The Big Chew Podcast

The Big Chew Podcast

By Maria Theresa StadtmuellerSociety & Culture
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The Big Chew Podcast episodes

  • Life, Death, Forensics—and Why the West Freaks Over Death, with Jennifer Kissinger
    We weren't supposed to die, says the Book of Genesis and many Christian sources that have been marinating this culture for two millennia. No wonder the West sees death as a catastrophe. My guest, Jennifer Kissinger, sees it as part of life—and it was a daily part of her life during her years as a deputy coroner/medicolegal death investigator. She'd like people to consider their mortality, plan for it, and accept it. Which doesn't mean you don't grieve at a loved one's death; it just means we see our mortality as part of our biology.
    Jennifer and I talk about:
    -Forensics! Everybody loves forensics (at least I do, and hey—it's my show)
    -Her training at the Body Farm, where she spent "as much time as possible"
    -What Christianity says about death and why that's a problem (beyond the fact that it's just not true)
    -What happens at a crime or death scene, what a coroner does (besides keep a few body bags in the back seat of her car)
    -How another, famously happy culture deals with death
    -The Terror Management Theory
    -How dealing with death every day has shaped Jennifer's view of life
    Music in this episode is "Light up the Night" by Ketsa, from the album May Starlight Find You, used via a Creative Commons license.
    Theme for the Big Chew Podcast is "She Say Go" by the Birdinumnums, also used via a Creative Commons license.
    56 min
  • Sam Guarnaccia: Music for Our Universe
    Music can bring us into new, profound kinds of awareness. Composer and classical guitarist Sam Guarnaccia is doing his part. We talk about his new musical work that calls on orchestra, chorus, and soloists to celebrate the evolving universe we all share. I've heard Sam's Emergent Universe Oratorio—it's lush and evocative and includes praise for life forms and forces you don't often hear about in concert halls, like cell membranes, tree roots, and gravity.
    There are selections from Sam's Emergent Universe Oratorio in this episode. He and I talk about stuff like:
    -The role music plays in heightening our awareness
    -How this new Universe Story differs from indigenous stories
    -Sam's religious background and how he's oriented now
    -What "emergence" is and why it rocks
    -Humanity's fatal flaw
    -Slime molds and why I want Sam to put them back in the oratorio.
    Some of the people we mention in this episode are Buddhist and systems scholar and writer Joanna Macy; cultural historian Thomas Berry and mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme, who wrote The Universe Story and other related works; Mary Evelyn Tucker, a religious scholar at Yale University who worked with Thomas Berry (She and Brian Swimme produced the film Journey of the Universe); and Ursula Goodenough, cell biologist, writer, and professor of biology at Washington University.
    Here's information on the June 2017 premiere of the oratorio in Cleveland, and Sam Guarnaccia's other works.
    Awakening
    "We are beings
    In whom the universe
    Shivers in wonder at itself —
    The space where earth dreams."
    Brian Thomas Swimme, Mary Evelyn Tucker
    Gravity’s Law
    How surely gravity’s law,
    Strong as an ocean current,
    Takes hold of even the smallest thing
    And pulls it toward the heart of the world.
    Each thing —
    Each stone, blossom, child —
    Is held in place.
    Only we, in our arrogance,
    Push out beyond what we each belong to
    For some empty freedom.
    If we surrendered
    To earth’s intelligence
    We could rise up rooted, like trees.
    Instead we entangle ourselves
    In knots of our own making.
    And struggle, lonely and confused.
    So, like children, we begin again
    To learn from the things,
    Because they are in God’s heart;
    They have never left him.
    This is what the things can teach us:
    To fall,
    patiently to trust our heaviness.
    Even a bird has to do that
    Before it can fly.
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
    50 min
  • Thea Alvin, Who Dances with Stone
    We live on a rocky planet. Thea Alvin knows that language. She creates fantastic structures of stone all over the world. Thea lives here in Vermont and has had some powerful interactions with Icelandic caves, ancient English burial mounds, and Chinese mountaintops. She teaches all over (we talk about her Italian workshops, which feature fantastic food and the opportunity to get really dirty rebuilding ancient stone villages). Among the ideas we talk about:
    -The difference between stone and rock
    -How Thea creates a project--music and movement
    -Stones have "hearts," "faces," and a purpose
    -The Chinese philosophy of stone as a process, not just matter
    -How stone structures shape the people around them and vice versa
    -What she thinks people 500 years from now might think of her structures
    -Burial mounds and cathedrals: when god changed from around us in the Earth to above us
    -Powerful reactions from rock in Iceland, England, and Italy
    -What she does with a stone too "grumpy" to work in a wall
    Here's Thea's class at Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Vermont (June 2017)
    Thea's website: http://www.myearthwork.com
    Subscribe to the Big Chew Podcast at www.MeetYourMyth.com
    Music in this episode is "Worky, Worky" by Andy G. Cohen, from the album Through the Lens. Used via a Creative Commons license.
    57 min
  • TBC012: We Are All Starinese: The Universe Story Grows In King's Cross, London
