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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Elaine Pagels is a ground-breaking scholar of Christianity. Back in the Sixties she was a student at Harvard when long-forgotten ancient texts re-emerged, secret gospels challenging old religious ideas. That research shook up Christian history, but for Pagels, it was also really personal. And unlike most scholars, she decided to take her intensely personal stories public, writing about the incredible ups and tragic downs happening behind the scholarly scenes. Transcript at firesidepod.org/episodes/pagels.Buy the book and other merch at firesidepod.org/store.