Listening ideas for 13 March 2011

Tapestry
A Call for Compassion
Karen Armstrong joins host Mary Hynes for a feature interview on Armstrong's Charter of Compassion. Her wish for a more compassionate world got the nod, and much-deserved seed money from the TED Foundation. The Charter was written and endorsed by some of the world's leading thinkers, and now, the work begins. And in our ongoing Global Soul series we hear from Tarek Fatah, activist and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress.
(review, feed)

Zencast
The Awakened Heart
Dharma teaching by Jack Kornfield.
(review, feed)

Veertien Achttien
Alexander Kerenski
In maart 1917 had Alexander Kerenski het vertrouwen van het volk. Dat hij het kwijt ging raken, is de tragiek van Rusland.
(review, feed)

Reported podcasts since November - Anne is a Man

Hi Anne!

I write children's poetry and decided to create a podcast of me reading them - for children who don't have my book, for those who want to read along or just listen in the car.
So far, I've only read published poems (52), and they're in the same order as the book. But now that my Podcast has been out for a month, I'll start adding more new and unpublished poems...
Anything to give parents a few minutes break while sparking the imaginations of their children!

Right now on Podbean, I am the 3rd most listened to podcast in the Kids/Family category.
I'd love it if you'd review my work:

Carrie Heyes Doopod: poetry for kids (feed)

Thanks!
Carrie Heyes

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Hello everyone,

Announcing a new Catholic podcast that examines books and movies from a Catholic perspective.

It features Scott Danielson and I (Julie Davies from Forgotten Classics - AFDV) who have a lot in common. We are both frequent contributors to SFFaudio (a science fiction audiobook review site and podcast) and also both practicing Catholics. After an SFFaudio podcast one week (the Readalong about The Stars My Destination), we realized that there was a lot to say about some of these books from a Catholic perspective, and we were leaving much of it unsaid. This led to the idea of a podcast where we talk about books and movies “as Catholics”.

So we did it! We just posted the first episode – where we discuss Alden Bell’s excellent zombie novel The Reapers Are the Angels. The podcast is called A Good Story is Hard to Find (feed).  The iTunes feed will be coming soon.
Please join us!

Julie Davis

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Anonymous recommendation:

Poem Podcast from the Poetry Translation Centre (feed)

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Greg has left a new comment on your post "Report a Podcast":

http://www.simpletoremember.com/authors/a/crash-course-jewish-history-mp3s/

Not strictly speaking a podcast, but a collection of MP3 audio lectures on Jewish history from the Old Testament stories to the present day. Rabbi Ken Spiro gives not only the history of the Jewish people, but also a good insight into Jewish beliefs and their interpretation of history. Very clear and entertaining presentation suitable for an audience without a background in history. Total duration is about 24 hours.

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Geoffrey Welchman has left a new comment on your post "Report a Podcast":

The Inverse Delirium podcast is a comedic take on public radio, produced in Baltimore, USA. Inspired by the likes of Monty Python, Mr Show, Daffy Duck, and Word Jazz, each 12-minute show features interviews and sketches straight from the mind of creator Geoffrey Welchman. Watch the line between reality and reality podcasting blur! (feed)

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Hello,

My name is Diana Brown. I'm a performer and founding member on the podcast Radiostar Improv.. (feed)

www.radiostar.com

Radiostar is produced by Dan Wilson of Cassandra's Call Productions. We'd like to have Radiostar Improv reviewed on your site.
My email address is dianabrown99@aol.com

You can reach our producer at info@cassandrascall.com

Thanks for considering us.

Best-
Diana Brown

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Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Report a Podcast":

"We Hate Movies!" is a bad movie podcast that's actually funny. Please check us out and let us know what you think. (feed)

Please contact me at szyszka at gmail.com if you do review it. Would love to hear your input. Thanks!

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Stuart Andrews here from CINEPHOBIA RADIO. (feed)

I'd love you to check out the podcast. As far as I'm aware, it's one of the most intensely produced film podcasts on the internet (and I'm an avid listener of film podcasts.)

The WINNEBAGO MAN episode is probably a good starting point - although there are career retrospective interviews with the likes of Malcolm McDowell and Ray Harryhausen on there as well.

Hope you manage to listen.....

:- Stuart Feedback Andrews

Dan Dennett: what should replace religion?

On January 29th the podcast Big Ideas suddenly published three issues all at once. Normally we get one a week from Big Ideas, but now three? Big Ideas is a program by TVO and delivers on podcast interesting lectures the broadcaster has recorded at universities or conferences. The trio that came out on the same day, were recorded at the Canadian conference for Humanism. (feed)

One of the three was lecture by Brian Dalton about whom I wrote before (The podcast review of Mr Deity and Mormon Stories meets Brian Dalton), the other two I would like to recommend here.

First there is the lecture by Daniel Dennett in which he discusses what atheists and humanists can organize to offer themselves and everyone else what otherwise is only offered by traditional religions. The underlying thought in Dennett's lecture is that the religions are, in his view, outdated and falsified and we'd be better off without them. Yet he acknowledges that the religious traditions fulfill a function in people's lives. So the talk is trying to identify these contributions of religion and to propose secular alternatives for them.

Second is PZ Myers lecture in which he argues that the scientific world-view pairs especially well with an atheistic outlook. My expectations were a bit negative, but I found myself fascinated by the talk after all. Myers is a biologist and I began to wonder about Richard Dawkins, who is also a biologist and such a public face of atheism. Eventually I was tempted to get his The God Delusion from the library and I am reading it now.

More Big Ideas:
Chris Hedges,
Needham about China,
The Reluctant Fundamentalist,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the quest against Islam,
Jewish Humor.

World Literature - HACC

In the past month I have listened to an entire course I found on iTunesU. It is a series of short lectures about a large variety of stories from World Literature, delivered by Rick Albright at the Harrisburg Area Community College. (feed)

Albright takes the Norton Anthology of World literature and sort of chronologically travels the world and its ages. Albright retells and discusses classics such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as the Aeneid and European Medieval literature and also non-western stuff from India, China, Japan and the Americas. What he also does not shy away from are the Bible and the Koran. You get a good feeling of the stories and the poetry while you are also informed about some of the tropes and some of the historic frame - though I would have loved to get a little bit more from that.

I did not exactly follow Albrights order, which seems strictly chronological and this explains why he kicks off with age-old Gilgamesh and ends with Popul Vuh, which was inscribed rather recently. I have taken the culturally linked stories in batches. So that I took the Greek and Roman classics together, which made the literary discussion more coherent. The same method worked while taking the Chinese stories in one blow and so on. Very informative and great, narrative, fun.

The latest revolution

Sorry, yes, I have not been blogging for nearly a month. I have been listening to podcasts though and here is a handful around one theme: the wave of popular uprisings in North-Africa and the Middle East.

BBC Analysis (feed)
Rethinking the Middle East; Maha Azzam examines the long term implications of the recent uprisings in the Middle East. Get updated with some backgrounds within half an hour.

Rear Vision (feed)
The Arab world; As political unrest spreads across the Middle East and North Africa we take a look at the history of the Arab world, through the 20th century. Another mere half hour to get smart quicker. A very learned and concise introduction to the relevant history.

Africa Past and Present (feed)
Salah Hassan and Ken Harrow (Michigan State University) on the democratic revolutions in North Africa. Events in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt are analyzed from below and above, with focus on the perspectives of youth, creative uses of technology, as well as the connections to, and relevance of, the events to Africa and the wider world.

CNES (feed)
Podcasts from the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The Egyptian Intifada in Historical Perspective; A lecture by Joel Beinin, Stanford University. If you want to be more thorough and are ready to spend a couple of hours, start here. An in-depth expose of the Egyptian situation, with noted applicability to the other countries in uproar is given here. The shorter references in the other podcasts will then be less enigmatic.

LSE Podcast (feed)
A Perfect Storm in the Arab World?
Regardless of the outcome of events in Egypt, for Arabs, psychologically and symbolically, this is their Berlin Wall moment. They are on the brink of a democratic wave similar to the one that swept through Eastern Europe more than 20 years ago, hastening the Soviet Union's collapse. The Arab intifada has put to rest the claim that Islam and Muslims are incompatible with democracy. The democratic virus is mutating and will probably give birth to a new language - and a new era - of politics in the Arab world. Fawaz A. Gerges is a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also holds the Emirates Chair of the Contemporary Middle East and is the Director of the Middle East Centre at LSE.
Here also Israel and Iran are entering the equation.

And if you want more Israeli and Jewish perspective:
Radio Open Source (feed)
A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt
Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” The 55-year-old meta-journalist dedicates his website MondoWeiss to “the war of ideas in the Middle East.” His project is more daring and difficult than that sounds. Really it’s to start something between a moral argument and a civil war over the big book of Jewish tradition and “spiritual wholeness” — over US national interests, the Palestinian condition, Israel and the whole modern idea of Zionism, by which he means the judgment from 19th and 20th Century European experience that Jews cannot be safe as a tiny minority in non-Jewish countries.

Selected listening for 9 February 2011

Elucidations
Simon Critchley discusses faith
In this episode, Simon Critchley considers whether religious faith can serve as a model for faith in ethical principles.
(review, feed)

The Christian Humanist Podcast
Town and Country
David Grubbs moderates a conversation with Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour about the ways that people in different places and moments have distinguished between rural and urban life. The strange relationship between city and countryside has always involved both idealization and demonization, and those dynamics make for some fascinating developments as imperial cities give way to the City of God and eventually become suburbs. Among the texts and authors we discuss are Gilgamesh, Genesis, the Gospels, City of God, the Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Return of the King, and Rabbit, Run.
(review, feed)