This week, Richard Saville-Smith joins Kelly and John to talk about his book Acute Religious Experiences – Madness, Psychosis, and Religious Studies, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

Saville-Smith is an independent researcher who focuses on the intersection of madness, mental disorders, and acute religious experiences, from a mad studies perspective. He earned his PhD in Philosophy and Religious Studies from the University of Edinburgh in 2020.

They discuss the relatively little-known academic field of mad studies - which seeks to destigmatize and depathologize the concept of madness - and how the fields of psychiatry and religious studies, often operating in conflict with one another, have distorted our understanding of the authenticity of acute religious experiences like the ones described in the lives of Joan of Arc or Jesus.

Richard is on Bluesky @dranamorphosis

Apple TV's Severance wrapped its long-awaited 2nd season recently and left us with more answers than questions.

But some answers! We (sorta) know what Severance is really all about, and we (sorta, maybe) know what Lumon is up to now!

So while we wait the ungodly eternity for Severance to return, John and Kelly invited scholar Niki Dolfi on to talk about the cults, religious allusions, identity, and goats.

Niki Dolfi researches Christian Nationalism and white supremacy (among other things) and explores the intersection of religion and popular entertainment. She enjoys British television and is longtime Whovian

Niki is on Bluesky @profdolfi

Last week, the Catholic Church absolutely shook the world by electing Robert Prevost - an Augustinian from Chicago - Pope Leo XIV, making him the first ever American pope.

Immediately, MAGA lost their collective minds, calling Leo XIV a woke Marxist and an anti-Trump liberal.

Leo XIV's election was, without question, a statement by the Church directed squarely at MAGA and Donald Trump, but so many questions remain about what happens next.

Kelly and John share their thoughts about the selection of Prevost, what it means that he chose the name Leo XIV, and why this way well serve as a check against Trump's fascism and persecution of immigrant communities.

They also take a look at some of the findings from the Public Religion Research Institute's findings from their survey of Americans following Trump's first 100 days.

John's thoughts on Leo XIV or available on our blog.

The PRRI surveys we discuss on the episode can be found here and here

This week, author and journalist Annika Brockschmidt joins John to talk about the perception of the American Christian Right in Europe, the possibly intentional downplaying of Christian Nationalism in Trump 2.0, and Pete Hegseth's tattoos.

Annika Brockschmidt studied History, German Studies, and War and Conflict Studies in Heidelberg, Durham and Potsdam. She is a freelance journalist and author, Worked for the capital city studio of German public-broadcaster ZDF and produces the podcasts “Kreuz und Flagge” And “Feminist Shelf Control”.

She is senior correspondent for Religion Dispatches and writes for example for German daily newspaper Tagesspiegel, German online magazine Zeit Online, Frankfurt-based daily Frankfurter Rundschau, Swiss online magazine Republik, and German cross-regional weekly Der Freitag.

Her Book “Amerikas Gotteskrieger. Über die Macht der Religiösen Rechten in den USA” (American Holy Warriors. The Power of the Religious Right in the USA) was a bestseller in 2021.

Annika is on Bluesky @ardenthistorian.bsky.social

William Golding's 1952 novel Lord of the Flies is one of those books most of us of a certain age were forced to read in high school and pretty much universally hated.

Often presented as a bleak meditation on human nature, Lord of the Flies certainly isn't that. But why were its real themes - the destructive nature of colonialism, the inconsistency between the ideals of democratic nations and their actual values, and how and why fascists tend to rise the top - so routinely overlooked for so long?

Here, we suggest it's because Lord of the Flies is a book so obvious and unsparing in its symbolism it can really only be appreciated when its themes are playing out in front of us. As they are right now. With abandon.

In this episode we also talk about how the Showtime series Yellowjackets helps illuminate why Lord of the Flies needs to be understood allegorically, as well as how fascism is depicted in another popular dystopian work involving teenagers killing each other, The Hunger Games.

John's essay on Lord of the Flies can be found on our blog here: Lord of the Flies is more relevant now than ever

Higher education is under attack in a way few saw coming.

Maybe they should have, and maybe that's part of the problem.

Institutions of higher education have been a laser target of the Trump administration's authoritarian project in its first two months. And while authoritarians have long prioritized going after and dismantling academic institutes, this strategy also includes the cynical use of major wedge issues (namely Israel/Palestine) and the manipulation of emotionally-charged, religiously-oriented terminology like "antisemitism"

There is, as they say, a lot going on here, and we can't get to it all in one episode, but we thought it was important to take a broad look at what is going on in higher education, where we have gone wrong in our approach to that's made it so vulnerable to attack, and some of the surprising ways religious interests are shaping the outcomes.

