Pod Only Knows

By: Kelly J. Baker and John Brooks
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • 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.
    ℗ & © 2020 The CageClub Podcast Network
    Show more Show less
Social Sciences Spirituality World
Show more Show less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock

    #041 – A Load of Comstock - The life and times of Anthony Comstock
    Jan 7 2025
    Anthony Comstock might be the most significant American that it's entirely possible you've never heard of. A zealous Christian crusader against so-called "obscenity" in the late 19th century, he is the namesake of the Comstock Act, the interstate commerce law that the Heritage Foundation plans to use to curb access to abortion pills and pornography. Born in Connecticut in the mid-1800s, Anthony Comstock grew up with regressive Victorian ideals in a puritanical New England household. His self-loathing and religious zeal lead to a life of bullying and persecuting countless men and (more often) women, driving many to suicide and tallying up hundreds of years in prison sentences. The radical social dynamics at the time in many ways echo our current culture wars, and since Anthony Comstock is about to play a major role in American life again, we thought it would be useful to talk a bit about his life and times. Much of the information for this episode was drawn from Amy Sohn's book The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age Also helpful were the biography of Comstock from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum and TheFire.org's Why the 1873 Comstock Act still matters today
    Show more Show less
    1 hr and 22 mins
  • #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.
    Show more Show less
    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.
    Show more Show less
    55 mins

What listeners say about Pod Only Knows

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available