Audio by Adam

The witch has come in for some pretty hard knocks in previous centuries, but lately there has been a resurgence of interest in what she has to offer both as a way of seeing, and a way of being that is female, strong, earthy, connected and wise. This is a half hour documentary that explores witchcraft in all its wholesomeness and mystery. Appearances by Z. Budapest, Starhawk, Gina Banghart, Matthew Fox, Joseph Campbell and many others. Come on in! The magick’s fine!

(Also of interest: my NPR long form documentary “The Goddess in the USA” )

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:51 — 25.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Even given its colonial past and present day kitsch, Hawaii remains both an earthly paradise and a place of natural numinous power.  This is evident in its variety of spiritual musical idioms. Here is a taste of some of them,culled from a Smithsonian Festival a few years back.  Aloha!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:10 — 9.3MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Due to religion, socialism, the Zionist ideal, the militarization of the society, Western feminism, Arab culture and many other factors, Israeli women have complex competing factors that inform their self-image and their social roles.  This is a half hour documentary I did for National Public Radio back in the 1990s that is still relevant today.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:48 — 25.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Between Zionism, Socialsim,  Feminism, Judaism, the Holocaust, and all the American, Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian cultural influences that compete for primacy as models for women in Israel, their status and self-image is deeply multi-layered and complex. This half hour documentary, which I completed for National Public Radio back in the early 1990s, offers a sound-rich and varied sampling through the eyes of real women living, working and raising families in that amazing place.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:46 — 13.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS

On one level, this is a long form documentary about eminent (and eminently sparkling and intelligent) Wendy Doniger, the professor of Sanskrit and Hindu Mythology at the University of Chicago. On a deeper level, it is about Hindu myth, and Hindu gods, and the ways that the human and divine Narrator becomes part of the story He/She is telling. How those two themes interweave is the subject of the piece, which is one of my favorites from throughout my career.  Listen with the lights off!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:51 — 24.6MB)

Subscribe: RSS

The Eye is also in the eye of the beholder. When Saint Jerome’s, a church in the South Bronx, was constructed at the turn of the 20th century, it was built by immigrant artisans, mostly from Ireland and Italy, where the human eyes were often blue. So of course, they imagined the All-Seeing Eye of God as blue also, and that’s just how they painted the giant Eye-of-God mural on their church ceiling. Now the neighborhood has changed, and almost all the services are in Spanish for the brown-eyed Mexicans who now live there. It came to be time to restore the mural, and so now God’s Eye is brown. This is the story.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:37 — 4.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS