PZ's Podcast

By Mockingbird

Society & Culture Arts Religion & Spirituality

What's PZ's Podcast about?

From "Telstar" to "Vault of Horror," from Rattigan to Kerouac, from the Village of Bray to the Village of Midwich, help PZ link old ancient news and pop culture. I think I can see him, "Crawling from the Wreckage." Will he find his way? This show is brought to you by Mockingbird! www.mbird.com

Download our free app to listen on your phone

PZ's Podcast episodes:

05.31.2024
Episode 389 - The New Perspective on Paul
Now "here's a howdy-do" (The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan). How does Joe Meek shed light on that ascendant movement -- and it still is ascendant -- within New Testament scholarship and interpretation? Let me say how. Admirers of Joe Meek's amazing productions...
05.29.2024
Episode 388 - Self Portrait
Consideration of these (thousands of) new "Tea Chest" tapes from Joe Meek is such a blow to old assumptions. For example, I thought I knew his music pretty well. Even dedicated a book to him once, despite his having been...
05.29.2024
Episode 387 - A Cappella (Acappullco)
The new release of hundreds of Joe-Meek tapes and tape-excerpts from the "Tea Chests" of yore is a fresh flashlight into the nature of reality within this broken/fallen world. Did any of us have any idea of how much good material...
05.22.2024
Episode 386 - I Am the Eggman
It was quite arresting, decades ago, when a young artist in New York City told me that, despite appearances -- she came across as confident and hopeful -- she felt inside herself as if she were an egg that had...
05.01.2024
Episode 385 - Jack, Be Nimble -- NOT!
I keep hearing the word "nimble" these days. It comes up in relation to declining and therefore merging church institutions, in which a press release declares that the sale of a church property or the merger of two diminished churches...
04.22.2024
Episode 384 - Theme & Variations
Mary Zahl was recently the guest on an episode of a podcast known as "The Brothers Zahl" (out this summer). The subject of the cast was parenting, and I can think of no better illustration of a good parent. Mary...
04.09.2024
Episode 383 - Do You Need a Receipt?
I wonder if you are ever struck by the ubiquity of this phrase at the end of every checkout line in the known universe: "Do you need a receipt?". Or, in grocery stores, "Find everything you were looking for?". Or,...
03.25.2024
Episode 382 - We Interrupt This Program
You can't help noticing, if you study Soviet-Era Iron-Curtain sci fi illustrations and posters -- an activity which I feel sure governs your every waking minute -- that there are ZERO aliens or extra-terrestrial forms of life to be seen....
03.11.2024
Episode 381 - Up the Down Staircase
I'm trying to put into words the core principles of accessible Christian theology. Not mentally or intellectually accessible, but feeling-accessible -- heart-accessible -- and therefore actually and experientially accessible! Karl Barth promulgated what was called a "theology from the top down". He...
02.28.2024
Episode 380 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 2)
I don't tire of quoting Thomas Cranmer's 'meme' that goes like this: "What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies." That is so true to life. Now note its difference with the sentence quoted in part one of...
02.28.2024
Episode 379 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 1)
An old acquaintance, an Australian bishop, has been quoting recently from a popular cartoonist and kind of pop philosopher "Down Under" named Mike Leunig. The bishop quoted an aphorism from Leunig in relation to his long-term hopes for the Anglican...
02.16.2024
Episode 378 - PZ's Mature Thoughts Concerning Rock n' Roll
Personally, I think that one's most cherished tunes come from ... oneself. By which I mean that the music you love may say more about you than about the music itself. You hear a Pretenders single and it calls you instantaneously...
01.15.2024
Episode 377 - Happy 50th, Rod McKuen
I've been thinking some about "borderland" states, meaning extremely strong states of mind and feeling that are not necessarily explicit, but are nonetheless real. Borderland states of mind are when you are in despair concerning your life, or your primary...
01.07.2024
Episode 376 - Fury
One just can't get over that repeating, concluding forcefulness of Los Straitjackets' music by which they almost always save the best for last -- like in the wedding at Cana, sort of. They light up the sky in the last...
01.01.2024
Episode 375 - New Morning
Heard a sermon last night that cut to the quick. It evoked the image of a "new priesthood" -- a new movement of God in the New Year. The preacher's vision of life and the work of God in the...
12.29.2023
Episode 374 - The Girl I Married (TZ 1987)
