Episodes

  • #039 – Breath of Fire: Conspirituality, Fraud, and the Prosperity Dharma

    #039 – Breath of Fire: Conspirituality, Fraud, and the Prosperity Dharma
    Nov 26 2024
    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 hr and 8 mins
  • #038 – Welp...what now? - with Andrew Tobolowsky

    #038 – Welp...what now? - with Andrew Tobolowsky
    Nov 11 2024
    We'll just cut to the chase - this week sucked and the next four years are going to be very dark and very difficult. But we're not here just to rage and doomcast. This Kelly and John were joined by fellow religion scholar Andrew Tobolowsky to try to provide some perspective on what's ahead, what the fight is going to be, the role Project 2025 will and won't play, and why the more likely challenge will be living through a chaotic nightmare as opposed to a Christian Nationalist dystopia. Andrew is on BlueSky at @andytobo.bsky.social
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • #037 – What really happened at Salem - with Kathleen M. Brown

    #037 – What really happened at Salem - with Kathleen M. Brown
    Oct 29 2024
    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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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • #036 – HELL HOUSE (2001) - with Jason Bivins

    #036 – HELL HOUSE (2001) - with Jason Bivins
    Oct 17 2024
    George Ratliff's 2001 documentary Hell House chronicles the development of the 10th annual Hell House Halloween production put on by Trinity Church in Texas. A Hell House is a variation on the Halloween haunted house tradition, in which actors play out horror movie scenarios as guests move room to room to be frightened out of their minds. But Hell Houses are, instead, tools of Christian indoctrination and recruitment, taking visitors through scenes of horror that led people to hell, like abortion, suicide, or being other than heterosexual. Ratliff's film captures a pretty specific moment in the Evangelical movement, one that has morphed and evolved into something different today. But Hell House provides us some useful insights into the role horror, fear, and trauma play in the Evangelical mind. Jason Bivins rejoins the show to talk about it. He is a specialist in religion and American culture an is the author of 2008's Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism. If you want to connect with Jason, you can email him at jcbivins@ncsu.edu.
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    1 hr and 13 mins
  • #035 – Sarah Posner - Humor vs. Rage and The Ohio Blood Libel

    #035 – Sarah Posner - Humor vs. Rage and The Ohio Blood Libel
    Oct 1 2024
    "They're eating the dogs" is already enshrined as one of the most memorable and iconic (and insane) phrases ever to enter the arena of American politics. Donald Trump is a ridiculous, unserious, and increasingly gullible person, and his amplifying of a fake story of Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets in front an audience of tens of millions is a new low even for him. "They're eating the dogs" has been memed and remixed to death already, sometimes to hilarious effect. And plenty of experts on the authoritarianism highlight the need to mock and belittle authoritarians. Plenty of "they're eating the dogs" memes serve that end. But it's also a carbon copy of the Blood Libel, the medieval conspiracy theory against Jewish populations that accused them of stealing and feeding off the blood of Christian children. So is there a line where humor has to end and genuine outrage response has to begin? Also, who's gonna win this election anyway? For thoughts on that, we turned to our friend, journalist Sarah Posner, who last joined us in March. You can find Sarah on Bluesky @sarahposner.bsky.social
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • #034 – Thomas Lecaque - Why the right can't stop loving the Crusades (and other losers)

    #034 – Thomas Lecaque - Why the right can't stop loving the Crusades (and other losers)
    Sep 17 2024
    This week, in part inspired by the anniversary of 9/11, Kelly and John invited Thomas Lecaque on the show to talk about the ways the Christian right frame the Crusades and other violent failures to justify their own acts of political and religious violence. Thomas Lecaque is an associate professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. He specializes in the nexus of apocalyptic religion and political violence. He has written for the Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, Foreign Policy and The Bulwark, among others. He has recently turned his attention to colonial America, examining the ways in which Christian holy war zeal shaped the American landscape Also this week, John delivers some really bad news about ciabatta, and Thomas and Kelly go head to head in POK's exciting new game "What The Hell Was He Talking About?" You can find Thomas on Twitter @tlecaque
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • #033 – “Jesus Camp” (2006) with Megan Goodwin

    #033 – “Jesus Camp” (2006) with Megan Goodwin
    Sep 3 2024
    Jesus Camp was 2006's other big documentary, nominated for the Academy Award for documentary feature but losing out to a little film called An Inconvenient Truth. Directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (and timed, coincidentally, to the appointment of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court) it mainly follows three young evangelical Christians as they prepare to attend the Kids On Fire summer camp, run by a youth pastor named Becky Fischer. Largely through interviews with Fischer and the children, Ewing and Grady paint a picture of an emerging movement to indoctrinate young people in order to take on secularism at every level of American life as adults. 18 years later, Jesus Camp provides a fascinating juxtaposition between the far-right evangelical movement then (with its obsession with George W. Bush, Harry Potter, Intelligent Design, and Ted Haggard) and the post-January 6th, Trumpian present. Megan Goodwin again joins Kelly and John to sort through all this and more. For an update on the three featured kids, you can check out Jennifer Tisdale's post on Distractify here: https://www.distractify.com/p/jesus-camp-where-are-they-now
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • #032 - Stockholm Syndrome: The Story of a Dumb Idea

    #032 - Stockholm Syndrome: The Story of a Dumb Idea
    Aug 13 2024
    Stockholm Syndrome is a really good MUSE song. Unfortunately, it's not a good anything else.0 On a recent episode of television's worst show, The Five on Fox News, panelist Jessica Tarlov, herself Jewish, asked her fellow panelist Greg Gutfeld why Jews tend to be Democrat and not Republican. His answer? Stockholm syndrome. Most people could probably give a decent summary of what Stockholm syndrome supposedly is - the phenomenon of a hostage coming sympathize and even identify with their captor - but few of them would be able to accurately recount the story that gave rise to its supposed existence. This stubbornly enduring - and almost certainly wrong - belief has gone on to influence the way we think about why people take on certain political positions, join cults, or even adhere to extremist religious views. So we decided it was worth taking a look at the story at its center to find out what it can tell us about why we are so wrong about how we think about out other people think. Of the many resources used for this episode, none was better at filling in the most important gaps than Rebecca Armitage's piece for ABC News Australia https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-23/is-stockholm-syndrome-a-myth/102738084
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    51 mins