Ideas CBC Discover & Learn

The 'culture wars' have been a staple of modern politics for decades now. They are especially entrenched within Christian communities. Philosopher and author James K. A. Smith has a radical prescription to move beyond this: the church needs more mystics. 

The Cultural Revolution is everywhere felt in China today, but rarely if ever talked about openly. But prize-winning historian Tania Branigan tries to fill in the historical silences with voices both past and present in her book, Red Memory.

Smell has been called the 'Cinderella sense,' capable of inspiring profound admiration if we stop turning our noses at it. Producer Annie Bender examines what we lose when we take our powerful — but often misunderstood — sense of smell for granted.

In her book, We Are All Perfectly Fine: A Memoir of Love, Medicine and Healing, Dr. Jillian Horton shares her personal story of burnout and calls for developing a compassionate medical system, with a more balanced and humane understanding of what it means to heal and be healed. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 18, 2024.

The book may well be the greatest invention since the wheel, according to author Irene Vallejo. She traces the history of this miraculous invention with a book of her own, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World.

John Vaillant details the terrifying growth and destructive force of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire in his award-winning book, Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast. He unpacks how fire made humans who we are — and how humans are changing fire. Vaillant says we're changing the climate "in a way that favours fire way more than it favours us."