The Blue Room with MaryAnn McKibben Dana – Details, episodes & analysis

Pete Nunnally, pastor of Water and Wilderness Church and mega social media star (at least as far as religious types go) was gracious to invite me to chat on Instagram Live about writing, the spiritual life, our respective books, and how the world can be made new. Just some tiny topics… Here’s the video/audio for your enjoyment! Pete is a great hang.

Pete is the author of the upcoming Catching Hope: The Hidden Spiritual Wisdom of Fishing. I’ve started the book and let me tell you, this is a book for anyone who’s looking to COME ALIVE, whether you ever pick up a fishing rod!

As always, you can order my book, Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life anywhere books are sold, and at the publisher for a 40% discount with the code NORMAL40.

Pete will be with Ed and me on Pop Culture Pastors Hour later this month to talk about our favorite works of pop culture that deal with creation and the natural world.

Steady on.

This may have been my (MaryAnn’s) favorite episode so far. The Pitt is a hyper-realistic peek into a trauma ED, with lots of wisdom and heart—deserving of its many accolades—and it was awesome to hear from Amy Snow and Christine Vaughan Davies, two chaplains with deep experience, about the work chaplains do in all kinds of hospitals and contexts.

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.

Mae govannen, friends!

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.: Category Crowns! Favorite villain, most annoying hero, and lots more fun. Link to join.

Catch all replays of PCPH at our dedicated Substack page or your favorite podcast app.

The Oscar nominations are out and Sinners dominated, Pluribus continues to confound and intrigue audiences, and we are… spending three episodes talking about movies that came out 25 years ago.

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.

Thanks for joining us this afternoon!

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.

As for pop culture that was saving our lives (h/t to Barbara Brown Taylor for the question), 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.

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.

A sermon from Sunday, January 11, based on Genesis 1, as part of Trinity Presbyterian’s latest worship series based on Michael Adam Beck’s book Never Alone: Sharing the Gift of Community in a Lonely World.

The “seven stuff” I mentioned comes from this source.

Thanks for listening!

If you’re listening on Substack, you can also access the Blue Room from the podcast app of your choice. If you appreciate this program, please rate and review, and consider sharing with others.

Steady on.

Thank you to everyone for tuning into today’s Pop Culture Pastors Hour! What a rich film… We went everywhere from Christian Nationalism to Rick Astley, and there was stuff we didn’t even get to!

A few items referenced:

Christ and Culture (book), H. Richard Niebuhr

Disobedient Women (book), Sarah Stankorb

The Four Shapes of Transformation, Richard Rohr

See you in January, for discussions of Pluribus (AppleTV+) and Lord of the Rings. Please note that moving forward, we’ll be hosting these conversations at our Pop Culture Pastors Hour dedicated feed. Subscribe there for all the latest.

Here’s last Sunday’s sermon on Matthew 2:13-23. Synopsis: Herod was an awful dude who killed lots of people and if anything, the scripture undersold what a brutal paranoid tyrant he was. But all is not lost, because maybe it also undersold the other side?

Hat tip to Howard Thurman’s The Work of Christmas, and Carrie Newcomer’s story about Christmas in the bar at 2 a.m. Also my friend Chris Tuttle of Westminster Presbyterian in Durham NC for his research into Herod, much of which came from the book Jerusalem: A Biography.

Thanks for listening. Steady on.

Thank you Michael Moore, Marion Hardwick, Capitol Jill, and many others for tuning into our latest episode! Our lists of favorite pastor portrayals (and two dishonorable mentions) ran the gamut from cozy book series to acerbic satire and everything in between.

Join us Wednesday 12/31 at 11 a.m. for a discussion of the movie that inspired today’s conversation: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, available on Netflix. Here’s the link to join us.

And if you haven’t, check out our dedicated Pop Culture Pastors Hour page, where we’ll be putting all of these conversations (once we work out some kinks).

Happy New Year!

Hello, Blue Roomies!

Today, a sermon based on Matthew 1:18-25, Joseph’s dream.

“Poor Joseph. It’s only once every three years, when we’re in the book of Matthew, that we even hear anything about Jesus’ earthly father. Every other year, Joseph is basically a donkey jockey and a travel agent. And it’s the final Sunday in Advent when this story appears, when Christmas is so close we can taste the eggnog, when the energy in the room is vibrating, whether with excitement at what’s to come, or stress over too much to do, or tension over complicated relationships, family members long gone, and the baggage that often comes from this holiday. The timing of this story doesn’t lend itself to deep consideration of this quiet giant of the faith.

But that’s what he is.”

~

And here’s a link to the Nate Bargatze sketch I started with. Wonderful!

Steady on.