Blair Hodges Podcasts

What happens if we approach some of our favorite books with a similar kind of devotion and attentive reading religious communities bring to their scripture? Vanessa Zoltan breathes new life into our engagement with our favorite books—even the ones that don't hold up well regarding sexism, racism, and more. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org…

In his book Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in our Obsession with Civility, Alex Zamalin traces the history of civility from its deployment against African slaves, through Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, all the way to today’s Black Lives Matter protests. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/zamalin. Buy the book an…

Ultra-Orthodox Jews structure every aspect of their lives around their religion. But those who come to doubt their beliefs, or who question various practices and rituals, risk losing everything. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/fader. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.…

Anna Sale says a loss of faith in social institutions has left people seeking alternative ways of celebrating, mourning, and connecting. At a fractured and disconnected moment in time, she urges us to reconnect by having hard conversations that are too-often avoided. Anna Sale is the host of the award-winning podcast Death, Sex, and Money from WNYC…

Is human gender and sexuality fixed and binary, or malleable and multi-various? Taylor Petrey discusses the fascinating twists and turns in Latter-day Saint thought on these questions. By looking at LDS beliefs as they evolve over time, we might get a clearer view of where we are now and what's up ahead. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/e…

Lauren Sandler was a journalist covering homelessness in New York City when she met Camilla, a woman without a home who didn’t seem to fit the homeless stereotype at all. Sandler tells Camilla’s story in This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search For Home. It’s an up close and personal account of one woman who shares the fate of millions of Americans…

John Swinton’s path-breaking book, Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefulness, and Gentle Discipleship takes us through a brief history of time, showing how western culture has changed its experience of time in big ways, and how those changes have impacted people with intellectual disabilities, brain trauma, and people with conditions like D…

Anthea Butler is a top expert on religion, politics, and race in the United States. In her latest book White Evangelical Racism she tells the history of the rise of the Religious Right in America—Christians who are politically conservative, predominantly white, and Republican. As church attendance shrinks and public confidence and respect of religi…

David Dark seems hard to pin down. He's a professor of religion and the arts, he's a Christian, and also a self-identified agnostic. He engages readers all along the spectrum of belief by claiming that everyone believes in some sort of scripture, even if it's a sci-fi novel or a Radiohead album. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/d…

Elaine Pagels is a ground-breaking scholar of Christianity. Back in the Sixties she was a student at Harvard when long-forgotten ancient texts re-emerged, secret gospels challenging old religious ideas. That research shook up Christian history, but for Pagels, it was also really personal. And unlike most scholars, she decided to take her intensely …

By Fireside with Blair Hodges

Things were falling apart in Mary Rakow’s life. Her writing was stagnating, her marriage was falling apart, and she broke up with God. Then Mary picked up a pen and created one of the most religiously rich books I’ve ever read in my life. Transcript at firesidepod.org/episodes/rakow Buy the book at firesidepod.org/store…

If you ask philosopher Adam Miller what he thinks the end of the world will be like, he’d tell you it looks like the day his son turned fifteen years old. Not because anything remarkable that happened that day, but because it wasn’t remarkable at all. It was a day that came and went and then it was gone. And it’s never coming back. We face the end …

Family history can be delightful, but it can also be heart-wrenching. Nora Krug was born in Germany decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth. In her award-winning graphic memoir 'Belonging,' she struggles under the weight of catastrophic history and reflects on the responsib…

Do you think of yourself as spiritual but not religious? Or maybe you feel more religious than spiritual. Or maybe you're not quite sure what labels fit you best because things go back and forth--like, it depends on the day, and you've felt all of it or none of it. But most of all you're really interested in thinking about religion, spirituality, a…