The Classical Ideas Podcast

Hersch Wilson is a thirty-year veteran volunteer Firefighter-EMT with the  Hondo Fire Department in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. He is also a story-teller, committed to explaining how First Responding can change how we see and experience our own lives. In his "real job" he is a writer, speaker, and consultant. He is the author of "Firefighter Zen," out now from New World Library.  Buy "Firefighter...

Meido Moore Roshi was a disciple of the lay Zen master Tenzan Toyoda Rokoji, under whom he endured a severe training in both Zen and traditional martial arts. He also trained under Dogen Hosokawa Roshi, and later under So'zan Miller Roshi. All three of these teachers are in the lineage of the famous Omori Sogen Roshi, perhaps the most famous Rinzai Zen master of the twentieth century. Meido serves...

Dag Hammarskjöld served as secretary-general of the United Nations from 1953 until his tragic death in a suspicious plane crash in 1961. During those years he saw the fledgling international organization through numerous crises with skill that made him a star on the international stage. As readers of his now-classic diary, Markings , are aware, Hammarskjöld understood political leadership as an ho...

Guo Gu (Dr. Jimmy Yu) is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center ( www.tallahasseechan.com ) and is also the guiding teacher for the Western Dharma Teachers Training course at the Chan Meditation Center in New York and the Dharma Drum Lineage. He is one of the late Master Sheng Yen's (1930–2009) senior and closest disciples, and assisted him in leading intensive retreats throughout the United S...

Dr. Arlene Sánchez Walsh is a professor of religious studies and the author of the award-winning book Latino Pentecostal Identity, which was released by Columbia University Press in 2003, as well as the book Pentecostals in America from Columbia University Press in 2018. She has served as a media expert for outlets such as the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , and On Being with Krista Tip...

Rachel Quist specializes in East Asian Buddhist imagery with focuses in pre-modern Japan and China. Her research centers on questions of interaction with imagery, materiality and object agency, and the accessibility of image-based practices. She has written on topics such as Buddhist reliquary design and expressivity, the didactic project underlying the hell tableau at Baodingshan, and the constru...

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate is a writer, editor, public speaker, and college professor. He's interested in how sensuality affects spirituality. His writings all circle around questions of the ways sense perceptions influence ways of being religious, and how religious traditions change our ways of perceiving the world around us. In other words, religion and spirituality are rooted in the body. Along t...

Dr. Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College where she teaches classes on religion and masculinity, Catholics in the Americas, urban religion, and religions of Latin America. She is an ethnographer and her research focuses on material culture, contemporary Catholicism, and gender and embodiment. She is the author of Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Devotio...

Jonathan McFarland teaches Classical Ideas and World Religions at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. 

In this special episode, friends, family, past students, and colleagues of George tell stories about why they loved him. George founded Classical Ideas and World Religions at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri in 1989-1990 and taught the course until 2016. George passed away May 14, 2020 in Columbia, Missouri. 

Dr. Sarah Shaw is a faculty member and lecturer at the University of Oxford. She has taught and published numerous works on the history and practices of Buddhism, including  An Introduction to Buddhist Meditation  and  The Spirit of Meditation . Order Mindfulness: Where It Comes From And What It Means  from Shambhala here: https://www.shambhala.com/authors/o-t/sarah-shaw.html    

About Dr. Laury Silvers: The Sufi Mysteries arise out of my desire to talk about the people and places I researched as a scholar of early Islam and Sufism beyond the constraints of academic skepticism. They are my love song to these early pious folk, mystics, and Sufis as human beings—who lived in a particular historical moment with all its complications—and to my experience of Islam. I am a North...

Chris Hannah is the vocalist and guitarist of the band Propagandhi.  Propagandhi "Duplicate Keys Icaro": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGf8vrXhFQY Follow Chris Hannah on Twitter: https://twitter.com/propagandhi Follow Chris Hannah on Patreon here . 

Alison Melnick Dyer is Assistant Professor of Asian Religions at Bates College. She is an expert on gender and Tibetan Buddhism. She is currently writing a book about the life of Mingyur Peldrön, an 18th century Buddhist nun and religious leader. Melnick Dyer is especially interested in the ways that privilege influences gender in religious communities. She earned her B.A. at the University of Mic...

 Dr. Rebecca Epstein-Levi is the Mellon Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Women's and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University . She's an expert on Jewish sexual ethics, and is working on a book project on sex, risk, and rabbinic text. She has written for Alma , Religion Dispatches , Feminist Studies in Religion , the Jewish Theological Seminary's newsletter Gleanings , StyleWise Blog , and...

Dr. Brett Krutzsch is an expert on LGBTQ politics and religion in the United States and a scholar at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where he serves as editor of The Revealer . He is the author of the 2019 book Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics from Oxford University Press. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post , Newsday , Medium , th...

Dr. Sajida Jalalzai is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She is an expert in the study of North American Islam. Jalalzai earned her PhD from Columbia University, specializing in American Religions. She is currently writing a book on Muslim leadership education in three Protestant Christian seminaries in the United States and Canada: Hartford Seminary,...

Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler is an assistant professor and an expert in contemporary Black Islam in the United States. Dr. Wheeler is writing a book on the history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States. The book is based on five years of research, including interviewing Black Muslim fashion designers and attending fashion shows in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Newark. Dr. Wheeler is also the creato...

Dr. Shreena Gandhi is a multi-faceted cultural historian of religion with expertise in religion, race, the Americas and Hinduism. Trained at Swarthmore, Harvard and the University of Florida, Professor Gandhi currently teaches at Michigan State University, where she starts off the first few weeks of all her classes introducing students to the concept of structural white supremacy and why that is i...

Dr. Vicki Brennan is an anthropologist who studies religion, sound, music, and urban space in Africa and the African Diaspora. She is an Associate Professor of Religion and the Director of African Studies at the University of Vermont. Her research is based on more than fifteen years of field research in southwest Nigeria, primarily in Lagos and Ibadan. She has also conducted research in Nigerian i...

Dr. Brian Clites is a professor at Case Western Reserve University. He is an expert in clergy sexual abuse, and he has spent the last eight years interviewing Catholic survivors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Illinois. In his upcoming book, Surviving Soul Murder, Clites explains how survivors have transformed their pain into legal and political reforms, and how the Catholic scandal has change...

Dr. Tia Noelle Pratt is a higher education professional, researcher, and inclusion & diversity specialist based in Philadelphia, PA. She received her PhD in sociology from Fordham University . A sociologist of religion, she is an expert in systemic racism with experience researching and writing about how systemic racism impacts African-American Catholics. Follow her on Twitter: https://www.twitter...

Emily Crews is a Ph. D. candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School . Her dissertation project traces the relationship between movement and identity formation in the context of Nigerian immigration to the United States, exploring the ways in which Pentecostalism conditions, and is conditioned by, the attempts of people to make themselves feel "at home" in a forei...

Danielle Dulsky is a heathen visionary, painter, and word-witch. The author of Woman Most Wild and The Holy Wild., she teaches internationally and has facilitated circles, embodiment trainings, communal spell-work, and seasonal rituals since 2007. She is the founder of The Hag School and believes in the emerging power of wild collectives and sudden circles of curious dreamers, cunning witches, and...

Julia M. Gossard is Assistant Professor of History at Utah State University. She specializes in early modern European and Atlantic history with an emphasis on gender, family, and childhood. With funding from the American Historical Association, the Newberry Library, the Society for French Historical Studies, and the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Dr. Gossard wrote her first book,...