Here are the films/shows/books that we taked about:

* Unbroken (book | movie)

* Seabiscuit (book | movie)

* Moneyball (book | movie)

* Invictus (book | movie)

* Running with Raven

* A League of their Own

* 42

* Friday Night Lights (book | movie | TV show)

* McFarland USA

* Free Solo

And there’s so many more out there!

We also share a few running tidbits and our go-to running songs

Our upcoming ones are not yet scheduled but we have plans for one on AI films (especially in light of Pope Leo’s newest encyclical) and another on America250 related films. Watch for those dates to be scheduled.

As always, you can find the audio podcast of our conversations on Apple or Spotify!

Thanks for running with us!

Our next PCPH is yet to be scheduled as the rest of May gets really crazy for family and church life stuff for both of us. But, as King George said… we’ll be back…

Thanks for joining in!

And a quick reminder that our next “full” episode is this coming Wednesday (5/6) at 12:30pm ET as we talk with Amber Groomes,Ph.D. (she/her) about the AppleTV show, Shrinking. Dr Groomes (Amber) writes here on substack and is a licensed therapist and counselor and will help us navigate this really unique and wonderful show.

Here’s a few links from our conversation today…

The Ted Lasso Season 4 Teaser

The song that plays during the trailer is Rubber Band Man by Mumford and Sons and Hozier…

And of course… May the Fourth Be With You!

See you Wednesday!

MaryAnn and Ed

Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing

We round-robin’ed it with three nature-centric Pop Culture items for each of us - could be movies, shows, books, music. Here’s what we came up with:

Fr PeteField of Dreams (movie)A River Runs Through It (mostly the movie, but also the book)Beasts of the Southern Wild (movie)

EdThe Way (movie)Orbital (book by Samantha Harvey)Finding the Mother Tree (book by Suzanne Simard)

MaryAnnTiny World (AppleTV Nature Documentary)Into Thin Air (mostly the book, but also the IMAX movie)My Neighbor Totoro (Studio Ghibli movie)

We also snuck in a few other connections…

* The Lord of the Rings (of course) and its emphasis upon harmony with the natural world versus exploitation of resources

* Radiolab’s recent podcast episode, Forests on Forests - incredible insights of what is found in the canopy of the gigantic redwoods of the Pacific Northwest…

Our next PCPH is on Wednesday, May 6 at 12:30pm ET as we talk about the AppleTV show, Shrinking, with our guest Dr. Amber Groomes- a real life therapist - to help us reflect on this show about therapists! We won’t be necessarily talking about a specific episode but instead some senses of what we have seen in the show as a whole over its (so far) three seasons.

Off to the woods!

MaryAnn and Ed

As mentioned at the end of our conversation, April is National Donate Life Month. Please consider giving the gift of life by opting to be an organ donor, and letting your loved ones know of your choice. You can reflect this on your drivers license, or even in the Health app of your iPhone. All major religions in the U.S. support donation as a final act of compassion and generosity (which was reflected in season one of The Pitt!).

See you on April 28 at 3 p.m. EDT for our next episode of PCPH. We’ll be joined by Fr Pete the Wilderness Priest, author of the upcoming book Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing to celebrate spring and talk about our favorite works of pop culture about nature. Link to join.

Follow Pop Culture Pastors Hour on Substack or in your favorite podcast app.

Articles referenced in our conversation are here and here. The Jamar Tisby book mentioned is called The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance.

See you next Monday, April 6 at 1 p.m. EDT as we take up the HBO Max show The Pitt. Two bona fide chaplains will join us and make the case for that wonderfully chaotic ER needing some chaplains on staff… See you there!

Three days and counting until we get to see Andy Weir’s charming, funny, optimistic, humanity-affirming book brought to life on the screen. In this conversation we recommend some space fiction and discuss our favorite Project Hail Mary themes, our hopes for the film adaptation, and more.

We started our conversation by talking about some of our favorite “space” books, so if you’re looking for a new read…

* Project Hail Mary (duh)

* The Martian

* Artemis

* Ender’s Game

* Orbital

* Sea of Tranquility

* Dune

* The Story of Your Life (short story)

* Thrawn Trilogy (Star Wars)

* Lost Moon / Apollo 13

* Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

See you March 30 when we take up the movie version of Project Hail Mary. See you at 3 p.m. EDT via this link.

It’s the mark of a good show that we talked for almost an hour, going deep on a number of themes in the show, and somehow didn’t get to some major plot points, like how the Others get their sustenance. I’ll just leave it at that.

But we did talk about the show as commentary on AI, what makes a human a human, and the appeal of complex characters. Plus: how would we preach this show?

Here’s the podcast episode Ed referenced about the Darien Gap.

* Best/Worst change from books to movies

* Which “villain” do you like the most, and which “hero” annoys you?

* Best music cue

* What meal (or scene?) that we witness would you most want to be a part of?

