I Was a Teenage Fundamentalist Episode 97 What about Progressive Christianity? I must say, that when I was an evangelical Christian about 40 years ago, I didn’t ever have a problem with Christianity and Progressivism. I think that it says more about modern evangelical Christianity than it does about me, that there could even be a tension between the two. In this episode, Brian and Troy talk with Rev. Tim Costello, someone I generally admire for his work on refugees and gambling. In the introduction Brian and Troy give a trigger warning for how much Christianity is going to follow: I bet that Tim Costello hadn’t been introduced with a trigger warning before! I do find his frequent declarations that “I believe in Jesus” rather strident, given the general progressiveness of the rest of the podcasts- what does that mean? Resurrection? Salvation? etc.
Three Million Episode 2: The Cigarette Tin When the Japanese invaded Calcutta (I didn’t know they did!), people fled their lands and crowded into the cities. Because the British government was requisitioning supplies, the price of rice rocketed. Amartya Sen, one of the interviewees, who lived a comfortable middle class childhood, speaks of his mother allowing him to give half a cigarette tin of rice to people in his immediate neighbourhood who asked for it. The British Government refused to free up ships as a mere ‘goodwill gesture’ and merchants were buying up rice and stockpiling it. It was a class-based famine.
The Rest is History Episode 431: Titanic: Nightmare at Midnight (Part 5) The two hours and 40 minutes that it took the Titanic to sink makes it seem like a performance to us. Survivors mention the crunch (like running over gravel) as it hit the iceberg, then silence. People were paralyzed by deference, inertia and compliance. CQD (‘All stations help’), the emergency code, was sent out (SOS had been introduced 4 years earlier but was not in widespread use). All the crew knew that there was a lifeboat deficiency of about 1000 (it would have been almost 2000 if the Titanic was at full capacity). There was a fear of panic but also reluctance to face the 11-storey drop down to the water. The code was ‘women and children first’ but what did that mean? No men until all the women were off? Or let women and children fill up the lifeboat, then men could go on? The instructions were interpreted differently on one side of the ship to the other, so your survival depended on which side you went to. The gates blocking Third Class were opened after 45 minutes but there was a 3rd class reluctance to leave their baggage (their sole possessions) and it was very, very cold. Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon and his wife survived in Lifeboat 1 which had only 12 occupants out of a capacity of 40 and were treated with obloquy for the rest of their lives. Isodor Strauss and his wife Ida, two of the few Jewish passengers and co-owners of Macy’s department store, chose to stay because, as a man, Isodor was refused a place on the lifeboat. J. Bruce Ismay, the chairman and managing director of White Star Line also survived when he got onto a spare lifeboat. Most of those who died did so because of the cold, rather than drowning. The survivors recalled hearing the clamour of voices, then a roar as the Titanic sank.
Very Short Introductions Podcast Abolitionism Abolitionism? Is that an American thing? This podcast, of very poor acoustic quality, is presented by Richard Newman, who has written on American Abolitionism, and is very US-centric. He sounds almost surprised by the fact that there was a continuous wave of activism through from the 1770s to the late 19th century on both sides of the Atlantic, and that it worked globally and tactically through petitions and courtcases. He notes the diversity among abolitionists, who worked as politicians, ministers, photographers, writers, men and women, black and white. He notes that African Americans were particularly important in the formation of the first Pennyslvania Abolition Society in 1775, and in Britain. He emphasizes the importance of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) in 1793 which led to the end of French slavery, and attracted the attention of the whole world.
History Hit Episode 1424 Pontius Pilate features Helen Bond. She discusses the portrayal of Pilate in the canonical bibles, the apocryphal books of the Bible, and through secular writing at the time. In 6CE Judea came under direct Roman rule, and the first governors appointed were prefects, as was Pilate. The early Christian writers, who had the problem of squaring the Messiah with a crucified criminal, portrayed the Jewish leaders as responsible. Mark (the earliest of the gospels) speaks of the trade-off with Barabbas – is that plausible? Matthew depicts Pilate washing his hands, and Herod Antipas, another high-status man involved in his trial. John goes off on an esoteric frolic of his own. The Romans were mainly based at Caesaria Maritima, on the coast, and they were not a big presence in Jerusalem, where they knew they were not welcome. The Apocryphal gospels have The Acts of Pilate (or Gospel of Nicodemus) but they are generally viewed as being spurious. Among the non-biblical sources, Philo of Alexandria is contemptuous of Pilate, while Josephus is writing after the Jewish-Roman War and is looking for insensitivities amongst the prefects to explain the war. He notes times when Pilate backed down over Jewish demands, and generally sees him as mediocre. In the Coptic Ethiopic tradition, Pilate is a saint because he converted to Christianity. There are other stories about Pilate’s supposed suicide, and the idea that he was buried in a lake in Lucerne because evil spirits followed him. What we do know is that Pilate was in Judea for about 10 years (a relatively long posting) and that he really existed.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 