Episodes

  • #026 - Dr. Richard Newton

    #026 - Dr. Richard Newton
    Apr 23 2024
    Dr. Richard Newton is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director in the Religious Studies department at the University of Alabama From the University's website: Dr. Newton's areas of interest include theory and method in the study of religion, African American history, the New Testament in Western imagination, American cultural politics, and pedagogy in religious studies. His research explores how people create “scriptures” and how those productions operate in the formation of identities and cultural boundaries. In addition to an array of book chapters and online essays, Dr. Newton has published in the Journal of Biblical Literature and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion among other venues. His book, Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures (Equinox, 2020), casts Alex Haley’s Roots as a case study in the dynamics of scriptures and identity politics with critical implication for the study of race, religion, and media. And you can learn more about his use of digital media and pedagogy at his site, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture, and Teaching. He joined Kelly and John to talk about a cul-de-sac in Houston led him to religious studies, the value of scripture, and Pearl Jam. Find him on Twitter @seedpods
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • #025 - Eclipse Day Special! - featuring journalist Emily McFarlan Miller

    #025 - Eclipse Day Special! - featuring journalist Emily McFarlan Miller
    Apr 8 2024
    It's Eclipse Day, so we're releasing a day early! The solar eclipse that will be visible for much of the United States today had evoked all kinds of reactions, from overbooked hotels in wholly unprepared corners of the country to end times zealots declaring it a warning from God. Eclipses have always been a source of wonder and religious interpretation, and if Marjorie Taylor Greene's Twitter feed is any indication, there is no sign of that slowing down anytime soon. But do eclipses also have a place among the more level-headed, mainline religious communities in America? We asked journalist Emily McFarlan Miller, who wrote about religion and eclipses for the 2017 solar eclipse, to share her thoughts on the matter. You can find Emily on most of the socials with the handle @emmillerwrites. Her piece on the last eclipse, from Religion News Services, can be found here: Signs and wonder: How people of different faiths view the total solar eclipse
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    57 mins
  • #024 - Simulation Theory, or Young Earth Creationism for Atheists

    #024 - Simulation Theory, or Young Earth Creationism for Atheists
    Mar 26 2024
    In 2003, Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom published a paper titled Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, thus giving rise to the modern incarnation of Simulation Theory, which posits that our experienced reality is actually the product of an advanced (possibly future-self) civilization running a simulation experiment. But the paper on might have been written off as a useful thought experiment had it not been for the popularity of the 1999 film The Matrix, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, and its two sequels, which came out the same year as Bostrom's paper. In the years since, Simulation Theory has become a lot of things to a lot of people - from a fun metaphor to explain Cartesian philosophy to college freshmen to an all-out article of faith for an increasingly doctrinaire sub-culture of futurists. How useful (or even likely) is Simulation Theory? In honor of The Matrix's birthday, John and Kelly decided to take up that question. Sources https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/ https://www.wired.com/story/living-in-a-simulation/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/
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    53 mins
  • #023 - Sarah Posner

    #023 - Sarah Posner
    Mar 12 2024
    Sarah Posner has been covering the Christian right and Christian Nationalism for more than a decade. A regular contributor to MSNBC, her works has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon, The Nation, The American Prospect, Al Jazeera America, and many other publications. Posner is the author of 2008's God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and 2020's Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency, and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind. She joined Kelly and John last week, on the eve of the State of the Union Address and just as Donald Trump had secured the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential race, about how she came to cover religion, how Christian Nationalism has evolved over the past few decades, and what she thinks is ahead, whether Trump returns to power or not. Her website is http://sarahposner.com.
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    57 mins
  • #022 - God's Army with Amanda Moore

    #022 - God's Army with Amanda Moore
    Feb 27 2024
    For the last couple years, Amanda Moore has spent her time covering the far right on her Substack The Turtle Diaries Amanda infiltrated the far right during the final year of the Trump administration and has written about her experiences in publications like The Nation. She recently went to the Texas border to cover the arrival of "God's Army" - a group of truckers (possibly) who took it upon themselves to defend the border from an "invasion" and maybe possibly kick of the 2nd Civil War (they didn't). Amanda joined Kelly and John to talk about her experience at the border (which led to her acquiring a new far-right, J6-alumnus stalker), growing up with fundamentalism, how she sees QAnon as a perfectly predictable offshoot of evangelicalism, and whether she thinks the right is poised to bubble over in violence once again. You can find her on Twitter (and other social media) @noturtlesoup17
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • #021 - Dr. Nicole Symmonds

    #021 - Dr. Nicole Symmonds
    Feb 13 2024
    This week, Kelly and John talk to Dr. Nicole Symmonds, who works as an Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics and, it happens, used to work a few cubicles down from John at Beliefnet a decade and a half or so ago. Dr. Symmonds' work sits at the intersection of Christian ethics and women, gender, and sexuality studies. She explores Black women’s embodiment, particularly the practices of liberative embodiment they craft as a method of resistance to domination and as a simulation of freedom. Dr. Symmonds identifies as Black Catholic, a religious tradition that follows the rite of the Roman Catholic Church but is driven by the spirit of Blackness in all its forms according to Black people’s diasporic origins and heritage. She is a parishioner at Our Lady of Lourdes, the Mother Church of African-American Catholics in the Archdiocese of Atlanta. In this episode, she discusses her work studying evangelicals and anti-sex-trafficking work, becoming a Black Catholic, TikTok, and why she emphasizes the term "womanism" in her studies.` She is on Twitter @nicole_symmonds
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    1 hr and 14 mins
  • #020 - Dr. Judith Weisenfeld

    #020 - Dr. Judith Weisenfeld
    Jan 30 2024
    As a nice break from all the doom and gloom in the world (and the depressing stuff we often cover), we decided to ask the wonderful Dr. Judith Weisenfeld to come talk to us about her life and work. Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history, and she has explored a range of topics, including in the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization in African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture. She is currently the Director of The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities and Cultures, a four-year project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation aimed at producing deeper understandings of the history and diversity of Black religious life in the U.S. Here she talks to Kelly and John about how she got into religious studies, the joys of accidentally discovering new things during research, and her books Hollywood Be Thy Name and New World A-Coming. She is on Twitter @JLWeisenfeld
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    1 hr and 12 mins
  • #019 - The Cult of Peloton?

    #019 - The Cult of Peloton?
    Jan 16 2024
    Is Peloton a cult? Well, Kelly owns one, so she is uniquely qualified to answer. In all seriousness, a Google search for terms like "peloton cult" or "fitness cult" yields a lot of results. Fairly or not, the fitness equipment company Peloton has been accused of fostering cult-like behavior in its customers. And the same can be said for branded workout companies like CrossFit and SoulCycle. But why? And is there anything to this? In this episode, Kelly and John ask those very questions, and explore what thinking about fitness culture in the framing of religion and cult behavior can tell us about all three of those things. And they also look at the emerging "cults" that appear to defy our traditional understanding of what they are and what leads people to them, like Twin Flames.
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    1 hr and 4 mins