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.

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

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.

It's been a heck of a week on the internet!

Marjorie Taylor Greene went from MAGA darling to MAGA outcast and from Georgia Congresswoman to Soon-to-be-Former Georgie Congresswoman in record time.

We look at her attempted redemption/resurrection story with a skeptical eye, muse on what this means for the future or MAGA.

Plus - Silicon Valley is suddenly obsessed with the End Times and Peter Thiel is worried about the Antichrist, who, as it turns out, happens to probably be all the things Peter Thiel doesn't like!

And the US Bishops push back against Trump while the Pope decrees the four best films and rocks the mic at a rave!

Last episode we discussed The Exorcist, so this time we're taking a closer look its impact on our culture and religious beliefs as explored in The Exorcist Effect by Eric Harrelson and our guest Joseph Laycock.

Laycock is an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University. He holds a MTS from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD from Boston University and has written several books on new religious movements and American religious history.

Much of his work explores how pop culture and religion collide, and The Exorcist Effect looks at the ongoing relationship between horror movies and Western religious culture, with a focus on the period from 1968 to the modern day.

He joins Kelly and John to talk about how and why The Exorcist changed the Catholic (and broadly religious) imagination, and why so many moral panic stem from people who can't distinguish movies from real life.

Joe is on Bluesky @josephlaycock

1973's The Exorcist is a landmark film for any number of reasons (many of which we get into here). It's also a film Kelly had never seen, and a favorite of our friend Matthew J. Cressler. Matt talked to us about Catholic horror and The Exorcist two years ago, but we really wanted to dig into the film in detail, so here we are.

The Exorcist is one of many examples of art imitating life imitating art. It both revived a certain kind of supernatural zeal in Catholicism while also exploring an underlying aversion to the same.

While it's not always successful and doesn't necessarily hold the same shock value it once did, it also completely reimagined what a horror film could be and provided proof of concept that the public was ready to explore and challenge religious ideas in new and sometime shocking ways. And like a lot of other horror that has captured the cultural imagination throughout history, The Exorcist spilled over into the real world, giving rise to the idea that the film was cursed.

And in the next episode, we'll take a closer look at its cultural and religious impact.

Matt is on Bluesky @mjcressler

It's spooky season, and to start off our spooky and spooky-adjacent episodes, Kelly and John talk to scholar Darryl Caterine, author of 2011's Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America which explores the meaning of our nation’s fascination with paranormal phenomena through a series of thick descriptions and analyses of a Spiritualist camp in upstate New York, the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico, and an annual dowsing convention in Vermont.

Caterine is a historian of religions whose research focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and politics in the United States and parts of Latin America. His areas of academic interest include Latino/a religions, metaphysical/occult religions in America, and religion and popular culture. He also co-edited 2019's collection of scholarly essays The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape.

Here they talk about the thin line between hoax and sincere belief, how mystical and spiritual practices function in the information age, and how geography, history, and culture shape how the paranormal appears in various pockets of America.

Due to some scheduling difficulties, we're pushing back this week's episode to next week and then going back-to-back Tuesdays.

In the meantime, enjoy this episode from last Halloween with Kathleen M. Brown on the Salem Witch Trials

_____________________________

The Salem Witch Trials may well be the single most notorious and iconic event of America's colonial period. Every Halloween, Salem, Massachusetts, hosts untold thousands of tourists who revel in the city's occult history and reputation as America's haunted capital of spookiness.

But as well-known as the Salem Witch Trials are, they remain a hotbed of historical inaccuracy and misconception.

So what exactly happened? How did a sleepy, growing Massachusetts town become the epicenter of witch hysteria? Did everyone go insane, or were the Salem Witch Trials perfectly consistent with the worldview of Salem's citizens.

To help us clear this up, Kelly and John asked University of Pennsylvania history professor Kathleen M. Brown for her insights.

Brown is a historian of gender and race in early America and the Atlantic World. Educated at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, she is author of Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), which won the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association.

Her latest, Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, was published in 2023.