Lost and Found, with Elaine Pagels

“That’s what faith is about, I think. Not knowing, but deciding to believe and to trust.”

— Elaine Pagels

About the Guest

ELAINE PAGELS is a historian of religion and the Harrington Spear Paine Professor at Princeton University. Her ground-breaking books include The Gnostic Gospels, The Origin of Satan, and the New York Times best-seller Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. Her most recent book tells her own story and why she loves investigating the history of religion: Why Religion? A Personal Story. In 2016 she received the National Medal for the Arts from President Barack Obama.

Best Books

Why Religion: A Personal Story, by Elaine Pagels.

Elaine recommended:
Man’s Search For Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl.
A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy
How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, by T.M. Luhrmann.

Transcript

ELAINE PAGELS: People don't always feel religious about suffering. And I don't like suffering. I don't have good things to say about it.

BLAIR HODGES: Elaine Pagels is a ground-breaking scholar of Christianity, a true rock star in her field. Back in the Sixties she was a student at Harvard when long-forgotten ancient texts re-emerged, secret gospels challenging old religious ideas.

ELAINE PAGELS: And I thought, wait a minute, what do you mean the Gospel of Thomas the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene? where do these come from? And what are they about? So all of us graduate students were riveted because we had a unique opportunity to look at texts that nobody had read for nearly two thousand years.

BLAIR HODGES: 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.

ELAINE PAGELS: This is the hardest book I ever wrote. I didn't intend to write it, it was necessary. And I didn't know if I'd ever publish it either.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I have good news. She did publish it. And it’s the kind of book that will stop you right in your tracks.

Welcome back to Fireside with Blair Hodges. Elaine Pagels is a historian of religion at Princeton University, one of the few scholars whose work has crossed over from the halls of academia to the New York Times best-seller list. In 2018 she published the outstanding memoir Why Religion?, which will plunge you into the depths of personal loss.

ELAINE PAGELS: But it was not just about loss. It was not just about a personal life, a memoir. It was also weaving the work that I do, and showing how this exploration of the study of religion and engagement in those traditions could be kind of a path of recovery.

BLAIR HODGES: This is episode 5. Lost and Found. There are a few intense moments dealing with sexual assault and also the death of close family members. If that concerns you, check out the transcript for guidance on when to skip ahead.

Why Why Religion? - 2:01

BLAIR HODGES: Dr. Elaine Pagels, welcome to Fireside.

ELAINE PAGELS: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking today about a book called Why Religion? The title itself is inspired by a question you've been hearing for decades.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes. Well, I grew up in a family that was nominally Christian. We went to a Methodist Church. But my father had given up the Christianity of his family. It was a kind of ferocious form of Presbyterianism, a lot of hell and damnation, he said. And as soon as he went to college and discovered Darwin he felt, “No, it's all wrong. That's just nonsense. I'm going with science.” So he went that way.

And I grew up hearing the attitude that religion was for people who just were uneducated and didn't understand science. So why would anyone explore it? You know, I mean, you might as well leave that, you know, in the archaic past, but I couldn't. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Well, you've heard it from a lot of people. Your book begins in the introduction talking about a reception for the New York Academy of Sciences—

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes! [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: —where your husband was the director, and we'll talk more about him later, but you're there with all these scientists. And then you get to say, “Oh, I study religion.” And you get these looks!

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, they say, “Religion! Why would you do that?” It does startle a lot of people who simply don't have that as part of their world. And I wanted to share my work with them. So I write books that should be accessible to any reader, and Why Religion was a question I had to grow up with. But at one point, I suddenly was immersed in it, and I fell right in.

BLAIR HODGES: And you bring us right into your personal life from the beginning of this book. It's an unusual book, I think, because a lot of scholars don't usually write about themselves and you’re writing almost confessionally here. Do you think there's a hesitancy in the academy to write more personally like this?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, of course, Blair. I mean, there's a taboo, not just a hesitancy. [laughter] I mean, scholars are supposed to be objective, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yes.

ELAINE PAGELS: There's a fantasy that people who study history are objective, but we all have points of view. And, I mean, we're responsible to data, you don't just make things up if you write history, but you do choose what you're interested in. And the same is true for anyone doing almost anything. But you're sort of forbidden to say, “Well, I'm, I'm really engaged in this personally.” But my work started as a kind of spiritual quest.

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, it started as this spiritual quest. And when people ask you “Why religion,” you mentioned how sometimes it's the more skeptical people or maybe scientifically minded people who say, “Why waste your time with that kind of thing?” That's kind of the attitude. What about from the religious side of things? Do people think that studying religion in the academy is also kind of a little scary or a little—Why are you doing that?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, yes, another time that question came up to me was when I first went out with a man I later married, very fortunately, and he was doing elementary particle physics. He said, “Well, why religion? I mean, why don't you do something that has impact in the real world?” And I said, “Why do you study elementary particles,” you know? So we both wanted to understand something fundamental.

But you're right, Blair, that religious people often feel that people who study religion and teach it are really out to debunk it, and sort of show all of its liabilities and what's wrong with it. That's not at all what many of us do. We're trying to understand how the great traditions of the world—whether it's Christianity, or Judaism, or Buddhism, or Islam—where they come from and how they shape a culture.

I think of them as cultural languages. They articulate the values of different cultures. They tell you what's meaningful in life. They tell you why we live and why we die, and who you may marry and who you may not, and what is men's work, and what is women's work. All of that is in Genesis 1, right? All of those issues are addressed.

So these are all powerful traditions that really are fundamental to the way we think, whether we are religious or not.

When Elaine Pagels got saved - 6:12

BLAIR HODGES: And as you said, this kind of began as a spiritual quest of sorts for you. You mentioned growing up in a home where your father at least was not very interested in religion, if not outright antagonistic to it. So I think some readers might be surprised to find out that you yourself converted to Christianity as a teenager at a Billy Graham revival.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, that's the last place that some of my readers would expect to find me. [laughs] But I went with some friends when I was in high school, fourteen years old, to hear Billy Graham. I didn't know who he was, but they were going to San Francisco and I thought that was much more interesting than the town I was living in. So I went. And there were eighteen thousand people packed into the sports stadium where I'd seen baseball played by the San Francisco Giants. And six thousand more people in the parking lot! It was absolutely—it stopped traffic all around San Francisco, this is a very big deal.

