I’ve been listening, fairly regularly, to the BBC4 radio program In Our Time. Each week, host Melvyn Bragg gathers three scholars on a given subject, and they have a usually fascinating and very educational conversation. You can download each episode for a week after the initial airing. I might be wrong about this, but I don’t think they’ve had archives available until recently – you can’t download, but you can listen on the computer to any in the current series. Here’s the link. I’ve listened to most of them down to..let’s see…the program on the Jesuits, an episode I mentioned before because of the oddness (or not) of the program not mentioning the Jesuit presence in England at all.

Other than that, I’ve not detected any huge omissions, but then, neither am I an expert on the history of optics or microbiology, so it’s not as if I woud detect any. Bragg does a great job rounding everyone up and keeping the academics on track, with only one shaky effort in my listening – for the program on symmetry, he had a couple of physicists on who were determined to talk about symmetry from the standpoint of physics – way beyond me, don’t ask – and he kept trying to bring them around to the visual and psychological appeal of symmetry, but they stubbornly stuck to their physicist guns…perhaps he got them to cooperate eventually, but I didn’t stick around to see. Or hear. With either ear.

Every time I listen, I think how great it would be to have a program like that from a Catholic perspective – have 3 scholars on with a well-prepared and objective host to discuss the history of ideas and practices..oh, like the Inquisition and such. And to do so in a way that emulates what In Our Time does: not seeking controversy, but not ignoring disagreements among scholars, either. (This past week: Was Spinoza’s "God" a religious concept? Yes! No! Such tension! Well..not really.)

Such untapped potential…everywhere.