Podcast
PZ's Podcast
Hosted by Mockingbird · EN
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
17episodes
Episodes
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Episode 401 - It's a Stretch!
Mar 16, 202500:22:24Tap to summarizeIt's been too long but here is my new episode. It started with the second-to-last scene in an 'Outer Limits' episode from 1963 entitled "The Human Factor". Brought yours truly straight to tears. Then we hurtled through time to 1996, to Cliff Robertson's touching redemption at the end of another 'Outer Limits' episode, entitled "Joyride". The combination of these two genius moments equipped PZ to talk about... yes... Anglicanism... and yes... the Episcopal Church... and yes... contemporary parish ministry. But I couldn't go there until my heart was ready. And that work was achieved by Sally Kellerman and Gary Merrill in 1963. Incidentally, I recommend you begin your sermon preparation -- maybe any public preparation -- by getting in touch with your heart. (People aren't really that interested in your mind.) Get in touch with your heart and you might actually convince somebody. Oh, and by the way, I'm an Episcopal minister and still glad to be one. (And we go to a great church.) LUV U.
Transcribe →Episode 400 - Jordan, Meet Jackie
Jan 4, 202500:21:52Tap to summarizeThis is a sort of "marker" podcast -- my 400th. It's kind of my summing up on the subject of human identity and the origin of human satisfaction. The cast cites a recent interview with Jordan Peterson, and do note that the interviewer is almost as interesting as the interviewee I also quote John Zahl's distillation sermon from December 29th -- which happened to be Mrs. Zahl's and my 51st Anniversary. The cast finishes with a little James Hilton (i.e., one's current fave) and... a 1978 cover of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs. You'll see. I want you to think about the origins of your own psychic self. From where does "self-hood" come? Did you create yours? What do you want for yourself more than anything else in the world? What would you do anything to acquire? Oh, and is satisfaction in life about loving or being loved? When have you been happiest? (When have you been happy at all?) "All You Need Is (Be-)Love(dness)". Nothing else really matters -- or at least at the start of life (I mean infancy), and also at the end of (mortal) life (I mean death). Oh, and also at every felt point of need you have ever had to face. At the end of the day, a baby, a "disheartened" person (to quote Jackie Wilson from '68), and a dying person need one thing: Love From Outside. And may that Love ever "STAY" (J. Browne, '78). Podcast 400 is dedicated to Mary Cappleman Zahl.
Transcribe →Episode 399 - Sligh and the Family...
Dec 2, 202400:22:57Tap to summarizeEveryday I see how little I know. Everyday I see how little I've read, or seen, or heard. (Thought I had, but hadn't.) A prime example of this is Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Have you ever heard of Agnes Sligh Turnbull? (You probably have.) She wrote very successful novels in the 1940s and '50s, and later, too. But she was an optimist, she was a Christian, and she believed in redemption. (So she's more or less been "cancelled" by critical opinion, even tho' she sold millions of novels in her day.) Now you've got to read Agnes Sligh Turnbull's 1947 novel entitled The Bishop's Mantle. It's the inside story of a young Episcopal rector in a northeastern city -- "inside story", in that the author gets inside the heart and mind of a sincere man of God who is still completely human and vulnerable. Almost every page of The Bishop's Mantle has a moment of total insight into what it is like to be parish priest. The man happens also to be in love with a high flying young woman who is reluctant to marry a "parson". That problem needs to be worked out. Oh, and one more thing: The Bishop's Mantle describes a denomination that was, prior to 1979, about 90% "low church". The church observed by Agnes Sligh Turnbull is just so refreshingly not high church. (I think you'll love that aspect.) Oh, and it's 'Sligh' not 'Sly' -- tho' we sure loved Sly back in the day. LUV U.
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Episode 398 - Can You Read My Mind?
Nov 3, 202400:23:55Tap to summarizeThere is a roughly four-minute sequence in the middle of the first Superman movie (1978) that hits the stratosphere of movie emotion -- and of real-life emotion, too. It is the scene in which Superman takes Lois Lane's hand and flies her leisuredly over Manhattan Island. As the pair glide over the city, Lois Lane (played by Margot Kidder) confides her innermost thoughts to the viewer: she has fallen completely in love with Superman, and that is because he has singled her out as the object of his most personal regard. The sequence is monumental in feeling and memory because it sums up the sequence of romantic loving -- and also the sequence of God's loving of poor us. Because Superman has singled out Lois for his most tender regard, she responds with her entire self. She voices her feelings in this way: "Here I am like a kid out of school. Holding hands with a god. I'm a fool. Will you look at me? Quivering. Like a little girl shivering. You can see right through me. Can you read my mind? Can you picture the things I'm thinking of? Wondering why you are all the wonderful things you are. You can fly! You belong in the sky. You and I could belong to each other. If you need a friend, I'm the one to fly to. If you need to be loved, here I am. Read my mind." What this demonstrates is that love does not start with loving someone, but rather with being loved by someone. I need to be the object of someone's love before I can actually love someone myself. Now capitalize the 's' - S - and the analogy to the Christian Gospel becomes palpable. Instantly palpable! All love begins as One-Way Love: not love from me but love to me. So go now and look up that sequence in Superman from 1978. It's easy to find. And it's the truth of life. And not a truth of life. But the truth of life. LUV U.
