The Worker's Cauldron
A podcast about the cultural politics of the paranormal. Where Karl Marx shakes his fist at the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot speaks to us about the legacies of colonialism. We discuss the contemporary obsession with all things supernatural through a socialist, feminist lens and ask what our strange experiences and beliefs tell us about the society we live in.
The Worker's Cauldron
When Mary Moved: Ireland 1985
This week we take a look at the strange moving statues phenomenon that attracted hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics to shrines across the country in the summer of 1985. The moving statues were part the bleak social landscape of Ireland in the 1980s, and a series of scandals leading up to that summer ignited something of a social movement that politicized the alleged miracles.
We are joined by Victoria Anne Pearson of University College Cork and Cian Gill of the Wide
Atlantic Weird Podcast who help contextualize the strange occurrences.
J. Ryan and T. Kirakowski, Ballinspittle, Moving Statues and Faith
Sharon Tighe-Mooney, Irreconcilable differences?: The fraught relationship between women and the Catholic Church in Ireland
Nell McCafferty, A Woman to Blame: the Kerry Babies Case
Michael Allen, From men, to women, to children: some changing paradigms in the anthropological understanding of religion