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Fireside with Blair Hodges — Religion & Spirituality
Fireside with Blair Hodges

Interviews about culture, religion, and more with brilliant people who will fan the flames of your curiosity.

Copyright: © 2021 Blair Hodges

Latest Episodes:

Relationscapes: “The Radical Origins of Pride Month,” with Kaila Story Oct 27, 2026

Show notes

“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!

Relationscapes: MINI EPISODE, “The Sitcomification of Holly Brown” Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

Holly Brown loves TV sitcoms. Growing up, her own family looked like the prototype for must-see TV: a charismatic dad who worked on a top sitcom in Hollywood, siblings and a mother filling the other familiar family roles.

Until it all started to fall apart. As though the writers were playing some kind of sadistic joke. And as her father was dying of cancer, he revealed a secret no one had told her—Holly and her siblings had five-year-old twin half brothers.

Holly joins Blair to talk about her genre-bending new podcast, Everybody Knows But Me, which blends memoir, investigative storytelling, with fake sitcom scenes of her life complete with wisecracks and laugh tracks.

Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org.

Fellow Traveler Episodes

Dead Dads Club, with Maddie Norris

About the Guest

Holly Brown is an LA-based stand-up comedian, a podcast person at Tink Media, and also the host and creator of a new darkly comedic narrative podcast called Everybody Knows But Me.

Relationscapes: “The Slow-Motion Inevitability of Becoming Yourself,” with Kevin James Thornton Jul 28, 2026

Show notes

“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!

S’mores (Bonus Episode)—Tara Boyce on Hope Sep 27, 2023

Show notes

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.

Joy, with Ross Gay Apr 18, 2023

Show notes

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.

Invisible, with Meghan O’Rourke Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

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.

Transitions, with Susan Stryker Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

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.

Mission, with Kathryn Gin Lum Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

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.

Shell Play, with Toni Jensen Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

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.

Hope, with Tom Whyman Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

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.

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