25 May 2019
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Feb 5, 2019 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- What is metaphysics, and did it get derailed?
- The desire to live in a universe that “makes sense”
- How the human lifespan limits our scope of understanding
- Why we’re drawn to metaphysical questions
- Why younger generations are choosing the supernatural and spiritual over traditional religion
- Metaphysics as a means of organizing the sublime
- Is the feeling of awe older than humanity itself?
- The uncertain future of metaphysics
Jan 27, 2019 —
Josh Summers & Dan Keown
- Dan’s new book, The Unchartered Body: A New Textbook of Medicine
- How Dan’s intrepid grandmother brought him to Eastern medicine
- Explaining Eastern medicine to a skeptic
- Embryology and the importance of “connectedness” within a body
- What is “chi,” exactly?
- Where Western medicine falls short
- What placebo research proves (and doesn’t prove) about acupuncture
- What does the acupuncture needle do?
- Dan’s recommended lifestyle changes for systemic health
Nov 13, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- Tanya’s “local theory of mind”
- Harry Potter, prayer, and other “cultural invitations”
- Psychotherapy in the US and witchcraft in Ghana
- American individualism and Asian interdependence
- The differences between hearing God in Ghana and the US
- The Internet as externalized imagination: Pepe and Kek
- A “hyper-real God”: having coffee with Jesus
- Thoughts, perceptions, the world, and the self
Oct 28, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Minding Emotions: music edition
- The emotional shift between minor and major chords
- Examining tonal dissonance in Western music
- When melodies become “pregnant with meaning”
- Why we find beauty in disharmony
- Rami: Social class and culture imbue music with meaning, too
- Is music hardwired in humans?
- How practicing art and music hones the eye and the ear
Oct 14, 2018 —
Colin Pugh & Alex Guerrero
- Alex explains “lottocracy,” a system using random selection to choose politicians
- Does democracy have to mean voting?
- Democratic systems as forms of technologies
- Imagining many legislatures, each devoted to a single issue
- Capture and accountability in elections
- How would randomly selected politicians learn about policy?
- Leveraging collective knowledge for political decisions
- Alex: Elections encourage short-term focus and tribalism
Aug 23, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- What is pleasure, and what isn’t?
- How human will fits into philosophies of pleasure
- Addiction, brain chemistry, and the lies we tell ourselves
- Why are some people more prone to addiction than others?
- Addiction as a disease of deprivation
- Antonio Demasio’s new book that rethinks culture and the roots of consciousness
Aug 9, 2018 —
Josh Summers & Stephen Asma
- Stephen’s new book, Why We Need Religion
- Who is Stephen’s intended audience?
- How religion shaped our emotional lives for millennia
- Can you benefit from religion without sincere belief?
- “False consolation”? No such thing, Stephen says
- Stephen learns to appreciate the “smells and bells” of Buddhism in Bhutan
- How will religion evolve in America?
Aug 6, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Gary Lachman
- The rise of “occult politics” in the Trump era
- Pepe the Frog and “willing Trump into office”
- Trickle-down metaphysics from Nietzsche to Trump
- Steve Bannon’s connection to European far-right esoteric philosophy
- “Putin’s Rasputin,” Alexander Dugin
- Gary’s new project on the return of “Holy Russia”
- Gary’s thoughts on Jordan Peterson
Jun 20, 2018 —
William Black & Jemar Tisby
- Jemar’s path from educator to historian
- How racial history shapes the landscape of the Deep South
- The “quiet exodus” of black Christians from white evangelical churches
- Not a “skin problem,” but a “sin problem”
- Jemar: Kindness isn’t just being polite to avoid offense
- Bill explains the historic racial divide within the Cumberland Presbyterian Church
Jun 13, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Where do culture, emotion, and cognition intersect?
- Is altruism a fluke of humans’ inherently selfish nature?
- How Western individualism clouds our view of human nature
- Stephen: The strongest cultural adaptations are shared unconsciously
- An evolutionary explanation of Trump’s cult of personality
- Complicating the narrative on immigrant cultural values and success
- Reactions to Stephen’s new book, Why We Need Religion
Jun 7, 2018 —
William Dailey & Ross Douthat
- Ross’s new book, To Change the Church
- The strengths and weaknesses of Ross’s intellectual approach to faith
- Father Bill speaks from Ireland about the country’s recent abortion referendum
- Ross challenges liberal Catholics to explain their logic of doctrinal change
- How marriage, divorce, and communion came back into Catholic conversation
- What will people who read Ross’s book in a hundred years think of it?
May 17, 2018 —
William Black & ContraPoints
- What is “autogynephilia”?
- Are there identifiable “subtypes” of trans women?
- Are trans individuals’ souls “trapped in the wrong body”?
- Why ContraPoints ruffles feathers in the Twittersphere
- New Atheism as an entry point to the alt-right
- Assessing Sam Harris and Ezra Klein’s recent debate on race and IQ
May 15, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Are emotions cultural or physiological?
- Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s argument for emotion-via-culture
- Why social construct theory is all the rage today
- Rami’s thoughts on self-help psychology
- Rami: Pets teach us that emotional connection predates language
- What makes emotions adaptive to environment?
