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I decided early on that a grandfather should be a story teller.  I would entertain the four grandkids by telling stories.  Sometimes these were real stories, and sometimes they were made up.  I would say, "Do you want a real story or a made up one?"  My grandson would often ask for a real story, but the other kids were more flexible. 

These are three stories that I told my grandkids.  Children love to hear stories over and over, so these were not one-off stories.  

You may not like these stories, which would be fine.  

Or you may enjoy them.  They are only 20 minutes. 

My grandkids did. 

(Music by the awesome Kevin Dewey). 

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When I would start my class on Religion and Politics, my first lecture would always be on Feuerbach.  He would give students a new way to think.  We could focus on the God Idea-  which we humans generate.  This had nothing to do with God but rather with human thinking.  We could analyze "outside of the circle" of believers as I would call it.  

This is a bit of an intellectual discussion, but I have tried to make it accessible. 

If you think this might upset you, then skip it.  If you want your thinking challenged, then Carry On (as the British would say).  

The students liked it. 

Happy studenting.  

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Vernon Jordan died on March 2, 2021.  He was one of the last of the Civil Rights generation, those giants who were contemporaries of Martin Luther King.  (Jesse Jackson is the last of that generation, unless I have forgotten someone). 

Jordan was at the center of DC politics, and of advancing Black rights.  

As a close friend of Bill Clinton, he got questioned in the Monica scandal.  His answers show the substance of the man.  

I met him once, when he was doing a book tour.  I was able to ask him a question, and got an answer that I really liked. 

This is my appreciation of his life. 

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To his fans, who were many, Ariel Sharon was a hero, a defender of his people.  His exploits during the 1973 war were legendary.  But not everyone agreed. To the Lebanese he was the Butcher of Beirut.  Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, under whom Sharon served, saw him as a security threat, an insubordinate general who escalated the Lebanese War into a major crisis.  Begin said that he expected to wake up some morning to look out the window and see his office surrounded by tanks.  And Sharon's insistence on capturing as much of the West Bank as possible set up a future crisis whose outcome we cannot yet tell.  

This is the story of Sharon's life and career, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  

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This describes the two times Jane and I crossed paths with Nelson Mandela.  Once was in Cape Town, once in Detroit.  

How amazing to come so close to greatness. 

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Christian Zionism is the belief that the Bible predicted the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 and that Christians are obligated to support that state.  This belief grew out of the Protestant Reformation in the 1600s.  By the late 1800s it was very strong in America.  What is interesting is that the Protestant idea of "restoring" the Jews to Jerusalem predates the emergence of Jewish political Zionism in 1896 when Herzl wrote his famous essay.   This podcast, which was et up as a classroom lecture, discusses the Biblical texts that provide a foundation for the belief.  It discusses how traditional Catholic teachings (unfriendly to Jews) were transformed by the emergence of Protestantism and a new "philo-Semitic" way of reading the Bible. 

There is a discussion of the concept of the millennium (a thousand years of justice), of pre-millennial and post-millennial views, of the idea of an Anti-Christ, of the concept of "signs," and of the passage in the gospels known as the Eschatological Discourse. 

There is also a discussion of public opinion patterns and why public opinion does not shape policy but allows it to emerge without resistance. 

For those interested, my article on this topic is available in Deep Blue.  It's title is "Christian Zionism: Prophecy and Public Opinion."  

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Deep Blue is the University of Michigan virtual archive on the internet.  You can find my publications there -- articles, talks, essays, book chapters.  They can be downloaded for free.  When I mention one of my articles or talks during a podcast, you can follow up if you wish. 

Update (June 1, 2021) 

1.  Google "University of Michigan Deep Blue"

2.  Once in, click on Deep Blue Repositories. 

3.  Then enter my name  Stockton, Ronald.  Stockton alone will not work. 
       If perchance, you get a doctor, try again with Stockton, Ronald R.  

4.  Note:  Deep Blue alone is a chess game.  If you get that, try again with University of Michigan included.   

It's easy. 

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This is a short discussion of only about 15 minutes. 

These are not rules in the traditional sense of rules and you do not have to be a student in the traditional sense of being enrolled in a class.  These "rules" are more guidelines for how to listen in a way that will maximize your ability to engage with difficult topics on which you might have pre-existing perspectives.  

My classroom students really liked these rules.  

Note:  While I originally wrote these rules for the benefit of my students, I also wrote them to reflect my own experience and my own efforts to get beyond my assumptions about something difficult to understand. 

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This is the second half of the talk on the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939.  The focus is on how all parties to this conflict -- British, Jewish, Palestinian -- were transformed in fundamental ways, and how the consequences of the uprising set the stage for future developments. 

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The 1936 Arab Revolt was a turning point in this conflict.   It changed the nature of British policy, of Palestinian politics, and of Jewish politics.  

To make this more accessible, I have broken the talk into two parts, A and B. 

You will notice that these thought were directed to a class.  There are a couple of times when I mention documents.  I wish I could attach documents to these podcasts, but perhaps you can find them on the internet. 

I suggest that you print out a map of the 1937 partition plan.  It will help when we discuss this. 

There are some other podcasts coming that pre-date this topic sequentially.   You haven't missed anything.  

Interesting factoid:  Izzadin al Kassem, the Syrian religious scholar and reformer who joined the revolt, was killed in his first battle. 

Also, when I discussed the possibility that my wife might have divorced me when we were living in enya, that was a hypothetical example.  We are still happily married.