And then I heard this very striking preacher, as he was then, charismatic, powerful speaker. And he was talking about being born again and starting a whole new life. And I was fourteen. And I thought that was irresistible. I mean, who wouldn't want to have your own independent life and start all over? I was also moved by what he said about the love of God. So I went down at the altar call and was born again and joined an evangelical church. And I was engaged in it intensely for about a year.

BLAIR HODGES: And you say it really opened up a world for you, or worlds. It kind of expanded the possibilities for you, you also introduce us to your circle of friends at this time. So you're not joining alone, you've also got these friends, and you introduce us to someone called Paul, who I was really drawn to. Maybe spend a minute telling us about Paul.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, he was a high school friend, but he dropped out of high school because he was bored to death. All he wanted to do was paint, he had a great gift for painting. And he had lots of books about European painters throughout the ages. And he was painting on a level that was absolutely extraordinary in his garage. But his father thought his son must be crazy to want to stop going to school. And we had a bunch of sort of Maverick friends that were painting and would be artists and musicians and—

BLAIR HODGES: Including Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. That is not a lie! [laughs]

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes! Jerry Garcia was then, he'd been discharged from the army, and he was playing music around the coffee house where we always went. I mean, playing a 12-string steel guitar with nine and a half fingers. Brilliant musician. And we were high school kids. And we were very impressed by him.

And so that's part of the story, as you know, of how I got out of that evangelical group. Because there was a gathering one night—I wasn't there, but other friends were. And afterwards, as some were driving home, there was an automobile accident, the car was going very fast. Car spun. Our high school friend Paul was suddenly killed, crushed by the car. And two other passengers—one was Jerry Garcia, and the other was his closest friend, Alan Trist, who had just come from England and found this wild foreign world. And they survived the crash. And it was five years after that that Jerry Garcia started the band he called the Grateful Dead. And I thought, “Oh, so I know where that name comes from.” Because, you know, they were as good as dead. And Jerry later said he started to get serious about his life at that point.

But for me, it was very different. I was devastated by the death of our friend.

BLAIR HODGES: You took an interesting path, though, because here you could have said, why would God let something like this happen? But that doesn't seem to be the question that stood out to you at that time.

ELAINE PAGELS: I was just terribly in shock and in need of consolation. So I went to my evangelical friends and said this terrible thing had happened. And they said, Oh, that's, that's awful. Was he born again? And I said, no, he was Jewish. They said, well then he’s in hell. And I thought, wasn't Jesus Jewish?

But I mean, I couldn't even speak. I was so stunned and shocked at their reaction that I just walked out of there and never went back. That was nothing about the love of God that Billy Graham had preached. And I just found I had no place there.

Leaving religion and seeking religion - 10:36

BLAIR HODGES: Yes, you talk about how it was that sort of judgment, and what you saw as hypocrisy, and it didn't match up with what you thought you were getting when you joined Christianity.

And so at this point, it seems like your story is heading in a certain direction away from religion entirely, that maybe you wouldn't want anything to do with it. And then you arrive at Stanford University and you notice that even there, religion wasn't seen as something worth much academic study, either. So let's talk a little bit about how you stuck with thinking about religion after such a traumatic experience. And also the fact that religion wasn't heavily studied in the academy at the time.

ELAINE PAGELS: Not only it wasn't studied. It was not a subject you could study. I mean, you could study anything from astronomy to zoology, but religion was something they'd send you to the chaplain, and I didn't want to go to the chaplain and hear some nice words, they just sounded hollow to me. So I abandoned all that.

I decided I was going to New York to become a dancer. Modern Dance was what I was learning, and it was marvelous. So I did that.

BLAIR HODGES: But you didn't stay there, though. Something—something about you brought you back again, to think about religion.

ELAINE PAGELS: The first thing that brought me back was the fact that I realized, Blair, that I was pretty good as a dancer. But you can't be pretty good in New York. I mean, that's nowhere. There were some of those students who were fantastic, right? And you'd be waiting on tables forever if you're the level I was.

So I thought, okay, what's plan B? And that was years after the accident. And I thought, well, there's something about that experience of being born again, being part of that intense religious group, that kind of felt like it opened up another dimension. It was like I lived on a flat earth, and suddenly the sky opened up, and it was full of a much bigger universe, right? So I thought, what hit me? What was it about religion that was so compelling? Was it Christianity, or could have been Buddhism or what? So I went to graduate school, very much choosing a non-religious school, because I didn't want to be brainwashed, and I felt there was too much of that. And I decided to find out, what do we know about Jesus anyway? And that's where I started.

BLAIR HODGES: And this is at Harvard, right?

ELAINE PAGELS: This was at Harvard. I started to do a Ph.D. program in the study of religion. I thought, what do we know about Jesus? Well, the answer is, we really don't know much until about forty years after his death when the Gospel of Mark, the earliest one, was written.

And then I realized—I found out at Harvard, which I had no idea—that there had been found in 1945, a whole library of secret gospels that we'd never heard of. And I thought, wait a minute. What do you mean the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip? Where do these come from? And what are they about?

So all of us graduate students were riveted because we had a unique opportunity to look at texts that nobody had read for nearly two thousand years.

Facing sexism and more as a woman in the academy - 13:33

 BLAIR HODGES: It just so happens that you came to Harvard at this pivotal time in religious scholarship, especially regarding Christianity, as all these texts were coming to light. But it was also a time when there were a lot of obstacles placed in your way, because you were a woman. You talked about this in the book.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, I applied to the graduate school, for the PhD program. And I got a note from the dean, which I'll never forget, saying, “Well, we've read your application. Ordinarily, we would admit a student with your qualifications. However, women always quit the doctoral program. So we just cannot offer you a place. We could only admit five students this year. And we can't give a place to a woman because they always quit.” And then he put a note at the end, he said, “But if you're still serious a year from now, we'll guarantee you admission.”

So I was pretty frustrated. But hey, that was where I wanted to be. So I said, Okay, I'll spend another year studying Greek, because you never can read Greek to well, at least I couldn't, it's a hard language.

BLAIR HODGES: And that got you ready. But there were even more obstacles. When you finally were admitted you also had some terrible experiences with a particular professor there. And in this part of the book, you talk about sexual assault, about something really personal and really difficult. How did you feel putting this into the book and kind of telling this story?

