Handel’s Messiah is one of the best-loved pieces of Christmas music. Only it was meant for Easter. But it draws on far more from the Old Testament than the New. There are more surprising facts about this 18th-century masterpiece that IDEAS explores with Ivars Taurins, founding director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir who has conducted Messiah over 200 times, and veteran CBC Radio broadcaster Robert Harris. In nine movements, they reveal the hidden treasures of Handel’s celebrated work. *This episode originally aired in 2015.

The nativity story that Christians believe is that God took the form of a baby named Jesus who was born to save the world and bring about an enduring peace. So what happened? Did we miss it? And what happens next? These are questions Trappist monk Thomas Merton grappled with in his own meditation on the Christmas story. His version "The Time of The End is the Time of No Room" was published in 1966. At the time he called it a sober statement about the climate of our time, a time of finality and fulfillment.

In an era of political polarization, and fatigue from ongoing crises, education scholar Kari Grain argues hope is vital. It's not something you have, it's something you do. Grain says "critical hope" in action is an abiding belief that transformation is not just possible, but crucial. So how does water play into hope? The author explores how hope can come from three areas: teachers, critical thinking and biomimicry, the practice of observing how nature functions in order to solve human problems. Grain reimagines hope as something that can move like the four habits of water: bending, pooling in deep places, going underground, and persisting. In this way, hope is fluid enough to forge new pathways forward.

Kari Grain is a professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Education, where she leads the Masters program in Adult Learning and Global Change Program. She delivered the University of Prince Edward Island’s 2025 Shannon K Murray Lecture on Hope and the Academy.

Indigenous math isn't just about numbers and equations, it involves culture, spirituality and more. Math professor Edward Doolittle, a Mohawk from Six Nations in Ontario, sees math as something embedded in Creation itself. In his Hagey Lecture at the University of Waterloo, he describes Indigenous mathematics as being grounded in cognition, emotion, the physical world and community. Indigenizing math, Doolittle hopes, will make it more approachable and meaningful to Indigenous students — show them how entwined it is with everyday life and something much bigger than ourselves.

"We are the monsters" — that's the premise for the genre of film known as body horror — movies that fixate on monstrous and grotesque changes to the body. There have been good body horror films and bad ones, but "The Fly" starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis was perhaps the most consequential. The movie captured anxieties around bodily autonomy and physical decay, just as the AIDS epidemic was becoming catastrophic. Forty years later, Body Horror is back with films like "The Substance" and "Together." Producer Matthew Lazin-Ryder examines what these films reveal about our bodies, our minds and our sense of who we are.

In 2024, 'polarization' was Merriam-Webster's word of the year. That division still grows, making it increasingly difficult to connect to one another. But there are people having important conversations and they have advice for us all. From fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Colombia, championing human rights in Southern Africa and working for a two-state solution post Oct. 7, the winners of the The Global Centre for Pluralism awards tell host Nahlah Ayed about how minds can and do change, and why we need to not only talk, but listen.

The yellow light is a perfect example of imperfection — with intention. When a traffic light turns yellow while you’re driving, you have to think fast. Speed up or stop, whether that means easily or slamming on the brakes. Every driver has their answer and what lies in the middle is a vast perceptual field. A great deal of thought has gone into the use of the ambiguous yellow light, as IDEAS producer Seán Foley found out. He had his own encounter with what he was sure was the shortest yellow light in the world. It resulted in a traffic fine, and gave voice to so many questions.

Tech billionaires are on a mission to make the stories of science fiction a reality: space colonization, human/machine bio organisms, and living forever in a state of unhindered bliss. This version of a far future utopia may come of as a "billionaire boys and their toys" but experts warn such a dismissive attitude is naïve and dangerous. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 22, 2025.