Now we think that reality, the "real world", is what happens "between nine and five", that is, what happens at work, in the office, at school, in career, and so forth. And a lot of people want to tell us that's true. "But not The Vogues. They were from Pittsburgh and they understood about shifts and hourly pay. Yet they understand more than that! "For the fact is, 'as you lay dying' (Faulkner), you won't give your "nine-to-five" life a single second thought. Not one single second thought! You'll...
Jan 08, 2016•25 min
Here are a few thoughts concerning the atrocity attacks in Paris. I talk about Islam (and "Islamophobia"), Syrian migration into Europe, Original Sin and "low" vs. "high" anthropology, reaction-formations among young men when drones are over their heads and they have no control, let alone "buy-in"; and finally, a threatening experience Mary and I had on Times Square recently. Call this PZ's perspective on a current (big) event.
Nov 16, 2015•26 min
I keep getting requests for a sort of "early morning Bible study" -- giving the 'treatment', you might say, to a New Testament text that stings, and also helps. So that's what I'll do for a few episodes, beginning with this one. Christ's Parable of the Rich Man (aka 'Dives') and Lazarus is given in St. Luke, Chapter 16. It's a scorcher, as rough and sand-paper-like as anything he ever said. It's got that devastating line, that between there (hell) and here (heaven) there is a great gulf fixed, a...
Nov 09, 2015•21 min
It's not an abstraction! It's more than something just to talk about or consider. It could happen to you. In fact, it probably will. I'm talking about unforeseen death. Some people hold on for a long time, even when they don't really want to. Other people want to hold on, but illness intervenes and they go a dozen years earlier than they expected. (You never expect it.) Other people had a bad habit in youth and maybe adulthood, and it catches them later. They never thought they would be hooked u...
Nov 09, 2015•21 min
Pop songs about love are like a corkscrew for understanding the Bible. Songs like "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Don't Pull Your Love Out on Me, Baby", together with a zillion co-belligerants that are written and performed "In the Name of Love" (Thompson Twins), reveal the nature of love and loss, undoings and exaltings, and painful stasis and buoyed forward movement. Now just imagine if professional New Testament scholars "parsed" pop songs the way they want to parse the Gospels. You can't do it. O...
Oct 01, 2015•22 min
The music is "Good Vibrations" at the start, by The Beach Boys; and "I Knew Jesus (Before He Was a Super Star)", at the end, by Glen Campbell. Here is the description for iTunes and also the blurb for Mockingbird: So much has been written -- I mean, SO MUCH -- concerning the so-called Historical Jesus: a welter of books and "Untersuchungen". I've spent most of my career reading these books, and writing a few, too. Then Pope Francis came along and put them all in a cocked hat. This is because if ...
Oct 01, 2015•21 min
Did you cry at any point as you watched Pope Francis in action during his visit? If you did, when was it? What made you cry? "Now it wasn't just John Boehner! I noticed as I watched the Pope inter-acting with individuals, and especially with individuals in acute need or distress, that it was those encounters that touched me personally. (I was abreacting all over the place.) I don't have spina bifida. I'm not in a wheelchair. I'm not six years old, nor 84 (yet). Nor am I homeless. But hey: Someti...
Sep 28, 2015•22 min
Is there anything to it? Is vertical religion -- not just calls to social justice, not just implied belief (system) -- but actual vertical religion rooted in anything resembling fact? I'm utterly bummed these days by mainstream Christianity that just leaps over the religious element on the way to the "mission" element. There's nothing there, I mean nothing there -- to aid an everyday sufferer. Like me, for example. On the other hand, evangelicals continue to fake it royally. They'll talk you blu...
Sep 17, 2015•25 min
This is not the Who's Final Tour. (They always come back.) So maybe it is the Who's Final Tour. Whatever it is, it's Podcast 200, and that's a benchmark. Somehow. So I decided to sum up the two core themes of the last... 100 or so casts, and also tell you something that's blown my mind recently. It's an instance of catatonia by way of Catalonia. Seriously, the two core themes of PZ's Podcast are the durability and necessity of romantic connection; and the presence of God when a person is at the ...