ELAINE PAGELS: I wasn't going to tell that story. Except Blair, that particular professor of New Testament, right, a European famous scholar, it wasn't a onetime thing. It became his way of life. He would always try to seduce women graduate students, and it was a habit, and everybody knew it, and nobody talked about it, including me, because it was—I mean, nobody would believe it. Because he would say, “Well, that's ridiculous. She's making it up.” And there was no way in the world that anyone would have believed it. So I just put it in the back of my mind and went and did my work, you know?

And I only actually really thought about it and remembered it decades later, when people were praising my work, and he stood up and started saying what a wonderful student I was. And a friend of mine said, “You looked so weird when your advisor got up there. If my advisor said that about me, I'd be so happy.” And suddenly a light went off, and I thought, Oh, there are things about this man I wanted to forget. But I couldn't forget.

So then I went to the office of the President of Harvard who was doing a study on sexual harassment—it's not an accident that this was the first woman President of Harvard who did this, Drew Faust—and reported this man.

And it turned out that this was, as I said, it was known by everybody and never spoken about for decades. I wrote about it because it was a habit of his or I wouldn't have. And also because it happened to so many women. It's not just about me. This is just a typical story, unfortunately, of what graduate school was like then. And is now for some people, but far less because now it's much more likely that women will report it, and they might even be believed.

BLAIR HODGES: I feel like it's an important part of the story. And even now, it seemed to me that it took some courage to be able to talk about that.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, it did because it was about the time that he was being honored, and he was very old. And I thought, I didn't want to exactly expose him. But I just felt that he had it coming, and that people should know. And so it was a relief to finally talk about something that had been taboo for so long.

So many women have that story in so many fields, Blair. At business, at work, anywhere you go.

Audacious heretical women who love and contend - 17:13

BLAIR HODGES: So with all those obstacles, you still persisted. You're this person that just continuously persists throughout the book. You're at Harvard at this pivotal time when these new texts are coming to light, these secret gospels, these documents that had been forgotten or hidden away, that weren't included in the Christian canon. And a lot of Christians, when this starts coming out seem to kind of want to resist this. “They're heretical, they're not in the canon, we can ignore these”—

You seem to come at it from a different angle, you almost seem to relish in the fact that some of the early Christian fathers like Tertullian were pushing back against these texts. You quote Tertullian, where he says, "These heretical women! How audacious they are, they have no modesty, and they're bold enough to teach, enact healing, and maybe even baptize!" You seem to love that quote.

ELAINE PAGELS: [laughs] Well, you know, we were told at Harvard that these books were heresy, and they probably had a lot of nonsense in them, just sort of, you know, magic passwords and gobbledygook, and it was just going to be kind of junk. This is the junk, right? And the good gospels are in the New Testament.

What we found that was really a surprise was, I started with the Gospel of Thomas. And what it is—it’s not a gospel, like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, because it doesn't really have a story. And it's not written to contradict the other gospels. It's meant to amplify them and give you secret teachings that Jesus didn't teach to everybody. Because the New Testament gospels always talk about Jesus out in the fields, there's five thousand people—five thousand men. Women and children weren't counted—Five thousand men listening to him, or four thousand, or hundreds. But these actually say, “Yes, but there are things he also taught secretly.” The Gospel of Mark says in chapter four that he taught secretly to his disciples the secret of the Kingdom of God. But Mark never tells you what he taught secretly. These texts claim to give you a secret teaching of Jesus. And that's one thing that surprised us.

But then I opened this, the Gospel of Thomas, and it's just a list of one hundred and fourteen sayings. And lots of them are ones you know perfectly well from Matthew and Luke, like, love your brother, the parable of the mustard seed, the parable of the pearl of great price, you know, many familiar stories. But the others were really amazing.

The one that hit me is saying number seventy, in which—this is how it goes. Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."

And I thought, Whoa, you don't have to believe that it just happens to be true. I was thinking of it psychologically. And later, I understood that it's also a theological statement. I got to know this text much better. It's a mystical text.

Now, did Jesus really teach it? Frankly, we don't know. But it sounds very much like other things that he did teach.

BLAIR HODGES: And while you're digging into these texts, and really seeing these things for the first time, you also come back to Christianity. You call yourself “incorrigibly Christian.” [laughter] What was this reconversion like?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, it wasn't a reconversion. I just felt that this is the culture that I live in. And this is the spiritual language that speaks to me. I wanted to study Buddhism too at Harvard, we had wonderful professors apart from the exception you mentioned. And I wanted to study Buddhism. But the way it was taught there was really engaged. And I was trying to study Hebrew and Greek, and Coptic, French, and German, to work with the subject. And I couldn't understand the Buddhist texts, I knew that, in any depth if I didn't do the languages, so couldn't do it.

But I also feel that this is the tradition that I love and contend with. And here we now thought there's a lot more about Jesus than we ever had before. I mean, we had a little narrow stream of tradition, four gospels. Now there's a whole lot more information. Why was all this suppressed? Who did that and why? So there are a lot of questions that opened up. And I thought, this is like a detective story. We all had a great deal of fun because we never expected something like this.

BLAIR HODGES: And it wasn't back to evangelical Christianity either. Where did you find communion at this point?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, there were some wonderful friends and I actually went to a church in Boston—I’m trying to think, the Church of the Ascension, which was actually an Episcopal Church, because I was going out with somebody who was studying to be an Episcopal priest. And it was very moving. I mean, I loved the music, and the liturgy, the gathering for the supper of the Lord, you know, it was very powerful. So I became part of that community. And so I was both a participant and an observer, and I still am.

BLAIR HODGES: That's what might blow people's minds the most. Do people try to get you to answer like, do you really believe this? Or is it fairy tales? We want to know, is this true or not? Do you get that?

ELAINE PAGELS: [laughs] Well, it can be true in fairy tales. And what I mean by that is, it doesn't have to be literally true to tell the truth. Because sometimes stories are ways that people communicate.

