292 episodes

Simply stated, religion matters. Religion matters not only for personal reasons, but also for social, economic, political, and military purposes. Unfortunately, studies suggest that religious knowledge and cultural literacy for any religious tradition is either in decline or is non-existent in the United States, despite being one of the most religiously diverse nation on earth. Today, religion is implicated in nearly every major national and international issue. The public arena is awash in religious explanations and arguments for nearly every issue. The goal of The Classical Ideas Podcast is to empower students with the core knowledge of major world religions to improve citizenship and agency in a diverse society. Welcome to the show!

The Classical Ideas Podcast Gregory Soden

    • Religion & Spirituality
    • 4.8 • 93 Ratings

Simply stated, religion matters. Religion matters not only for personal reasons, but also for social, economic, political, and military purposes. Unfortunately, studies suggest that religious knowledge and cultural literacy for any religious tradition is either in decline or is non-existent in the United States, despite being one of the most religiously diverse nation on earth. Today, religion is implicated in nearly every major national and international issue. The public arena is awash in religious explanations and arguments for nearly every issue. The goal of The Classical Ideas Podcast is to empower students with the core knowledge of major world religions to improve citizenship and agency in a diverse society. Welcome to the show!

    EP 289: The Cake Baker and the Coach w/Dr. Charles McCrary

    EP 289: The Cake Baker and the Coach w/Dr. Charles McCrary

    Charles McCrary (Ph.D., Religion, Florida State University) is an assistant professor of religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He researches and teaches broadly on American religion, especially topics related to politics, race, secularism, and science. His first book, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines the history of “sincerely held religious belief” and how that became a standard for legal understandings of religion in religious freedom cases. He is currently in the early stages of a project about a “crank,” in which he explores how religious, scientific, and political fringes are defined as such. McCrary has written in scholarly journals as well as popular outlets such as The Revealer, Religion & Politics, and The New Republic.
    Read The Making of a Crass Religious Freedom Celebrity: https://newrepublic.com/article/175783/praying-coach-book-religious-freedom
    Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024

    • 40 min
    EP 288: Multiracial Cosmotheandrism w/Dr. Aizaiah Yong

    EP 288: Multiracial Cosmotheandrism w/Dr. Aizaiah Yong

    Rev. Aizaiah G. Yong (Ph.D., Practical Theology, Claremont School of Theology) serves as Assistant Professor of Spirituality at the Claremont School of Theology in Southern California, USA. He is an ordained Pentecostal Christian minister within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a recognized facilitator in the Compassion Practice and an Internal Family Systems Practitioner. Growing up in a multiracial and immigrant family, he is committed to sustaining transformational and collective efforts that address ongoing realities of social oppression with presence, passion, and peace.
    Multiracial Cosmotheandrism: https://orbisbooks.com/products/working-title-multiracial-cosmotheandrism-a-practical-theology-of-multiraciality-inspired-by-the-life-philosophy-and-mysticism-of-raimon-panikkar-tentative
    Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/acls-cohort-winter-2024
    Spirited Renewal: https://www.spiritedrenewal.org/

    • 36 min
    EP 287: Moon of the Turning Leaves w/Waubgeshig Rice

    EP 287: Moon of the Turning Leaves w/Waubgeshig Rice

    In this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by Evan Whitesky ventures into unknown and dangerous territory to find a new home for their close-knit Northern Ontario Indigenous community more than a decade after a world-ending blackout.
    For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in the wake of the power failure that brought about societal collapse. Since then they have survived and thrived the way their ancestors once did, but their natural food resources are dwindling, and the time has come to find a new home.
    Evan Whitesky volunteers to lead a mission south to explore the possibility of moving back to their original homeland, the “land where the birch trees grow by the big water” in the Great Lakes region. Accompanied by five others, including his daughter Nangohns, an expert archer, Evan begins a journey that will take him to where the Anishinaabe were once settled, near the devastated city of Gibson, a land now being reclaimed by nature.
    But it isn’t just the wilderness that poses a threat: they encounter other survivors. Those who, like the Anishinaabe, live in harmony with the land, and those who use violence.

