Stranger than fiction

Since I am a persistent follower of the feeds from Forgotten Classics and SFF audio, I was also familiar with the new podcast A Good Story Is Hard To Find made by Julie Davies (Forgotten Classics) and Scott Danielson (SFF). The two come together as believing Catholics and discuss their favorite books and movies and express what they find in these stories that strikes them as Christian content or a Christian message. (feed)

So far, the titles they chose to discuss were not ones I had any affinity with, but recently they took up the movie Stranger Than Fiction and that made me game. This movie has the supra-realistic tale of a man named Harold who finds out he is in a novel and seeks the help of a literature professor (a great performance by Dustin Hoffman). He thinks the author of the novel intends for him to die and he wants to do something about it. In the end Harold meets the author and when she (a role by Emma Thompson) finds out her character is a real person, she finds her intention to kill him off in the story further complicated - aside from her writer's block.

It was great fun to have the film discussed and learn more of the details. It sure makes me want to see the movie again. I am not sure I will agree with Scott and Julie's take on the story. I can understand how they can see Christ when they meet a person sacrificing his life in a story, but that could be a stretch. When they discuss the peculiar role of Harold's watch and claim to see 'how God works in ones life' I do not even know what they mean. Is it that God is in the details? Or that God's Master Plan is carried out by seemingly trivial circumstances? That is when I find their perspective being forced upon the story and upon an otherwise very captivating and entertaining discussion.

Listening ideas for 23 April 2011

Philosophy Bites
Pascal Bruckner on the Pursuit of Happiness
Is the attempt to find happiness self-defeating? Have people always been so obsessed with the pursuit of happiness? Pascal Bruckner dis cusses these questions with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast. Philosophy Bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
(review, feed)

New Books in Public Policy
Stewart A. Baker, “Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism”
How do government officials decide key homeland security questions? How do those decisions affect our day to day lives? In Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism (Hoover Institution, 2010), Stewart Baker, a former senior official from the Department of Homeland Security, takes us behind the scenes of government homeland security decision making. Baker, who was the DHS’s first Assistant Secretary for Policy, examines some of the key security threats the US faces, and some of our greatest challenges in meeting them. While Baker has a healthy respect for the abilities of outside forces would do us harm, he also recognizes that some of our greatest challenges to providing security come from our allies, and from ourselves. In addition, while many people tune out when they hear acronyms like CFIUS of VWP, Baker shows what those acronyms mean, and their implications for our safety and security. Read all about it, and more, in Baker’s informative new book.
(review, feed)

Rebecca Goldstein - Thoughtcast

Jenny Attiyeh does in podcast what I believe podcast is fitted for most well: interviews and she does it very professionally on her podcast Thoughtcast, which, if I understand it correctly, is also being broadcast on a variety of radio stations in America. Attiyeh interviews authors from various backgrounds and speak with them about their work, their theories and thoughts and about their life. (feed)

Some of her work has recently been republished on New Books in History (feed), but for this review I got my inspiration from an interview that I picked from the long standing feed of Thoughtcast, with Rebecca Goldstein which was published in January 2010.

They speak around Goldstein's last novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a work of fiction in which she describes the life of Azariyah a young brilliant man who is born into a community of orthodox Jews. Azariyah loses his faith in God and therefore, personally cannot stay within the community, however, he feels responsible as the rabbi and the leader of the second generation of Holocaust survivors. Admitting to his personal philosophy and thus abandoning the community, he feels, will kill it and so he stays, concealing his true insights.

As Attiyeh suggests and Goldstein acknowledges, this tragic set up has strong resemblance in Goldstein biography. She was born into a orthodox family, found out she had no faith, but broke away only after her parents had died out of s sense of responsibility. And now, she sees herself as an atheist, but one, as she points out right away with great respect and love for the religious. Further down the interview, I sense this reverence goes even further. She actually places herself below them. She feels, like Azariyah, that as an atheist, she is not proceeding with Jewishness down the generations. She still feels connected and identifies, but expresses a pessimism about her own capacity to pass this cultural identity on to her children - as opposed to those who still believe. For the record, I disagree, as Jewishness is a cultural identity, it can also be passed on by those who do not have the faith, I think, but the paradox is well taken.

What a cleaning day can bring

Today we were cleaning the house all day (as if cleaning it before Passover was not enough) and I put in several hours of consecutive podcast listening which gave a lot of interesting material to write about, when I finish the to-do list I gave you a couple of days ago.


Apart from a review of one of the SALT seminars which featured Ian Morris, I will certainly review some of the stuff I heard today:

Partially Examinied Life about Kierkegaard

Kol Hadash, a second lecture on the Synagogue

Mahabharata Podcast, the temptation of Karna (with some unexpected takes on Dharma)

Partially Examinied Life about Montaigne

The introductory lectures to three new lecture series on Yale:
Epidemics in western society since 1600
Early Modern England
Moral foundation of politics

In Our Time: The Pelagian Controversy

Myoclonic Jerk: Episode about _why_ does Dan Kaufman play World of Witchcraft

The two episodes of a new Hebrew podcast פרורי מידע

The house is very clean now....

Listening ideas for 22 April 2011

New Books In History
Michael A. Reynolds, “Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918″
Prior to the nineteenth century, people generally did not live in a world of nations. They lived in a world of empires. Now in hindsight, we say that these empires were “multinational,” that is, they were made up of nations. But the elites who ran the empires didn’t think so. They saw them as made up of territories where the sovereign’s writ ran, not “nations” that the sovereign ruled (though there was some of that as well).
(review, feed)

A Short History of Japan
Tsunami
A look at the history of tsunami and Japan
(review, feed)

Shrink Rap Radio
A Door into The Unconscious with Jerry Trumbule
Jerry Tumbule, M.S, ABD and I have yet another one of our wide ranging conversations, picking up the thread that we left off on SRR # 259. In the beginning of our conversation I mention three very inspiring documentaries. The three films are: “I Am,” “Happy, The Movie,” and “Genghis Blues.” And Genghis Blues is [...]
(review, feed)

Listening ideas for 21 April 2011

In Our Time
The Pelagian Controversy
Melvyn Bragg discusses The Pelagian Controversy. With Caroline Humfress, Martin Palmer and John Milbank.
(review, feed)

Center for Near Eastern Studies
Violence's Law
A lecture with George Bisharat, UC Hastings College of the Law
(review, feed)