I mean, Jesus told stories about someone finding a pearl in a field. That's not a literal story, it's a metaphorical story. And some of the stories about Jesus are certainly understood as speaking in symbols like that. And these texts often do that. So they opened up different ways of thinking, Blair. Because many American Christians particularly have been influenced by what started at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is this movement called Fundamentalism, in which a group of ministers tried to get to the fundamentals, and they meant, well, every word in the Bible has to be taken literally. You know, the world is created in seven days. There's a flood that goes over the whole world until Noah descends from the ark. I mean, all of that. Now, I don't take those things literally. But I do take them seriously as very powerful ways our culture has taught us to think and imagine and live.

A theoretical physicist and a scholar of religion - 23:43

BLAIR HODGES: That's Elaine Pagels. She's a historian of religion, and today we're talking about her book, Why Religion?: A Personal Story. It was published in 2018. Elaine, you also introduce us to your family. This is a, as I said, a really personal book. So we get to know a little bit about your husband. Tell us a little bit about him.

ELAINE PAGELS: He was magnificent. He was a theoretical physicist, I met him when I was in high school, I saw him actually and was stunned to see such a handsome young man, as he was then starting Stanford doing a PhD in theoretical physics. I didn't know that at the time, I just thought, oh, look at that beautiful young boy. [laughter]

Anyway, so years later, I met him when I was at Stanford as a freshman and he was a graduate student. And he was just playful, thoughtful, imaginative, a wonderful dancer. Loved the outdoors. And we just were fascinated by each other. But he thought my subject was really weird! And I thought his was unintelligible, although I came to love theoretical physics as a bystander, because I don't do mathematics easily. That was his language and I came to appreciate the wonderful imagination and vision of these theoretical physicists.

Anyway, I hadn't planned to get married, because I thought it would end my career. So it wasn't until I got my PhD and he asked me to marry him, and that was a surprise too, and it was an offer that I couldn't refuse.

BLAIR HODGES: So Heinz Pagels, together with him, you experienced a lot, even early on, you talk about dealing with infertility, that you wanted to have children, but...

ELAINE PAGELS: It didn't happen.

BLAIR HODGES: It didn't happen. And so you describe kind of ritual that a friend invited you to try.

ELAINE PAGELS: It was kind of a joke I thought, but the person who did it was an artist. And this is the 1970s, you know, when things are kind of—the art was heating up in New York City, and people were doing all kinds of performance art. And this artist was doing rituals.

And actually, so much of religious tradition is about rituals, Blair, it's not about what you believe, as much as it is about what you do. And so she was doing these as kind of experiments, these rituals with groups in New York in a performance theater. And she said to me, Do you have children? I said, No, we really want children, but it hasn't happened. And she said, Well, I'll do a ritual for you.

So she did. And it was a very powerful experience, actually.

BLAIR HODGES: What did it look like?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, we gathered in her loft and meditated, and all of the women there had had children, and they spoke about children and childbearing, and it was powerful. It put me in touch with things I wasn't aware of. And who knows why, I became pregnant shortly after that and had a wonderful child.

BLAIR HODGES: Did you think twice about it at that point? Did you wonder if that did something special, or—?

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, absolutely. I talked to the doctor I've been seeing about, you know—a gynecologist. He was Belgian and a Catholic. And he said, Well, you know, things happen mysteriously, like this. We don't understand it. They often do.

And actually, there are many things I put in the book, as you know, that are experiences I can't explain that sound a little strange, like having a fertility ritual. I felt kind of silly when I went into it. But it felt quite powerful when it happened.

Mark - 27:24

BLAIR HODGES: This is where we meet Mark, the child that you had. And it's so easy, from the way that you tell the story, it's so easy to fall in love with this child as you introduce him to us and you're a new mother. But this is a fragile child.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, we were told when he was born that he had a problem with his heart. So we had to go back on his first birthday and he had open heart surgery. It was a new surgery that had been perfected at this New York hospital just five years before. And it went very well. We thought we were home free after that. But a couple years later we discovered he had a potential problem with his lungs that could involve, they said, a terminal illness from which there were no survivors. It's called pulmonary hypertension. And people with that illness often die very young.

We were horrendously shocked, and asked the doctor, Well, how long? What are you talking about? He said, We don't know, a few months, few years. So we lived with this child that we adored knowing that the doctor said there was no hope. And we went to Boston, we went to San Francisco, different hospitals. Nothing short of a heart lung transplant would help. And the same is true today.

BLAIR HODGES: And there was one point where they performed a special procedure on him. And you talk about another one of these kind of mystical experiences that are found throughout your book. Talk about that night, the sort of vision that you had.

ELAINE PAGELS: That happened actually the night before he was going to have open heart surgery, he was just one. And the hospitals at that time, that's like twenty-five years ago, didn't want parents hanging around and bothering the staff, right? They wanted parents to go home at night, there was no place you could sleep in the same room with a child or anything. You could only sleep on the concrete floor if you were going to stay and I wasn't going to leave because you don't leave a one-year-old alone in a hospital room. At least I wasn't going to do it.

So I was sitting there about two in the morning, pretty much unable to sleep and really quite terrified. And then I had the sense suddenly that there were—there was a whole circle of women sitting with me. One of them was a woman I knew who is a professor of religion at another university, and others were sitting in a circle. And I felt very comforted by their presence. And after that I felt much more calm. And when they came the next morning and they wheeled this baby into the operating room for open heart surgery, my husband and I were waiting there, and I wrote a note to the woman I'd seen in the dream. She was living in California at the time, and I said, you know I had this dream last night. And I dreamt that you were here, and there was a whole circle of women. And I'm in the hospital with Mark, he's about to have open heart surgery. And it was very comforting. Strange.

And so then, about four days later, after the surgery, I got a note from her, saying, On Monday night we were sitting in the sister’s circle and praying for you and your son. I didn't know they did that. I had no idea they were going to do that. So how did that happen? I mean, there must be some more communication between people than we ordinarily recognize, or certainly we can't replicate scientifically. But things like that happen. So I decided to take a risk, Blair, that was another risk, and write about them.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm really glad you did. Getting to know Mark is a really, it's a special part of the book. And with his diagnosis being terminal, it did come down to Mark's death, and you're able to write about this. And, considering my own children, I don't know how I would be able to do that. How I would be able to write about that.

ELAINE PAGELS: You wouldn't. No. Because I mean, I couldn't even imagine. Your children are small, in kindergarten and second grade?

BLAIR HODGES: That's right.

