Pod Only Knows

Have women always been forbidden from serving as priests? Or is the Church’s current ruling on the issue little more than a cover-up? These questions finally came into focus for Margaret Mary O’Connor when, well into her adult life, she John Wijngaards' 2001 book The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church.

O'Connor is a life-long, devout Catholic, who always questioned the muted role women were allowed to play in her Church. She always suspected there might be more (or less) to the arguments the Church made about the ordination of wome, and Wjingaard’s book sent her down a research rabbit hole which ultimately led to her publishing her own conclusions in her book Scandal in the Shadows: The Original Priest - Mother Mary.

O'Connor has since dedicated her time to vocally, openly championing the ordination of Catholic women, and to exposing the sexual abuse scandal that continues to cast a shadow over the institution she loves. She holds a Master of Arts in Pastoral Ministry, from Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, New York and is a a Eucharistic Minister at Our Lady of Charity Parish in Buffalo, New York.

Learn more about Margaret and her work at her website.

Special thanks to Bry from Pontifacts for recording our introduction this week.

The Devil of Hell's Kitchen. The Man Without Fear. By day he is Matt Murdock, the blind lawyer, defender of the defenseless by day. And by night he is the Daredevil, the noble protector of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.

But while most superheroes have two identities - one secret, one public - Murdock has a third: he is a Catholic.

How, exactly, does Murdock's Catholicism define the his character? And, more importantly, what does the specific portrayal of Catholicism in Daredevil stories like Frank Miller's Born Again say about Catholicism more broadly?

Matthew J. Cressler has some thoughts on that topic. Cressler is an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of Charleston. His teaching and research areas include African American religions, Catholic studies, religion in America, and theory in the study of religion. He has written about the portrayal of religion, and especially Catholicism, in popular culture, notably in a recent piece about Midnight Mass for The Atlantic.

But he has a particular interest in the intersection of comics and religion, and he is currently working on an essay exploring Daredevil's portrayal of Catholic masculinity, which he was kind enough to let John take an early look at for the purposes of this episode.

You can find Matthew on Twitter @mjcressler.

81yG7vgeyCgufrdaAOSg

This week, John speaks to Mark Ryall, the author of Age-Decoded, a science fiction novel that explores a world in which aging can be cured and, in fact, reversed.

In 1996, scientists announced the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep. And, in 1997, the film Gattaca – a film very much in the same tradition of speculative science fiction as the subject of our last episode, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – envisioned a world in which genetic engineering yielded genetic segregation. But while the decades since haven’t given us much reason to heed its warnings, recently that’s begun to change, with recent breakthroughs in the mechanics of aging, and a boom in the use of CRISPR gene-editing, including the 2018 announcement from a Chinese scientist claiming he had edited two human embryos to immunize them from HIV

Ryall taught college economics and mathematics for twenty-two years. He wrote Age-Decoded in an effort to educate himself and the world about we he believes will be an imminent tsunami of CRISPR genetic engineering. And he believes this technology will fundamentally alter human nature, and that it must be carefully controlled and applied to serve humanity well.

It's a story that, by now, is as famous as the monster it led Mary Shelley to create: On a dark and stormy evening, two British literary giants, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, challenged each other and the handful of friends in attendance to write the best ghost story. The unlikely winner was Percy Shelley's teenaged wife, Mary, who would ride her creation to fame and literary immortality.

But there's a lot more to this story, and so, so much more to Mary herself.

For the Halloween episode, John invited Dan Colón (back for his second straight episode) and frequent guest Mike Manzi - who together host the Universal Monster Movie podcast The Monsters That Made Us - to join him as they dig into the life and mind of Mary Shelley: What haunted her, what drove her, and how her masterpiece, Frankenstein, is as much autobiography is it is the blueprint for the entire horror genre.

Among the many sources for this episode, none were more illuminating than The Strange and Twisted Life of "Frankenstein" by Jill Lepore

TWITTER/Links!

Mike on Twitter

Dan on Twitter

The Monsters That Made Us on Twitter

Show page: The Monsters That Made Us

(DISCLAIMER: This episode contains a lot of spoilers for "Midnight Mass"!)

Mike Flanagan's "Midnight Mass" revisits a lot of the themes of much of his previous work: grief, death, trauma, loss (and you can listen to our discussion of his "Haunting Of" Netflix series here).

But it also covers some a lot of new ground, including the complicated relationship between human beings and the religions they build. It is a show grounded as much in humanity as it is in horror, and it asks more questions than it answers - and, in this way, it demonstrates an understanding of what religion is and how it works that is rare not only for the genre but for popular fiction in general.

John has been unable to stop thinking about the series since it debuted three weeks ago, and so, desperate to talk about it, he invited the two most qualified voices on the subjects of horror and religion he knows - Dr. Kelly J. Baker, making her second appearance on the show, and Dan Colón, co-host and co-creator of Cage Club's The Monsters that Made Us.

TWITTER/Links!

Kelly on Twitter

Buy Kelly's Book: The Zombies are Coming

Dan on Twitter

Show page: The Monsters That Made Us

End of Days is a very weird movie that hit theaters during a very weird time in our recent history, as actual educated adults began preparing for the Y2K bug to bring on the End Times in the form of stock market collapses and planes falling out of the sky and nuclear missiles setting themselves off, followed by Jesus (or maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger?) stepping in to clean up our mess. Either way, lots of people built lots of makeshift bunkers stocked with lots canned food. While the rest of us watched End of Days, apparently, since the movie made more than two hundred million dollars, which in 1999 money was...a lot.

Anyway, Gabriel Byrne plays The Devil in it, and so John invited Brian Rodriguez (of High School Slumber Party) and Joe Two (of 2 Fast 2 Forever) back to talk about this very weird movie, about which perhaps the craziest thing is how accurately it reflected what a lot of people believed was literally about to happen. Strap in, because God works in mysterious ways, and we're about to endure the End of Days!

TWITTER!

Joe: https://twitter.com/JoeyDe_

2 Fast 2 Forever: https://twitter.com/2Fast2Forever

High School Slumber Party: https://twitter.com/HSSlumberParty

A few months ago, John got into a back-and-forth on Twitter with progressive theologian Brandan Robertson (who has made quite a name for himself on Tik Tok) At issue was the idea that the existence of extraterrestrial intelligent life was a matter of certainty (a position John continues to challenge).

But with Twitter being no place for a productive airing of these ideas, he invited Robertson to discuss them with him on the show.

So what if the existence of aliens were no longer a matter of speculation by an unavoidable historical fact? And what would aliens among us - out in the open - mean for religion in general, and theistic religion in particular?

Robertson thinks we should be more prepared to answer these questions. And John, who sometimes cites Contact as his favorite movie, agrees (turns out they agree on most points).

Here they discuss his work in spreading the Gospel of Inclusion, expanding the definition of God, why we should or should not be skeptical of life "out there", and whether aliens are actually time-travelling future humans who somehow managed to survive ecological collapse.

Learn all about Brandan here