YOUR HOSTS
Brian Doak & Leah Payne
…are re both professors, authors, and pop culture aficionados, whose interests range from archaeology and history and linguistics to LARPing and The Walking Dead. Episodes tackle some piece of media highlighting the wonderful weirdness of religious experience—a documentary, a television show, a Twitter scandal—and use that as a thread on which to hang pearly reflections on a wide variety of topics. Heaven. Hell. The perils of fame within the evangelical world. Church attendance. Atheism. Gamer communities. Starting a cult. Join us.
Dr. Leah payne
is a professor, author, and television critic (in her own mind!), and American religious historian specializing in religious innovations, performance, and celebrity culture. She has a PhD in History and Critical Theories of Religion from Vanderbilt University. Her forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2022) explores how a pop culture industry shaped American evangelical theology and politics. Her first book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century (Palgrave, 2015) won the 2016 Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies Book Award. In addition to her book, she has recently published articles in the Journal of Ritual Studies, Fashion Theory, Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, and The Canadian Journal of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Her work analyzing religion and popular culture has appeared in The Washington Post and Christianity Today.
Dr. Brian doak
is a professor, author, mountaineer (not really), and biblical scholar specializing in ancient Israel. He has a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. He is the recipient of the Aviram Prize for archaeological research (2012) and the George Fox University Undergraduate Researcher of the Year (2014). He is the author, co-author, and editor of seven books, including the forthcoming Heroic Bodies in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Consider Leviathan: Narratives of Nature and the Self in Job (Fortress, 2014), as well as articles in venues such as Harvard Theological Review, the Journal of Biblical Literature, and various collected volumes and reference works.