As I try and catch up with podcasts and stories I missed I am constantly impressed with your ability to talk about religion in fiction that is insightful and nuanced. It is so refreshing to hear, thank you.
You both got way more out of this story than I did. I thought the analogy was kind of clunky and this more of a complaint about university uinstitutionalism than a wider story. A favorite podcast moment for me, 30 minutes into a 35 minute podcast:
Glenn: "Is Smythe Jesus Christ?"
Brandon: "WHAT?!?!?!"
Way to bury the lead Glenn, bravo.
As a side note, when I read the introduction to Storeys From the Old Hotel Wolfe commented on one of the stories was his obligatory Holmes type story. Also we could thank him that he dropped an idea to do a Nero Wolfe story with Nero being a robot. I would have loved this as a story. Gene Wolfe writing Nero Wolfe has a pleasing symmetry to it. Frankly Gene Wolfe could definitely write a hell of murder mystery, does anyone know if he did so?
I'm glad you enjoyed this episode. It's by far one of my least favorite Wolfe stories we've covered, and I don't think we'd even have done it if we'd used the patron voting to select stories in that batch. But still, I'm glad that we read it as we were building up to getting into Wolfe's masterpieces. And that gag has become something of a running joke, now, so that was worth it -- though it's been a while since I've really been able to use it.
As for the mystery, the Holmes story that Wolfe wrote is "Slaves of Silver," which we covered (and remains one of my favorites). But I don't know that we ever get Gene Wolfe doing a Nero Wolfe story -- or any other hardboiled type of detective story, which makes me a little sad. I hope I'm wrong and that he did get around to this, just in a later part of his career where I haven't read many of his short stories. But, I will say, that Wolfe loves mystery fiction, for sure, and some of his novels have an element of this in them, and I'm looking forward to getting to them.