Pod Only Knows

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 [https://theconversation.com/soccer-and-religion-have-more-in-common-than-you-might-think-234459] America Magazine: The Church of Maradona: Understanding the left-wing saint of soccer by Ashley McKinless [https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/12/01/diego-maradona-saint-soccer-catholic-pope-francis-239375/] The Times: ‘If we pray like a gringo, then we play like a gringo’ by Stephen Gibbs [https://www.thetimes.com/world/latin-america/article/brazilians-blame-rise-protestants-world-cup-defeat-wz6bwljsd]

#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. [https://slate.com/technology/2026/05/artificial-intelligence-pope-leo-encyclical.html] 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 [https://bsky.app/profile/nitishpahwa.com]

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".

#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!

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.