ELAINE PAGELS: Mark was in kindergarten too at the time. No, write about it? That's impossible. I never thought I would write about it. And I never intended to.

I write about other things. I mean, I wrote a book about the origin of Satan. I wrote a book about, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. But years after—I mean, I'm talking thirty-five years after that happened, you know, if you have something overwhelming happen, and you just put it out of your mind, because it's like a black hole in space, it's too terrible, dark, and frightening to go close to, right? But it's there, you know? It doesn't disappear from your life, your memory, your experience. And if you just ignore it, it comes back.

So there was a time—that's only thirty-five years later, that I thought, You know, what, I can't just—I can't just pretend that didn't happen, I have to—If you want to live your full life you have to engage your experience and not just block it off because it's too traumatic, as it was, for decades. So that's when I started to write about it. And it was very hard. This is the hardest book I ever wrote. I didn't intend to write it, it was necessary. And I didn't know if I'd ever publish it either, Blair.

But it was not just about loss. It was not just about a personal life, a memoir. It was also weaving the work that I do, and showing how this exploration of the study of religion and engagement in those traditions could be kind of a yoga, kind of a path of recovery. And could be helpful. I wanted to write not about loss, because look, everybody has loss. We know a lot about it.

But the surprise is that you can recover from loss that you imagine you couldn't possibly live through, because if anybody'd told me what would happen, I couldn't have imagined living through it. And I still can't, except that people are more resilient than I imagined. And I'm grateful for that.

In times of mourning - 34:03

BLAIR HODGES: What kind of things did you come to realize about religion in particular, through losing Mark?

ELAINE PAGELS: Well you know, what you do if you're raised in Christianity is you can go to the book of Job. And there, Job expresses anger. And that was one thing that my culture had never talked about it. I mean, Jewish and Christian tradition says when somebody dies, you tear your clothes, and you put ashes on your head, and you fast and you mourn, and you grieve, and you cry, but you don't get angry. But I was angry. And so that was one thing I had to learn. I learned it from an anthropologist who had also suffered a similar tragedy, not only with his child, but also with his beloved wife. And so that was a help.

But also I realized that, you know Blair, I decided to write about it because one of the great taboos, another one, is writing about the death of a child, because it's every parent's nightmare. And people to whom it's happened often never talk about it, even to their own family members. And I realized that part of the reason for this in Western culture is that our religious tradition, Jewish/Christian, teaches us that if your child dies, it's your fault. You are guilty.

And of course, it's partly a natural feeling, because your job as a parent is to keep your children alive, right? That's really basic. And if you can't do that, you feel devastated. But it's not just devastation. It's also guilt. For example, if you're a Buddhist, if I were a Buddhist, I might have learned that every being comes into life with a certain karma, a certain lifespan, a certain level of energy. And some of them learn what they need to learn in this life very quickly. They might learn it in three years, or six months, or six years, six and a half years, like my son, and say, Well, he had accomplished when he came here to do, and he's gone, and that's the way it should be.

But our culture, the story of Adam and Eve says, Why do we die? We die because somebody sinned. Adam sinned, and if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, we wouldn't die. There wouldn't be pain, there wouldn't be oppression, all those things happen—God doesn't do it. But humans caused it. And even for example, I was really stunned, [laughs] I was reading the story of David and Bathsheba. And you know, David sees this woman naked, she's bathing, and he catches a glimpse of her, and he desires her. So he puts her husband in the front of the army in order to get him killed, which succeeds. And then he takes this woman as one of his concubines, King David, and they have a son. And the Bible says—you can check it out—that the Lord smote the baby. The baby died because of the sin of David and Bathsheba, having this sexual relationship before they were married.

So the Bible teaches actually, that if your child dies, it's something the parents did wrong, this is punishment. And I came to realize that I had been taught that, and yet that it was inappropriate. That is, guilt is appropriate if you do something careless and negligent as a parent so that your child dies because you're not taking care of them. Or because the parent harms the child, right? Horrible things, but they do happen. But guilt is inappropriate if you do everything you can to prevent it, and you can't help it.

So learning about the history of religion isn't just learning the benefits of it. But it's also learning the liabilities of it, where you have to say, No, I don't accept that story. That doesn't resonate with my experience. And I was able to let go of that. And I wanted to write about that, because so many parents suffered not only terrible grief, but guilt on top of it. And that's not necessary.

BLAIR HODGES: It's also interesting to think about how the guilt takes on different registers, or comes from different angles, depending on different traditions. As I'm listening to you describe this kind of guilt, within my faith tradition, Mormonism, there's this sense of, kind of like you said, where there's a plan, and a person is here to progress and learn and grow. And maybe they do that in the span of a couple of years, and then they die. And that's for the better. So the guilt for a parent might actually be connected to wanting the child to still be alive, rather than feeling like they somehow caused the death—

ELAINE PAGELS: Ah.

BLAIR HODGES: —but rather saying, I shouldn't feel sad, I shouldn't feel sad about this. This is God's plan. And it's wrong of me to feel bad.

ELAINE PAGELS: This is God's will, so I shouldn't feel grief.

BLAIR HODGES: Right.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, I was just working with a senior at Princeton who is studying parents whose children are in the intensive care ward for very compromised children. And she's doing that because her younger brother has a very serious case of autism. And she is devoted to her younger brother. But she realizes that many people speak about God's will that way. And she realized that can be very cruel. “Why don't you just accept it as God's will? Why are you feeling such grief? Why are you feeling such anger? You shouldn't feel that way.”

BLAIR HODGES: Or if you believe in Jesus, “the child will be resurrected, you'll get them back. There's no reason to feel bad, then.”

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, yes, I mean, a monk, one of the Catholic monks said to me, after this happened, God must love you very much. And I sort of looked at him and I said, Well, that reminds me of what St. Teresa said once. If this is the way he treats his friends, no wonder he has so few of them. [laughs] Right?

But the other side of it is, Blair, that these traditions can offer some consolation. I mean, the Book of Job allows Job to rant and be angry and frustrated and grieve. And then at the end, there is this moment, in which he realizes that the energy that created the universe is so far beyond our understanding, and how life comes into it, and how life leaves it is so far beyond us and our understanding that you just have to let go and recognize the mystery and the wonder that’s articulated at the end of the Book of Job. So I'm saying in these traditions, there's both. There can be tremendous help for our understanding or our failure to understand. There’s so much we don't understand.

