I don’t teach philosophy but I do co-sponsor our school’s Philosophy Club. Therefore, I’m qualified to share this list of my favorite philosophy podcasts with you. If I’ve missed a good one, please let me know in the comments.
Favorite philosophy podcasts:
Philosophize This! — simply a great podcast that’s informative, well-researched, and easy listening
Philosophy Bakes Bread — a ‘Car Talk’ like podcast about philosophy that always has interesting guests discussing interesting topics
Honorable mention: Philosophy Talk Starters — basically previews to one of my favorite radio shows of all times, Philosophy Talk, but still just previews (for fans of the show, the tribute to the great Ken Taylor, who just passed away [RIP] a few weeks ago, is available in full)
Philosophers Take on the World: Exploring Moral Issues Beyondthe News edited by David Edmonds (Oxford: OUP, 2016).
Philosophers Take on the World, edited by David Edmonds (one of the great minds behind the Philosophy Bytes website and podcast), is an easy to read, relevant collection of short essays (actually, a collection of blog-posts from the University of Oxford’s Practical Ethics blog) wherein philosophers discuss recent (2016) news items from a philosophical perspective. It’s fun to read. The authors take tough topics and make them easy to understand. And it’s a book that even someone with the shortest attention span can enjoy because each chapter is only a few pages long.
The philosophers discuss a wide-array of subjects related to ethics including gun rights, stolen artwork, the point of death, sports-hate, adoption, artificial wombs, whether men should be able to discuss abortion, how people use the Internet to shame others, the worth of pets, and whether we should be allowed to erase painful memories. There’s much, much more for the philosophically minded person who likes to read but doesn’t have a whole lot of time to dedicate to long chapters.
David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Savedis a direct, unwavering rejection of the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, but also the ‘softer’ versions like annihilationism. Oddly, for many Christians (those Hart calls ‘infernalists’) there are few doctrines as precious as the belief in an eternal hell. Many Fundamentalists hate this book: do a quick Google search! On the other hand, I found it to be less a rejection and more of an embrace—an embrace of a God who is ‘the Good’ in this God’s very nature; an embrace of a God who won’t let even one evil or misfortune go without resolve as all things are reconciled back to this God.
In ‘Part 1: The Question of an Eternal Hell’, Hart spends two chapters dismantling (in my opinion) defenses of the compatibility between an eternal hell and a good God. In some sense, his abrasive rhetoric shows little interest in convincing the ‘infernalists’. Instead, he’s preaching to the (admittedly, very small) choir of Christians who either affirm the doctrine of universal salvation/reconciliation or who are seriously considering it but need to hear a voice that’s as filled with righteous indignation as often is heard from defenders of the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.
In ‘Part 2: Apokatastasis: Four Meditations’, Hart works through these four meditations: (1) Who is God?; (2) What is Judgment?; (3) What is a Person?; (4) What is Freedom?. Those who come to this book prepared to reject his arguments will do so. Those who come to this book prepared to consider his arguments, or like myself come ready to fully embrace them, will encounter a presentation of God that aligns with the Christian tradition while also being incredibly beautiful and hope-inspiring.
Some of the more important observations that Hart makes have to do with his meditation on personhood. Hart’s ideas echoed concepts on personhood in Buddhism that teach that we are all interconnected. As someone who teaches comparative religion, this resonated with me. In short, Hart argues that if even one person were to rot in hell forever, no one could be fully saved because there’s no me without you. His example would be a parent whose child was damned forever. If God wiped away that parent’s memory of the child, then the parent would enter eternity having lost something of their personhood. If God allowed them into the heavenly state as indifferent toward the suffering of their child, then we might ask how they are redeemed in any meaningful way. If like some theologians have suggested the parent rejoices in God’s justice and in their own salvation, well, this is just disturbing. Ultimately, our salvation is tied into the salvation of others. While there’s much more to say about this book, my advice is read it, especially if you’re a Christian who wants to embrace your religious tradition but fears that you can’t because of the doctrine of hell as it has been presented to you.
MatthewD.C. Larsen, Gospels Before the Book (Oxford: OUP, 2018).
Well, now I don’t know to teach the Synoptic Problem to my students in a few weeks. This isn’t to say that Matthew D.C. Larsen’s Gospels Before the Book has overthrown the broadly accepted Two-Source Hypothesis but he has complicated it. In essence, Larsen contends that (what we call) the Gospel of Mark is not a finished narrative like the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, but instead Hypomnemata—basically, written notes that function as the scripting of oral traditions.
