Genealogies of Modernity Episode 8: The Enemy of Morality Is Not Modernity, It’s Me
The great English essayist and linguist Samuel Johnson was writing during the Enlightenment – the period some historians identify as the beg...
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Ministry of Ideas
A podcast about the ideas that shape our lives.
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Genealogies of Modernity Episode 7: A Genealogy of Gun Violence
The problem of gun violence is as old as guns themselves. According to historian Priya Satia, America’s present epidemic of gun violence has...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 6: A Medieval Anti-Racist
What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-rac...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 5: Picturing Race in Colonial Mexico
Race is sometimes treated as a biological fact. It is actually a modern invention. But for this concept to gain power, its logic had to be s...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 4: Jamestown and the Myth of the Sovereign Family
What is the “traditional American family?” Popular images from the colonial and pioneer past suggest an isolated and self-sufficient nuclear...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 3: What Is Genealogy?
Genealogy, in Charles Darwin’s terms, is the study of “descent with modification.” Taken as an analogy for the study of history, genealogy c...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 2: What Is Modernity?
We often think of modernity as a distinct time period in history – one that is said to start at different places, but which always includes...
Genealogies of Modernity Episode 1: Climbing the Mountains of Modernity
We all know many stories about how modernity came about. But what does it mean to be “modern”? This episode comes at the question through th...
Illuminations Episode 10: Universal Knowledge
At the dawn of European exploration, the Renaissance polymath Francis Bacon dreamed of resurrecting the Garden of Eden. Driving this vision...
Illuminations Episode 9: Rituals for a Dying World
Absorbing the full reality of climate change will require more than a scientific approach. Some American Jews are showing how religious ritu...
Illuminations Episode 8: Watching Heaven
The story of Galileo has long been cited as evidence the Catholic Church is inherently opposed to scientific research. But in fact, astronom...
Illuminations Episode 7: Mirrors of Morality
Scientific origin stories promise to tell us who we really are. But that deepest question of human existence can never fully be answered by...
Illuminations Episode 6: Manifest Mars
A sense of divine destiny drove Americans to expand West. A similar spirit is behind the modern quest to conquer space. Guests Lois Rosson,...
Illuminations Episode 5: Moveable Feasts
God, we know, is outside space and time. But the need to date one faith’s most sacred feast drove a cutting-edge technological quest to accu...
Illuminations Episode 4: Quantum Buddhism
What’s the spiritual significance of quantum mechanics? One answer comes from the Dalai Lama - a surprising but genuine lover of scientific...
Illuminations Episode 3: Divine Technology
It’s common to feel that technology removes the magic of the world, but Hindu worshippers in Bangalore have shown that it's all in the appro...
Illuminations Episode 2: Beyond Belief
Do scientists ever reject science? Research data on the controversial topic of extraterrestrial life has met with resistance from some in th...
Illuminations Episode 1: Experimental Methods
Have faith and science always been enemies? The story of Robert Hooke, a revolutionary working in the Scientific Revolution, exemplifies the...
Illuminations Introduction
Illuminations is a limited series that reveals the untold friendship of religion and science. Through interviews and stories drawn from a ra...
Illuminations Teaser
Illuminations is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that reveals the untold friendship of religion and science. Through interviews and...