Advertise on podcast: Mossbunker Review

As a Halloween treat, Dr. Liam reprises his most popular podcast in this new recording of “The Lodge” This is  a work of historical fiction based on real-life occurrences in during a trip to England in 1993. Following the story, he gives a historian's assessment of what haunted Bodley Lodge.

After the strong response to last week’s reading of “Naboth’s Vineyard,” Dr. Liam returns to Melville Davisson Post with one of his favorite Uncle Abner stories, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. A brutal man is found shot dead inside a bolted room, two different people claim responsibility, and every obvious explanation collapses under examination. What follows is Post at his best, blending the locked-room mystery, frontier justice, biblical imagery, and Uncle Abner’s conviction that what Randolph calls accident may yet reveal the justice of God.

In this episode, Dr. Liam reads Melville Davisson Post’s “Naboth’s Vineyard,” one of the finest Uncle Abner stories. A farm hand stands accused of murder, a young woman makes a shocking confession, and what appears to be a solved case begins to unravel when Uncle Abner sees what everyone else has missed. The story becomes a meditation on evidence, justice, public authority, and the danger of mistaking appearances for truth, all set against Post’s vivid world of western Virginia.

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but his Uncle Abner stories remain one of the most unusual achievements in early American detective fiction. Abner is a Bible-reading cattleman from the Virginia mountains who solves murders, exposes fraud, and pursues justice in a world where formal law is often weak or distant. In this episode, Dr. Liam explores how Post combined legal experience, frontier memory, biblical imagination, and carefully constructed mystery plots to create a detective unlike almost anyone else in the genre.

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but at the turn of the twentieth century he was one of the most inventive writers working in the mystery genre. Long before Perry Mason, Post created Randolph Mason, a brilliant and deeply unsettling lawyer whose clients were often plainly guilty and whose genius lay in showing them how the law might fail to punish them. In this episode, Dr. Liam explores how Post turned the detective story inside out, why Randolph Mason caused such ethical controversy, and how this small-town West Virginia lawyer helped reshape the possibilities of crime fiction.

In 1946, Winston Churchill stood before a small audience in Fulton, Missouri and said something that would echo for forty years: an iron curtain had descended across Europe. But the speech he called The Sinews of Peace was never meant as a prophecy of permanent division. Dr. Liam argues it was an old Victorian's case for building enough strength to negotiate without fear. Not to fight, but to parley. This week, we revisit Fulton and find a Churchill more complicated and more hopeful than the one we remember, who believed that peace needs bones and muscles as well as good intentions.

Dr. Liam reflects on what it means to be born in another century. The simple purchase of an Apple Watch to pair with his iPhone sparks memories of a very different world: the Cuban Missile Crisis, backyard fallout shelters, and a childhood lived in the shadow of nuclear war. From there, he discusses idea of a "short twentieth century" running from 1914 to 1989, coving seventy-five years that amounted to one long struggle. He then examines Winston Churchill's 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, better known as the Iron Curtain Speech, arguing that its real message wasn't a curtain of division but what Churchill called "the sinews of peace": the idea that strength and diplomacy must work together.

“A man walks into a coffeehouse” is no joke. In this  redux of an earlier episode, Dr. Liam uses a little coffeehouse mischief to explore the idea that human beings stand at the center of what they know, and why that esoteric idea is so important. The Scientific Revolution taught us that Earth is not the physical center of the cosmos, but we can never step outside ourselves and observe the past from nowhere. History comes to us through human minds, memories, evidence, language, and judgment, and the way we understand and tell other people’s stories matters.

Long before Dr. Liam knew Salt Creek Valley as the home of a rival grade-school basketball team, another boy was growing up there and learning some of the skills, relationships, and hard lessons that would shape the man later known as Buffalo Bill Cody. In this episode, Liam returns to the country north of Leavenworth, Kansas, where young William Cody learned horses, encountered Native people, became connected with western freighting, and watched the violence of Bleeding Kansas strike his own family.

A sixth-grade basketball rivalry, a mysterious bottle of “energy” tablets, twenty-two points in one half—and five fouls before the second half even began. Dr. Liam returns to the Salt Creek Valley of his Kansas childhood, where a humiliating afternoon against the hated rivals from the north became one of those stories that only gets better with age. But beneath the basketball and Three Stooges humor lies another discovery: the places we think we know as children often have histories we cannot yet see. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to turn around and notice the story that was there all along.

In April 1882, a twenty-seven-year-old Oscar Wilde carried his gospel of beauty into Kansas and discovered that the Sunflower State was not entirely prepared for an Irish aesthete in velvet breeches. Following Wilde through northeastern Kansas, Dr. Liam explores the strange collision between the Victorian Aesthetic Movement and the practical sensibilities of the American Midwest. Many laughed at Wilde’s appearance, but some Kansans recognized a hidden diamond in the rough as Wilde raised a question that still matters: in a civilization very good at making useful things, have we forgotten how important it is to make beautiful ones?

Before William Tecumseh Sherman became one of the Union’s most formidable generals, he was a melancholy banker, a restless businessman, and a thoroughly unhappy lawyer in Leavenworth, Kansas. Dr. Liam traces the unlikely prewar career of a man who often seemed badly placed, yet kept learning, organizing, observing, and preparing for work he could not yet foresee. Sherman’s story offers a wry and thoughtful reflection on vocation, disappointment, perseverance, and the possibility that the jobs we were never meant to keep may still teach us what we will later need.

When his wife, Precious, asked from her hospital bed, “Liam, was it worth it?”, she was asking whether a lifetime invested in people had truly mattered. In this deeply personal companion to The Family We Need, Dr. Liam reflects on the extraordinary friends who became family, and the surprising wealth revealed when a life of hospitality, storykeeping, and faithful friendship reaches its final chapter.

When my wife, Precious, died, I expected grief to teach me about loss. Instead, it taught me something unexpected about friendship, family, and the wisdom our ancestors may have understood better than we do. Drawing on C. S. Lewis, Erasmus, John Lukacs, and the New Testament, this essay explores why modern assumptions about family often fail us in the final chapters of life and why the Christian tradition envisioned a larger household built through shared stories, faithful presence, and enduring friendship. If history is personal, relational, and participatory, then perhaps our truest family is found not only in those who share our blood, but in those who have shared our lives.

As a boy growing up on a small Kansas farm, I was convinced our old milk house was haunted. One summer evening, I heard an eerie sound that reminded me of bagpipes coming from a mysterious box addressed to my father. What followed was one of the most frightening and, in the end, one of the funniest adventures of my childhood. Like good history, the truth turned out to be far more interesting than the ghost I thought I had encountered.