Monsters, with David Livingstone Smith

“Relationscapes” is the current podcast by Fireside host Blair Hodges. Enjoy this sample episode! Be sure to subscribe directly to Relationscapes now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!

“Family Proclamations” is the current podcast by Blair Hodges, host of Fireside. Enjoy this sample episode and be sure to subscribe directly to Family Proclamations now, because this episode will fall out of the Fireside feed next month!

Tara Boyce joins us to reconsider Tom Whyman’s episode about “hope.” Is Tom too hopeful? Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/boyce.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Ross Gay is a New York Times bestselling author of essays and poetry. His latest book is ‘Inciting Joy,’ which argues that “joy is something like what we feel like when we help each other carry our sorrows, what we feel like when we sort of realize we're practicing our entanglement, our belonging to one another.”Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/gay.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Meghan O'Rourke is a citizen of what she calls the invisible kingdom. Anyone can become a citizen. Even you. All you need is a debilitating chronic illness that doctors can't easily understand or treat—autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme, fibromyalgia, and a bunch of other conditions at the blurry edges of medical knowledge. As doctors tried to pinpoint Meghan’s diagnoses, she decided to create a record of what she was learning about chronic illness from doctors, scientists, and patients along the way.Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/orourke.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

When she was born, Susan Stryker’s parents thought they were welcoming a baby boy. She knew they were wrong by the time she was five years old, but it took decades to let them know who she really was. Being trans raised a lot of questions for Susan—practical questions of course, but also theological, philosophical, and historical questions. So she went searching for answers. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/stryker.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Race and religion have been intertwined throughout American history. Christians believed they could detect so-called “heathen” unbelief by the color of someone’s skin or the state of a foreign landscape. Over time, the word “heathen” dropped off, but historian Kathryn Gin Lum says the ideas behind it are alive and well in the United States today, even beyond religion. Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/ginlum.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Toni Jensen grew up around guns. As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. Toni is a Métis woman, with mixed European and Indigenous ancestry. She's no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies and lands of Indigenous people, especially women, and the ways violence is hidden, ignored, forgotten.This episode was incidentally recorded on May 24, 2022, the day of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. It is dedicated to the memory of those destroyed by gun violence.Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/jensen.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

When Tom Whyman started thinking about becoming a father, he worried. Would he and his partner be able to make a living to support a child? What about political upheaval in the UK, or the increasing threat of climate change—not to mention all the little daily ways having a child could change his life. Then a global pandemic shook things up even more. As a philosopher, he asked: What reason is there for hope? Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/whyman.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Coming up out of the waters of baptism at a new white Christian church, Danté Stewart envisioned leaving his blackness behind, washing away his boyhood Black Pentecostal baptism, and rising to a colorblind world where all lives matter. But as time passed, as he witnessed more bodies of Black Americans being killed, he felt rage growing inside. An unexpectedly holy kind of rage that prepared him for yet another baptism—this time, by fire.Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/stewart.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.