    A flourishing garden in dumpsters; a beehive to show how communities work; children learning their "cosmic address" by growing carrots. Inspired by the Universe Story of evolution, Jane Riddiford and Rod Sugden of Global Generation are helping to shape London's busiest construction zone. Jane and Rod, staff and volunteers are catalyzing a community with opportunities to garden, eat, and learn together. Here, construction workers, local families, refugees, Muslim immigrant kids, and office workers connect with each other and with natural rhythms still pulsing under the concrete.
    Some ideas we talk about:
    -The Universe Story as a source of values
    -How modern people can develop a sense of being indigenous
    -How we can have creative, functional cities that allow people to be different
    -Living in three levels of history: cultural history, our contributions to the future, and our cosmic history
    -How a garden is a 3D metaphor for something coming from nothing
    -A Maori myth in London—The Three Baskets of Knowledge: I, We, and the Planet
    -What is ritual?
    -The work of GG alumni: young Muslims connecting the environment with their spirituality and enlisting nature as a model of diverse communities
    Music in this episode is "Bathed in Fine Dust," by Andy G. Cohen. Used through a Creative Commons license.
    1 hr 17 min
  • Psychedelics, Healing, and Transformation
    Can psychedelic drugs, and breathing techniques that achieve similar states, help heal our individual and collective emotional pain? Can they help us transform our society?
    I talk with Joe Moore and Kyle Buller of Psychedelics Today, a podcast that features professionals involved with psychedelics and breathwork as tools for mental health and spiritual growth.
    Joe and Kyle are also facilitators in Holotropic Breathwork, developed by the Czech-born psychiatrist and researcher Stanislav Grof.
    Here's what we talk about in this episode's delicious stuffing:
    -The Multidisciplinary Assoc. for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and their peer-reviewed research
    -How the War on Drugs delayed this research by decades
    -Kyle's "near death" experience and his path; Joe's path through philosophy, ayahuasca, and breathwork
    -Holotropic Breathwork, a non-substance alternative
    -Integration—a key to these therapeutic uses of psychedelics
    -The likeness of these journeys to mythic ones
    -The role of elders
    -Are we on the verge of a psychedelic revolution?
    -Inventing new "rites of passage" (beyond getting a driver's license and being able to buy booze.)
    Hope you enjoy it! As always, you're welcome to leave a message on this episode's page at The Big Chew Podcast.
    As someone who knows first-hand the sucking black vortex of PTSD, I encourage anyone who suffers from it to seek out professionals who can help. Some of the links below might be useful. But this isn't medical advice. Just sayin'.
    By the way, you might hear high-pitched voices in this recording. Those are children. Because our bandwidth here in northeastern Vermont sucks, I record over Skype in the librarian's office of our tiny local bibliothek. Shut up and read, kids. It's a library. But I mean that in a good way.
    Kyle Buller and Joe Moore's podcast, Psychedelics Today
    The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
    Holotropic Breathwork (sometimes also known as Grof Transpersonal Training)
    Holotropic Breathwork in Vermont
    Music in this episode is "I Call it Love" by Carbon Manual, from the album Kali Yuga is here, via a Creative Commons license
    46 min
  • Sandor Katz--Living with Bacteria, Tastefully
    We can't live without bacteria. Nor would we want to—bacteria help flavor and preserve some of our favorite foods. My guest, fermentation activist Sandor Ellix Katz, explains why we humans should rethink our relationship with these tiny creatures who actually run the place.
    Sandor Ellix Katz is the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of two great books, Wild Fermentation and The Art of Fermentation. He's a really smart, fun guy on a mission—to reconnect people with their food. (Thanks to his books, my cellar shelves hold jars of homemade sauerkraut, pickled beets, pickled green tomatoes...)
    Sandor and I talk about the history and deliciousness of fermented food, and how safe home-fermenting is. We totally diss that modern Western notion that bacteria are our enemies and that 99.99% of them must be vanquished by sprays or wipes or soaps.
    "Bacteria are the matrix of all life," says Sandor. He explains some of their many skills—they can transform themselves, unlock the nutrients in our food, improve our health, our mood, and our menus.
    They also set a good example. They outnumber our cells by orders of magnitude--even in our "own" bodies. They teach us how that whole rugged American go-it-alone thing isn't doable or desirable.
    Sandor gives fermenting classes around the world (including Vermont this summer!). Check his website for his schedule. You can also buy his books there. www.wildfermentation.com
    Music in this episode is "Rose" by From Bacteria to Boys, live on the WFMU Scott McDowell Show, used by a Creative Commons license.
    1 hr 1 min
  • How A Creative Universe Invites Mythic Lives: Jennifer Morgan, Part Two
    Whether we plunder the Earth or participate in it depends on deep notions of who we are. Jennifer Morgan of the Deep Time Journey Network says in Part Two of our conversation about the Universe Story, "What's going on every single second is so stunning that if we were truly present to it, we would fall down on our knees and kiss the ground."
