Fireside with Blair Hodges

“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!

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.

David Livingstone Smith has studied dehumanization for decades. He's spent a lot of time researching horrific genocides, lynching, massacres, and other brutalities. Real humans pull the trigger. Real humans administer the poisonous gasses and drop the bombs. People not entirely unlike me and you, although it's a lot more comforting to imagine they're monsters. And in fighting monsters, we risk becoming the very thing we’re fighting against.Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/smith.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

It’s been said that, like the Bible, there are few women in the Book of Mormon. And that’s true, in one sense. But in another, women are everywhere there. Fatimah Salleh and Margaret Olsen Hemming are looking for them while they work on the first complete commentary on the Book of Mormon ever written by women.Transcript available: firesidepod.org/episodes/salleh-olsen.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

In his book Against Civility: The Hidden Racism in our Obsession with Civility, Alex Zamalin traces the history of civility from its deployment against African slaves, through Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, all the way to today’s Black Lives Matter protests.Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/zamalin.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Anna Sale says a loss of faith in social institutions has left people seeking alternative ways of celebrating, mourning, and connecting. At a fractured and disconnected moment in time, she urges us to reconnect by having hard conversations that are too-often avoided. Anna Sale is the host of the award-winning podcast Death, Sex, and Money from WNYC Studios, and author of the book “Let’s Talk About Hard Things.”

Lauren Sandler was a journalist covering homelessness in New York City when she met Camilla, a woman without a home who didn’t seem to fit the homeless stereotype at all. Sandler tells Camilla’s story in This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search For Home. It’s an up close and personal account of one woman who shares the fate of millions of Americans battling homelessness and the stunning boring inefficient bureaucracy of it all.Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/sandler.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.

Anthea Butler is a top expert on religion, politics, and race in the United States. In her latest book White Evangelical Racism she tells the history of the rise of the Religious Right in America—Christians who are politically conservative, predominantly white, and Republican. As church attendance shrinks and public confidence and respect of religious people dwindles, Butler sees a moment of reckoning for American Christianity. Transcript at our website, firesidepod.org/episodes/butler.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.