* Best hair acting (This was put in specifically for MaryAnn to comment on Eowyn’s hair)

* No LOTR actors were nominated for Oscars. Who gets best and best supporting?

And some more fun ones too!

We will be leaving the realms of dwarves, elves, hobbits, humans, ents, and wizards and moving back to sci-fi (of a sort) with AppleTV’s series Pluribus. We’ll be talking on this on Monday, February 9 at 12pm ET. We’d love for you to join us live or you can follow here or via your favorite podcast app!

Mae govannen!

Haha so… MaryAnn could not see anyone logged in to this conversation due to some quirk of Substack, but they were there! We ran the themes of Lord of the Rings through Ed’s standard signoff on his posts: GPLHJ, or Grace Peace Love Hope Joy.

Book recommendation: Everything Is a Story by Kaitlin Curtice

And here’s the quote MaryAnn read from Return of the King:

But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him, and he felt through all his limbs a thrill, as if he was turning into some creature of stone and steel that neither despair nor weariness nor endless barren miles could subdue.

We’ve got one more LOTR episode next Tuesday, February 3 at 1:00 p.m ET.: Category Crowns! Favorite villain, most annoying hero, and lots more fun. Link to join.

What can we say? The nerdery must flow. And the themes in the Lord of the Rings are RICH.

In honor of the LOTR trilogy’s re-release in theaters, we begin our series with a few rounds of “Will It Preach?” in which our magic wheel chose random scenes we had to wrestle some meaning out of. Tolkien being Tolkien, that wasn’t hard, but the conversation did take us in some unexpected places.

Watch this space for future episodes.

PS - Ed saw Fellowship in the theater tonight and it started with a rather off-the-cuff Peter Jackson commentary. I’m still trying to figure out what was on his t-shirt but I loved the fact that his cat-play-thing was just in the background.

And along with the folks I saw it with, a few members of the fellowship joined me…Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, and Boromir…

Before we dive in, here’s the audio of Dr. King reading Letter from Birmingham Jail, as Ed referenced. And there’s a lot of videos of Willie Pearl Mackey King telling the story of putting together the letter from the scraps of paper Dr. King had available while in the jail, and her work for civil rights in general. Here’s one.

So, Carrie Newcomer has a song called “Take More Time, Cover Less Ground.” Well, we kind of did the opposite today, we covered a LOT of ground in not a lot of time. During this hour, inspired by the wisdom of Barbara Brown Taylor we talked about “What’s Saving Our Lives Right now.” What is meant by that is what is giving us life, what is making us laugh, what is stirring hope, and so forth. We came up with quite an eclectic list of things that are keeping us going amid ~gesturing at everything~. Art is sustaining, illuminating, diverting, and more—and you see that full gamut reflected in our choices.

Viewer discretion advised on some of the items below.

Also note that there’s a short outtake at the end of the video… Its actually the beginning of the video where Substack went live before we were quite ready…

Our next time is scheduled to be this Friday at 11:30am ET as we do our first of three episodes on the Lord of the Rings books/films. We aren’t going film-by-film but instead three episodes on some themes from them - some deeper, some sillier, but all will be great.

MaryAnn’s list:

* Somebody Somewhere, HBOmax

* Hank Green’s comedy special “Pissing Out Cancer”, originally on DropoutTV, now free on YouTube

* “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine—the louder the better

* A Man on the Inside, Netflix

* Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

Ed’s list:

* The “Time” Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time

* Rooted: A Spiritual Memoir of Homecoming, Christy Berghoef (and here’s her Substack)

* The Soundtrack Show (podcast)

* Clair Obscur (video game)

* Sports! (Go Broncos)

What’s saving your life lately? Thanks to viewer Mark who shared the song “This Is My Country” by Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble.

Thanks again for joining us! Our LOTR “trilogy” is coming up!

Suffice to say it was a great 60 minutes of movie-ing, theologizing, and pop-culture-ing.

A few other links:

* Ed mentioned this book - Disobedient Women by Sarah Stankorb when we were discussing the ways that the church has not listened to the abused and sought to protect the abusers. This is a powerful book profiling women who stood up to the abuses in the Southern Baptist Convention.

* Our next conversation will be in early January about the new AppleTV show, Pluribus and then we’ll have several conversations later in the month about Lord of the Rings (books and movies). We’ll also be doing a few on the upcoming movie (based on the book), Project Hail Mary. So lots of great stuff on the horizon!

Thanks for joining in!

MaryAnn and Ed

Here are some links to the different ones we discussed:

* Keeping the Faith

* The Mitford Series (books) by Jan Karon

* Rev - BBC TV Show

* Of Gods and Men

* First Reformed

* Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

* Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Sound of Music, Signs, Fleabag, Vicar of Dibley

Super fun conversation! We’d love your thoughts!

MaryAnn McKibben Dana // Edward Goode