Larsen begins by explaining the ‘publication’ process on antiquity (obviously, very different from the post-Gutenberg world) where texts went through several stages before being ‘ready’ for public consumption. Ancients like Cicero, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Galen, and others have left us examples and discussion of texts that were in process. According to Larsen, Mark is one of those texts in such a way that many first- and second-century people may not have interpreted the Gospel of Matthew as something radically different from Mark but instead a ‘public-eyes ready’ version of Mark’s ‘notes’ (hypomnemata). Chapters 2 ‘Unfinished and Less Authored Texts’, 3 ‘Accidental Publication and Postpublication Revision’, and 4 ‘Multiple Authorized Versions of the Same Work’ explain these ideas in-depth.
Chapter 5 ‘The Earliest Readers of the Gospel according to Mark’ supports Larsen’s theory that Mark is hypomnemata by appealing to how Papias, Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius appear to explain Mark differently than they do Matthew, Luke, and John, hinting that they knew it was a lesser developed text, even when it begins to receive ‘book’ status by Irenaeus.
Chapter 6 ‘The Earliest Users of the Gospel according to Mark’ focuses heavily upon Matthew’s use of Mark and the aforementioned claim that many readers of Matthew wouldn’t have seen it as being something radically distinct from what we call Mark since almost every story in Mark is found in Matthew.
Chapter 7 ‘Reading Mark as Unfinished’ is the part of the book that has me scrambling for how to teach about the relation of one Gospel to another. For a few years I’ve embraced the idea that the abrupt ending of Mark is a literary device that’s part of a complicated narrative, but Larsen makes a strong argument that the organization of Mark points not to a developed narrative but five sets of notes with key words and ideas that hold them together. This means the abrupt ending is just how the fifth set ends, not some edgy, post-modern conclusion where the women don’t tell anyone of Jesus’ resurrection leaving this responsibility to the ‘reader’. Bummer.
If you’re interested in the Gospels, their composition, and their reception-history, this is a must-read in my opinion. Very thought-provoking and one of the few books out there that I would say has shifted how most scholars will write about the Gospels for the foreseeable future. In other words, it’s a ‘game-changer’.
The late Jonathan Z. Smith in his essay ‘God Save This Honourable Court: Religion and Civic Discourse’ commented, ‘The Internal Revenue Service is, both de facto and de jure, America’s primary definer and classifier of religion.’ (Relating Religion, p. 376) Here’s the criteria the IRS used to determine if a group qualifies as a ‘church’ (some mix needed):
-Distinct legal existence -Recognized creed and form of worship -Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government -Formal code of doctrine and discipline -Distinct religious history -Membership not associated with any other church or denomination -Organization of ordained ministers -Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study -Literature of its own -Established places of worship -Regular congregations -Regular religious services -Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young -Schools for the preparation of its members
I’ll be dedicating a class period of this semester’s ‘Religion in the United States’ (and next year in ‘Religion in Global Context’) to this topic. It’s a fascinating list of criteria. (In recent years it’s allowed the Scientologist, the Satanic Temple, and even John Oliver’s spoof ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Indulgence’ have qualified.)
If you teach Religious Studies, and care about pedagogy, you’ll be happy to hear that the Wabash Center Journal on Teaching has been born. It’s online. It’s open access (free!). It’s peer reviewed. It’s quarterly. I look forward to browsing through Issue 1:1.
This is the question I ask in a variety of ways for the first couple weeks of my class ‘Introduction to World Religion’ (to be named ‘Religion in Global Context’ in 2020-21). One of the ways I’ve had my students wrestle with this question is through a debate. I would split the class in half. One side had to represent the legitimacy of Jediism* and the other Pastafarianism. (Aside: Eventually, I dropped Jediism because it won most of the time…like 90% of the time. I replaced it with ‘Dudeism’—a Taoism-like religion based on the cult film The Big Lebowski. The outcome is more even now. Which makes me wonder why Jediism was so easy to embrace as a religion compared to Pastafarianism and Dudeism.) The point of this exercise is to get them thinking about how we use the word ‘religion’, what it defines, and how subjective our uses can be.
I mention this because Andrew Mark Henry, the scholarly and creative mind behind the YouTube page ‘Religion for Breakfast’, has created a timely video on this topic. I’ll definitely be showing this to my students in the future. If you haven’t checked out Religion for Breakfast, please do. The videos are good and getting better. The content is well-researched. (Henry put notes in the video description and often has in-video citations.)
I think it’s worthwhile to ask questions about newer or lesser-known religions in order to challenge the ‘world religion’ paradigm that equates authentic religion (consciously or subconsciously) with the older, more adhered to, structured religions. It’s one thing to suggest that Coca-Cola is a religion but something else to ask if Jediism or Pastafarianism are (or is it?).
Anyway, if you’d like to see the most recent version of my debate guidelines (I plan on enhancing the criteria and structure before I teach again next fall), here it is:
The blog of Brian LePort 