What Friends are Saying

Recommendation: the first episode of the "Ill Concieved" podcast, which promises to be a podcast about natalism. Their first episode is Promise Keepers.

Note: I had a complex reaction to this content. The dominant one is actually a sort of relief in finding someone in 2025 of vaguely my demographic digging into this. I recognise Promise Keepers. I don't think I know anyone who went to a Promise Keepers rally (I'm not even sure if there WERE such rallies in Aus), but I definitely heard people talk about the Important Movement which Ill Concieved delightfully describe as "700,000 Dicks Out For Jesus".

However. I was a left-ish, liturgy-friendly Protestant growing up around charismatic and Pentecostal-leaning evangelicals. I dealt with this by Reading Up, particularly once I got academic library access and could search the keywords which my confirmation mentor had mentioned. Marion Maddox's "God Under Howard" is in my top five formative books, I reckon. I also read a fair bit of Karen Armstrong, which I realise is not the BEST one could read, but several points which were jarring to me in that episode come under the heading of "wait, Karen Armstrong can and does explain this, I'm open to other explanations but you're just saying it's Odd?".

Consequently, I ended up posting a mini-essay in skeets. I reproduce it here with corrected punctuation.

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Recommendation: this.

Additional note: it’s a little weird to me, someone who dealt with growing up around charismatic evangelicals by researching as much on the history of both Pentecostalism and evangelical movements as I could get my teenage hands on, to hear @ junlper.beer repeatedly surprised about the multi-racial makeup of Promise Keepers. “Revival” style evangelical movements in the US have historic roots in African-American evangelical movements, and Pentecostalism in the US traces back to a Black revivalist preacher in early 20th c LA.

Pentecostalism didn’t get integrated into “mainline” evangelism until the 80s or so - many regarded them as indecorous, which no doubt had a lot to do with race. But folding Pentecostal practices and beliefs in with other charismatic evangelicals allowed the charismatic sectors of some of the major denominations to really strengthen their dominance over the evangelical cultural landscape.

( Summary One: you thought the filioque dispute was difficult, you thought reformation predistination disputes were arcane, you try not to think about Arianism... I give you: subdivisions of charismatic and pentecostal protestantism )

Summary two: some Protestants will do literally anything to avoid endorsing sacramentalism, including... whatever the fuck happened with Pentecostalism.

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*Obligatory citation to Marion Maddox's "God Under Howard".

Today's musical development is that courtesy of the world's least impressive dictactor parade, I have remembered that I actually like Credence Clearwater Revival. Figured out that the cassette tape we used to have in the car must have been Cosmo's Factory with a couple of tracks off Willy and the Poor Boys taped onto the end.

Instagram has been feeding me a trickle of interesting indie protest-song creators lately.

Consider Jesse Welles, who seems to be able to come up with a new political song within a day of every new twist the Trump administration disaster show. I do somewhat prefer his less "breaking news" work, for instance:



There's Malört & Savior, who have this rather catchy little track. Although what really strikes me is that they seem to be a fairly new band, and cerainly this was put out in the past month - but they SOUND like they walked straight out of 2009.



And there's Rain McMey, who has a few bangers going back a few years now, but this one delights me:



Podcasts, assorted recommendations:

The recent Bad Gays episode about Gavin Arthur was pretty fascinating.

I enjoy "Lions Led By Donkeys" frequently, and they had a thematically linked pair of interesting episodes recently: The Pastry War (also known as the first French Intervention in Mexico) and The War of the Oaken Bucket.

The most recent episode of Gender Reveal, with Alison Bechdel is great, generally, and has particularly interesting comments on the difference between memoir and fiction.

The Odd Lots podcast episode of last week, A Major American Egg Producer Just Lost 90% of its flock was fascinating. It's sort of a follow-up to Why are Eggs So Expensive of last year, which I also really appreciated (dangerous though: the cashier at my local service station convenience store wasn't expecting a mini-lecture on how long it takes to recover from a bird flu outbreak, or the impact which the fade-out of battery farms has). This time I was also particularly struck by the way Hickman talked about not being able to access vaccines - apparently the US exports vaccines to other countries who choose to vaccinate their laying flock, but US producers who WANT the vaccine can't get hands on it. He did not once mention the post-covid stakes in anti-vaccination policy, but you can kind of hear the outlines of it as he's talking. The other thing that was really clear is what an impact bird flu must have on the local economy - when Hickman's talking about the cost to the company of losing "institutional knowledge" and/or having to "hire back" the staff once the flock is re-established, that must mean that an outbreak means massive job losses.

The Behind the Bastards two-parter about Versailles was fascinating in its own right. I also, courtesy of a reminder somewhere in there that this is NOT a medieval system of administration, and courtesy of my own having figured out that the HSC modern history syllabus, which started "modernity" with the French revolution and absolutely did refer to the preceding regime as medieval, wasn't just lying-to-children, it was specifically drawing on the long duree, Marxist-leaning school of historical analysis - well put those two together and... oh, RIGHT. The reason the "palace complex" of Tamora Pierce's Tortall (or Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar) is so _bizarre_, economically speaking, is that their shared invisible template is _Versailles_. Combined with the 16th c English Chancery, certainly, and some influence from the Prussian War College.

Fiction:

I powered through Dimension 20's "Fantasy High: The Seven" and I loved it. Adorable! Now on to Fantasty High: Junior Year, which I am actually finding a little difficult as the early episodes have so much emphasis on how busy / under pressure everyone is. And the "your god is at risk of dying, you are her only believer, why aren't you evangelising for her?" storyline re Kristen is... uncomfortable. Maybe it's cathartic to Ally Beardsley, but it makes me feel squeamy.

Because I require MORE of Brennan Lee Mulligan in my ears, I found Worlds Beyond Number and am so far enjoying The Wizard, The Witch and the Wild One.