Pod Only Knows

By: Kelly J. Baker and John Brooks
  • 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
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Episodes
  • RERELEASE (11/21/23) - Unraveling the Thanksgiving Myth - with Dr. David J. Silverman
    Nov 28 2024
    (Rerelease from 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. You can buy Dr. Silverman's book here: This Land is Their Land @ Amazon Read also Dr. Silverman's 2019 piece in The New York Times: The Vicious Reality Behind the Thanksgiving Myth
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • #039 – Breath of Fire: Conspirituality, Fraud, and the Prosperity Dharma
    Nov 26 2024
    Directed by first time documentary directors Haley Pappas and Smiley Stevens, Breath of Fire was released on MAX in October as a four-part documentary series. Breath of Fire is based on the 2021 Vanity Fair piece The Second Coming of Guru Jagat by Hayley Phelan, who also appears in and executive produced the series. It tells the story of Kundalini yoga practitioner turned de facto cult leader/professional grifter Katie Griggs, known to her followers as Guru Jagat. Throughout its four hours, Breath of Fire touches on some recurring themes and questions, such as the power of religious fraud, abuse, orientalism, and what exactly it is that people rally want from religion. This week, Kelly and John try to unpack its often enlightening, often disturbing implications.
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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • #038 – Welp...what now? - with Andrew Tobolowsky
    Nov 11 2024
    We'll just cut to the chase - this week sucked and the next four years are going to be very dark and very difficult. But we're not here just to rage and doomcast. This Kelly and John were joined by fellow religion scholar Andrew Tobolowsky to try to provide some perspective on what's ahead, what the fight is going to be, the role Project 2025 will and won't play, and why the more likely challenge will be living through a chaotic nightmare as opposed to a Christian Nationalist dystopia. Andrew is on BlueSky at @andytobo.bsky.social
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    1 hr and 10 mins

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