a voice spoke to me, as I listened...

Sometimes when I hear a sermon or address that stresses the presence of God in catastrophic situations, let alone God’s presence in the midst of sin and sinners, I want to stand up and ask (tho’ I never do): “Do you really believe what you are saying? Are you willing to go all the way with such pronouncements, placing God in such desperate company? Or rather, is it just ‘Easier Said Than Done’?” O...

The fact that the mainstream churches are hiding their Light under a bushel is the primary reason for their atrophy. The fact that most of our churches are “missing in action” when it comes to the seemingly insuperable pain of living that we bring to them and to their representatives — well, that, I believe, is the main cause of their numerical decline. Today I want to posit an alternative to this...

One more ‘riff’ on the paucity of mainstream church “address” to the hungry and hurt visitor, let alone the hungry and hurt regular; but with hope: Justin Hayward is sometimes accused of sentimental romanticism. I don’t agree. I think he is on to something. His songs locate the heart of human pain in the misses and defeats incurred within the elemental atmosphere of romantic love. I believe experi...

I keep trying to make sense of the divisions we are almost all feeling currently. How can one get "under" them, i.e., in hopes of lessening them a little? Does anyone who is reading this enjoy feeling estranged from others, especially old friends, for example, because of political opinions? Very few, I'll bet. But it's happening. Then the insight came: Remember what it was like 47 years ago. Remem...

There is this amazing supposed contrast between the God Who comes to us from without, and the God Who speaks to us from within. Historic Christianity generally hears the First. Eastern religion generally hears the second. Personally, I hear both -- by which I mean, a lot of Love is "channelled" or "made flesh" in the inspirations I feel to love and to cherish that are indistinguishable from my own...

When you were in a tight spot, how did help get through to you, assuming help did get through to you? Did God speak from out of the whirlwind -- of crisis, panic, and despair? Or did aid come from inside yourself -- a 'how-to' or random thought that proved serviceable in the midst? If you're a regular listener to PZ's Podcast, you may well answer, the former. That's certainly what happened to PZ!...

The answer to that question has to lie, somehow, in whatever explains the popular success of Rodney Marvin ('Rod') McKuen. Rod McKuen died a year ago, and did you know he sold 100 million records? No kidding. Rod McKuen sold 100 million records. (He also sold 60 million books. But hey...) Here is a man who was universally dismissed, from day one of his earthly success, as being a "kitschy" Philist...

Now we think that reality, the "real world", is what happens "between nine and five", that is, what happens at work, in the office, at school, in career, and so forth. And a lot of people want to tell us that's true. "But not The Vogues. They were from Pittsburgh and they understood about shifts and hourly pay. Yet they understand more than that! "For the fact is, 'as you lay dying' (Faulkner), yo...

Here are a few thoughts concerning the atrocity attacks in Paris. I talk about Islam (and "Islamophobia"), Syrian migration into Europe, Original Sin and "low" vs. "high" anthropology, reaction-formations among young men when drones are over their heads and they have no control, let alone "buy-in"; and finally, a threatening experience Mary and I had on Times Square recently. Call this PZ's perspe...

I keep getting requests for a sort of "early morning Bible study" -- giving the 'treatment', you might say, to a New Testament text that stings, and also helps. So that's what I'll do for a few episodes, beginning with this one. Christ's Parable of the Rich Man (aka 'Dives') and Lazarus is given in St. Luke, Chapter 16. It's a scorcher, as rough and sand-paper-like as anything he ever said. It's g...

It's not an abstraction! It's more than something just to talk about or consider. It could happen to you. In fact, it probably will. I'm talking about unforeseen death. Some people hold on for a long time, even when they don't really want to. Other people want to hold on, but illness intervenes and they go a dozen years earlier than they expected. (You never expect it.) Other people had a bad habi...

Pop songs about love are like a corkscrew for understanding the Bible. Songs like "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Don't Pull Your Love Out on Me, Baby", together with a zillion co-belligerants that are written and performed "In the Name of Love" (Thompson Twins), reveal the nature of love and loss, undoings and exaltings, and painful stasis and buoyed forward movement. Now just imagine if professional...

The music is "Good Vibrations" at the start, by The Beach Boys; and "I Knew Jesus (Before He Was a Super Star)", at the end, by Glen Campbell. Here is the description for iTunes and also the blurb for Mockingbird: So much has been written -- I mean, SO MUCH -- concerning the so-called Historical Jesus: a welter of books and "Untersuchungen". I've spent most of my career reading these books, and wr...

Did you cry at any point as you watched Pope Francis in action during his visit? If you did, when was it? What made you cry? "Now it wasn't just John Boehner! I noticed as I watched the Pope inter-acting with individuals, and especially with individuals in acute need or distress, that it was those encounters that touched me personally. (I was abreacting all over the place.) I don't have spina bifi...

Is there anything to it? Is vertical religion -- not just calls to social justice, not just implied belief (system) -- but actual vertical religion rooted in anything resembling fact? I'm utterly bummed these days by mainstream Christianity that just leaps over the religious element on the way to the "mission" element. There's nothing there, I mean nothing there -- to aid an everyday sufferer. Lik...

This is not the Who's Final Tour. (They always come back.) So maybe it is the Who's Final Tour. Whatever it is, it's Podcast 200, and that's a benchmark. Somehow. So I decided to sum up the two core themes of the last... 100 or so casts, and also tell you something that's blown my mind recently. It's an instance of catatonia by way of Catalonia. Seriously, the two core themes of PZ's Podcast are t...

If you don't factor in the element of romantic love -- or at least its possibility -- you'll surprise yourself when you start making decisions in life. Sometimes I wish I could give a college commencement address. (No one is ever going to ask.) But I should like to talk about romantic love, and its over-riding, over-reaching, superseding strength as an element -- the decisive element -- in persona...

Talk about being misunderstood!: Artur London was one of the 11 most misunderstood men in the world, at least at the end of 1951. London was a defendant in the Slansky Trial, a "show trial" under Joseph Stalin. After suffering the most inhuman torture and brainwashing, London was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes not one of which he had come 10,000 light years close to committing. Later on...

The church is today so vastly over-eucharisted that you can barely pause to catch your breath. This cast offers an alternative view of the Holy Communion, as well as of Baptism. The original Prayer Book definition of a sacrament was that it is 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. What a refined and powerful expression. So now Let Smokey Sing (ABC) and find... The Face Be...

"The movie Cimarron, which was released in 1931, won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. (Did you know this?) It's great blessing, Cimarron -- which was based on the novel Cimarron, written by Edna Ferber. But you'd never know it's a blessing if you relied on the critics. Cimarron has become notorious in recent times for its racial and ethnic stereotyping. When you read contemporary desc...

Shag The Movie (1989) is a great little entertainment! It captures perfectly, and with high humor and enormous love and heart, the Beach Music phenomenon of the 1960s. Today, however, it touches a current issue -- right from the opening credits. What do you do with distressing material -- images and associations that relate to things you'd rather forget? The general answer seems to be, well, you b...