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  • #044 – The Lord of the Right: Tolkien, Fascism, and Race - with Marika Rose

    #044 – The Lord of the Right: Tolkien, Fascism, and Race - with Marika Rose
    2025/02/18
    What's the deal with the far-right's obsession with Tolkien? Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is, ostensibly, a story of different races coming together to defeat a shared enemy - one that intends to shroud the world in darkness and despair. Or...is it? If you ask billionaire fascist Peter Thiel - whose surveillance company Palantir is named for an evil crystal ball in Lord of the Rings - the answer isn't so simple. Nor is it for self-proclaimed "Tolkien guy" and Thiel protege JD Vance. Is the fascism-leaning right-wing and the TradCath movement justified in declaring Tolkien one of their own? And even if they're not, can we reconcile the racism inherent in Lord of the Rings with its apparent message of fellowship and perseverance in the face of an existential threat? Those questions have kept Tolkien scholars busy for 80 years, but we talked through some of them with scholar Marika Rose. You can find out more about Marika as well as links to some of the sources for this episode below: Marika Rose Marika on Bluesky How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World How The Lord of the Rings became a symbol for Italy's far-right ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is Not the Far Right’s Playground Tolkien and Race
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    1 時間 10 分
  • #043 – The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover with Lerone A. Martin

    #043 – The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover with Lerone A. Martin
    2025/02/04
    This week, Kelly and John are joined by Lerone A. Martin to discuss his unfortunately timely and prescient book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism. Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, African & African American Studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. He's is an award-winning author. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover was published in February 2023 by Princeton University Press. The book has garnered praise from numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and History Today. In 2014 he published, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. That book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History. His commentary and writing have been featured on The NBC Today Show, The History Channel, PBS, CSPAN, and NPR, as well as in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN.com, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He currently serves as an advisor on the upcoming PBS documentary series The History of Gospel Music & Preaching.
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    1 時間 2 分
  • #042 – Jason Kirk on "Hell Is A World Without You"

    #042 – Jason Kirk on "Hell Is A World Without You"
    2025/01/21
    Writer and journalist Jason Kirk's debut novel, Hell is a World Without You, was released in December of 2023 to wide acclaim. Hell is a World Without You tells the story of Isaac Siena, an Evangelical teenager living in Pennsylvania at the turn of the millennium who struggles with the dual-challenges of adolescence and his faith. The novel is drawn from elements of Kirk's own life and is set against the backdrop of an America in the wake of Y2K and on the verge of 9/11. Kirk is a senior editor for The Athletic and cohosts the podcast Vacation Bible School with his wife Emily. He joined Kelly and John to talk about drawing from his own experiences to write a novel that would speak to people both within and without the youth evangelical experience, his faith journey, and who is going to win the Super Bowl (it's the Bills, apparently - take it to the bank). You can learn more about him and read some of his work at https://www.jasonkirk.fyi/
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    1 時間 10 分
  • #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock

    #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock
    2025/01/07
    Anthony Comstock might be the most significant American that it's entirely possible you've never heard of. A zealous Christian crusader against so-called "obscenity" in the late 19th century, he is the namesake of the Comstock Act, the interstate commerce law that the Heritage Foundation plans to use to curb access to abortion pills and pornography. Born in Connecticut in the mid-1800s, Anthony Comstock grew up with regressive Victorian ideals in a puritanical New England household. His self-loathing and religious zeal lead to a life of bullying and persecuting countless men and (more often) women, driving many to suicide and tallying up hundreds of years in prison sentences. The radical social dynamics at the time in many ways echo our current culture wars, and since Anthony Comstock is about to play a major role in American life again, we thought it would be useful to talk a bit about his life and times. Much of the information for this episode was drawn from Amy Sohn's book The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age Also helpful were the biography of Comstock from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum and TheFire.org's Why the 1873 Comstock Act still matters today
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    1 時間 22 分
  • #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo

    #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo
    2024/12/24
    The 2017 film The Man Who Invented Christmas, starring human treasure Dan Stevens as Charles Dickens, is a lovely bit of an anachronistic historical revisionism (though, to be fair, it gets a number of things right both in fact and in, pardon the pun, spirit). But it also perpetuates an increasingly popular myth - that Charles Dickens...well...invented Christmas. At least, that is, Christmas as we think of it today. There are a lot of reasons why this seems true, and, yes, Dicken's A Christmas Carol played an enormous role in a Victorian revival and redefining of Christmas - but that revival was happening with him or without him. So we decided to take a closer look at Victorian society in the 1940s and exam how religious - or not - Dickens and A Christmas Carol actually were. Kelly and John invited Victorianist Kristen Hanley Cardozo to share some of her expertise and talk about spirits, Scrooges, and the real reasons for the season.
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    1 時間 8 分
  • RERELEASE (12/19/23) Ghosts of Christmas Past - with Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

    RERELEASE (12/19/23) Ghosts of Christmas Past - with Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman
    2024/12/10
    Kelly is away, so our next new episode will be released in two weeks. This is a rerelease of an episode originally published on December 19th, 2023. 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 beloved 1843 classic A Christmas Carol. And while A Christmas Carol is best known as the endlessly-adapted and reimagined cornerstone of modern Christmas storytelling, it's also a freaky ghost story, and it turns out that, in Dickens' England, telling ghost stories at Christmas was a whole thing! There were, as it turns out, a lot of ghosts in Christmas past. Why did Victorians like themselves a spooky Christmas? And when did spookiness get replaced with mall Santas, Bing Crosby, and family church services? Is it too late to make Christmas spooky again? This week, Kelly and John talk to folklorists Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, co-founders of the Carterhaugh School about lost Christmas traditions, winter hauntings, and what else you should read if you prefer ghastly specters to eggnog and Rudolph.
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    55 分
  • RERELEASE (11/21/23) - Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth - with Dr. David J. Silverman

    RERELEASE (11/21/23) - Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth - with Dr. David J. Silverman
    2024/11/28
    (Rerelease from 2023) 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 secular celebration that is at once also an aggressively religious one, built around a series of supposedly historical events that seem to have a lot of missing pieces when you start connecting the dots. It can also be a day that evokes painful memories for the indigenous population. To help us unpack what Thanksgiving is and what it is not, and to shed some light on how we came to celebrate this holiday as well as how important it is that we not let that celebration obscure our understanding of early American history and the genocide of the indigenous population, we asked historian David J. Silverman - author of This Land is Their Land - to join us. You can buy Dr. Silverman's book here: This Land is Their Land @ Amazon Read also Dr. Silverman's 2019 piece in The New York Times: The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth
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    1 時間 25 分
  • #039 – Breath of Fire: Conspirituality, Fraud, and the Prosperity Dharma

    #039 – Breath of Fire: Conspirituality, Fraud, and the Prosperity Dharma
    2024/11/26
    Directed by first time documentary directors Haley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, Breath of Fire was released on MAX in October as a four-part documentary series. Breath of Fire is based on the 2021 Vanity Fair piece The Second Coming of Guru Jagat by Hayley Phelan, who also appears in and executive produced the series. It tells the story of Kundalini yoga practitioner turned de facto cult leader/professional grifter Katie Griggs, known to her followers as Guru Jagat. Throughout its four hours, Breath of Fire touches on some recurring themes and questions, such as the power of religious fraud, abuse, orientalism, and what exactly it is that people rally want from religion. This week, Kelly and John try to unpack its often enlightening, often disturbing implications.
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    1 時間 8 分