Announcing a new podcast: Our Parasocial Bible Study
Reading the Bible together with friends you kinda know
Readers of Indwelling, I’m grateful to all of you who continue to check in on my weekly Sunday sermons that I’ve been posting for about 2.5 years, and they will continue. I hope you have a blessed Holy Week as we follow Jesus in the last week of his life.
I wanted to announce the new project I’ve been working on, a podcast called Our Parasocial Bible Study. I started it with my friend Nathan Dufour Oglesby, who is a seminarian at Yale Divinity School who also has a PhD in classics and a YouTube channel full of songs and video essays on philosophy, theology and ecology.
You can subscribe to our Substack to get new episodes, as well as on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Nathan and I have been working on this throughout Lent and have now put out seven episodes. Essentially, the format is reading the same texts each week that I preach from, which come from the Revised Common Lectionary. We will record and upload every Tuesday with minimal editing and preparation, just reading the Bible together to draw points of connection that we hope will be helpful for you.
If you are a regular reader of Indwelling, think of this as an accompanying conversational piece early in the week while I’m still working on my sermon, and a chance to marinate in the texts with us as the Church moves through the week.
Here is the episode we recorded today, which gets into our Easter Sunday texts:
Okay but one question — why “parasocial”?
For the unaware, “parasocial” is a word that often describes our asymmetrical relationships over the internet (it was Cambridge Dictionary’s 2025 word of the year, defining it as “involving or relating to a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc., or an artificial intelligence”).
The title came together as an attempt to poke honest fun at the limitation of podcasts that we all experience, where listeners typically know much more about the hosts than vice versa. Yet we actually hope that this will erode somewhat over time and that we get to know our audience. We plan to do this podcast whether a bunch of people listen or not for our own biblical edification and spiritual formation, but it would be way more fun if this got more collaborative. For now, we’d love for you to comment on episodes or reach out to us directly at ourparasocialbiblestudy@substack.com.
Actually, a second question — will you be automatically signing me up for this against my will when I just wanted Indwelling?
No. Thank you for asking. If you’d like to keep up with the podcast, subscribe on Substack, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Peace of Christ,
Joe