BLAIR HODGES: There's a quote here I'd like to read where you said, when people would try to comfort you with the loss of Mark, they would have pat answers or say things like the priest that you just mentioned, and you say, "Whatever most people mean by faith was never more remote than during times of mourning”—

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes.

BLAIR HODGES: —"When professions of faith in God sounded like unintelligible noise heard from the bottom of the sea."

ELAINE PAGELS: People would say, “Oh, your faith must have really helped you.” And at the time, if you're in rending grief, your faith may be as remote as mine was. I mean, people don't always feel religious about suffering. And I don't like suffering. I don't have good things to say about it. I mean, I do think that people can find meaning and actually that we must, or you can kind of go crazy or into depression, or even suicide—

BLAIR HODGES: This is what Anthropologist Clifford Geertz was talking about. You quote him where he's talking about how religion can “help make suffering sufferable.”

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, he said religion helps make suffering sufferable. That's one of the things it does. And I wanted to say, Well also, Clifford, it can make joy more joyful, you know, when you're celebrating a wedding or a joyful thing. But yes, it does help.

And, and yet Blair, I learned more from Viktor Frankl's little book, do you know the book Man's Search for Meaning?

BLAIR HODGES: Of course.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well of course, everyone should read it. It's just seventy pages by a Jewish psychiatrist in the Auschwitz death camp, when the Nazis had confined Jews there and were burning them alive. And his wife was also in the same camp and she died there. Horrendous suffering intentionally inflicted, which is something I've never experienced. It's just overwhelming. And he said, you can't just find meaning in suffering like that. I couldn't find meaning in my son's death, this a beautiful child with so much to offer. I didn't find it meaningful that he died. But he said, Sometimes you can create meaning.

And so what we did was feel that we were so devastated by the death of our child that we had to find children to whom we could give the love that we couldn't give to that child. And we had to find children who needed parents the way we needed children. So we adopted two children. And that was a way of finding meaning, and going on living. And other people do this too. But I think it's very important to understand that sometimes these are ways of dealing with the suffering by giving something to other people to diminish their suffering, or to make your life more joyful.

BLAIR HODGES: I've had the experience of helping to care for someone who's dying. So this question comes from a place of understanding, or at least of resonance. You talk about the unbelievable sadness, but you also mentioned how it's mixed with a kind of relief as well. The thing that you and Heinz had been fearing so much had finally happened. And that at least takes away the anxiety of anticipation, and you remember even thinking with Heinz that “nothing worse could happen.” That's the thought that you had.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yeah, well, nothing—what could be worse than the death of a child? You know, even in the ancient world when it happened so often, people called it the unbearable grief.

Back and forth - 44:27

BLAIR HODGES: It's ominous when you say nothing worse could happen because more happens to you. What happened to Heinz?

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, we adopted two children. And when the youngest was three months old—we'd just adopted him, beautiful child, and his sister was two—my husband was taking his usual Saturday hike with other physicists in the mountains, and fell from a peak and died instantly, apparently. And he had been hiking for all the twenty-two years we were married, he did it all the time. He was someone who loved to be out in the mountains as so many people in Santa Fe know. And this was in Colorado. That was, that was devastation beyond devastation.

BLAIR HODGES: These moments—again, transcendence seems to keep breaking in on your story. You talk about hearing a voice after he died.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, I don't know if you've had this kind of experience. But I only wrote about it because it happened. And because many people do.

It was three days after his death and I was in complete shock. I had boils all over my body, and I went to the emergency room and the doctor said, Well, you're in post-traumatic stress syndrome. I was sort of speechless. I couldn't even cry. I was just—I was just in shock. And after I went with some friends to make funeral arrangements, I went out to a monastery in Colorado, which is a monastery of the Trappist order, Cistercian orders is what Catholics call it. I'm not a Catholic, they knew I'm a Protestant and a heretic! But these monks were very remarkable men, and they are. And they always invited me and other people to come to their evening prayer services in which they sing and have the mass. It's powerful, and they're quite spiritually powerful people.

So I was just though in shock and barely could walk, I couldn't think about anything. So I went there and sat in the chapel with a monk named Theophane, which means “manifestation of God.” I mean, he was an amazing human being full of laughter and light and depth and beauty, just an amazingly spiritual being. And we sat in the chapel for about an hour and a half. And it got very quiet for the first time in three days.

And then I weirdly felt that I could ask my husband, Well how do you feel about this? And just like that, I thought I heard a voice. I mean, it wasn't an audible voice, it was in my head, saying, This is fine with me, it's you I'm concerned about now. And I thought Fine with you, what are you talking about? This is not fine with me. You leave me with two babies, and you say it's fine with you?

And then I realized that he had died. And I thought, wait a minute. That wasn't my unconscious talking. It wasn't fine with me. It's not fine with me today, that I had to live without him ever since that time, that's thirty years ago. And it was not fine with me that these two children would grow up without their wonderful father. So I thought—but it sounded like him. It sounded like something he would say. And that really kind of made me mad. But it was more surprising. And I thought, it certainly sounded like him. So I don't know. It's—I don't think it was my unconscious talking, which is what I would have said, the way I was brought up to be a rationalist.

BLAIR HODGES: And I feel like you kind of go back and forth on this too, because there's a part where you say, even with these spiritual experiences, you say there are some days when you do expect to see Heinz and Mark again—

ELAINE PAGELS: I do.

BLAIR HODGES: And then there are other times when you expect, you say, “I expect nothing more than blank sky when it all ends.”

ELAINE PAGELS: That's right. I mean, I'm sure that when I face death, I'll hope to see them. And many people do apparently see people they love, when at that point, it's, you know, it's a rather common experience—or they think they do. So I can't tell you for sure that I think it's that.

But that seems true to me. And it maintains a hope that there is something beyond devastation and death. And that's what faith is about, I think. Not knowing, but deciding to believe that, to trust that.

Discovering Satan -  49:03

BLAIR HODGES: That's Elaine Pagels. She's a historian of religion and her books include the Gnostic Gospels, The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. We're talking today about her book, Why Religion?: A Personal Story.