On December 29th, 2023 Mary and I have been married exactly 50 years. What a marker for us! (I truly feel it and celebrate it.) This marker-episode concerns the primacy of individual belovedness over any and everything else, including career and professional...
12.18.2023
Episode 373 - “Everybody’s Talkin’” — NOT!
Bishop Colin Buchanan died November 29th in Leeds Infirmary, and there’s been almost no coverage of it — not even in the Church press. Astonishing! Colin was one of the most influential ministers and scholars in the Church of England during...
12.04.2023
Episode 372 - We've Only Just Begun
This Christmas podcast is in honor of Mary's and my 50th Anniversary, which comes on December 29th. She and I are both in thankful awe of having made it thus far. And happily! To me this is worth celebrating. The cast...
12.03.2023
Episode 371 - At the Earth's Core
That's a fun movie, from 1976, in which a group of Victorian English people are mistakenly rocketed into inner space, right down to the core of the earth. (What they find, well, you can probably imagine.) But the title and the...
11.16.2023
Episode 370 - Serling's Miracle, and Ours
When I survey... not the Wondrous Cross, but the world as it's currently going, it's hard not to despair. So many things seem and feel wrong -- are wrong. Providentially (as I see it), I've been directed back to Rod Serling....
11.01.2023
Episode 369 - Don't You Care
God spoke to me recently. Not through a mediated form -- albeit it was through another human being. Not through concept nor reading nor paradox nor metaphor nor memory. But right Here and Now! I was truly blown away. It was neither...
10.20.2023
Episode 368 - Straining Out Gnats and...
I've been much affected by the pictures of murdered and bombed children from Israel and Gaza in the last week, and found myself comparing these unutterably tragic losses with some of the other issues on which our world is fixed....
10.10.2023
Episode 367 - "Summer of '42"
If you want to get to the core, the very heart, of a person's -- say, your own -- experience of Grace, ask them (i.e., ask yourself) to tell you about an experience of acceptance or belovedness that came to...
09.06.2023
Episode 366 - Our Movie
Written by Jimmy Webb and performed by Glen Campbell, "Our Movie" is a very touching song. It describes a fulfilled marriage from its beginning and right through. It really describes one's whole life in affectionate and thankful perspective. For me the...
08.14.2023
Episode 365 - The Whole Loaf
So I was in Henley-on-Thames last week and there was this almost hidden bookshop next to a place called "The Ferret". (I kid you not.) High on a shelf there was an old leather-bound copy of Charles Dickens' lesser known...
07.07.2023
Episode 364 - How to Survive Being in Full Time Ministry
Serving in full time ministry is as stress-full as any occupation can be. You get hit from all sides -- unendingly -- and just when you think things are beginning to stabilize, you get hit again. Plus, there is the in-built...
07.06.2023
Episode 363 - In Quintessence
The quintessence of one's continuing love of popular culture that embodies heart-to-heart communication is the subject of this cast. What makes a work of popular art "Christian"? Does it have to be explicit to qualify? Or implicit -- and...
06.28.2023
Episode 362 - Midsummer Night's Dream
It's interesting how far music drives this podcast. Fer sher, I've been "out of pocket" for a month or so, but what drove me to record this new cast was one thing: music. I'd recently heard a section of The Carpenters'...
05.17.2023
Episode 361 - Outer Limits
Verticality is a make-or-break attribute of the Christian Church. When we put horizontality before verticality, we run out of gas. Always. People cannot "keep up" horizontal good works and outreach if they are not being, as the English say, resourced. I saw this...
05.13.2023
Episode 360 - Outta Gear
I think we probably all need to get "outta gear", at least to some extent. 'Gears' are the attitudes, narratives, and exterior values that shape and define most of what we spend our time doing. We are trying to be successful,...
05.12.2023
Episode 359 - Better Late Than Never
I think about it a lot: why isn't God intervening to make the world a less harsh and broiling place? 'Where are you, God? Come on, already.' Another way of putting it: What's taking You so long? And that's not...
04.24.2023
Episode 358 - The Wisdom of... Los Straitjackets
It just came down to me. Like the letter at the beginning of Forrest Gump. Like the chap who rescued Mary and me six years ago when we blew a tire in the most remote "track" to be found in...
04.20.2023
Episode 357 - 'Mockingbird' en France
We're always looking out for resources, mostly in the popular-art side of life, that embody the Belovedness that precedes all loving. Whether it's a Motown single or a novel no one's ever heard of or a TV show from last...