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Episode 397 - Out of the Deeps
Oct 21, 202400:24:38Tap to summarizeI so want to connect with my hearers when I preach or speak. Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job. J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had basically lost whatever faith he had been exposed to as a child, spent a lot of years looking for... something. He would gladly have capitalized "something" (i.e., Something). In 1960 Priestley wrote specifically about the decline of Christianity in the West. He wrote that the only way the "Church" could 'come back' -- which he would have welcomed given the cultural despair and nihilism he observed everywhere around him -- was to get through to the unconscious. Christianity's original, great and contagious strength had been to reach individuals in their depth/s. I agree with JBP. For many years Mary and I have listened to sermons that are sincere, sound theologically, and well prepared exegetically. Yet we often leave the service untouched, un-addressed, un-healed. As Herr Kaesemann said once, after listening to a sermon during a conference at Yale Divinity School: "Es gibt keine Anrede!" In other words, the Word has to address me in the deeps. The preacher's "deeps" need to be calling out to mine (Psalm 42:7). This cast draws on Priestley's "Presence of the Absence"; a John Wyndham paperback from 1953; and -- wait for it -- Spanky & Our Gang. The last track, from 1969, is IMO pure perfection. Oh, and "Out of the Deeps" is dedicated to Mary Zahl, whose recent talk to the Women of the Advent in Birmingham, entitled "The Things That Remain" (https://talkingbird.fireside.fm/400) is as fine as anything I have ever heard her present. LUV U.
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Episode 396 - Chapel in the Pines
Oct 15, 202400:24:25Tap to summarizeI'm thinking about ecclesiology today. Rarely do. But a combination of J.B. Priestley's "low anthropology", a couple of recent lightning bolts from outside space and (present) time, and a fresh glimpse of the touching statue of "The Compassionate Christ" outside Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham: Well, they got me thinking of what the Christian Church is centrally and anchoredly about. Add to that the third verse of Lou Christie's number-one song from 1966, "Lightnin' Strikes"; and it's probably all there. One's ecclesiology, I mean. "Dangerous Corner" by J.B. Priestley, which was first performed in London in 1932, unmasks the human tragedy of self-serving, manipulation, and deception in about as unrelieved a manner as could be imagined. The last scene but one, which leads directly to a character's suicide, surely rips the curtain off our world's endemic conspiratorial malice. It is almost a pure enactment of the "low anthropology" that is endemic to us. But the playwright offers us no hope. He actually, explicitly dismisses the antidote of faith in God. I so want to enter that scene myself, speaking sincerely and personally, and address the desperate "hero". He's got it mostly right, you see; his diagnosis is accurate. But we believe in God -- and not a "deistic"/hands-off sort of force, but rather: Pure Empathy, Pure Sympathy, Pure Mercy, Pure Grace. Our ecclesiology, therefore, is the Church, in whatever form, as Embodiment of One-Way Love. That's PZ's ecclesiology. That's Lou Christie's "chapel in the pines" (1966). That's the churches of refuge at the end of War of the Worlds (1953), that's 'Mr. Carpenter' in Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), that's the Isaiah 2, verse 4 climax of The Colossus of New York (1958), that's the hymn chorale at the end of The Space Children (1958), that's the Christ-figure at the conclusion of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). And so it goes. When the curtain is ripped away on life as it really is and people as they really are, all that's needed is One Helping Hand, One "Next Voice You Hear" (1951), One... Man from Galilee (Ocean, 1971/Elvis, 1972), One Jesus Christ Superstar. LUV U.
Transcribe →Episode 194: Left Hand Path
Jul 24, 2015Tap to summarizeI 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. Hey, but isn't that a reactionary movie from the Eisenhower movie? No, it's not. It's an excruciating journey into the cause of liberal intolerance. If I -- meaning PZ -- had a mother and a father like 'John' does in My Son John, I'd probably do what he did. I'm almost sure I'd want to.
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