Stop, Look, and Listen #12
A round-up of what I have been reading and listening to this past week.
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This post is part of the newsletter’s ‘Stop, Look, and Listen’ series, a digest of articles and podcasts (and occasionally programmes and films) that I’ve found engaging and insightful over the past week. I also maintain a regular record of all these via Substack’s ‘Notes’ feature; you can also read these via the Notes section of my site.
Content warnings: War and ethnic cleaning; Antisemitism.
This week’s recommended reading and listening are on the areas of:
Histories and theologies.
Contested religious symbols.
Post-Soviet legacies.
Unruly animals.
Dissecting Hollywood films.
Histories and theologies
Examinations of how particular religious belief systems evolve historically, including their understandings of divinity, their fissures from and relationships with other branches of faith, and the significances of their broader political and cultural contexts.
Recommendations:
This episode of the Let’s Talk Religion podcast with Filip Holm explores Jewish mysticism. It covers earlier manifestations of mysticism in parts of the Tanakh, such the Book of Ezequiel; its development thereafter – through cross-pollination with mystical strands of Christianity and Islam – into Kabbalah during the Middle Ages; and the subsequent emergence of Hasidism among Jews in Eastern Europe from the 18th century.
Kelly Therese Pollock interviews Benjamin E. Park, author of American Zion: A New History of Mormonism, on the Unsung History podcast. Their conversation covers the importance of the Church’s (highly contested) history to the Mormon faith; the role of gender within the Mormon movement, and particularly of founder Joseph Smith’s first wife, Emma Smith, and its paradoxical significance as a space for both polygamy and female political activism; and the relationship between Mormonism and the broader American experience in which it was partly in tension with and partly a microcosm of, especially as Mormonism began to spread to other countries.
On the In Our Time podcast, Melvyn Bragg talks to Stephen Plant, Christiane Tietz, and Tom Greggs about the life and career of the Swiss-born theologian Karl Barth. They cover how the outbreak of the First World War, and the supportive response of many German liberal theologians for the German war effort, prompted him to break with them and reject the notion of the divine as present in aspects of human culture, as opposed to the idea of God as something that revealed itself to people of his own volition. They also look at how Barth’s religious thought ultimately put him in opposition to the rise of Hitler, culminating in his having to return to his native Switzerland.
Contested religious symbols
Continuing the religious theme, but with a particular on emphasis on the values that particular objects, symbols, and dates are imbued with.
Recommendations:
Emily Webb interviews Tasoula Hadjitofi for a two-part episode of the BBC World Service’s Lives Less Ordinary programme. Hadjitofi had been just a teenager, growing up in Famagusta, when conflict erupted in Cyprus in 1974, and the Turkish invasion forced her to leave her home. In Part I, she recounts her traumatic experiences of the war and her subsequent suppression of those memories while studying in the UK, and then her re-confrontation with them when, working in the art sector in the Netherlands, she learned of relics that had been looted from her former local church and that were now selling on the black market. Part II continues this story, as she recounts how in 1987, after becoming aware that these items had been stolen, she collaborated with an unpredictable Dutch art dealer, the then Archbishop of Cyprus Chrysostomos I, and the Cypriot and German police in a sting operation to retrieve them.
Ed Simon writes about the continuing importance of depictions of angels in contemporary culture, in this article for Religion Dispatches. He argues that while frequently mocked as kitsch or saccharine, renderings of angels across a range of media including films, television series, cards, graphic comics, and album covers demonstrate their value for expressing visions of politics, the erotic, and human nature.
Chris Hann looks at the potential controversy arising from Volodymr Zelensky‘s imposition of a reformed calendar on Ukraine, in this article for The Conversation. He notes that while efforts to move the country’s ritual year away from Russia’s and towards Europe’s tap into wider popular sentiment, they also risk being seen as a top-down imposition and exacerbating differences between and within its Greek Catholic and Orthodox communities.
Post-Soviet legacies
On how the politics of the Soviet Union’s decline and break-up and the search for new identities shaped the politics of three of its successor states: Russia, Uzbekistan, and Ukraine.
