Featured : CHRISTINA WARD, Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat — An American HistoryDoes God have a recipe? I know who to ask! Independent food historian Christina Ward’s highly anticipated Holy Food explores the influence of mainstream (and fringe) religious beliefs on modern American food culture. It's the story of true believers and charlatans, of idealists and visionaries, and of the everyday people who followed them—often at their peril. Of course, religious beliefs have been the source of food "rules" since Pythagoras told his followers not to eat beans (because they contain souls, apparently), the Kosher and Halal rules that forbade he shrimp cocktail, or the long-ago Pope who forbade Catholics from eating meat on Fridays (fasting to atone for committed sins—or just needed to boost the fish market value?). Only in the United States—where the freedom to worship the God of your choice and sometimes of your own making—could people embrace such new ideas about religion...and what you’re allowed to put in your mouth (I am going to have to revisit my comedy sketch God costume, aren’t I…) By the way, if you aren’t already enticed, Holy Food features over 75 recipes from religious and communal groups tested and updated for modern cooks. Maybe instead of a cocktail we should have a bake off?

Episode was recorded live November 13, 2025.

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New laws limit access to abortion and threaten doctors with prison. Religious zealots and opportunistic politicians team up to ban books about sex and to “protect” children from their “corrupting” influence. Sound familiar? Welcome to America in the late 19th-century under the Comstock Act, a federal law that prohibited the distribution of information about sex, contraception, or abortion through the U.S. Mail.

SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner, tells the story of one woman who dared to challenge that law, and its namesake, the puritanical “vice-hunter” and U.S. postal inspector, Anthony Comstock. Ida Craddock was a late-Victorian feminist, scholar, and sexual mystic who defied Comstock, face-to-face. Defending the right of a woman to “control her own person,” Craddock risked everything by publishing frank instructional pamphlets about sex. Though arrested multiple times, sentenced to prison, committed to an asylum, and forced to turn over her books for burning, Craddock was undeterred in her fight for women’s sexual equality and her own First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion. The feminist icon, Emma Goldman, called her “one of the bravest champions of Women’s Emancipation,” and Craddock’s was the very first case to be taken up by the Free Speech League, a forerunner to modern civil liberties groups like the ACLU and PEN America.

SEX RADICAL Press Release

SEX RADICAL Live Stream Link

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Welcome to the Peculiar Movie Club, a bonus podcast linked to our main show the Peculiar Book Club through common themes in media. This week, in honor of having some Halloween fun, we are reviewing the horror comedy An American Werewolf in London.

Join Davey Berris and Darren Cross as they take a deep dive into the themes of transformation, anger and rage, and what's the best song with moon in the title.

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