    • 43 min
    EP 286: Political Organizing and Teaching about Theology w/Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart

    EP 286: Political Organizing and Teaching about Theology w/Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart

    Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart is a Black queer preacher, teacher, public administrator, and justice advocate. She is an adjunct professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University and the Government Fellow for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. In 2021, Rev. Naomi founded Salt | Yeast | Light, an organization that develops spaces of spiritual education, disruption, reflection, transformation, and public action.
    Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023
    Visit Reverend Naomi Washington-Leapheart:
    https://twitter.com/oholyshift
    https://www.instagram.com/oholyshift/
    https://linktr.ee/heartleaps?fbclid=IwAR0KBxltXNIzvz1JYA_CmaXLj425I-Rn2YZqcjBSu3Ay50yFH5om-fqtrB8
     

    • 30 min
    EP 285: Jewish Cemeteries at the US Border w/Dr. Maxwell Greenberg

    EP 285: Jewish Cemeteries at the US Border w/Dr. Maxwell Greenberg

    Maxwell Greenberg (he/they) | (Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies in the Department of Cultural Studies at Goucher College) is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator who researches and teaches about race, religion, gender, and place. He earned his PhD in Chicana/o and Central American Studies from UCLA (2021), before serving as the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis (2021-23). He works at the intersection of Jewish, Religious and Indigenous Studies, and is particularly interested in how Judaism and Jewish memory function as unstable tools of statecraft in the US. Greenberg is passionate about building community with a network of scholars, artists and organizers who engage with religion as a connective tool for coalition building with movements to end racism and transmisogyny.
    Visit Sacred Writes: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023

    • 59 min
    EP 284: Teaching, Curriculum, & Standards w/Dr. Elizabeth Jemison

    EP 284: Teaching, Curriculum, & Standards w/Dr. Elizabeth Jemison

    Elizabeth Jemison is Associate Professor of Religion at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American religion. She is the author of Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, published by UNC Press in 2020. Her next book project, tentatively titled, Christian Motherhood: Race and Southern Churchwomen’s Organizing during Segregation, examines how women’s religious groups across racial lines mobilized to defend Christian motherhood with conflicting results. She has written for Patheos and Religion & Politics. At Clemson, Jemison received the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Teacher Award in 2022 and the College of AAH Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2020. She was a Young Scholar in American Religion in the 2015-2017 cohort.
    Follow Elizabeth Jemison online: https://twitter.com/eljemison
    Visit Sacred Writes online: https://www.sacred-writes.org/luce-cohort-summer-2023

    • 42 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
93 Ratings

93 Ratings

AK_66 ,

He used to be my English teacher!

I’m so glad I thought about looking up this podcast. Mr. Soden was my sophomore English teacher and seriously changed my life! I remember him telling us about his podcast in class a couple different times not long after he made it.

He would regularly suggest to take his Classical ideas and world religions class to really further our education and go into it with an open mind. He was absolutely my favorite teacher and was what I really needed in a role model at that point of my life.

Being 15 I had so much to really learn about the world and how he taught our class was engaging and challenging. I learned things I still utilize to this day. I always had so much fun in his class and was so excited to take the class about religions.

I signed up for the class and he told us close to the end of the school year he would no longer be teaching at our school as his family was moving away. I was so upset and even told him I would drop the class since the whole reason I wanted to take it was specifically because his teaching style resonated with me the most. He told me to still take it and not to rob myself of that experience simply because he wouldn’t be teaching the class.

Although the teacher who took his place wasn’t as energetic and engaging as Mr. Soden was, as well as never getting to talk to any guest speakers or go to any places of religious significance like he had intended. I don’t regret listening to him and remaining in the class.

People always ask me about the hoodie I got with the logo and I get to tell them about it t what I learned and how it changed my life for the better. I’m super excited to catch up with all the missing bits of the class I didn’t get to experience years ago though this podcast. I’m only on episode two but I’ll probably be caught up by the end of the week 😁

Yujiro Seki ,

Educational Inspiring and irresistible...

Consistently educational, rich in content, the purpose to make the world more peaceful and compassionate through promoting religious literary around the world, Greg Soden’s inspiring series the Classical Ideas Podcast is an amazing piece of work that you don’t want to miss! 1000 thumbs up!

Dannyny1978 ,

Education Al fair and balance

If you are like me who love to learn about other perspective this great resource for. My only issue podcaster need have better sound.

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