Before you listen to today's episode, you should know that knowing about Roko's Basilisk can doom you forever.

Still here? Great.

This week, John and Kelly explore a few of the religion stories that have surfaced in recent weeks, including what happens and if when Pope Francis dies soon, and the evangelical backlash of Trump appointing Paula White as the White House Faith officer. 

Then, we take on Roko's Basilisk, an unhinged thought experiment about the moral imperative of helping to develop super-intelligent A.I. that, as it happens, also helps explain Elon Musk's zealous, eugenicist project to dismantle the federal government. We promise it matters!

We recorded this about a year ago, for the 25th anniversary of the release of THE MATRIX.

But since Elon Musk now controls the country, we're republishing an edited-down version because it's important to know how Musk thinks.

Next episode, we'll be talking about a number of the other beliefs that shape Musk's worldview, among them Roko's Basilisk, so this episode is good preparation for that conversation.

************************************************************************************

In 2003, Oxford University philosophy professor Nick Bostrom published a paper titled Are You Living in a Computer Simulation, thus giving rise to the modern incarnation of Simulation Theory, which posits that our experienced reality is actually the product of an advanced (possibly future-self) civilization running a simulation experiment.

But the paper on might have been written off as a useful thought experiment had it not been for the popularity of the 1999 film The Matrix, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, and its two sequels, which came out the same year as Bostrom's paper.

In the years since, Simulation Theory has become a lot of things to a lot of people - from a fun metaphor to explain Cartesian philosophy to college freshmen to an all-out article of faith for an increasingly doctrinaire sub-culture of futurists. How useful (or even likely) is Simulation Theory?

In honor of The Matrix's birthday, John and Kelly decided to take up that question.

Sources

https://simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf

https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/

https://www.wired.com/story/living-in-a-simulation/

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/

This is a republished episode from John's former podcast Hard to Believe featuring an interview with Chris Kluwe

In light Kluwe making national news with his recent act of anti-MAGA civil disobedience, we decided to republish an interview John conducted with Kluwe in 2021, in which he describes, among other things, how he came to be an activist and advocate for justice causes.

Here is the original descriptions of that episode:

********************************************************************

Chris Kluwe was an accomplished NFL punter with the Minnesota Vikings. Then he decided to stand up for the rights of other human beings. Now he's a science fiction novelist. And a lot has happened in between. His first science fiction novel, Otaku, was just released in paperback, so he and John sat across the internet from each other to talk about where he gets his sense of social responsibility, his evolution as a writer, and how it feels to be the only person in American history to have used the term "lustful cockmonster" in a letter to a sitting elected official.

Find out where to buy Otaku from somewhere other than Amazon here

You can try not to get blocked by Chris by following him on Twitter @ChrisWarcraft

Clips from the beginning of this episode come from:

CNN, MSNBC, The Young Turks, The Dan Patrick Show, Geek and Sundry, Larry King Now, and Conan

The outro is a cover of "Science Fiction / Double Feature" by Tall Dark Whimsy

What's the deal with the far-right's obsession with Tolkien?

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is, ostensibly, a story of different races coming together to defeat a shared enemy - one that intends to shroud the world in darkness and despair.

Or...is it?

If you ask billionaire fascist Peter Thiel - whose surveillance company Palantir is named for an evil crystal ball in Lord of the Rings - the answer isn't so simple. Nor is it for self-proclaimed "Tolkien guy" and Thiel protege JD Vance.

Is the fascism-leaning right-wing and the TradCath movement justified in declaring Tolkien one of their own? And even if they're not, can we reconcile the racism inherent in Lord of the Rings with its apparent message of fellowship and perseverance in the face of an existential threat? Those questions have kept Tolkien scholars busy for 80 years, but we talked through some of them with scholar Marika Rose.

You can find out more about Marika as well as links to some of the sources for this episode below:

Marika Rose

Marika on Bluesky

How Lord of the Rings Shaped JD Vance’s Politics

Revisiting Race in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Constructing Cultures and Ideologies in an Imaginary World

How The Lord of the Rings became a symbol for Italy's far-right

‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is Not the Far Right’s Playground

Tolkien and Race