Recommendations:
Pavel Khazanov is interviewed by Peter Bertero about his book The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse on
’s Russian and Eurasian Studies channel. Khazanov explains how the seemingly discredited Russian Empire was increasingly evoked after Stalinism as a glorious Russian past to pit against the disillusioning socialist present in Soviet Russia, and the appeal it held for both conservatives and liberals after the Soviet Union collapsed, even as the country increasingly headed down the path of oligarchism and autocracy.Tom Leeman profiles Islam Karimov, the first president of independent Uzbekistan, with guest Jennifer Murtazashvili on The Hated and the Dead podcast. They explore how Karimov, who ruled the country from 1991 until his death in 2016, was shaped by his ascent through the Communist Party of Uzbekistan during its time as a Soviet republic. They also examine why – frightened by the liberalisation of markets embraced by other Soviet successor states, with mixed results, and by internal ethnic divisions and the growth of political Islam – he instead embraced a closed economy and repressive state apparatus, and the implications of this for Uzbek prosperity levels and civil society.
Published in Time, this excerpt of Simon Shuster’s forthcoming book The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky looks back at how the Ukrainian President was shaped by his childhood in the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih, by his family’s experiences as Jews of both persecution by the Nazis and of antisemitism within the Soviet Union, and by his early comedy career as part of the nascent Kvartal 95 troupe in the Moscow-dominated Russophone entertainment world of the 1990s and 2000s.
Unruly animals
On the shifting meanings invested in three particular mammals – wolves, orcas, and cats – that challenge dominant social orders, and the human responses that these animals do and might evoke.
Recommendations:
Host Gemma Ware talks to Hanna Petterson about wolves and rewilding on The Conversation podcast. Wolf numbers have increased in Europe over the past two decades, due both to growing availability of (formerly farmed) land for them to live on, and EU-led policy initiatives designed to protect them. They discuss Petterson’s research into how wolf-human relationships have played out on the ground in Spain, where the government has been particularly proactive in ensuring wolves are protected. They also consider the relationship between conservation science and politics in shaping policy, amid concerns over wolf attacks on livestock that have encouraged the US to partially reverse its policies.
Charmaine Cozier hosts this episode of BBC World Service’s The Inquiry on orcas, featuring Billy Heaney, Jeremy Kiszka, Hannah Strager, and Nicola Hodgins. They examine the reasons why orcas have been assailing boats off the coast of Southwestern Europe, the distinctiveness of particular local orca populations in their diets and behaviours, and the threats posed to some of them by human activities such as overfishing and hunting.
- interviews Leigh Clare Le Berge about her book Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary on . Le Berge explains how the cat has featured as a motif in radical thought and literature for over a millennium, and the way its attributes have commonly been interpreted as anti-authoritarian and undisciplinable. Their dialogue also touches on the potentials of a Marxist thought that takes non-human animals seriously and seeks their liberation as well as that of humans, rather than just to lift humans from the plight of animals.
Dissecting Hollywood films
Finally, three examinations of three Hollywood films, each made by renowned directors, each released a decade apart: The Godfather; E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; and Unforgiven.
Recommendations:
On The Next Picture Show podcast,
and Genevieve Koski are joined by to talk about 1972 film The Godfather. They discuss how director Francis Ford Coppola’s infused the pulpy original source material with deeper meaning, and how the film’s depiction of an Italian-Americans mafia family aspiring to legitimacy and facing the challenge of finding the right successor to its powerful patriarch captured the broader struggles of migrant families in the US.In this piece for her Review Roulette newsletter,
looks at 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and why the film’s enduring legacy may owe much to the chord it struck with younger viewers at the time of its release for its presentation of a child-centred world that adults do not understand nor value.Jamelle Bouie is the guest on this episode of Podcast Like It’s 1992, talking about Unforgiven, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. He and the podcast’s hosts discuss the film’s place within Eastwood’s directorial oeuvre and trajectory, as well as within the history of the Western as a genre, and its treatment of themes of the deleterious impact of committing violence on human beings, and of ageing and the finality of death.
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