I’ve said it many times here before, but if you haven’t already tuned in to Radio 4’s ‘In Our Time‘ archive on your iTunes, then you’re seriously missing out. Listening to it I’m always reminded of the great quote in Good Will Hunting where Will quips to a Harvard student:
you wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
Where else can you find in one programme serious discussion of science, philosophy, religion, mathematics, history and the arts? It’s brilliant.
If you don’t know where to start, you could do worse than the recent programme discussing William James’ book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’:
For the first time, here was a close-up examination of religion not as a body of beliefs, but as an intimate personal experience. The book laid the ground for a whole new area of study – the psychology of religion – and influenced figures from the psychiatrist Carl Jung to the novelist Aldous Huxley.
I’ll be blogging some thoughts from the programme concerning the roots of happiness. In the mean time, point your podcaster of choice right there, and get a brilliant education for free.