So you've lost Mark, you've lost Heinz, you have two new children you're caring for, and somehow you managed to carry on, you managed to continue. And instead of writing about these experiences—as you said, you couldn't, that's not where you were at—but you had to still write, and so you started writing about Satan.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, I started writing about Satan, Blair, because some well-meaning minister said, Well now, don't be angry at God. And I thought, I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me. I'd love to be angry at somebody because I found I was driving too fast. I was wanting to crash into the car next to me, I was just kind of a wreck. I thought about how in the ancient world somebody would’ve said, This isn't God. This is Satan. Satan is the spiritual power that throws obstacles at people, that tests and that challenges and that harms human life.

So I thought, okay, I'll be angry at Satan. That seems like a safe thing, because I don't believe in Satan. So I started reading stories about Satan and thinking, who made these stories up? Why did they write them? What was going on here? Who invented Satan?

And what really surprised me, well, I realized Blair, that if somebody says to you, “You know, Satan is trying to take over this country.” That person is not just thinking of good and evil fighting up there in the atmosphere. That person's thinking about people right down here on Earth and can give you names and addresses. You know? They know who they're talking about. So when people talk about Satan, they're talking about people.

And I began to look at the New Testament very differently, and the story of Jesus, in which his followers say that Satan engineered his death, caused certain people to hound him and try to kill him, and then they succeeded in killing him and crucifying him. So I thought, well, that's really amazing. Interesting. So who will it be when I start reading the New Testament—I teach this stuff all the time—who will it be, that are seen as the people of Satan? I thought, well it’ll be the Romans who executed Jesus, and the Jewish high priests who collaborated with them—Mark says, you know, they turned him over to Pilate and Pilate had him crucified.

And I started to read Mark's gospel again, I thought I knew what I was reading. It didn't say that! I was so surprised. It spoke about the Romans as if they were innocent of causing Jesus's death. But the stories always connect Satan with Jews who were Jesus's own people. First Judas Iscariot, and then the chief priests, and then all the priests, and Matthew says with all the people of Jerusalem, who tried to help King Herod kill the baby Jesus. And then Matthew says in chapter 27, that when Jesus was on trial before Pilate, Pilate wanted to release him. But it says, the whole people shouted out “His blood be upon us and on our children.” And that's, that's the kind of—it gives me chills to say this—that's the kind of thing that Christians when they became powerful in the Roman Empire said about Jews who were not followers of Jesus.

When I wrote about it I thought, So these stories about Satan, to my total surprise, landed me right back in the real world. And when a friend of mine read this manuscript, he said, I sat up all night reading your book. I never knew why they called me a Christ killer in high school. I never killed anybody. I was kind of stunned. But I began to realize that these stories have been used in the real world to target not only Jews when Christianity became powerful, but heretics and people of a different religion.

So, you know, in the religious wars of Europe, a hundred thousand people died, Catholics fighting Protestants, and Protestants killing heretics and Catholics, and Protestants burning Catholics at the stake, and Catholics burning Protestant at the stake for translating the Bible into English. Can you imagine? These stories are dangerous, you know? And I became convinced, Blair, that I would not again call any person evil, although there are some candidates we could mention, because human beings are really complicated.

But there are deeds that are absolutely evil. And I mean by evil, violence against—especially against innocent people, against children, against anyone who's defenseless. So evil is harming people, or animals or whatever, the earth.

BLAIR HODGES: And you're projecting that judgment onto behaviors rather than simplifying people as being that.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes! Because if you say, “Our people are God's people, your people are Satan's people,” you can't negotiate with people, if you identify conflict in terms of good and evil only. You have to annihilate them. And that happened from the time Christians started war against Muslims, and Muslims have war against Christians. Jews don't do this that much. But it's Christians and Muslims who have done this. So the conflict between Christians and Muslims, and we're seeing it in the last, what, twenty, thirty years today, right? It’s still going on. And of course, it's not only Christians and Muslims, it's Buddhists and Hindus. But—

BLAIR HODGES: And we see it happening in Palestine. We just keep seeing this story keep on happening, here.

ELAINE PAGELS: It is. And I think that we can't afford to use stories that categorize whole groups as evil. Because it creates the impression that you can't negotiate with people. I think that's another liability of these traditions.

So I think it's really important that you brought out in this conversation, not only the great gifts that religious traditions give us, of which we're much more aware, and we speak about those more often. But also there are liabilities here that we need to be aware of and let go of. I mean, our common faith, Blair, Christianity, has been used to kill Jews, to kill people of different race. It's been used in all kinds of evil ways, just as Islam is sometimes used.

 A spiritual energy inside - 56:05

BLAIR HODGES: This also reminds me of something you do with the gospel of Mark, where you note that scholars looking at the Gospel of Mark see that it has two endings, that the original Mark that a lot of people read anciently ended at a very strange moment. As a scholar of the text, you see that Jesus is apparently dead and his disciples are fleeing in fear, and that's the end of it.

And your Christianity seems to lean into that moment, that moment of discomfort. Rather than trying to skip ahead to the triumphant resurrection, but to live in that interim space where it's kind of still unclear exactly what's happening and the disciples feel fear and uncertainty.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, it's not that I prefer to live in that space. It's just that we often do, you know? [laughs] And it speaks about the world we live in. I mean, often, you know, situations are very difficult. And so I think there in Mark's gospel, he wouldn't write a gospel—which means good news of course—if he didn't believe there was something much more mysterious and wonderful going on in the world that we don't understand, that life is something that we bless and are grateful for.

So I wanted to write, as I said, about the surprise that we can live through things that we can't possibly imagine we could survive. And people do. And then they can also be very positive and do positive things with life after that. And I feel, I'm just so surprised to have a wonderful life now.

BLAIR HODGES: I think readers are going to see that you can't help but apply things you're learning in scholarship to your own life and to see those intersections. And you said, something you wrote in the book, “While I work on these sayings, while I work on these Gnostic Gospels and these texts, they work on me.

ELAINE PAGELS: Let me speak to that, because the Gospel of Thomas—what is so striking to me about some of these texts, they were called heresy, and they were said to be, you know, awful. But the Gospel of Thomas has a very simple message. And it seems to me it comes straight out of Genesis, it comes out of the saying that God created us, humans, in the image of God. And there are many sayings in this secret gospel in which Jesus speaks about Genesis saying, what is the image of God in us? It's not a little human-type person in there. Jews in the ancient world said you're not supposed to make an image of God. So what is the image of God?