Aug 13, 2015•23 min
If you don't factor in the element of romantic love -- or at least its possibility -- you'll surprise yourself when you start making decisions in life. Sometimes I wish I could give a college commencement address. (No one is ever going to ask.) But I should like to talk about romantic love, and its over-riding, over-reaching, superseding strength as an element -- the decisive element -- in personal decision-making. I can't really say that, though. Many people seem to want to "privilege" career a...
Aug 09, 2015•22 min
Talk about being misunderstood!: Artur London was one of the 11 most misunderstood men in the world, at least at the end of 1951. London was a defendant in the Slansky Trial, a "show trial" under Joseph Stalin. After suffering the most inhuman torture and brainwashing, London was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes not one of which he had come 10,000 light years close to committing. Later on, Arthur London was released, rehabilitated; and now they name streets after him. Arthur London said...
Aug 08, 2015•23 min
The church is today so vastly over-eucharisted that you can barely pause to catch your breath. This cast offers an alternative view of the Holy Communion, as well as of Baptism. The original Prayer Book definition of a sacrament was that it is 'an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. What a refined and powerful expression. So now Let Smokey Sing (ABC) and find... The Face Behind the Mask (1941). This cast is dedicated to Nancy W. Hanna.
Aug 08, 2015•21 min
"The movie Cimarron, which was released in 1931, won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year. (Did you know this?) It's great blessing, Cimarron -- which was based on the novel Cimarron, written by Edna Ferber. But you'd never know it's a blessing if you relied on the critics. Cimarron has become notorious in recent times for its racial and ethnic stereotyping. When you read contemporary descriptions of this movie, it's as if you're being told to put your hands in front of your eyes and als...
Jul 31, 2015•25 min
Shag The Movie (1989) is a great little entertainment! It captures perfectly, and with high humor and enormous love and heart, the Beach Music phenomenon of the 1960s. Today, however, it touches a current issue -- right from the opening credits. What do you do with distressing material -- images and associations that relate to things you'd rather forget? The general answer seems to be, well, you burn them! You do away with them. You haul them down -- and out.
Jul 28, 2015•21 min
I think I'm supposed to understand why right-wing people are intolerant. But it's harder for me to understand why left-wing people are intolerant. Guess I thought they were supposed to be about freedom and diversity. Come to find out, they're not. So I had to go back to a source that's almost been "blacklisted" itself. It's the movie My Son John (1952), starring Helen Hayes and Robert Wagner. Hey, but isn't that a reactionary movie from the Eisenhower movie? No, it's not. It's an excruciating jo...
Jul 24, 2015•20 min
The Gallant Hours (1959) is one heuristic movie. Not only does it teach the Church a thing or two about how to honor faithful service, but it depicts an entirely ideal instance of how to dress properly if you're a minister -- or, Heav'n forfend, a "priest". The last scene of The Gallant Hours is one amazing illustration of the triumph of substance over form in connection with haberdashery. If you're a member of the clergy, or are close to one, PLEASE, help them dress down. We need clergy who dre...
Jul 21, 2015•23 min
The Church I have known all my life is in free fall numerically. I'm talking about Sunday attendance in everyday parishes. This is not conceptual: one parish Mary and I served for six and a half years has recently closed. (Yes, it's been there since 1832, and now is literally a shell, the congregation having gone formally out of existence!) Another church we served, also for six years but out on Long Island, has seen its attendance fall so drastically that its diocese wants to convert it into a ...
Jul 20, 2015•24 min
This talk concerns the indelibility of certain memories, and why they, and not other memories, are indelible. It also concerns a worrying vision I had in January. But it's all one! Here is my little attempt at some wise counsel: how to integrate indelible aspects of your grown life with the fact that you'll see it all again, up close and personal, the day you die. But again, it's all One. And hey, didn't Charles Reade say, "It is never too late to mend."