04.12.2023
Episode 356 - Happy Imputation Day
Gerry Rafferty's 1978 single entitled "Right Down the Line" is a pure classic on the experience of imputation. Imputation, for the record, is when someone lovingly regards you as different from the way you perceive yourself; and somehow in being...
04.05.2023
Episode 355 - The Story of My Life (1957)
That title song is a quiet masterpiece. Sure, it's a little corny in the arrangement, but the message is universal. It never fails, at least in my case, to elicit tears -- of recognition. This cast is a hymn to life-long...
03.21.2023
Episode 354 - Beep Alonia
These podcasts are almost all dialogues with music. The music, such as "Beep Alonia" from 1964, touches a soft or sensitive spot in my heart -- and also one's brain, maybe -- and suddenly "the waters flow". Here I am thinking about...
03.21.2023
Episode 353 - The Monster Swim
Good things, true things, lasting things have built-in repetition. They repeat in life because they are always valid. So they come back. Like "The Monster Swim"! That major contribution was the follow-up, by the same artist/s, to "The Monster Mash". We...
03.01.2023
Episode 352 - Thou Shalt Not Steal
Warning from Space, a Japanese sci-fi "thriller" from 1956, is an extremely ridiculous movie. But I had confused it with Message from Space, also Japanese but from 1978, which is in fact not as good. (What is he talking about?!) I had...
02.28.2023
Episode 351 - "Been Invited to a Party"
There is so little one knows. Here one thought one had a "deep bench" when it comes to foreign films, and yet I knew nothing of Julien Duvivier! Yes, there is his 'classic' Poil de Carotte, and Criterion put out Pepe...
02.21.2023
Episode 350 - Don't Sell Me a Semi-Automatic
Sometimes I hear a 'Grace' sermon that is just terrific... until the last five minutes. During the last five minutes, the preacher seems pressed to tell me how I should respond, at least mentally, to the message of God's One-Way...
02.21.2023
Episode 349 - Atlantic Twist
This is a follow-up to "Joe Meek Is God", and observes the non sequiturs of one's life. I believe they are Providential, those decisive non sequiturs; and are best observed in the absence of a "narrative" or personal story-line. What...
02.17.2023
Episode 348 - Joe Meek Is God
I've talked about Joe Meek before, but think I've finally gotten to the spiritual wisdom that lies beneath his many records. (Meek was an English independent record producer in the 1950s and '60s.) The wisdom of Joe Meek, which is a...
02.15.2023
Episode 347 - Perpetual Motion
What could really do it? What could actually revive the beneficent influence of the Christian Gospel on our current masochistic/sadistic world? "What Does It Take/To Win Your Love for Me" (Junior Walker, 1969). That is the question of this...
02.08.2023
Episode 346 - Dumb Head
I'm not talking about dying these days in order to be a downer. (For years one has tuned out all sorts of devotional books that major on death and dying. Especially R.C. ones, which felt morbid. They seemed both remote from...
02.04.2023
Episode 345 - The KA of Gifford Hillary
Dennis Wheatley was an author "on the margins". In other words, he was a flawed (tho' very popular in his day) writer who was not taken seriously by most critics. But his distinctly marginal themes and observations gave him a...
01.30.2023
Episode 344 - The Israelites
The recent death of an old friend (i.e., of 52 years' standing) has brought vividly to mind, in the recollection of the person by their friends and family, a vital distinction: the distinction between what actually took place in one's...
12.15.2022
Episode 343 - Billion Dollar Brain
People conceal so much about themselves. They don't always mean to, but in one area or another they are afraid to say what's really going on -- especially inside themselves. Then, over time, they -- we! -- become habituated to...
12.13.2022
Episode 342 - Strange Conflict
Herein is a degree of pushing-the-envelope that I hope may speak to you, dear Listener. One was struck recently when someone announced, "Your problem's been solved". "Come again?", I said. He added, "Your problem's been solved on the astral plane." Well, normally,...
12.04.2022
Episode 341 - The Chinese Prime Minister
Three recent sudden deaths of old friends have called forth this Christmas podcast. In two of the cases, the family, let alone the deceased, have been completely unprepared. I mean, completely. No service, no faith, no comfort, no hope. Only shock...
08.29.2022
Episode 340 - Tales of Hoffmann
What do our favorite songs, movies, and shows -- and even places -- say about us? Why do we like the media we do? What draws us to one form of art rather than another -- to one sort of...

