An outrageous idea?

Related reading and listening

• A metaphysics of realism, relationality, and personalism — John Milbank gives a survey and critique of the efforts of 20th and 21st century theologians to articulate a Trinitarian ontology that reflects reality and counters secularization. (61 minutes)
• Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters — FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes)
• Personhood, limits, and academic vocation — FROM VOL. 39 Marion Montgomery (1934–2002) offers a deep critique of the relationship of the academy to its community in an effort to diagnose how higher education has lost its way. (13 minutes)
• What higher education forgot — FROM VOL. 84 Harry L. Lewis discusses higher education’s amnesia about its purposes, and how that shortchanges students. (19 minutes)
• A Christian philosophy of integrated education — FROM VOL. 61 Michael L. Peterson discusses how Christianity could inform society’s understandings of education and human nature. (8 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)
• The social irrelevance of secular higher education — FROM VOL. 85 Professor C. John Sommerville describes the increasingly marginal influence of universities in our society, and why they seem to be of no substantive relevance to people outside the school. (13 minutes)
• The history of Christianity and higher education — FROM VOL. 50 In tracing Christianity’s relationship to the academy, Arthur F. Holmes points to Augustine as one of the first to embrace higher learning, believing God’s ordered creation to be open to study by the rational mind of man. (9 minutes)
• Insisting that political leaders are incapable of obeying Christ — Oliver O’Donovan on the unintended consequences of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
• An unwitting agent for the secularization of America — Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden explain how a prominent Christian Founding Father added momentum to the secularization of America
• Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
• A theology of active beauty — In a 2010 lecture, George Marsden examines a few ways in which the distorting effects of Enlightenment rationalism were resisted in the work of Jonathan Edwards. (64 minutes)
• The loss of hierarchy and humility in the academy — In interviews from 1999, literature professors Alvin Kernan and Marion Montgomery discuss how culture of the academy — its hyper-democratic posture and its loathing of limits — derails the pursuit of truth. (25 minutes)
• The de(con)struction of the humanities (and of truth) — Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb on the skeptical tendencies of the postmodern academy
• Blest be the ties of language that bind us — Marion Montgomery on the precious gift of words
• The academy’s deconstruction of both person and community — Marion Montgomery on cultivating “a deportment of intellect governed by a continuing concern for the truth of things”
• From university to multiversity to demoversity — Alvin Kernan on tectonic shifts in higher education since the 1960s
• Scholarship’s silos and the eclipse of meaning — Paul Tyson on how the modern academy avoids engagement with Reality
• Christian scholars and the secularized academy — Mark Noll on why Christian intellectual vitality requires a vision for the universality of Christian truth
• The dispiriting consequences of the commodification of knowledge — Thomas Pfau asks why so many students in universities are regarded only as consumers, who expect a good return on their investment. He also muses on some strategies for “re-spiritualizing” education. (30 minutes)
• Once there was no “secular” — Carlos Eire on the metaphysical assumptions championed in the sixteenth century
• Parsing the intellectual vocation — Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmermann demonstrate that some form of humanism has always been central to the purposes of higher education, and insist that the recovery of a rich, Christocentric Christian humanism is the only way for the university to recover a coherent purpose. (39 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 153 — FEATURED GUESTS: Charles C. Camosy, O. Carter Snead, Matt Feeney, Margarita A. Mooney, Louis Markos, and Alan Jacobs
• Aspects of our un-Christening — In this Friday Feature — presented courtesy of Biola University — Carlo Lancellotti talks with Aaron Kheriaty about the central ideas in Augusto Del Noce’s writings. (43 minutes)
• The scantily clad public square — Reinhard Hütter on the necessity of the virtue of religion
• David Martin on what happened in the 1960s — David Martin talks about how the cultural shifts of the 1960s were the fruition of previous changes in the 1890s and 1930s. (17 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 142 — FEATURED GUESTS: Stanley Hauerwas, Perry L. Glanzer, Nathan F. Alleman, Jeffrey Bishop, Alan Jacobs, D. C. Schindler, and Marianne Wright
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 140 — FEATURED GUESTS: Matthew Rubery, James A. Herrick, Jack Baker, Jeffrey Bilbro, Timothy Gloege, David Hollinger, and Barrett Fisher
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 133 — FEATURED GUESTS: Darío Fernández-Morera, Francis Oakley, Oliver O’Donovan, Thomas Storck, John Safranek, Brian Brock, and George Marsden
• Is religion just moralistic therapy after all? — Alexander Schmemann on the secularization of religion
• From darkness [sic] into light [sic] — David Bentley Hart on the ignorant myth that banishes the transcendent from modern public spaces
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 122 — FEATURED GUESTS: N. T. Wright, George Marsden, Makoto Fujimura, David Bentley Hart, and Thomas Lessl
• Religion for Sundays only — Walter Kasper on how secularization did not eliminate religion, but made it but one sector of modern life along with many others.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 114 — FEATURED GUESTS: Susan Cain, Brad S. Gregory, David Sehat, Augustine Thompson, O.P., Gerald R. McDermott, and Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 105 — FEATURED GUESTS: Julian Young, Perry L. Glanzer, Kendra Creasy Dean, Brian Brock, Nicholas Carr, and Alan Jacobs
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 101 — FEATURED GUESTS: James Davison Hunter, Paul Spears, Steven Loomis, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Long, and William T. Cavanaugh
• The Vocation of Knowledge: Higher Education and the Difference Christ Makes — Mark Noll (The Future of Christian Learning), Norman Klassen & Jens Zimmermann, (The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education),and James K. A. Smith explore the nature of Christian education. (78 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 97 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Noll, Stanley Fish, James Peters, Scott Moore, and Makoto Fujimura
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 94 — FEATURED GUESTS: Maggie Jackson, Mark Bauerlein, Tim Clydesdale, Andy Crouch, and Jeremy Begbie
• Possibility junkies — Voracious omnitasking, argues English professor Mark Edmundson, makes the lives of his students both highly promising and radically vulnerable to living lives that leave no room for reflection and self-knowledge.
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 86 — FEATURED GUESTS: Roger Lundin, Lawrence Buell, Harold K. Bush, Jr., Katherine Shaw Spaht, Steven L. Nock, Norman Klassen, and Jens Zimmermann
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 84 — FEATURED GUESTS: Harry L. Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Brendan Sweetman, James Turner Johnson, David Martin, and Edward Ericson, Jr.
• Why Johnny can’t think coherently — Alasdair MacIntyre on the importance of theology in liberal arts education
• Louise Cowan: “The Necessity of the Classics” — Louise Cowan insists that what we label the classics “have become classics because they elicit greatness of soul,” and that such aspiration can only be informed by such works. (35 minutes)
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 78 — FEATURED GUESTS: Mark Bauerlein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Sam Van Eman, Thomas de Zengotita, Eugene McCarraher, and John Witte, Jr.
• The Truth about Harvard — Ross Douthat looks at the effects of postmodern academic theory on the humanities. “The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum.”
• Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 69 — FEATURED GUESTS: John McWhorter, Douglas Koopman, Daniel Ritchie, Vincent Miller, and Barrett Fisher
• Art and the loss of transcendence — Suzi Gablik looks at how modern and postmodern artists have struggled with living in modern and postmodern societies in which there is no public vocabulary for the sacred.