Heads-up for 22 November 2010

Mahabharata Podcast
The Hawk and the Dove
The last three stories of the long series of tales in the Book of the Forest. Yavakrita, Jantu and the Hawk & the Dove.
(review, feed)

Archaeo News Podcast
Issue 179
British archaeology volunteers trace transport links back 4,000 years
Ancient Orcadians decorated their houses with homemade paint
Bronze Age hoard found intact in Essex
Tool-making technique is much older than thought
Prehistoric migrants found in Gloucestershire
Silbury Hill's construction process was more important than design
Copper Age history of Armenia revealed
Bulgarian archaeologist stumble upon 8000-year-old skeleton
10,000-year-old camp site unearthed along USA/Canada border
Neolithic knives found at Tirnony Dolmen
Ancient megalithic sites discovered in Russia
Archaeologists uncover early Neolithic activity on Cyprus
Modern humans emerged earlier than thought
(review, feed)

The History of Rome
116- Here Come the Illyrians
Claudius Gothicus became Emperor in 268 and promptly lead the legions to victories against the Goths and the Alamanni. Unfortunately he died before he was able to reunify the Empire.
(review, feed)

Paradigms
November 21, 2010
Rev. Dr. Katherine O'Connell of East-West Faith Seminary, Rabbi Roger Ross of The New Seminary for Interfaith Studies, and Rev. Tim Miner of the International Academy for Interfaith Studies join us to discuss Interfaith. We learn about World Interfaith Week, February 1 - 7, 2011.
(review, feed)

Zencast
288 - Joy & It's Causes
Dharma teaching by Jack Kornfield
(review, feed)

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Here is a podcast that I want to recommend you simply listen to. I do not want to say too much about it. On Big Ideas, listen to Robert Adams give his interpretation of Moshin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (feed)

The novel and Adams's interpretation give a personal touch to the clash of cultures. It also broadens the perception of Anti-Americanism beyond the world of Islam. As a matter of fact, Adams is of the opinion the novel is not about religion at all. It is about identity, about the identity one aspires and the culture to which one would want to belong. In that sense the whole discussion is thoroughly modern: culture has become a matter of choice, but that is not Adams's main point and probably also not Hamid's.

One thing I cannot resist to point out: Adams claims not to know of any other novel that has a monologue of the main character and a discussion partner who, although we do not hear his words, we get to know through the reactions of the speaker. My immediate thoughts of comparison went to the novel by Albert Camus, La Chute.

More Big Ideas:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam,
Jewish Humor,
JRR Tolkien versus CS Lewis,
Malcolm Gladwell,
The Age of Inequality.

Heads-up for 21 November 2010

Philosophy Bites
Nick Phillipson on Adam Smith on What Human Beings Are Like
Adam Smith, the great thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment, is best known as an economist. But much of his work was philosophical, and even his economic thinking is probably best understood as part of a larger project of attempting a science of humanity. Nick Phillipson, author of an acclaimed biography of Adam Smith, discusses Smith's philosophical agenda in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
(review, feed)

KMTT - The Torah Podcast
She'elot uTeshuvot 18-19 Century #05
Lessons by Rav Binyamin Tabory - Noda BeYehuda
(review, feed)

Indian roots of the Unicorn

It was not mentioned in the recent issue of In Our Time which dealt with the unicorn: there is a Unicorn story in the Mahabharata. You can hear that story in the Mahabharata podcast (feed).

Episode 31 - Rshyashrnga, you can hear this story be told by Lawrence Manzo. Manzo also mentions the hypothesis that the story made its way to the West in the form of the Unicorn myth.

The Mahabharata version tells of a Sadhu, a hermit who lives in abstinence, sits by a river after years of not having seen any woman. The river is being visited by some beautiful princess who takes a naked dip and this sight is too much for the Sadhu. He spills his seed, it falls in the water and is drunk by a deer who gives immediate birth to a boy who has an antilope horn growing from his forehead.

The boy grows up with his father the Sadhu who raises him as another hermit. Eventually, the boy, Rshyashrnga, grows up as a formidable yogi who has no knowledge of women. Yet, the moment comes when he is to be seduced and obviously it takes a maiden to conquer the Unicorn.

More Mahabharata Podcast:
Endless cloth,
The Mahabharata Podcast.

Heads-up for 20 November 2010

New Books In History by Marshall Poe
Kyra Hicks, “This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces”
There was a freed slave named Harriet Powers who made really beautiful, highly literate, and deeply religious quilts. In the world of quilting (which is much bigger than you think), she’s a bit like Vermeer: not many pieces, but all highly valued. And like Vermeer, she’s interesting because we don’t know a lot about her. In This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces (2010), Kyra Hicks does her best to fill in the many blanks. The book is a combination detective story, journey of discovery, and guide to further research. Hicks, a master quilter herself, doggedly pursues every lead she can find regarding the mysterious Powers, and they take her to some very unexpected places (for example, Keokuk, Iowa). The picture of Powers that emerges from This I Accomplish is that of a skilled, religiously-inspired artist, confident and proud of her work, moving through a long-forgotten world of African American quilters.
(review, feed)

Philosopher's Zone
The Mystery of Hegel
His thought was hugely influential and hugely difficult. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once described him as the single most difficult philosopher to understand. He was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Though he enjoyed relative fame during his lifetime, in the decades after his death in 1831, according to one writer, Hegel´s ideas were treated with "a mixture of contempt, horror and indifference." But something happened during the 20th century that brought Hegel back into sight for philosophers and thinkers. This week on The Philosopher´s Zone find out what that was.
(review, feed)

The State We're In
Stealing children
A father hatches a plan for his son to escape from Japan after his ex-wife took him there illegally. A detective specializing in snatchbacks tells how he returns children to their custodial parents from other countries. And a young black woman raised by a white family in the Netherlands talks about meeting her birth mother in Ghana for the first time.
(review, feed)

Veertien Achttien
Franz Joseph en de ogen van de waarzegster (zondag 19 november 1916)
'Mij blijft niets bespaard', verzucht keizer Franz Joseph van Oostenrijk-Hongarije na de moordaanslag op zijn vrouw Elisabeth, die hem postuum als Sissi naar de kroon zal blijven steken. Al eerder ook van zijn zoon beroofd, krijgt de stokoude vorst in 1914 het lot van de wereld toegespeeld.
(review, feed)

Diarmaid MacCulloch in podcast

As usual it was a great pleasure to listen to BBC's In Our Time. The latest issue contained a discussion of Foxe's Book of Martyrs which was published at the height of the stormy Reformation in England in 1563 and was frequently republished afterward. Foxe's historic work gave the new Protestant Churches a legitimacy by making a connection between Christian martyrs through the ages. (feed)

One of the guests at the BBC was historian Diarmaid MacCulloch whose voice I recognized from a lecture I fondly remember at the LSE about the pasts and futures of Christianity. Here he showed the enormous varieties of Christianity through the ages and in all corners of the world. It made me search for his name in iTunes.

My search brought me to the 24th episode of the podcast Some Books Considered (feed). Historian Diarmaid MacCulloch spoke with podcast host Dan Skinner about his book Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. MacCulloch chose the title to indicate that the history prior to Christianity is important to understand the context of the of religion’s birth and also to indicate that it still has a long history yet to unfold. The book has been described as the first truly global history that examines the great ideas and personalities of Christianity. MacCulloch also examined how Christianity is currently being expressed in different cultures around the world.