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

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

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/

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.

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

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

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

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.

34 years ago, in December of 1989, Fox aired Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, a Simpsons Christmas special, the de facto pilot to the subsequent primetime sitcom, and a cultural phenomenon was born. To people of a certain age, The Simpsons is part of the cultural DNA. And as an animated sitcom, it had unique license to explore elements of American culture that no other series could. And one of those elements was religion. The Simpson family went to church. They lived in a multicultural, multiethnic (but still predominantly white and Christian) community. They exposed aspects of American religious life that were hiding in plain sight. Dr. David Feltmate wrote about all this (in addition to how religion is portrayed in Family Guy and South Park) in his book Drawn to the Gods, and this week, he joined Kelly and John to talk about his life in religious studies, why he loves The Simpsons, and how religion exists in a post-Simpsons America.

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.

It's December, which means it's time for everybody's racist uncle's favorite holiday tradition, the War on Christmas. Every year, sure as silver bells chime and lit wreathes line the streets of America's most aggressively white suburbs, Fox News delights eager viewers by trotting out this year's new battlefront narrative: Gay nutcrackers at Target! Insufficiently Christmassy Starbucks cup! Liberals cancelling Rudolph! If you ask Fox News and your least-favorite relatives, there is a War on Christmas...and there always will be. So Kelly and John are here to lay down so facts, starting with the fact that Christmas in the year 2023 is a much, much more religious affair than at any time in the past, and that Christmas is only growing more ubiquitous as a holiday globally. And that there was a War on Christmas - a war that Christmas won in a rout - waged by Christians for centuries. LINKS! The Right-Wing’s Forever War: A Short History Of The War On Christmas - Bill Berkowitz Who Waged the Very First ‘War on Christmas’? - Jade McClain Target is “Sexualizing Christmas for Children” Screeches Fox News - John Riley A Puritan Christmas under Cromwell - Jessica Brain The Plum Pudding Riots: What happened when Christmas was cancelled in Kent - Phil Hayes

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

Mike Johnson is the new Speaker of the House or Representatives. And what the media seems to think you should know about him is that he's very nice, he's smart. he's well-respected by his colleagues, he's personally liked by Democrats, and he's conservative Christian. Oh, and did we mention he's nice? Mike Johnson - real nice guy! What we think you should know about him, however, is that he is now the most powerful Christian Nationalist in the country - possibly in the history of the country. And Mike's niceness masks some truly dark intentions. Because while nobody seems to have heard of this guy before last month, he has been at the center of the far-right Christian project to remake America as a patriarchal theocracy, and he has very close ties to the likes of the Falwells, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins. So today, Kelly and John take some time to vent about the failure of our media and to try to correct their missteps ever so slightly, including highlighting some folks who have been covering Johnson the right way, as they provide a quick rundown of who Mike Johnson and why the ascension of this very nice man marks a very dangerous moment for the future of the country. The New York Times: The Embodiment of White Christian Nationalism in a Tailored Suit Mother Jones: Mike Johnson’s Long Flirtation With Christian Nationalism Mother Jones: Mike Johnson Conducted Seminars Promoting the US as a “Christian Nation” The Nation: The Folksy Fanaticism of Mike Johnson

Jenn Tisdale joins John and Kelly to talk about Edgar Allan Poe and the new Netflix series from Mike Flanagan The Fall of the House of Usher Like he did for Shirley Jackson with The Haunting of Hill House, Flanagan's series remixes and reimagines much of Poe's work and life story to create something haunting, timely, and revelatory, exposing themes in Poe's work and digging into the author's sense of morality and justice. For this Halloween special, they discuss the role that fears of pain and death play in narrative, what Carla Cugino's Raven character suggests about justice and free will, and just how damn great this cast is.