The prophet Ezekiel, in the opening chapter of his visions, says he was lifted up into heaven in a very powerful moment. And he said, “I somehow, I saw a throne. And on the throne, there was something like a human being. But I couldn't see a human being. What I saw was like jewels and diamonds and rubies and emeralds and lightning and fire and light, it was just overwhelmingly brilliant light. And so that's the only image the prophets could use for God was the metaphor of light because it's invisible and it's a spiritual energy. And they think of this light as the divine energy which brings the world into being.

So if you asked a rabbi in the first century—and you know, in his own time Jesus was called rabbi, because if you read the New Testament in Greek, it says Rabbi where we have teacher—so they say, Well, what does it mean that God created us in his image? And the rabbis would say, Well it means that within us there's a kind of spiritual energy, let’s just call it light, an inner light. And if you come to recognize that that inner light is within you, that's what it means by “if you bring forth what is within you,” it's not just a psychological saying as I originally thought. It's a saying about a spiritual energy that is embedded within each of us, even if we don't know it, even if we're in total depression or darkness.

BLAIR HODGES: I think that's what readers will find in reading your book. I would say, the last chapter might as well be titled “The Secret gospel according to Elaine Pagels.”

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, it's the gospel according to Thomas, and maybe according to Jesus, that if you look very deeply into yourself, we can find a link between ourselves and that source from which we come. And that it doesn't necessarily require an institution. Although many of us value the churches, the synagogues that we love, but you can find it even by yourself. And that's a powerful teaching in the Gospel of Thomas. It's a mystical teaching. And it's meant to be advanced level teaching, not to replace the other gospels, but to supplement them when you're ready for a spiritual search. And I find them very inspiring.

BLAIR HODGES: One last question about the book. You're a few years removed from it's being published, this came out in 2018. Is there anything that you regret about the book or that you would have done differently?

ELAINE PAGELS: No, I felt like it was just what it had to be at the time, and I didn't know where it would end. But it ended in a moment of joy and gratitude. So that's where we are, and you know, each creative work seems to take its own shape. I didn't know how to end the book. And then the book sort of ended itself. [laughs]

BLAIR HODGES: Well I can't wait for readers to find out how it ends. It's a beautiful book, the book is called Why Religion: A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels. We'll be right back after this for a quick word about a best book recommendation.

[BREAK]

Best books - 1:04:23

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, Elaine, now it's your moment here. I've asked you to bring a recommendation, a book recommendation, a best book, something that's changed your life, something that you like, something you want to recommend. Let's hear it.

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes, there are two that are absolutely essential. And one of them you know very well, is Viktor Frankl's little tiny book—well, maybe there are three. [laughs] So Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning. That's an extraordinary book about how we need to find meaning in our lives. And he thinks that suffering can only be endured when you find some kind of meaning. And it can be very personal.

The second book, which is brilliant and it came out last year, is called How God Becomes Real. And it's written by a friend of mine, she's an anthropologist at Stanford. Her name is Tanya Lurhmann. She talks about how anthropologists try to understand how people believe in all these invisible beings. And she wants to say, You know, it's not that religious people believe in a lot of invisible beings in the way that I believe I'm seeing you at this moment or hearing your voice. But the attunement to a spiritual reality takes effort and practice. It's not like just seeing something that's right in front of you. She said, people become much more open to spiritual reality if they do things. If they practice meditation, if they pray regularly, if they worship with a group, or meet with a group and meditate together, or do rituals together. She says you have to create meaning by doing it.

It's a very interesting book, because it gives a different perspective on what religious faith is. Not just a bunch of beliefs, but practices that open you to another reality.

And the third book, if you're up for it, is a book by Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace. The book is called A Confession. Do you know this book?

BLAIR HODGES: I don't. I’ve visited his grave and I've read a lot of Tolstoy but I do not know this one.

ELAINE PAGELS: Ah. This is one of the best. It's called A Confession. Tolstoy started to write it in his fifties. And he was in a depression. He was a very famous writer, he had done everything, he'd done it all, he was famous, he'd written brilliant books, he'd been in wars, he'd been feted and famous, and he'd had everything he ever wanted, and a family and a big house and fame all over the world. And he was so depressed, he felt he wanted to kill himself because his life had no meaning. And he wrote A Confession, and it's about how he came to find meaning. And I just think it's an utterly wonderful little book.

BLAIR HODGES: I'm noticing a theme amongst these books!

ELAINE PAGELS: Yes you are!

BLAIR HODGES: Well, I would put your book on that bookshelf of amazing and thoughtful people who have been living that quest to find meaning. And so I want to thank you so much, Elaine, for talking about your book with me on Fireside.

ELAINE PAGELS: Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you Blair. I’ve enjoyed it.

Outro - 1:07:37

BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.

Alright, well this episode is over but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. I’m on Facebook as well. I enabled the comments on the website, firesidepod.org. So if you don’t know where to review the show you can always just click on an episode and scroll down past the transcript, you’ll see the comment section there. You can also email questions, comments, or suggestions to me at blair@firesidepod.org, that’s the email address.

And also please continue to let people know about the show. Every episode it seems like we get a few more listeners so some of you are inviting others to join us, and I hope if you haven’t done that yet you’ll just take a second to recommend it to somebody. It makes a difference That’s the primary way people hear about the show, really, is through you. So for those of you who’ve recommended the show, I really appreciate it.

Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistant, Kate Davis. She created the transcript. And also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, Caroline Kline, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges. And also a special thanks to Catherine Taylor, she’s a wonderful scholar and a wonderful human being who I had the honor of working with at BYU for a number of years. And she’s the one who recommended Elaine Pagels’s memoir to me, and then Morgan Davis who also worked with us at BYU offered a strong endorsement of that recommendation. So to both of them, my gratitude. I really loved this book and I was grateful to be able to talk to Elaine Pagels about it.

Our Fireside theme music is by Faded Paper Figures. And now we’re about halfway through with season one, so I’m going to take a week off. I’ll see you back here in three weeks instead of two here at Fireside. It’s the place where we come together to fan the flames of our curiosity about life, faith, and culture.

[End]

NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.