Pod Only Knows

Епизоди

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  #065 - "Contact" (1997) with Lauren Turek 08.09.2026 1ч 9мин

  (SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY! Naturally, our production staff have all been fired and fed to the wolves.* We BELIEVE the episode should now be glitch free!) 1997's "Contact", directed by Robert Zemeckis, remains one of the best "What if aliens made contact?" movies ever made. Conceived by astronomer Carl Sagan, the film thoughtfully wrestles with ideas of humanity, religion, and international relations in a way most science fiction merely glance at. This week, we revisit the film with Trinity University professor Dr. Lauren Turek. You can find Lauren on Bluesky @laurenfturek *just kidding, John is the entire production staff
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  #064 - Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" 13.08.2026 1ч 4мин

  More summer movie series fun as we (finally) talk about Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" after Kelly (finally) sees it because John told her she should. Did Kelly like it? Not really! But after we discuss Nolan's take - which explores themes like PTSD, the morality of war, and Christian militarism - she liked it a little more! For this episode, we reference the following: The W.H.D. Rouse Translation of The Odyssey Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's film David French's NYT essay: Christopher Nolan Has Rebuked the Spirit of the Age Ezra Klein's NYT essay: Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse
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  #063 - The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby with Michael Blanding 24.07.2026 1ч 15мин

  Journalist and author Michael Blanding's new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby tells the story of the billionaire Green family, whose commitment to right-wing Christian activism has touched every corner of modern American life. Blanding paints a thorough and fair portrait of the family, their motivations, and how they found themselves right in the middle of one of history's most expansive antiquities frauds. He joins Kelly and John to talk about how he came to the story of the Greens, what he makes of the Museum of the Bible, and what all this has to do with Chad Allen. You can find out more about Michael and his work at michaelblanding.com (Also, apologies for John's slightly wonky audio in the second half of this one!)
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  Football Is (The Way, The Truth, and The) Life! - World Cup Special 11.07.2026 49мин

  Football (or soccer if you want) like all sports has a religious dimension...and when it comes to the World Cup, the line between football and religion shrinks to the point of all-but-invisibility. We talk about how football is an and isn't a religion, the "Hand of God" 1986 and the sanctification of Diego Maradona, and how Brazilians blaming the national team's loss on Protestantism is actually a story to take seriously. For this episode, we looked at: The Convesation: Soccer and religion have more in common than you might think by Hanna Tervanotko America Magazine: The Church of Maradona: Understanding the left-wing saint of soccer by Ashley McKinless The Times: ‘If we pray like a gringo, then we play like a gringo’ by Stephen Gibbs
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  #062 - Woke Pope Updates! Schism and AI Encyclicals (with Nitish Pahwa) 07.07.2026 1ч 5мин

  In May, Pope Leo released his first Papal Encyclical. Its focus was on the moral and material threat posed by AI. Journalist Nitish Pahwa, whose normal beat is technology and business, read the whole thing and shared his thoughts in a great piece for Slate: I Read the Pope’s Encyclical on A.I. I’m Astounded By What He Wrote. This week, we talked about Leo's recent excommunication of the Society of St. Pius X and invited Nitish to give us his read on Leo's encyclical from the perspective of someone who understands the technology side of it in the ways we don't! Nitish is on Bluesky @nitishpahwa
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  Reissue (from 2023) #005 - Is July 4th a Religious Holiday? 04.07.2026 45мин

  This week, Kelly and John take on July 4th and ask if it's possible to wrestle it away from the darker side of American history as well as its increasingly Christian Nationalist connotations. Even though (or maybe because) America is not, in fact, a Christian nation and has no official religious identity, is July 4th a religious holiday? Has the project of state that (purportedly) guarantees freedom of religion and keeps the government (purportedly) independent of any religious affiliation actually made American history and its icons objects of religious devotion? Also this week: The good news is dogs and Bears. And we spend too much time on Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". Plus, we talk about how where you are in America often reflects what you're actually celebrating on Independence Day, we bring up Robert Bellah's 1967 article "American Civil Religion", that time Thomas Jefferson tried to take all the miracles out the New Testament, and the fact that most of the founders were deists. And we somehow make no references to the 1996 movie, while Kelly attempts to accurately employ the phrase "go to bat for".
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  #061 - RELIGULOUS with Shaily Patel 01.07.2026 1ч 24мин