Jason Bivins 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. He has also published multiple articles, review essays, and occasional pieces on religion, politics, and culture in the United States. His most recent book is Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Religion (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, April 2022). A child of the era of the Satanic Panic - the unfounded moral hysteria around devil worship that gripped much of the US and Canada in the 1980s and 90s - Jason's interest and study of religion has been driven in large part by the experiences of his metal-loving, comic book-reading youth. Here he talks to Kelly and John about how conservative evangelicals manipulate and embrace horror tropes for their own ends in books like Left Behind, the story of Hell Houses, and how are cultural fractured and broke all our brains sometime in the mid 1990s. If you want to connect with Jason, you can email him at jcbivins@ncsu.edu.

Mike Flanagan's "Midnight Mass" revisits a lot of the themes of much of his previous work: grief, death, trauma, loss (and you can listen to our discussion of his "Haunting Of" Netflix series here). But it also covers some a lot of new ground, including the complicated relationship between human beings and the religions they build. It is a show grounded as much in humanity as it is in horror, and it asks more questions than it answers - and, in this way, it demonstrates an understanding of what religion is and how it works that is rare not only for the genre but for popular fiction in general. John has been unable to stop thinking about the series since it debuted three weeks ago, and so, desperate to talk about it, he invited the two most qualified voices on the subjects of horror and religion he knows - Kelly J. Baker and Dan Colón, co-host and co-creator of Cage Club's The Monsters that Made Us. Dan on Twitter Show page: The Monsters That Made Us

If you've been feeling a little off lately, it's probably because FEMA recently tested a new emergency alert system and it activated the nanotech in your covid vaccine and now you're a zombie. As least, that's what a disturbing number of people on the right thought would happen. And maybe some of them still think it DID happen? You can find all about that in Matt Shuham's piece in the Huffington Post here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fema-wireless-emergency-alerts-system-test-conspiracy-theories-zombies-5g_n_651c71bfe4b00623d35ea98f So this weekend, we're asking, first of all, "why?" - and trying to make sense of the timing and implications of this particularly loopy conspiracy theory and what it says about the state of right-wing endtimes conspiracism.

Horror would be nothing without Catholic horror. From crucifixes to demon possession, from Dante's "Inferno" to the "The Nun II", Catholic imagery and imagination have shaped horror for centuries. But the intersection of Catholicism and horror has a dark real-world connection, as well. The Hero Priest trope at once masks and alludes to a hidden legacy of clerical sexual abuse, and the threat of hell lingers in the imagination of so many believers. This week, we talk to our friend Matthew J. Cressler, a scholar of Catholicism and longtime fan of William Friedkin's 1973 classic "The Exorcist", about Catholicism's influence on horror as well as horror's influence on the Catholic imagination. You can find more about Matt and his work here: https://matthewjcressler.com/

In this Weekend Chit-Chat, we discuss: How the Klan of 1920s used mainstream acceptance and the mantle of Christianity to push their agenda in the center of American life, and we ask how the descendants of that group, like the Proud Boys, have altered those tactics in ways that seem radically different on the surface but maybe aren't so different after all. We talk absurd memes, the "it's just a joke!" defense, and tapping into pop culture references to appeal to the modern mainstream. But, hey, soccer! Soccer's good!

If you happen to fall within a certain (fairly broad) age range, there is a very good chance that somewhere, at some point, you have encountered Chick Tracts. Jack Chick's horrific, over-the-top, feverish warnings about what happens if you don't accept Christ before you DIE!!!! have literally littered city streets and coffee shop tabletops for decades. Chick Tracts are outlandish and, if you don't happen to be an ultra fundamentalist end times Christian, deeply offensive. But they are also interesting and, from an artistic perspective, clever and accomplished. In fact, purely in terms of how many eyes have seen his work, Jack Chick is one of the most successful artists ever. American Hysteria host Chelsey Weber-Smith recently released an in-depth, thoughtful, and thorough look at Chick's life and work, including his use of urban legend and horror tropes, and she joined us to talk about what made Chick tick, his theology, and why he's so beloved and despised (at the same time) by horror fans. You can find AH and Chelsey on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/americanhysteriapodcast/