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

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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.

As soon as Taylor Swift announced her engagement to podcast host and occasional football player Travis Kelce, the weirdest weirdos on the Christian right burst into excitement over the possibility that Swift might finally, finally be morphing into one of them, urging her to "submit" to Kelce as a TradWife.

It seems unlikely that a billionaire in her mid-30s like Taylor Swift will feel inclined to suddenly drop everything to bake bread, rear children, and spend her weekends Konmari-ing, but who knows?!

This week, Kelly and John examine why, exactly, the right is particularly deranged when it comes to their Taylor Swift obsession, and why they feel a particular ownership over the world's most famous former Christmas Tree farm inhabitant.

Also! We bid a sad farewell to friend of the pod and recurring POK supporting character Ryan Walters, address the troubling phenomenon of the Two Charlie Kirk Algorithms problem, and check in with which child murderers the world's most powerful Christian Nationalist and former weekend talk show host Pete Hegseth is honoring this week!

Given recent events, we have decided not to release a new episode this week. Instead, given rising concerns about state retribution to political violence and the weaponization of law enforcement, we are re-releasing our conversation with Lerone A. Martin from February, in which he discusses his book The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover.

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This week, Kelly and John are joined by Lerone A. Martin to discuss his unfortunately timely and prescient book, The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism.

Martin is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor in Religious Studies, African & African American Studies, and The Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar. He also serves as the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

He's is an award-winning author. The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover was published in February 2023 by Princeton University Press. The book has garnered praise from numerous publications including The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, and History Today.

In 2014 he published, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Making of Modern African American Religion. That book received the 2015 first book award by the American Society of Church History.

His commentary and writing have been featured on The NBC Today Show, The History Channel, PBS, CSPAN, and NPR, as well as in The New York Times, Boston Globe, CNN.com, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He currently serves as an advisor on the upcoming PBS documentary series The History of Gospel Music & Preaching.

James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family and author of many popular books about "Christian parenting", died in late August at the age of 89.

Dobson's death was celebrated by many ex-Evangelicals of a certain age who were raised in part or in total by Dobson's teaching and methods.

He leaves behind a complicated and questionable legacy, including a generation of ex-Evangelicals who despise him and credit him for ruining their lives on the one hand, and an Evangelical movement that seems to have moved past him on the other.

Joining Kelly and John to talk about the life and times of James Dobson is Hilde Løvdal Stephens, an associatie professor of American Studies at the University of Oslo. Her first book, Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Crusade for the Christian Home, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2019.

You can find her on Bluesky @hildelstephens

(NOTE: At about the 15 minute mark, John's audio goes crackly. We did our best to make it as listenable as possible! Our apologies to all. We'll do better next time!)

Heretic was released in theaters in 2024 and quickly developed something of a cult fandom, especially among religion nerds.

Starring Hugh Grant in a rare villainous dark turn, Heretic tells to story of two young Mormon missionaries, Sister Paxton and Sister Barnes, who find themselves forced to defend their faith (and their lives) against the human manifestation of dickish online atheist bros.

Whether of not Heretic is a good movie about religion is open to debate (and we take that up here), but unlike other religious horror, it pulls its thrills from a very unique source and its writers did their homework, painting faith and believers in three dimensions while not endorsing either, and showing the folly of hyper-rationality at the same time.

Shaily Patel, one of our earliest guests, rejoins us to talk about a movie she describes as one she both loves and hates.

You can find her on Bluesky @vox-magica.

We're back, and we're catching up on the things we missed this summer: Woke Superman, Ryan Walters' porn crisis, the DHS's weird fascism Twitter posts, and more!

Kelly tells us about her surgery and recovery. John talks about his trip and getting a ridiculous amount of poison ivy on him. And they both talk about how Ryan Walters, the notorious Christian Nationalist in charge of Oklahoma schools, got caught with porn.

Also, there's a new Woke Superman! James Gunn pisses off the right by deciding to make a Superman movie where Superman in an immigrant who cares about non-white people! It's very radical and disturbing!

Plus: Epstein, and how it's now cool for you to convert the person in the next cubicle to Christianity if you work for the government.

Links to the pieces discussed in this episode:

Siri Dahl vs. Christian Nationalism

With its ‘Homeland Heritage’ Campaign Trump’s DHS is Leaning Sharply into ‘Blood and Soil’ Ideology

DHS’s ‘Homeland Heritage’ Campaign Highlights Danger of Innocence Myths of a White Christian America

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