PZ's Podcast

Episode Archive

Episode Archive

365 episodes of PZ's Podcast since the first episode, which aired on August 4th, 2010.

  • Episode 195: Shag (The Movie)

    July 28th, 2015  |  20 mins 56 secs

    Shag The Movie (1989) is a great little entertainment! It captures perfectly, and with high humor and enormous love and heart, the Beach Music phenomenon of the 1960s. Today, however, it touches a current issue -- right from the opening credits.

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    Episode 194: Left Hand Path

    July 24th, 2015  |  19 mins 45 secs

    I think I'm supposed to understand why right-wing people are intolerant. But it's harder for me to understand why left-wing people are intolerant. Guess I thought they were supposed to be about freedom and diversity. Come to find out, they're not. So I had to go back to a source that's almost been "blacklisted" itself. It's the movie My Son John (1952), starring Helen Hayes and Robert Wagner.

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    Episode 193: Cross Dressing

    July 21st, 2015  |  22 mins 40 secs

    The Gallant Hours (1959) is one heuristic movie. Not only does it teach the Church a thing or two about how to honor faithful service, but it depicts an entirely ideal instance of how to dress properly if you're a minister -- or, Heav'n forfend, a "priest."

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    Episode 192: How to Save the Church (But Our Lips Are Sealed)

    July 20th, 2015  |  23 mins 40 secs

    The Church I have known all my life is in free fall numerically. I'm talking about Sunday attendance in everyday parishes.

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    Episode 191: Shakin' All Over

    July 20th, 2015  |  22 mins 1 sec

    This talk concerns the indelibility of certain memories, and why they, and not other memories, are indelible. It also concerns a worrying vision I had in January. But it's all one!

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    Episode 190 - PZ's Fabulous New Dating Tips for Gals

    July 6th, 2015  |  18 mins 49 secs

    This is a word to your future self. You probably can't hear it today. But I predict you'll hear it loud and clear in five years, or maybe ten. This is a word to your future self. It's a new fabulous dating tip, and carries almost no exceptions, tho' I wish it did!

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    Episode 189 - Why Weepest Thou?

    June 28th, 2015  |  18 mins 14 secs

    "What makes you cry? When you have an irruption of strong feeling -- and I mean tears in this case -- what is going on? This cast tries to get underneath some emotions we all feel, and in terms of music.

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    Episode 188 - Scuppernong

    June 23rd, 2015  |  20 mins 6 secs

    Tupper Saussy (1936-2007) was a musician behind The Neon Philharmonic, who produced two memorable albums in 1968-69. He was also a polymath who let himself get in the sights of the Internal Revenue Service, and paid a heavy price for it. Moreover, he was a devout Christian, of old-fashioned Episcopalian provenance.

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    Episode 187 - Norwegian Wood

    June 15th, 2015  |  20 mins 30 secs

    Nevil Shute, whose proper name was Nevil Shute Norway, was a British novelist whose work took an odd turn in mid-career. He was a kind of parasitologist of human nature, always asking the big questions:
    Why do people act the way they do? How does the past affect the present? Is there something more to it that is beyond the apparent? Shute thought there was, but he was a tentative explorer. (He was also a churchgoer.) Did he pierce "the veil"? My answer to that is maybe.

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    Episode 186 - Dead End (My Friend)

    June 14th, 2015  |  19 mins 1 sec

    'No' is the worst word you can ever hear. (I realize the virtues of saying 'No', yourself, on certain occasions. But when 'No' is said to you, especially at an impressionable age, it's the worst.) This cast is about the damage created by 'No', especially in romance.

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    Episode 185 - One Toke Over The Line (Sweet Mary)

    March 11th, 2015  |  24 mins 42 secs

    What think ye when I say that 95% of what you are doing is futile and meaningless?

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    Episode 184 - Hysteria

    March 8th, 2015  |  24 mins 17 secs

    In life you can be trapped by forces that are bigger than you are. Especially in professional life.

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    Episode 183 - Dr. Syn

    March 6th, 2015  |  22 mins 20 secs

    Oh, to encounter an integrated minister! We all want to be integrated -- to be ourselves in the pulpit and also out of it. But it's tricky to pull off.

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    Episode 181 - Dualism Clinic with James Bernard

    January 25th, 2015  |  22 mins 24 secs

    Come to find out, dualism has a limited but necessary role in resolving the human dilemma, i.e., in living. The percentage is maybe 20% most of the time, but it's possibly 90% some of the time. The English composer James Bernard is Exhibit A here, and a most brilliant exhibit his work has become.

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    Episode 180 - Metropolitan Life

    November 21st, 2014  |  22 mins 43 secs

    This is the tableau of a childhood memory, a memory that came literally to life recently. I entered a dream, but then the dream was real. A little like the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but in reverse. With help from Orpheus and, by way of backdraft, the Warrens.

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    Episode 179 - Ere the Winter Storms

    November 14th, 2014  |  24 mins 54 secs

    Why are so many unchanged, I mean fundamentally unchanged, by the red lights of life? What accounts for persons' resistance to the lessons of catastrophe? This week Robert W. Anderson, not 'Sister Mary Ignatius', explains it all to us.