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Expanding Eyes: A Visionary Education

Michael Dolzani

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This podcast is aimed at a non-specialist audience interested in acquiring what Northrop Frye called, in the title of one of his books, an educated imagination. Its materials are drawn from the many courses in literature and mythology that I taught, combined with material from my book The Productions of Time, for which I hope the podcast may provide an accessible introduction, with concrete examples.

Recent Episodes

OCT 4, 2026
Episode 288: The Exodus as Imaginative Rather than Historical Pattern. Ex-hodos Means “the Way Out.” The Biblical Metaphor of the Journey or Way.
The Exodus is not conventional history but sacred history, not factual but not just a fiction. Its patterns are mythical and metaphorical. The myth of the journey or the “way” that begins here and runs through the rest of the Bible.
36 MIN
SEP 27, 2026
Episode 287: The Exodus. The Biblical Vision as an Overturn of Established Authority. The Vision of History as Linear and Progressive.
The Bible has been used to reinforce an authoritarian ideology of obedience to an elite, but in fact the Exodus, the defining event of the Old Testament, is a revolt against authority, and has had a powerful influence: “Let my people go.” The Biblical vision as historical and progressive rather than as endless cycles of death and renewal.
38 MIN
SEP 21, 2026
Episode 286: The Imagery of Sacrifice, Biblical and Classical. The Spiritualizing and Deliteralizing of Sacrifice.
The movement of religious thought from sacrifice as atonement to sacrifice as at-onement, outward legalistic act to an inward movement of the heart, from placating God or a god’s wrath to a self-sacrifice in the name of love. The two medieval theories of Christ’s Atonement as the sacrificial Lamb of God.
38 MIN
SEP 13, 2026
Episode 285: The Subversion of Primogeniture in the Bible, the Trickster God Passing Over the Normal Successor. The Imagery of Sheep and Shepherds, and the Imagery of Sacrifice.
A remarkable pattern runs throughout the Bible of the subverting of the normal line of succession, and its significance. The pastoral imagery of sheep and shepherds in the earlier books of the Bible, and the imagery of animal sacrifice, which we struggle to understand.
37 MIN
SEP 6, 2026
Episode 284: The Bible’s Alternative to the Heroic: Trickster Figures and a Trickster God, the God of the Underdog.
The heroic tradition tends to be tragic, its heroes ending in a downfall that is part of the greatness. The Bible is a divine comedy, and its figures are unheroic, often underdog figures. Their God is an invisible Trickster God who subverts the rules and champions those who lack power. Like all Tricksters, he can be troubling in his defiance of conventional morality.
38 MIN