The current Friday Feature
duration 24:18
If you’re a member, you can select this (or any other) Friday Feature, and download it to our app for later listening. Here’s the listing of Features.
Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- Discipline and piety
Bishop Robert Barron on Aquinas, the man - St. Thomas the anthropologist
G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man - The collaboration of bodies and minds
F. C. Copleston on Aquinas’s confidence in the embodied nature of knowledge - A brief for “prophetic Thomism”
David Decosimo on assuming a charitable posture toward pagan virtue - Coming unstuck from the earth
Henru de Lubac on how being heavenly minded makes one of immense earthly good
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Related Features
Metaphysics & sub-creation
Economics & personhood
Being & reason
Conscience & its counterfeits
Meet one of our Partners
The Center for Christian Study is an educational and outreach ministry at the University of Virginia (UVA). The Center for Christian Study brings thoughtful and informative lectures to UVA and the wider Charlottesville community; engages students in small groups to study the Bible and various books; offers a 12,000-volume library as a key student resource; and provides hospitality to students, serving coffee and fresh food and being a home away from home.
On this page, you can browse a listing of lectures that the Center for Christian Study has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
A recent Bonus Feature
In this 1993 essay, Judith Martin (whose pen name is Miss Manners) argues that etiquette is “civilization’s first necessity” and an indispensable societal virtue. Martin explains that, far from being a relic of high-class snobbery, manners uphold the dignity of persons, resolve conflicts and avert escalation to legal recourse, and reinforce foundational ethical principles that sustain complex societies. Manners serve both a regulatory and a symbolic, or ritual, function in societies. The latter function is less understood today, but it serves the sacred things that bind people together and make us more human. The decline of belief in the legitimacy of etiquette has led to attempts by clinical psychology and the law to compensate. However, Martin asserts that training in etiquette must begin in the family home early in childhood, because manners establish a basis for other virtues. Understanding that communal goals may sometimes outweigh individual desires is foundational to building stable societies.
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
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Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 163
- ANDREW YOUNGBLOOD, author of Know Thyself: Classical Catholic Education and the Discovery of Self, on the rise of the classical education movement
- R. J SNELL, author of Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, Hope, on living in a chaotic universe
- NICHOLAS DENYSENKO, author of The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy, on the historical background to Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine
- NIGEL BIGGAR, author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, on the need for a historically informed moral accounting of the British empire
- ROBERT MCNAMARA, author of The Personalism of Edith Stein: A Synthesis of Thomism and Phenomenology, on the deep inner life and penetrating philosophical insights of Edith Stein
- DAVID CAYLEY, author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, on Illich’s understanding of modernity