Episode 13 // Devotional

This week's episode takes root in religious notions of the 'devotional', and draws from Kierkegaard's contemplations on 'faith' and its tension with Hegel's supposed 'rationality'. The playlist features ancient African Islamic spiritual music known as Gnawa music, a 'Toronto Blessing' section in reference to a 1994 revivalist phenomenon of the same name, and a liturgical Gregorian chant performed by Dead Can Dance and also one which has been sung nearly continuously in some churches since the medieval period.

Below is an early 19th-century painting of 'Sant Kabir with Namdeva, Raidas and Pipaji' now at the National Museum New Delhi. The teachings and thought of Kabir and other 'sants' like him, greatly influenced the 'Bhatki' movement of medieval India, which advocated for personal expressions of 'devotion' to Divinity and communal harmony among various religious groups existing at the time.

episode download: [forthcoming]


0:01:07 - station id: Jack Layton
0:01:18 - promo: cfrc twitter
0:01:31 - Yilma Hailu - 'Tewahido (Track 1)'
0:09:31 - John Tavener (performed by Anonymous 4) - 'The Lord's Prayer'
'":"":""' - talking: Ethiopian mezmur, Soren Kierkegaard's 'Fear and Trembling', [1]
0:13:29 - Tujiko Noriko - 'Let Me See Your Face'
0:18:41 - Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos - 'New Binghi'
0:21:06 - Karlheinz Stockhausen - 'Gesang der Junglinge'
0:30:54 - White Fence - 'Is Growing Faith'
0:34:00 - Dead Can Dance - 'The Song of the Sibyl'
'":"":""' - talking: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kierkegaard vs. Hegel, Song of the Sibyl, [2]
0:37:46 - Swearin - 'Divine/Mimosa'
0:40:22 - Cass McCombs - 'You Saved My Life'
0:45:46 - Old Haunt - 'Sky Burial'
0:48:01 - Loren Mazzacane & Kath Bloom - 'Religion is Something Within You'
0:50:44 - Bruce Springsteen - 'Reason to Believe'
0:54:52 - Viva Voce - 'Believer'
0:58:01 - Planet Creature - 'Hymns'


1:01:14 - station id: Amy Goodman
1:01:29 - psa: Anishinaabe & Haudenosaunee land
1:01:39 - psa: Noam Chomsky on community radio
1:02:25 - promo: Below the Decks (radio show)
1:02:56 - Deptford Goth - 'Time'
1:07:44 - Petra Glynt - 'Faithfuel'
1:11:55 - Holy Other - 'Touch'
1:16:11 - Sisyphus - 'Rhythm of Devotion'
1:22:12 - Mahmoud Guinia - 'Track 1'
'":"":""' - talking: Bruce Springsteen, Slavoj Zizek, Gnawa music, [3]

"The devotional path isn’t necessarily a straight line to enlightenment. There’s a lot of back and forth, negotiations if you will, between the ego and the soul. You look around at all the aspects of suffering, and you watch your heart close in judgment. Then you practice opening it again and loving this too, as a manifestation of the Beloved, another way the Beloved is taking form. Again your love grows vast. In Bhakti, as you contemplate, emulate, and take on the qualities of the Beloved, your heart keeps expanding until you see the whole universe as the Beloved, even the suffering."
- Ram Dass

"Von Balthasar lamented what he saw as the loss of the mystical, Marian character of the Church after the Council... he complained that it had become more than ever a male Church, if perhaps one should not say a sexless entity, in which woman may gain for herself a place to the extent that she is ready herself to become such an entity... Charlene Spretnak is an American feminist writer at the opposite end of the theological spectrum from von Balthasar, but in her book Missing Mary she appeals for a rediscovery of the Catholic Church as ‘a container and guardian of mysteries far greater than itself’. She describes what she sees as the destructive influence of rationalising modernity on Catholic devotion,"
- Tina Beattie

Further Info:
[1] 'Fear and Trembling' by Soren Kierkegaard (online book)
[2] The Song of the Sibyl
[3] 'The Interpassive Subject' by Slavoj Zizek