Selected listening for 6 February 2011

Forgotten Classics
Genesis, chapters 16-17
In which Sarai gets pushy and regrets it, Abram is renamed,
and God makes Abram an offer he can't believe with a painful sign required.
(review, feed)

Tapestry
Life After Trauma
We marvel at how human beings can keep going under the most staggering load. For those who have known unimaginable loss, words of consolation and words of wisdom start to ring a little hollow. A feature interview with CBC producer David Gutnick who brings us stories from survivors of the Haitian earthquake, and Sister Lorraine Malo, a nun with the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto. Also a personal essay from Lynn Keane who lost her Daniel son to depression and suicide.
(review, feed)

Selected listening for 5 February 2011

New Books In History
Joyce Appleby, “The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism”
Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is “natural,” that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and one of the most common ways we cooperate is through trade. Some form of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” lies at the heart of almost every human relationship. We are built for reciprocation, and we do it remarkably well. But, as Joyce Appleby shows in her provocative, readable, and thoroughly entertaining The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (Norton, 2010), the natural impulse for reciprocal back-scratching did not capitalism make. A set of very unusual historical forces did.
(review, feed)

Big Ideas
Derek Walcott on his life and work
English professor, Christian Campbell, interviews Caribbean poet and playwright, Derek Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Walcott discusses issues of identity, culture, and language in this illuminating conversation.
(review, feed)

Social Innovation Conversations
Bill Gates - Education for the Real World
How do we get the brightest minds to become interested in social enterprise and philanthropy in order to solve the world's most intractable problems? In this audio lecture, sponsored by the Stanford Center for Social Innovation, Bill Gates, co-chair of his now famous foundation, calls on Stanford students to become part of the solution. He talks about his own path, pressing social challenges, and opportunities for addressing them.
(review, feed)

Mr. Deity

Mr. Deity is a video podcast by Brian Dalton in which he plays God as an underachieving character in a sitcom. With his assistant Larry, his son Jesse (Jesus) and the on and off ex-gf Lucy (Lucifer) he barely manages to cope with life as the managing director of the the universe. (feed)



Dalton describes himself as a Formone (a former Mormone) and comes from the angle of the atheist, but even if Mr. Deity is intended to show the absurdities of main stream belief systems in a comical way, the podcast actually manages to rise above that and be a playful prank on the common tenets of Christianity. I can picture a pastor actually use the short issues (3-8 minute video sketches) as a light entry into a serious sermon.

Selected listening for 4 February 2011

Irish History Podcast
The Pursuit of Power (pt. 1) The Decline of the O’Neills (919-944 CE)
Episode 6 is the start of a fascinating story, full of twists and turns. Over the next three shows we will see the O Neill kingdom who have dominated the first five shows see their power challenged by the Dal Cais (the family of Brian Boru). This will see many challengers rise and fall as these two families battle it out for supremacy in medieval Ireland.
(review, feed)

The State We're In
Neighbourhood watch
In Cairo, Juarez and Poland: people who have had enough will do whatever it takes to change things for the better, even if it means risking their lives.
(review, feed)

Radio Open Source
India-Pakistan: Vazira Zamindar on the raw wound of Partition
Vazira Zamindar is filling in a critical back story of fury and fear in our world, The Long Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and after. It was one of the great post-colonial wounds, and it keeps on wounding, visibly and invisibly. Partition has been the root of endless public miseries: ethnic cleansing, chronic warfare, constructed “national” and religious hatreds. It’s also, as Professor Zamindar testifies for herself, “a wound within.” It’s the mother of many millions of individual identity crises that seem never to go away.
(review, feed)

Selected listening for 3 February 2011

KQED's Forum
Jewish Secular Culture
In his new book "Not in the Heavens," author David Biale chronicles the development of Jewish secular culture which, he claims, began with the Bible and continues to this day. Biale joins to discuss his exploration of the roots of modern Jewish secularism within the religious tradition it rejects, and what the role of Jewish secularism is today.
(review, feed)

Fresh Air
Hezbollah, Israel And Egypt: What Happens Next?
Story: Journalist Thanassis Cambanis puts what has been going on in Egypt in a historical context — and explains what the popularity of other political parties, like Hezbollah, could mean for relations with Israel and the United States.
(review, feed)

Stuff You Missed in History Class
The Last Emperor of Ethiopia
Haile Selassie wasn't just the last emperor of Ethiopia -- he is also hailed as a messiah. In this episode, Deblina and Sarah explore the astonishing life of Haile Selassie. Tune in to learn more.
(review, feed)

Witness
Revolution in Iran
During the first week of February in 1979, an Islamic revolution began to unfold in Iran. Mohsen Sazegara was close to the heart of events.
(review, feed)

Chris Hedges - Big Ideas

I am currently listening to many issues of Big Ideas and I think I will make a combined review later this week, but here I'd like to shortly separate out a lecture by Chris Hedges on his book The Death of the Liberal Class. (feed) On the same book he was interviewed by Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source which I reviewed as well.

Hedges is extremely critical of western and especially American society and in addition to that extremely pessimistic. After you have listened to him, you really feel that fascism is going to take over really soon. At the Big Ideas lecture you get some insight as to where his dedication and inspiration comes from. This is not only left leaning politics, which has become clear in other shows just as well, nor his experiences in the wars in Yugoslavia, although none of these should be underestimated as influence.

I was surprised to learn of his Christian angle, which is just as unconventional as it is conventional. Pay attention where he says: I didn't study so many years on the seminary, only to find... In addition to his left politics it is also his religion that has imbued him with high social standards and which make him angry, sad and deeply disappointed to find that in modern society these values are mindlessly and systematically trodden. That makes you understand why he is so bleak.

More Big Ideas:
Needham about China,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam,
Jewish Humor,
JRR Tolkien versus CS Lewis.

More Chris Hedges:
On Open Source,
On Media Matters.