What's PZ's Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

PZ's Podcast episodes:

Episode 389 - The New Perspective on Paul

Episode 388 - Self Portrait

Episode 387 - A Cappella (Acappullco)

Episode 386 - I Am the Eggman

Episode 385 - Jack, Be Nimble -- NOT!

Episode 384 - Theme & Variations

Episode 383 - Do You Need a Receipt?

Episode 382 - We Interrupt This Program

Episode 381 - Up the Down Staircase

Episode 380 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 2)

Episode 379 - It Only Takes a Minute, Girl (Pt 1)

Episode 378 - PZ's Mature Thoughts Concerning Rock n' Roll

Episode 377 - Happy 50th, Rod McKuen

Episode 376 - Fury

Episode 375 - New Morning

Episode 374 - The Girl I Married (TZ 1987)

Episode 373 - “Everybody’s Talkin’” — NOT!

Episode 372 - We've Only Just Begun

Episode 371 - At the Earth's Core

Episode 370 - Serling's Miracle, and Ours

Episode 369 - Don't You Care

Episode 368 - Straining Out Gnats and...

Episode 367 - "Summer of '42"

Episode 366 - Our Movie

Episode 365 - The Whole Loaf

Episode 364 - How to Survive Being in Full Time Ministry

Episode 363 - In Quintessence

Episode 362 - Midsummer Night's Dream

Episode 361 - Outer Limits

Episode 360 - Outta Gear

Episode 359 - Better Late Than Never

Episode 358 - The Wisdom of... Los Straitjackets

Episode 357 - 'Mockingbird' en France

Episode 356 - Happy Imputation Day

Episode 355 - The Story of My Life (1957)

Episode 354 - Beep Alonia

Episode 353 - The Monster Swim

Episode 352 - Thou Shalt Not Steal

Episode 351 - "Been Invited to a Party"

Episode 350 - Don't Sell Me a Semi-Automatic

Episode 349 - Atlantic Twist

Episode 348 - Joe Meek Is God

Episode 347 - Perpetual Motion

Episode 346 - Dumb Head

Episode 345 - The KA of Gifford Hillary

Episode 344 - The Israelites

Episode 343 - Billion Dollar Brain

Episode 342 - Strange Conflict

Episode 341 - The Chinese Prime Minister

Episode 340 - Tales of Hoffmann