05/24/2023 – Third Year Anniversary
It’s my third year anniversary! Yeah baby! Come party with me. This is 10 on Religion.
Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. If you like religion and philosophy content one thing I really need you to do is to smash that sub button because it really helps out the channel. The transcript is available at TenOnReligion.com and new episodes are posted every few weeks, at noon, U.S. Pacific time, so drop me some views.
It’s been three years since I started this channel and I want to give a big shout out and thanks to all the subscribers which have more than doubled since last year, because it means so much to the channel. I’m so happy I’ve been able to share information on so many topics. I want to talk about some plans for the near future, but first, some of the highlights of this past year.
Last summer I started out with an episode on Star Wars and Religion and then created a five-part summer series on hermeneutics covering the death of the biblical author, Gadamer and dialogue, Habermas and critique, Ricoeur and suspicion and Levinas and the other. This was followed by a two-part series on Peter Berger: religion and world construction and religion and secularization. Last November, I attended the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Denver and posted a vlog-style episode of my trip experience as well as an episode on my favorite session of the event: “Home” in Comparative Theology and Theology Without Walls. I then did a two-part episode on an important religious scholar named W. C. Smith, and another movie-related episode on The Matrix and religion. Is the first Matrix film a metaphor for a particular religion? This past spring we did more episodes on Paul Tillich and Paul Ricoeur and then featured a recent European scholar named Marianne Moyaert on interreligious hospitality and interrituality. The most recent episode was on Jan Assman’s book titled, The Invention of Religion focusing on why Exodus was written. I had a great time creating that episode and it’s been popular, so if you haven’t watched it yet, go check it out. Actually, there’s a lot of great episodes that I really worked hard at researching, writing, and creating. In case you didn’t know, I’m a one-person operation here and I do everything myself from the writing to the filming to the editing. The older videos from a few years ago have great content but the production quality is lower because I was still learning how to film and edit. And I’m still learning. It’s always an ongoing process.
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Now on to the near future. There’s a lot of good stuff coming up. I recently read this great book titled, The Challenge of Pluralism: Church and State in Six Democracies. We don’t really get political here a whole lot but we’re going to do a series of episodes on various religion and government relationships based on this book. Both the similarities and the differences in approaches from these six countries are really fascinating. You want to know which countries they are? You’ll have to watch the episodes. After that, we’re going to have a three-part series on Paul Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology book series. Yeah, we’re gonna go there and it’s gonna be huge. This will be followed by an episode on another of Tillich’s books, Theology of Culture. Then in September it’s going to be episodes based on books from two of my acquaintances. First, my former graduate school classmate, J.R. Hustwit, .Interreligious Hermeneutics and the Pursuit of Truth. And then a super-cool dude Benjamin Chicka. His book titled, God the Created: Pragmatic Constructive Realism in Philosophy and Theology. I also recently acquired a book on Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of Religion by Brian Gregor, so hopefully I will have time to get through this and then we’ll do another deep dive into Ricoeur who is such a great figure to help understand religion.
It’s been a great three years and looking forward to the next one. Again, thanks to those of you who watch this channel. Let me know in the comments if you have a specific topic you’d like to see covered in the future and I’ll see what I can do. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel because it really helps out. This is 10 on Religion.