Jul 20, 2015•22 min
This is a word to your future self. You probably can't hear it today. But I predict you'll hear it loud and clear in five years, or maybe ten. This is a word to your future self. It's a new fabulous dating tip, and carries almost no exceptions, tho' I wish it did! It has to do with internet dating, with the aging process (especially in men), and with the poignant voice of experience. If you can "Now Hear This", it could save you years of excruciating suffering. I mean years, maybe decades. Maybe...
Jul 06, 2015•19 min
"What makes you cry? When you have an irruption of strong feeling -- and I mean tears in this case -- what is going on? This cast tries to get underneath some emotions we all feel, and in terms of music. It is a subjective "take" on one's music and one's highs and lows. And it's in the service of a Way Maker that tends in the direction of peace of mind."
Jun 28, 2015•18 min
Tupper Saussy (1936-2007) was a musician behind The Neon Philharmonic, who produced two memorable albums in 1968-69. He was also a polymath who let himself get in the sights of the Internal Revenue Service, and paid a heavy price for it. Moreover, he was a devout Christian, of old-fashioned Episcopalian provenance. This week he is on my mind because the fate of Tupper Saussy made me think of a friend who is in some trouble. "Handle Me With Care" is what Tupper Saussy needed. It is what my friend...
Jun 24, 2015•20 min
Nevil Shute, whose proper name was Nevil Shute Norway, was a British novelist whose work took an odd turn in mid-career. He was a kind of parasitologist of human nature, always asking the big questions: Why do people act the way they do? How does the past affect the present? Is there something more to it that is beyond the apparent? Shute thought there was, but he was a tentative explorer. (He was also a churchgoer.) Did he pierce "the veil"? My answer to that is maybe.
Jun 16, 2015•21 min
'No' is the worst word you can ever hear. (I realize the virtues of saying 'No', yourself, on certain occasions. But when 'No' is said to you, especially at an impressionable age, it's the worst.) This cast is about the damage created by 'No', especially in romance.
Jun 15, 2015•19 min
What think ye when I say that 95% of what you are doing is futile and meaningless? Well, let's put it another way: From the standpoint of the after-life, what you are doing is... you fill in the blanks. But you can still make it! You've got to learn how to meditate, and learn how to throw a Crucifix. Podcast 185 is dedicated to Mary C. Zahl.
Mar 12, 2015•25 min
In life you can be trapped by forces that are bigger than you are. Especially in professional life. It's possible to "wander in" -- or rather, bumble in -- to a situation in which you get used by somebody else to accomplish a plan of theirs of which you yourself are (at the time) unaware. Here is my homage to Jimmy Sangster movies. In particular, behold Hysteria, a masterpiece of intrigue from 1965. Watch out! And take comfort, too
Mar 09, 2015•24 min
Oh, to encounter an integrated minister! We all want to be integrated -- to be ourselves in the pulpit and also out of it. But it's tricky to pull off. Pharisaical elements in the church -- usually one or two individuals in the parish, who are present -- unconsciously -- in order to hide out themselves in some way or another -- can't long abide a minister who is himself or herself. Most of your listeners love it. But there are one or two who, well, have an allergy. (They are the ones that can ge...
Mar 07, 2015•22 min
Come to find out, dualism has a limited but necessary role in resolving the human dilemma, i.e., in living. The percentage is maybe 20% most of the time, but it's possibly 90% some of the time. The English composer James Bernard is Exhibit A here, and a most brilliant exhibit his work has become.
Jan 26, 2015•22 min
]This is the tableau of a childhood memory, a memory that came literally to life recently. I entered a dream, but then the dream was real. A little like the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but in reverse. With help from Orpheus and, by way of backdraft, the Warrens.
Nov 22, 2014•23 min
Why are so many unchanged, I mean fundamentally unchanged, by the red lights of life? What accounts for persons' resistance to the lessons of catastrophe? This week Robert W. Anderson, not 'Sister Mary Ignatius', explains it all to us.
Nov 15, 2014•25 min
Things recently got so bad somewhere that it looks like all hope is gone. The thing "imploded", like 'Susan' in The Buckinghams' otherwise cheery pop single. Poor Susan! Is there still hope? PZ thinks there is. But it comes from over the border! And from the year 1917.
Oct 30, 2014•28 min