  We're joined by our friend Shaily Patel who last joined us for our discussion of HERETIC to talk about a movie that has a lot in common with HERETIC - Bill Maher's 2008 "documentary" RELIGULOUS. Both feature and insufferable asshole who has figured out religion by researching the internet and wants all you foolish believers to know about it! But the difference is that RELIGULOUS is bad. We talk about New Atheists, why Bill Maher sucks and is unfunny, and why a movie like this could be good if it had a point and its creator knew anything about religion!
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  We're back! 18.06.2026 31мин

  Kelly has officially mastered the fine arts, so after a half year break, we're back! We'll have real episode coming up in a week or so, but for now we catch up on where we've been as Kelly talks about finishing her MFA and John talks about the World Cup and how England is definitely going to win it all for real this time.
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  Sarah Posner - On her new podcast, Epstein, and other news 09.02.2026 49мин

  Friend of the pod Sarah Posner joins John to discuss her great new podcast, Reign of Error. They also look at the various ways of understanding new developments in the Epstein case through the religious studies lens. *IMPORTANT PODCAST UPDATE* Kelly will be taking a few months away from the show. We plan to get back to normal rotation in the summer. In the meantime, John will be joined by some friends of the show for some conversations on the goings on in the news. During that time, we won't be following a normal release schedule, so get ready for some nice surprises!
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  RERELEASE (from 12/23): Ghosts of Christmas Past - with Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman 23.12.2025 55мин

  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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  RERELEASE (from 12/24): Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo 16.12.2025 1ч

  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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  #060 - Selling Out Santa - with Vaughn Joy 09.12.2025 1ч 11мин

  Dr. Vaughn Joy's new book, Selling Out Santa, explores the role Christmas movies played in shaping American culture (and vice-versa) during the Cold War. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, Selling Out Santa offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. In this episode, Kelly and John talk to Vaughn about the genesis of her book and the ways in which Christmas movies have evolved into the Hallmark rom-coms we have all come to know and love-or-hate today. You can find Vaughn on Bluesky @gvaughnjoy
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  RERELEASE: Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth - with Dr. David J. Silverman (11/2023) 27.11.2025 1ч 13мин

  RERELEASE FROM 11/2023 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.
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  #059 – The Passion of the Marjorie Taylor Greene 25.11.2025 56мин

  It's been a heck of a week on the internet! Marjorie Taylor Greene went from MAGA darling to MAGA outcast and from Georgia Congresswoman to Soon-to-be-Former Georgie Congresswoman in record time. We look at her attempted redemption/resurrection story with a skeptical eye, muse on what this means for the future or MAGA. Plus - Silicon Valley is suddenly obsessed with the End Times and Peter Thiel is worried about the Antichrist, who, as it turns out, happens to probably be all the things Peter Thiel doesn't like! And the US Bishops push back against Trump while the Pope decrees the four best films and rocks the mic at a rave! Adam Willems: An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’
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  #058 – THE EXORCIST EFFECT with Joseph Laycock 11.11.2025 1ч 6мин

  Last episode we discussed The Exorcist, so this time we're taking a closer look its impact on our culture and religious beliefs as explored in The Exorcist Effect by Eric Harrelson and our guest Joseph Laycock. Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He holds a MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University and has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history. Much of his work explores how pop culture and religion collide, and The Exorcist Effect looks at the ongoing relationship between horror movies and Western religious culture, with a focus on the period from 1968 to the modern day. He joins Kelly and John to talk about how and why The Exorcist changed the Catholic (and broadly religious) imagination, and why so many moral panic stem from people who can't distinguish movies from real life. Joe is on Bluesky @josephlaycock
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  #057 – THE EXORCIST with Matthew J. Cressler 28.10.2025 1ч 16мин

