Pod Only Knows

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!

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 [https://www.khandozo.com/] to share some of her expertise and talk about spirits, Scrooges, and the real reasons for the season.

#060 - Selling Out Santa - with Vaughn Joy

Dr. Vaughn Joy's new book, Selling Out Santa, explores the role Christmas movies played in shaping American culture (and vice-versa) during the Cold War. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, Selling Out Santa offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. In this episode, Kelly and John talk to Vaughn about the genesis of her book and the ways in which Christmas movies have evolved into the Hallmark rom-coms we have all come to know and love-or-hate today. You can find Vaughn on Bluesky @gvaughnjoy [https://bsky.app/profile/gvaughnjoy.bsky.social]

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.

#059 – The Passion of the Marjorie Taylor Greene

It's been a heck of a week on the internet! Marjorie Taylor Greene went from MAGA darling to MAGA outcast and from Georgia Congresswoman to Soon-to-be-Former Georgie Congresswoman in record time. We look at her attempted redemption/resurrection story with a skeptical eye, muse on what this means for the future or MAGA. Plus - Silicon Valley is suddenly obsessed with the End Times and Peter Thiel is worried about the Antichrist, who, as it turns out, happens to probably be all the things Peter Thiel doesn't like! And the US Bishops push back against Trump while the Pope decrees the four best films and rocks the mic at a rave! Adam Willems: An ex-Intel CEO’s mission to build a Christian AI: ‘hasten the coming of Christ’s return’ [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/28/patrick-gelsinger-christian-ai-gloo-silicon-valley]