    While she admits most of us aren't able to maintain that presence through our day-to-day lives, learning how our Earth creates and functions can help us live them. That kind of awareness invites us to live "mythical lives." Those quiet invitations are everywhere.
    As Jennifer explains, the Universe shows us how to handle crisis, in ways that mirror the lessons mythical heroes learn on their journeys: when you've come undone, cooperate—maybe with someone or something unexpected—and create something new.
    It happens on this planet all the time, despite dominant ideas that Nature works only through survival of the fittest, or that "red in tooth and claw" thing. "Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking," wrote the late, great biologist Lynn Margulis, who pioneered the concept of endosymbiosis and wrote about it with her son and collaborator, writer Dorion Sagan.
    Jennifer and I also talk about how to move past feelings of insignificance when considering a vast Universe, about ritual, the importance of Nature to children (and eating dirt), and about ideas of the divine.
    Jennifer's own religious background is fascinating: her anti-Christian grandmother was regularly welcomed into American Indian ceremonies; her Methodist organist mom turned churchgoers on to lava lamps. Her own path included converting to Catholicism (although some nuns tried to talk her out of it), Celtic spiritual ideas, and more…
    Music in this episode is "Ritual 13" by Jason Leonard, used via a Creative Commons license.
    Visit the website at www.meetyourmyth.com, and click on The Big Chew Podcast, to learn about endosymbiosis and why cooperation matters.
    46 min
  • Can Learning About the Universe Change Your Life? Jennifer Morgan
    The Big Bang. Supernovae. Evolution. What do they have to do with real, everyday life?
    My guest, author Jennifer Morgan, has spent decades helping people appreciate how our universe works, how we got here, and why that matters. In this first of two conversations, we talk about how knowing this evolutionary story can guide us, as stories have always guided humans. (Even better: This one doesn't require "belief"; it has data!)
    Jennifer directs the Deep Time Journey Network, where people worldwide explore how this science-based "new story" can inspire creativity, awe, connection, and better ways to live. She worked with the late, great cultural historian Thomas Berry and many Princeton University scientists to author a beautifully illustrated trilogy of kids' books about the story of our universe.
    I hope you'll enjoy this chat with Jennifer--I know I did!
    Music on this episode is "Stars Are Out" by Podington Bear, from the album Daydream. Used via a Creative Commons license. Theme song for The Big Chew Podcast is "She Say Go" by the Birdinumnums.
    51 min
  • From Evangelical to Atheist, Family-Style: Conclusion
    After leaving your Christian faith with its god and demons, speaking in tongues, and life everlasting, where do you find fulfillment? In the conclusion of my two-part interview with Steve and Krissy Hilliker, we talk about mourning what they left behind; the excitement of learning who you are and what's important to you; the novelty of movie binging and exploring evolution; and where they find spirituality now;
    Music in this episode is "You Need Sleep" by the Colin L. Orchestra, Live from WFMU's Airborne Event; Podcast theme song is "She Say Go" by the Birdinumnums. Both used via Creative Commons. For show notes, go to www.meetyourmyth.com, and click on The Big Chew Podcast.
    52 min
  • From Evangelical to Atheist, As a Family: Part 1
    What happens when you and your young family are counting on your career path as an Evangelical Christian minister--and you realize you've become an atheist?
    Steve and Krissy Hilliker were deeply religious. They married young, had two kids right away, and believed that God had a plan for them. Every element of their lives tied into their faith--until Steve started losing his religion.
    Do you disrupt your whole family when your beliefs change? What if your wife still believes? And, as Krissy recalls her situation, how do you reconcile the intellectual honesty of your husband's religious questioning when you believe he's going to hell for it? How do you build lives together once the religion that guided you both doesn't work anymore?
    Steve and Krissy started the Voices of Deconversion Podcast to help others moving from religious belief to agnosticism and atheism.
    In this two-episode conversation, which is both insightful and funny, we talk about the comforts, drama, and pressures of religion; how this kind of transition affects a family; and where they find meaning now.
    Music in this episode is "You Need Sleep" by the Colin L. Orchestra, from Live on WFMU's Airborne Event, used via a Creative Commons license.
    The Big Chew theme song is "She Say Go" by the Birdinumnums, from the album She Say Go, used via a Creative Commons license.
    44 min

About The Big Chew Podcast

From the publisher's feed

Can we change our futures by changing our story? Yup. Big Chew host Maria Theresa Stadtmueller and her guests take apart our culture's stories and look for ones without the stupid. Stories tell us what matters.The story that still runs our culture was created back when people thought the Earth was flat—by religions Westerners are leaving. That story says a god made us superior to all other creatures and our real home is "up there" in the sky—not here on Earth. When that old origin story combined with the Cartesian one of dualism, that Nature and the universe was a machine—well, now we're talking stupid. And that's what we're living now.