A look at burning political issues and debates and their historical context within the US and worldwide, hosted by Mitch Jeserich.

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Host Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts of the Iliad by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson.

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.

The post The Iliad: War, Rage, and Sorrow appeared first on KPFA.

Mitch Jeserich reads excerpts from the classic writings The Way of Chuang Tzu translated by Thomas Merton.

Thomas Merton composed a series of his own versions of the classic sayings of Chuang Tzu, the most spiritual of Chinese philosophers. Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the fourth and third centuries B.C., is the chief authentic historical spokesperson for Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (a legendary character known largely through Chuang Tzu’s writings). Indeed it was because of Chuang Tzu and the other Taoist sages that Indian Buddhism was transformed, in China, into the unique vehicle we now call by its Japanese name―Zen.

Excerpts from THE WAY OF CHUANG TZU by Thomas Merton, copyright ©1965 by The Abbey of Gethsemani. Reproduced by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The post The Taoist & Christian: The Way of Chuang Tzu appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Laurence Rees is an award-winning English historian and documentary filmmaker. He has authored several books including The Holocaust: A New History, Hitler and Stalin,  Auschwitz: A New History, and his latest, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History.

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Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina. He is a prominent human rights activist who worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University and the author of many books including his latest, Allegro: A Novel.

The post Ariel Dorfman on the Role of Beauty During Times of Chaos appeared first on KPFA.

Guests:

Tiny (Lisa) Gray-Garcia aka “PovertySkola” is a formerly unhoused, incarcerated, revolutionary journalist, lecturer, poet, visionary, teacher and single mama of Tiburcio, daughter of a houseless, disabled mama Dee, and the co-founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE/PoorNewsNetwork.

Victoria Montaño is a Po-scholar, interdisciplinary artist focussing on Indigenous Solidarity across seas and borders, Queer liberation, the Land Back Movement, and reawakening/reclamation of Ancestral Knowledge. They were born, raised and are  sustained in the Village of Huchiun which is now known as part of Oakland, Ca. Vick  carries lineages from the Yo’eme and Mexikah Nahua peoples.

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Guest: Paul Cooper is a podcaster, a historian, and the author of Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline.  He writes, produces, and hosts the Fall of Civilizations podcast which explores the collapse of different societies through history.

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Guest: Natalie Lawrence, author of Enchanted Creatures: Our Monsters and Their Meaning.

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Guest: Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and the director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA.  She is a 2019 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient and the author of the award-winning books Migra!, City of Inmates, and her latest, Bad Mexicans Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands winner of the 2023 Bancroft Prize in American History.

The post The Mexican Revolution and The Migrants Who Sparked it appeared first on KPFA.

Guest: Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.  He is the host of the podcast Myself with Others.

The post The Life & Works of Frantz Fanon appeared first on KPFA.