My favorite pastime: history podcasts

We are all born with a tremendous curiosity, and a need to explore and understand the world around us - to understand how and why things work, and how we fit into it.  It is so fun to watch babies and toddlers and young children go through this process.  I suspect that my sense of curiosity was partially stunted through 16 years of formal education.  But when I was in graduate school (Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison) around 2008 I started to follow politics, having a vague sense that something different was happening and things were changing in the word. I felt my curiosity drive began to resurface, and I opened a new chapter in my intellectual life.  (Maybe it had something to do with developing and practicing critical thinking techniques in a new way as a graduate student.)  Politics then gave way to the main question that planted itself in my mind, which was "How did the world come to be the way it is now, from how it used to be?"  We live in a peculiar moment, and I wanted to know why.

For me, audio material is easier to fit into a busy schedule because I can listen on commutes and while folding laundry, washing dishes, and feeding a baby. I found some great resources that helped me start to fill in the gaps of my historical knowledge.  I share the following to illustrate my self-taught learning approach, and to recommend some awesome free resources.  I first listened to all 179 episodes of Mike Duncan's "History of Rome" podcast, which is just amazing.  He has a political science background, and combined an analytical approach with tremendous narrative storytelling.  I followed that up with the early episodes of the History of Byzantium podcast, and a lecture series on Ancient Greece by Donald Kagan a fantastic lecturer at Yale, which shed light on the roots of democracy and rationalism in our modern world.  I listened to a History of Christianity lecture series (Part 1 and Part 2) by Donald Fortson III of the Reformed Theological Seminary.  I am currently listening to the History of England podcast by David Crowther and Mike Duncan's current project, Revolutions, which narrates the rough transition from feudal to modern times, with great political and historical analysis.  

I feel an understanding of the past is critical for understanding the present and making decisions that will impact the future.  It is so easy to get lost in the social pressures and cultural blinders of our own times.  Studying history means learning to see and judge the world from a cultural context that is completely different from our own.  History helps us see a broader perspective of the human condition, so we can more accurately understand and contextualize our own condition.  We are lucky to live in an age where we can learn so much about the past so easily.  

Let me suggest a couple of tips for Christians:

1. Study scripture.  Reading the word of God bring the spirit into our families and our daily lives.  And on a more mundane level, if history helps us step outside our own cultural blinders to see the world from a different perspective, what better perspective could there be to step into than that of other believers separated by time and space.  Their societies were as imperfect as we are, but their writings record their relationships with the very same God that we worship. 

2. Study history with the faith-based knowledge that all of humanity throughout time and space are all children of our Heavenly Father, equally loved.  We were all born on the Earth to complete the same mission, which is to seek out God and receive salvation through Him.  If we start with the assumption that at the point of birth salvation is equally open to all of us, we can derive a number of important principles that help to clarify what is truly important for us in our day, and what is distraction.

I'll expound on some of my aha moments and some other influential sources in later posts.