While his disciples loved their roguish leader, Sun Wukong’s misadventures had spread chaos throughout the land. The Jade Emperor, watching from his throne in Heaven, decided he would no longer stand by as this monkey wreaked havoc...

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative...

Between 1927 and 1941, workers blasted 450,000 tons of rock from a mountainside using chisels, jackhammers, and dynamite. Gradually, they carved out Mount Rushmore. Today, the monument draws nearly 3 million people to South Dakota's...

As the sun rises in 55 BCE, Camma lays two pigeons on the altar at the center of her village. She wrings the birds' necks and cuts them open to examine their entrails for divine messages. Camma is a druid. She conducts religious rites,...

For sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, the ocean is more than a muse -- it's an exhibition space and museum. Taylor creates sculptures of human forms and mundane life on land and sinks them to the ocean floor, where they are subsumed by the...

This week, we're continuing our talk about the characteristics of Goddesses, and we're going to look in depth at two stories from parts of the world we haven't visited much in this series so far. From Hawaii, we're going to hear a story...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Anthropologist Wade Davis muses on the worldwide web of belief and ritual that makes us human. He shares...

The way we behave politically, socially, economically and ecologically isn't working, says community organizer and activist Tai Simpson. Sharing the creation myth of her Nez Perce tribe, she advocates for a return to the "old ways"...

This week, we're talking about theories of Myth. We'll look at the different ways mythology has been studied in the last couple of millenia, and talk about the diffeent ways people have interpreted myth, academically.

This week, we're headed back to India to learn about the all night dance shows that culminate in killing a Demon (metaphorically): Kathakali! This form arose in the Kerala region of India, and tells traditional Indian stories, but with...

Today we’re turning our sociological eye to another major social institution: religion. We’ll use symbolic interactionism to help us understand the dichotomy of the Sacred vs. the Profane. We’ll compare the perspectives of structural...

Howcast - Learn how to set up a Wiccan altar from Wiccan High Priestess Phyllis Curott in this Howcast video.

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Howcast - Learn what a Wiccan Rite of Dedication is from Wiccan High Priestess Phyllis Curott in this Howcast video.

Howcast - Learn about the pagan religion Wicca, short for Witchcraft, from Wiccan High Priestess Phyllis Curott in this Howcast video.

Howcast - Learn how to invoke divinity in Wicca from Wiccan High Priestess Phyllis Curott in this Howcast video.