Lost Prophets

<p>In 1962, the American public’s faith in science was very high. After all, science was credited with helping us win World War II (Spam rations, nylons, the bomb) and was giving an emerging middle-class ever more...

<p>His Buddhist community called him simply “Thay,” the Vietnamese word for teacher. </p><p>Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh died at age 95 in his native Vietnam, having endured 39 years of exile between 1966 and 2005...

<p>We co-hosts at Lost Prophets each have a slightly different story about encountering Pope Francis, to use a word which he gave a particular meaning. (Elias’ reflection on the Pope of the Peripheries is here and...

<p>We now have an even dozen episodes of Lost Prophets under our belts. Time to stop, we thought, sit down by the side of the road, and look back down the mountain at the distance we’ve come. </p><p>Some key points that...

<p>To understand the accumulating fractures of our time, it’s important to look back at key earlier periods and try to discern: What were we thinking? </p><p>Colette Shade — who has written for The New Republic, The...

<p>It is slightly jarring to find the radically-minded Paul Goodman a welcome guest on the September 12, 1966 episode of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line television show. The topic was “Are Public Schools Necessary?”...

<p>Just over one year after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear brinksmanship gone wrong was slated to premiere for a New York audience on November 22, 1963. The assassination...

<p>We first encountered Dougald Hine about a year ago through the wide mycelium-like network of Ivan Illich fans—and we were glad we did. His new book was just out and we heard he was doing a book tour of the U.S. quite...

<p>He’s been called a poet of quiet revolution: a revolution staged to heal the rift between humanity and the natural world around us. Gary Snyder’s distinctive spirituality combines Eastern traditions like Zen...

<p>Marc H. Ellis (1952-2024) saw the prophet today as in a condition of exile, refusing to compromise with injustice, perhaps doomed, without protection, even without destination.</p><p>It was while first reading Jewish...

<p>Here at Lost Prophets, we are interested not only in the seminal mid-century figures we feature, but also in those contemporaries who have imbibed their ideas and are extending them today. So we were happy to speak...

<p>This episode takes us into the long history of the Civil Rights Movement as we talk about the methods and legacies of two long-distance runners, Ella Baker (1903-1986) and Septima Clark (1898-1987).</p><p>Baker was a...

<p>Ivan Illich (1926-2002) emerged in the late 1960s as a radical public intellectual. Many of his most radical insights have today become conventional wisdom. </p><p>The wonderful essayist George Scialabba once...

<p>Peter Maurin (1877-1949) was Dorothy Day’s great teacher and collaborator in establishing the Catholic Worker movement. He saw Catholic social teachings as the still-unexploded “dynamite of the Church.” </p><p>If...

<p>The life and career of Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) is a remarkable case of the inspired “amateur” who changes an entire field of study (urban planning) merely by looking more closely at things than the experts had done...