The Weekly Reading

Joe tries to remember the eruption of Mount St. Helens but isn’t sure he trusts memory. Transcript: Around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 18, 1980, my world changed. There was no way of knowing or suspecting, so soon into the morning, the sky would turn black. Not black like the night. Not black like an… Continue reading S2E11 Volcanoes

Joe sees the world in the time after the apocalypse, in a world without funerals. Transcript: For at least two decades, I’ve had this end-of-the-world fantasy. I base it on Night of the Comet, a 1984 movie about two Valley Girl sisters who survive the annihilation of humanity. After the comet, they have free reign… Continue reading S2E10 Funerals

Joe reads a new bit of fiction: a story about quarantine and a cat that doesn’t have anywhere better to go. Transcript: Stephen always hated cats. Always. This hatred had even ended relationships—women who were wonderful in all ways except their loyalties and adoration of cats. Cats. Vile creatures that resent and sulk and destroy.… Continue reading S2E09 Quarantine →

Joe considers neighbors, aspirations, and fear. He attempts to be inspirational. Transcript: On Saturday, my neighbor stopped me in the street. I was dumping compost from dinner, and he was wandering, a little stir crazy. My first feeling was that newly-gained dread: the terror of people: all of them are like zombies, carrying the plague… Continue reading S2E08 Talents

Joe is losing his mind, one memory at a time. Plus, he talks Augustine, Moby Dick, twenty-first birthdays, and Heaven. Transcript: For most of the Plague, I’ve been reading St. Augustine’s Confessions. It remains one of the glaring omissions in my study. For the first chapters, it was fascinating. I thought I would blaze through.… Continue reading S2E07 Memory

Joe marvels over the constancy of nature in a post-Easter essay. Transcript: Among the many controversies of the early Christian church was the date of Easter. In the first centuries, many Christians celebrated it on Passover. If Easter fell on a Wednesday, so be it. But a Pope began excommunicating those who followed this approach.… Continue reading S2E06 Constancy

Joe is done with Lent and the Plague. Instead, he wants to talk Passover and Robert Frost. Transcript: I had drafted a long essay on a strange dream I had about cats lurking in the bottom of a pond, like the ancient floating knights in Tolkien’s Dead Marshes. These cats, beneath leaves and in jade… Continue reading S2E05 Frost

Season 2 continues with Joe lamenting online church and considering the mailman’s war with porch pirates. Transcript: Yesterday, my wife said, “You are the only man I’ve seen in weeks. Other than the mailman.” We talked about how strange the mailman is—how he rings the bell and waits for one of us wave or shout—acknowledge… Continue reading S2E04 Mailman

In this episode, an actual third episode of Season 2, Joe writes about how he misses thinking that the world might end today. Transcript: American Christianity has always been eschatological. It has always viewed life with an expectation of an imminent end, where we are moments away from our personal finality or a step from… Continue reading S2E03 Apocalypse

In this episode, a surprise continuation of Season 2, Joe writes more about the wrongness of presence in the time of plague. Transcript: It is the first full Sunday of the Lenten-Plague. The churches, one by one, resolve to do their part in the collective self-quarantine, and with each notice of closures, I think two… Continue reading S202 Third Sunday of Lenten-Plague