- Stephen and Rami review the Jaak Panksepp Memorial Symposium
- What neuroscientists say about the brain’s unpredictability
Apr 23, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Kelly Baker
- The Ku Klux Klan’s appeal to Protestant America
- How the KKK rationalized a Jewish Jesus
- The Birth of a Nation and the symbology of the burning cross
- How to “love thy neighbor” as a Klansman (answer: very selectively)
- Kelly: The Klan declined, but its politics went mainstream
- Kelly’s search for apocalyptic rhetoric in Klan literature
Apr 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet Show: Are emotions in the brain?
- Luiz Pessoa’s argument for the feedback between lower and higher brain function
- How the regions of the brain evolved to interact
- “The content problem” in the neuroscience of emotion and cognition
- Are the common fears of snakes and spiders “hard-wired,” and how?
- What brain mapping fails to tell us about cognition
- Rami’s research on prosopagnosia (face blindness) and emotional cognition
Mar 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & David Lesondak
- What is fascia and why does it matter?
- When fascia malfunctions
- What David does as a “body worker”
- How body posture could influence mental health
- Unanswered questions in fascia research
- Can mindfulness meditation reduce the perception of pain?
- The concept of “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, in the human body
Mar 8, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Pater Edmund Waldstein
- Why the Mortara case is still provoking argument 150 years later
- Pater Edmund offers a defense of Pope Pius IX
- Integralism and different conceptions of liberty
- What would an integralist Catholic state look like?
- How Pater Edmund became a monk (with a blog)
- The day-to-day life of a modern meditating monk
Mar 7, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Puppet show: Why are human emotions unique?
- Does self-restraint make us human?
- Considering emotions as social constructs
- Stephen: If you have emotions, you have consciousness
- Artificial intelligence doesn’t necessarily defer to it its creator
- How insects are like robots
- Does culture change how the brain reads emotion in faces?
Feb 21, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Catherine Nichols
- Why is pop culture obsessed with good guy vs. bad guy stories?
- Catherine: Modern stories don’t let the villain be fully human
- World War II and the trope of the ragtag band of misfits
- Shakespeare vs. comic book movies
- Storytelling about why we go to war
- What pop culture best represents moral complexity?
Feb 9, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- This week’s puppet show: How do emotions help us survive?
- Darwin’s attempts to understand the inner lives of animals
- Can we really hide our feelings? Rami doubts it
- The “seeking” drive that keeps us going
- Angst: Fear without an object
- How culture complicates finding a mate
- Is there an adaptive function to recognizing beauty?
Feb 5, 2018 —
William Black & Benjamin Park
- The Mormon Church’s new president, 93 year-old Russell M. Nelson
- The decades-long campaign to incorporate the Church into the American mainstream
- Does the Church clash with academic historical study?
- Untangling the fates of remarried Mormons’ souls
- The LDS Church as a contained society within the US
- Why did the first Mormon women choose polygamy?
Jan 19, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Liz Wolfe
- Why the Aziz Ansari story blew up
- Are women like “Grace” damned if they do, damned if they don’t?
- Libertarianism and consent
- Katie Roiphe vs. the creator of the Shitty Media Men list
- Is giving the benefit of the doubt possible in the age of the Twitter mob?
- Having good politics vs. being a good person
Jan 17, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & Tanya Luhrmann
- How psychosis and prayer can make invisible entities ‘real’
- Why the voices heard by American schizophrenics are especially mean
- Turning madness into vocation: the shamans of West Africa
- Why talking to one’s hallucinations is a good idea
- How evangelicals shape their God
- ‘Remembering’ past lives in Scientology and ‘satanic ritual abuse’ in therapy
Jan 13, 2018 —
Josh Summers & Thomas Joiner
- Thomas describes a modern narcissism epidemic
- Does a lack of self-esteem fuel narcissism?
- Why is a focus on the “self” ubiquitous in mindfulness?
- Challenging the health claims of mindfulness meditation
- Why “self-compassion meditation” makes both Josh and Thomas uncomfortable
- The common ground between mindfulness and stoicism
Jan 10, 2018 —
Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel
- Stephen and Rami present: “The Evolution of Emotion” puppet show
- How ancient societies managed their earthly impulses
- The human anger displayed in Greek mythology
- Marcus Aurelius’s concept of the “wise man”
- Hafez, the drunk Sufi poet
- How does culture influence our core emotions?
- Are animals capable of feeling anger?
- Stephen on how horror plays on our most primal fears
Jan 8, 2018 —
Philip Menchaca & Jonathan Young
- Who was Joseph Campbell?
- Applying the idea of the monomyth to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- Can we disentangle myths from culture?
- Cinderella and mental health
- How Jonathan uses mythology in psychotherapy
- Is it healthy to think of yourself as a hero on a quest?
- Religion and the experience of meaning vs. the idea of meaning
Dec 5, 2017 —
Noah Rasheta & Ellen Leanse
- Ellen’s new book The Happiness Hack as an owner’s guide to the human brain
- Distraction as a “dopamine hijack”
- Conditioning the mind for happiness
- The neurology behind self-inflicted emotional wounds
- How to change happiness from “destination” to “journey”
- Ellen’s tips for “hacking into” contentment and purpose
Sep 24, 2017 —
Nikita Petrov & Tony Ortega
- Former Scientology executive Marty Rathbun’s private conflict with the Church
- New breakthroughs in media coverage of Scientology
- How the Church swiftly conquered US law and the IRS
- What makes Scientology different from other religions?
- How L. Ron Hubbard invented a reality for his followers
- Why Scientology isn’t concerned with the apocalypse
- The Church’s beef with professional psychology
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