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Well, it's somehow been five years since Mike Flanagan's masterful work of Catholic horror, Midnight Mass, was released on Netflix. So we thought it was time to give it a second look. Does it still deserve its reputation as one of the great pieces of work in its genre? Who better to ask than our semi-regular Halloween guest Matthew Cressler, who joined us last year for our discussion of The Exorcist. Matt's new book, Body and Blood: Catholic Horror in America, written with Jack Lee Downey, Kathleen Holscher, and Michael Pasquier comes out today (October 27th), and Midnight Mass plays a not insignificant role in its existence!

Sarah Handley-Cousins is a historian of disability and the military during the Civil War era. She has a PhD in History from the University at Buffalo where she currently teaches. She co-produces Dig: A History Podcast and her newest book, Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale, was cowritten with her fellow Dig producers Averill Earls, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik. The book is an exploration of Lily Dale, an intentional community in upstate New York that is now the spiritual (and physical) center of Spiritualism, the 19th Century faith movement that sought to eradicate the line between the land of the living and the dead. Sarah joins us to talk about the inspiration for the book, her own experiences with Spiritualism, and the thin line between self-delusion and authentic belief.

The word Luddite has a lot of unfair negative connotations. It's also almost always misused. In this episode, we look at the recent trend of reevaluating the Luddites - the radical labor rights movement of the early 19th century - in the age of AI and data centers. Who was Ned Ludd? How did he begin a movement? And what does it say about the religious nature of that movement that (spoiler) he never existed? In this episode, we reference Matthew James Seidel's review of Gavin Mueller's Breaking Things At Work in Current Affairs

(SORRY ABOUT YESTERDAY! Naturally, our production staff have all been fired and fed to the wolves.* We BELIEVE the episode should now be glitch free!) 1997's "Contact", directed by Robert Zemeckis, remains one of the best "What if aliens made contact?" movies ever made. Conceived by astronomer Carl Sagan, the film thoughtfully wrestles with ideas of humanity, religion, and international relations in a way most science fiction merely glance at. This week, we revisit the film with Trinity University professor Dr. Lauren Turek. You can find Lauren on Bluesky @laurenfturek *just kidding, John is the entire production staff

More summer movie series fun as we (finally) talk about Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" after Kelly (finally) sees it because John told her she should. Did Kelly like it? Not really! But after we discuss Nolan's take - which explores themes like PTSD, the morality of war, and Christian militarism - she liked it a little more! For this episode, we reference the following: The W.H.D. Rouse Translation of The Odyssey Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's film David French's NYT essay: Christopher Nolan Has Rebuked the Spirit of the Age Ezra Klein's NYT essay: Christopher Nolan's Trojan Horse

Journalist and author Michael Blanding's new book The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby tells the story of the billionaire Green family, whose commitment to right-wing Christian activism has touched every corner of modern American life. Blanding paints a thorough and fair portrait of the family, their motivations, and how they found themselves right in the middle of one of history's most expansive antiquities frauds. He joins Kelly and John to talk about how he came to the story of the Greens, what he makes of the Museum of the Bible, and what all this has to do with Chad Allen. You can find out more about Michael and his work at michaelblanding.com (Also, apologies for John's slightly wonky audio in the second half of this one!)

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 America Magazine: The Church of Maradona: Understanding the left-wing saint of soccer by Ashley McKinless The Times: ‘If we pray like a gringo, then we play like a gringo’ by Stephen Gibbs

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. 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

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".

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 a*****e 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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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