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Science and technology force us to ask some of the most challenging and unprecedented ethical questions in the world today. These issues encompass what it means to be human, how we relate to others and our world, and how we find meaning in life. How we can find a shared ethics for an interdependent world? In her 2006 CBC Massey Lectures, ethicist and McGill University professor Margaret Somerville tackles some of the most contentious issues of our times, and proposes a brilliant new kind of ethical language and thought to help us navigate them.

In spite of modern ideals and achievements in the area of freedom and choice, people today are often afflicted with a sense that they cannot change things for the better. They feel helpless, constrained, caught -- in a word, fatalistic. Beyond Fate, Margaret Visser's 2002 CBC Massey Lectures, examines why. This timely and important book investigates what fate means, and where the propensity to believe in it and accept it comes from.

The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form. Important thinkers whose Massey Lectures are lamentably out of print include the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Jane Jacobs, Paul Goodman, and Eric Kierans.

The world is facing the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War. Over 300,000 are dead in Syria, and one and half million are either injured or disabled. Four and a half million people are trying to flee the country. And Syria is just one of a growing number of failed or failing states in the Middle East and North Africa. How should developed nations respond to human suffering on this mass scale? Do the prosperous societies of the West, including Canada and the U.S., have a moral imperative to assist as many refugees as they reasonably and responsibly can?

As stock markets gyrate, Europe lurches from crisis to crisis, and recovery in the United States slows, the future of the North American economy is more uncertain than ever. Can individual entrepreneurship, corporate innovation, and governments create a new era of sustained economic growth? Or, will the ongoing financial crisis, political dysfunction in the United States, and the rise of emerging nations erode living standards in North America for the long term?

Historian Ramsay Cook called George Grant one of Canada's two most important political thinkers in the twentieth century. In these lively conversations, recorded not long before Grant's death, David Cayley explores with Grant the deep roots of his faith, his evolution as a thinker, and his views on the future of Canada.

In his 1968 CBC Massey Lectures R. D. Laing discusses how and why we value society's notions of family over our own. Using concepts of schizophrenia, R.D. Laing demonstrates that we tend to invalidate the subjective and experiential and accept the proper societal view of what should occur within the family. A psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Laing worked at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. His books include The Self and Others and The Politics of Experience.

For more than fifteen years, iconoclastic thinker Ivan Illich refused to be interviewed. Finally, in 1988, CBC's David Cayley persuaded Illich to record a conversation. This first interview led to additional sessoins that continued until 1992 and are now gathered in Ivan Illich in Conversation. In these fascinating conversations, which range over a wide selection of the celebrated thinker's published work and public career, Illich's brilliant mind alights on topics of great contemporary interest, including education, history, language, politics, and the church.

In his 1964 CBC Massey Lectures C. B. Macpherson examines the rival ideas of democracy - the communist, Third World, and Western-liberal variants - and their impact on one another. He suggests that the West need not fear any challenge to liberal democracy if it is prepared to re-examine and alter its own values.

The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form.