These programs include new and archive interviews, readings from important journal and magazine articles, lectures by important scholars, and the occasional illustrated essay about seasonal music. The ten most recent Features are available to all from our app, and the most recent one is available on our home page. Members have access to hundreds of past Features and may download them to the app for later listening.
Seven Messianic titles, seven attributes of Christ
Ken Myers introduces listeners to four composers who each have set all seven of the O Antiphons to music. (17 minutes)
A prophetic “wake-up call”
In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
“Prophet of holiness”
Timothy Larsen discusses a new edition of George MacDonald‘s Diary of An Old Soul, a slim book of poem-prayers to be read daily as a devotional aid. (30 minutes)
Seasons and everyday saints
Sylvie Vanhoozer introduces a French Advent tradition that involves a community of “little saints” whose stories have something to teach us about following Christ throughout the year. (28 minutes)
Critiquing “empire criticism”
Allan Bevere and Peter Leithart evaluate “empire criticism,” a way of reading the New Testament with an anti-imperial focus. (36 minutes)
Cosmetic surgery and human perfectibility
Elizabeth Haiken examines the shift that occurred in 20th century America from a focus on developing character to a focus on developing “personality” and achieving physical perfection. (19 minutes)
Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic
Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
The physical beauty of music
Music can be likened to a cathedral, says professional guitarist Gordon Kreplin, when it creates through silence and sound a meditative space into which one may enter and encounter God. (14 minutes)
Counterpoint as a “spirited discussion”
In this essay, John Ahern explains the beauty and order of counterpoint, the accumulation of multiple melodies that come together in a harmonious whole. (20 minutes)
Good stewardship of language
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre discusses central themes from her 2009 book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. ALSO: clips from 6 other programs about language. (36 minutes)
Constructing your Favorites List
Ken Myers describes the new ecosystem of Mars Hill Audio’s membership/partnership program and shares clips from five recent lectures released as Bonus Features. (26 minutes)
Is American culture now story-less?
From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)
How we know the world
Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
The roots of American disorder
In this reading of an article from 2021 by Michael Hanby, the critique of Marxism in Augusto del Noce’s work is compared with texts from the American Founders. (79 minutes)
Early evangelical response to C. S. Lewis
Historian Mark Noll discusses the reasons why American evangelicals were initially slow to warm to Lewis. (15 minutes)
Education for human flourishing
Co-authors Paul Spears and Steven Loomis argue that Christians should foster education that does justice to humans in our fullness of being. (23 minutes)