  1973's The Exorcist is a landmark film for any number of reasons (many of which we get into here). It's also a film Kelly had never seen, and a favorite of our friend Matthew J. Cressler. Matt talked to us about Catholic horror and The Exorcist two years ago, but we really wanted to dig into the film in detail, so here we are. The Exorcist is one of many examples of art imitating life imitating art. It both revived a certain kind of supernatural zeal in Catholicism while also exploring an underlying aversion to the same. While it's not always successful and doesn't necessarily hold the same shock value it once did, it also completely reimagined what a horror film could be and provided proof of concept that the public was ready to explore and challenge religious ideas in new and sometime shocking ways. And like a lot of other horror that has captured the cultural imagination throughout history, The Exorcist spilled over into the real world, giving rise to the idea that the film was cursed. And in the next episode, we'll take a closer look at its cultural and religious impact. Matt is on Bluesky @mjcressler
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  #056 – Paranormal America with Darryl Caterine 21.10.2025 1ч 3мин

  It's spooky season, and to start off our spooky and spooky-adjacent episodes, Kelly and John talk to scholar Darryl Caterine, author of 2011's Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America which explores the meaning of our nation’s fascination with paranormal phenomena through a series of thick descriptions and analyses of a Spiritualist camp in upstate New York, the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico, and an annual dowsing convention in Vermont. Caterine is a historian of religions whose research focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and politics in the United States and parts of Latin America. His areas of academic interest include Latino/a religions, metaphysical/occult religions in America, and religion and popular culture. He also co-edited 2019's collection of scholarly essays The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape. Here they talk about the thin line between hoax and sincere belief, how mystical and spiritual practices function in the information age, and how geography, history, and culture shape how the paranormal appears in various pockets of America.
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  RERELEASE: What really happened at Salem - with Kathleen M. Brown 14.10.2025 58мин

  Due to some scheduling difficulties, we're pushing back this week's episode to next week and then going back-to-back Tuesdays. In the meantime, enjoy this episode from last Halloween with Kathleen M. Brown on the Salem Witch Trials _____________________________ The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, hosts untold thousands of tourists who revel in the city's occult history and reputation as America's haunted capital of spookiness. But as well-known as the Salem Witch Trials are, they remain a hotbed of historical inaccuracy and misconception. So what exactly happened? How did a sleepy, growing Massachusetts town become the epicenter of witch hysteria? Did everyone go insane, or were the Salem Witch Trials perfectly consistent with the worldview of Salem's citizens. To help us clear this up, Kelly and John asked University of Pennsylvania history professor Kathleen M. Brown for her insights. Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. Her latest, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, was published in 2023.  
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  #055 – Taylor Swift: Christian TradWife Extraordinaire! 30.09.2025 53мин

  As soon as Taylor Swift announced her engagement to podcast host and occasional football player Travis Kelce, the weirdest weirdos on the Christian right burst into excitement over the possibility that Swift might finally, finally be morphing into one of them, urging her to "submit" to Kelce as a TradWife. It seems unlikely that a billionaire in her mid-30s like Taylor Swift will feel inclined to suddenly drop everything to bake bread, rear children, and spend her weekends Konmari-ing, but who knows?! This week, Kelly and John examine why, exactly, the right is particularly deranged when it comes to their Taylor Swift obsession, and why they feel a particular ownership over the world's most famous former Christmas Tree farm inhabitant. Also! We bid a sad farewell to friend of the pod and recurring POK supporting character Ryan Walters, address the troubling phenomenon of the Two Charlie Kirk Algorithms problem, and check in with which child murderers the world's most powerful Christian Nationalist and former weekend talk show host Pete Hegseth is honoring this week!
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  RERELEASE (from 2/25 ): The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover with Lerone A. Martin 16.09.2025 1ч 1мин

  Given recent events, we have decided not to release a new episode this week. Instead, given rising concerns about state retribution to political violence and the weaponization of law enforcement, we are re-releasing our conversation with Lerone A. Martin from February, in which he discusses his book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover. _________________________________________________________ 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.