Episodes

  • #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo

    #040 – Did Dickens "Invent" Christmas? - with Kristen Hanley Cardozo
    Dec 24 2024
    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 hr and 8 mins
  • 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
    Dec 10 2024
    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 mins
  • 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
    Nov 28 2024
    (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 hr and 25 mins
  • #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