Interviews about culture, religion, and more with brilliant people who will fan the flames of your curiosity.
“Relationscapes” is the current podcast by Fireside host Blair Hodges. Enjoy this sample episode! Be sure to subscribe directly to Relationscapes now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!
“Relationscapes” is the current podcast by Fireside host Blair Hodges. Enjoy this sample episode! Be sure to subscribe directly to Relationscapes now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!
“Relationscapes” is the current podcast by Fireside host Blair Hodges. Enjoy this sample episode! Be sure to subscribe directly to Relationscapes now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!
“Family Proclamations” is the current podcast by Blair Hodges, host of Fireside. Enjoy this sample episode and be sure to subscribe directly to Family Proclamations now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!
Tara Boyce joins us to reconsider Tom Whyman’s episode about “hope.” Is Tom too hopeful? Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/boyce. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.
Ross Gay is a New York Times bestselling author of essays and poetry. His latest book is ‘Inciting Joy,’ which argues that “joy is something like what we feel like when we help each other carry our sorrows, what we feel like when we sort of realize we're practicing our entanglement, our belonging to one another.” Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/gay. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
Meghan O'Rourke is a citizen of what she calls the invisible kingdom. Anyone can become a citizen. Even you. All you need is a debilitating chronic illness that doctors can't easily understand or treat—autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, and a bunch of other conditions at the blurry edges of medical knowledge. As doctors tried to pinpoint Meghan’s diagnoses, she decided to create a record of what she was learning about chronic illness from doctors, scientis...
When she was born, Susan Stryker’s parents thought they were welcoming a baby boy. She knew they were wrong by the time she was five years old, but it took decades to let them know who she really was. Being trans raised a lot of questions for Susan—practical questions of course, but also theological, philosophical, and historical questions. So she went searching for answers. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/stryker. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
Race and religion have been intertwined throughout American history. Christians believed they could detect so-called “heathen” unbelief by the color of someone’s skin or the state of a foreign landscape. Over time, the word “heathen” dropped off, but historian Kathryn Gin Lum says the ideas behind it are alive and well in the United States today, even beyond religion. Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/ginlum. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
Toni Jensen grew up around guns. As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. Toni is a Métis woman, with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. She's no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies and lands of Indigenous people, especially women, and the ways violence is hidden, ignored, forgotten. This episode was incidentally r...
When Tom Whyman started thinking about becoming a father, he worried. Would he and his partner be able to make a living to support a child? What about political upheaval in the UK, or the increasing threat of climate change—not to mention all the little daily ways having a child could change his life. Then a global pandemic shook things up even more. As a philosopher, he asked: What reason is there for hope? Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/whyman. Buy the book and other merch at f...
Coming up out of the waters of baptism at a new white Christian church, Danté Stewart envisioned leaving his blackness behind, washing away his boyhood Black Pentecostal baptism, and rising to a colorblind world where all lives matter. But as time passed, as he witnessed more bodies of Black Americans being killed, he felt rage growing inside. An unexpectedly holy kind of rage that prepared him for yet another baptism—this time, by fire. Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/stewart. Bu...
Masha Rumer immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union when she was thirteen. At first, her nationality made her self-conscious; she wanted to blend in with her new American peers as fast as possible. But over time, Masha discovered her love for her homeland never really went away, and she wanted to share it with her own children. Which turned out to be complicated. Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/rumer. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
David Livingstone Smith has studied dehumanization for decades. He's spent a lot of time researching horrific genocides, lynching, massacres, and other brutalities. Real humans pull the trigger. Real humans administer the poisonous gasses and drop the bombs. People not entirely unlike me and you, although it's a lot more comforting to imagine they're monsters. And in fighting monsters, we risk becoming the very thing we’re fighting against. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/smi...
When Rachel Held Evans unexpectedly died in 2019, the thirty-seven-year-old Christian writer left behind a husband and two young children, as well as an unfinished book manuscript. Rachel's husband Dan knew she would want that book out in the world, so he enlisted their good friend Jeff Chu—a writer, reporter, and editor—to put all the pieces in place. The technical logistics made it hard enough, but Jeff also had to reckon with his own grief at the loss of such a dear friend. Full transcript av...
It’s been said that, like the Bible, there are few women in the Book of Mormon. And that’s true, in one sense. But in another, women are everywhere there. Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming are looking for them while they work on the first complete commentary on the Book of Mormon ever written by women. Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/salleh-olsen. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
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/episodes/zoltan. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
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 and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
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 Studios, and author of the book “Let’s Talk About Hard Things.”
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/episodes/petrey. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
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 battling homelessness and the stunning boring inefficient bureaucracy of it all. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/sandler. Buy the...
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 Dementia. As a theologian, Swinton reflects on what this history suggests for Christianity. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/swinton...
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 religious people dwindles, Butler sees a moment of reckoning for American Christianity. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/butler. Buy the ...
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/dark. Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store....
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 personal stories public, writing about the incredible ups and tragic downs happening behind the scholarly scenes. Transcript at firesidepod.org/episod...
Kiese Laymon is a writer and professor of English who believes time travel is possible. It's as easy to access as human language. Laymon discusses his re-released novel, 'Long Division' and his memoir 'Heavy.' Transcript at firesidepod.org/episodes/laymon Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store
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 of worlds like this every day. But rather than despairing, this realization can energize us to appreciate the present even more....
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 responsibility we all have as inheritors of our peoples' pasts. See firesidepod.org for a complete transcript and show notes. Grab a copy of the book at https:...
