The Christian Humanist Podcast, Episode #135: Songs of Innocence and Experience

General Introduction
– Some eschatology
– Listener feedback
– A Dante omission
– A dedicated After Virtue episode?
– Jacques Barzun on baseball
– YOLO, tower libraries
– Cain and the Alien series

Poet and Prophet
– Rival powers
– The invisible chains across the Atlantic
– Human goodness and human freedom
– Struggle and benevolence
– Deciphering the mythology
– Blake’s fanfiction

Blake’s Designs
– BlakeArchive.org
– Poem and print
– The self-taught master
– The human body
– Iconography

“The Lamb” and “The Tyger”
– A child’s-eye view
– The catechism in “The Lamb”
– The nudity in the print
– The crap taxidermy of “The Tyger”
– A killing machine
– Who may I say is speaking?
– Are there multiple gods at play here?

The Innocent “Chimney Sweeper”
– Another eschatological vision
– The stain of the work
– Connections to Pilgrim’s Progress
– The opiate of the masses
– A critique of heaven, or a dream of it?

“The Clod and the Pebble”
– Ruling in hell and serving in heaven
– Differences in temperament and environment
– Whose team is Blake on?
– Blake’s modernity
– Romanticism
– Blake and Kierkegaard

Images of God
– The image of virtue
– Back into the tiger
– Image of whom?
– Throwing doubt on pity

Lightning Round
– “The Garden of Love” and organized religion
– The experienced “Chimney Sweeper”
– “Little Girl Lost”
– Blake’s hatred of industrialism reaches its apex

Our theme music this week is Terry Scott Taylor’s “Song of Innocence” from his 1986 album Knowledge and Innocence.