It's common in literary and historical accounts of powerful women to make them out to be villains — witches, demons, succubi, changelings — or erase them entirely. Historian Kara Cooney, author Madeline Miller, Religious scholar Serenity Young, and classics scholar Emily Wilson talk about why that might be.More
A Kaleidoscope of Ideas
Religion and Philosophy
David Kessler is one of the foremost experts on death and grieving. He’s written many books on the subject, and worked with Elizabeth Kubler Ross on famous five stages of grief. He recently added a sixth: finding meaning.More
Philosopher John Kaag discusses how the 19th century thinker William James might help us seek meaning and purpose in a confusing time.More
How do you know what’s real? Start with your senses — if you can see, touch, hear or taste something, it’s real — right? Not necessarily, according to cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan.More
Reverend Alex Gee tells Steve Paulson how rappers like Tupac Shakur function as prophets for the hip hop generation, and how he incorporates rap music into his liturgy.More
Jericho Brown is an award-winning poet who has been working with religious language for a long time. His poems have titles like "1 Corinthians 13:11" and "Hebrews 13." His book "The Tradition" continues to mine Brown's childhood in the church.More
In 2014, Dan and Judy Pierotti invited us to be part of the end of Dan's life. From early conversations with Dan - a retired Lutheran...More
Philip Pullman is once again having a moment, thanks to the new blockbuster adaptation of "His Dark Materials" by the BBC and HBO. Pullman has also returned to the fictional world of his heroine, Lyra Belacqua, with a new trilogy, "The Book of Dust," which probes more deeply into the central question of his earlier books: What is the nature of consciousness? More
He’s one of the most frenetically productive, wired guys on the planet, but digital media theorist Douglas Rushkoff is backing away from the clock.More
Steve sat down with logician and mathematician Roger Antonsen and computer science pioneer Barbara J. Grosz to talk about how AI will challenge our own perception of intelligence in ways we might not expect.More
Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme talks to Steve Paulson about the nature of time and the human obsession with clock time.More
Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist who studies the Eveny — also known as the "Reindeer People of Siberia." He tells Steve Paulson they keep herds of reindeer for meat, but also have personal, consecrated reindeer animal doubles, which they believe will die for them.More
Steve Paulson's family has lots of stories of the paranormal, but Steve is the family skeptic. So he did his own investigation, talking with skeptic Michael Shermer, religion scholars Tanya Luhrmann and Jeff Kripal, channeler Paul Selig, and his Aunt Marge Bradley.More
Former Church of Satan High Priestess Blanche Barton says that worshipping the devil is "ridiculous." She calls Satanic worship less an act of evil, and more an act of subversion and questioning norms.More
In a dark world, poet Ross Gay recommends "stacking delights." Share what you love, he says — not what you hate.More
Religious historian Jeffrey Kripal believes that anomalous experiences — near-death experiences, telepathic dreams and other primal spiritual encounters — are the deep roots of religion. You might call it "religion before it becomes religion."More
Elizabeth Krohn says she left her body, went somewhere else, met and talked to God. And then came back to dream the future. What does her experience tell us about where religion comes from?More
African chimps store caches of big rocks to throw at certain trees. And some scientists wonder, are those trees sacred to them?More