Terry Dosh - Historian

Terry Dosh entered a Roman Catholic seminary at the beginning of the great transformations of the Church surrounding the Second Vatican Council. His life, and his work as an historian, is in constant dialogue with the ideas of reform and renewal exemplified by Vatican II.

The Litchfield Area Adult Writers Group

This is a show I did in 1997 with my parents, Jim and Ardes Shea. The writing group they describe provided stimulation and support and a monthly challenge for them for decades. My dad died a couple of years after this interview; my mother is still an active participant in the group.

Oil and Water - An Exciting New Kind of Course

This semester, the University of Minnesota is offering a course called "Oil and Water: The Gulf Oil Spill of 2010." This is a rapid response to important events; it has received a lot of good press at the national level. The Institute for Advanced Study is making arrangements to post the course lectures online, so that people all over the world can follow along. Here is the first lecture. The details about subsequent episodes will be posted within a week.

Teaching People How to Live in the Nineteenth Century

Connie and Norm Peterson are committed to slowing down, to values that come from 19th Century rural culture. They are also passionate about teaching crafts -- fiber arts and woodworking -- as ways of entering into that state of mind. Here is their story.

Walken Schweigert: the Unseen Ghost Brigade

Walken Schweigert, an actor, director, performer, with a talent for learning new skills and having adventures, discusses an upcoming project: a trip down the Mississippi on raft, helping the ghosts of characters from the time of Mark Twain visit towns along the route from Minneapolis to New Orleans.

Edith Morgan - Pacifist and Holocaust Survivor

World War II presented a particular problem for pacifist principles. In this interview, Edith Morgan, a Jewish refugee from Europe whose family settled in Minnesota, tells the story of her escape and reflects on how she and her family thought about the problem of war, in light of their own history and the reality of Nazi ruthlessness.

Was McLuhan Right? The Gutenberg Galaxy and the Future of the Book

A passionate discussion in the philosophy section of a good bookstore, bringing together people who cared passionately about printed books and reading, people who were enthralled with new gadgets and techniques of information accesss and display, and people who just wanted to understand what is happening to our culture, as print becomes in various ways inconvenient and problematic: