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Pod Only Knows

Kelly J. Baker and John Brooks

Hosted by Dr. Kelly J. Baker and John Brooks. Kelly and John invite other people from the wide and wild world of religious studies to talk to them about why and how they do what they do and why their work matters to us all. They also talk to each other about the ideas, stories, and histories that fascinate them and that they think you should know about, too.

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  • 24 episodes
  • Avg 1 hr 1 min
  • English

Episodes 24

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  • Thursday · 1 hr 5 min

    #069 - Good News: The Episode!

    We skip Good News this week to bring you...a bunch of good news! Following the Blue Wave or Blue Tsunami or Blue Godzilla Stomping or whatever we're calling it, we talk about all the good things. BUT ALSO, we take on this emerging media narrative of the "return of the religious left" and ask if that's the best way of understanding what's happening (it's not!), John gushes about his obsession with Senator-Elect Adam Hamilton, and we talk about what Abdul Al-Sayed's win means in a post-9/11 America.

  • October 27 · 1 hr 18 min

    #068 - "Midnight Mass" (2021) with Matthew J. Cressler

    Well, it's somehow been five years since Mike Flanagan's masterful work of Catholic horror, Midnight Mass, was released on Netflix. So we thought it was time to give it a second look. Does it still deserve its reputation as one of the great pieces of work in its genre? Who better to ask than our semi-regular Halloween guest Matthew Cressler, who joined us last year for our discussion of The Exorcist. Matt's new book, Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America, written with Jack Lee Downey, Kathleen Holscher, and Michael Pasquier comes out today (October 27th), and Midnight Mass plays a not insignificant role in its existence!

  • October 15 · 58 min

    #067 - Lily Dale and American Spiritualism with Sarah Handley-Cousins

    Sarah Handley-Cousins is a historian of disability and the military during the Civil War era. She has a PhD in History from the University at Buffalo where she currently teaches. She co-produces Dig: A History Podcast and her newest book, Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale, was cowritten with her fellow Dig producers Averill Earls, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik. The book is an exploration of Lily Dale, an intentional community in upstate New York that is now the spiritual (and physical) center of Spiritualism, the 19th Century faith movement that sought to eradicate the line between the land of the living and the dead. Sarah joins us to talk about the inspiration for the book, her own experiences with Spiritualism, and the thin line between self-delusion and authentic belief.

  • September 28 · 51 min

    #066 - The Resurrection of Ned Ludd

    The word Luddite has a lot of unfair negative connotations. It's also almost always misused. In this episode, we look at the recent trend of reevaluating the Luddites - the radical labor rights movement of the early 19th century - in the age of AI and data centers. Who was Ned Ludd? How did he begin a movement? And what does it say about the religious nature of that movement that (spoiler) he never existed? In this episode, we reference Matthew James Seidel's review of Gavin Mueller's Breaking Things At Work in Current Affairs

  • September 8 · 1 hr 9 min

    #065 - "Contact" (1997) with Lauren Turek

    (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

  • August 13 · 1 hr 4 min

    #064 - Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey"

    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

  • July 24 · 1 hr 15 min

    #063 - The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby with Michael Blanding

    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!)

  • July 11 · 49 min

    Football Is (The Way, The Truth, and The) Life! - World Cup Special

    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

  • July 7 · 1 hr 5 min

    #062 - Woke Pope Updates! Schism and AI Encyclicals (with Nitish Pahwa)

    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

  • July 4 · 45 min

    Reissue (from 2023) #005 - Is July 4th a Religious Holiday?

    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".

  • July 1 · 1 hr 24 min

    #061 - RELIGULOUS with Shaily Patel

    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!

  • June 18 · 31 min

    We're back!

    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.

  • February 9 · 49 min

    Sarah Posner - On her new podcast, Epstein, and other news

    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!

  • Dec 16, 2025 · 1 hr

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

    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.

  • Nov 27, 2025 · 1 hr 13 min

    RERELEASE: Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth - with Dr. David J. Silverman (11/2023)

    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.

Showing 1–20 of 24 episodes